When I interview people, I ask them to describe one of their difficult work projects. I also ask them if they ever developed anything just for fun. I take their responses to both the questions into account when making a decision on taking them to the next round.
>When I interview people, I ask them to describe one of their difficult work projects
This only leads to a "rich get richer" kind of situation, where people who happened to get jobs that provides them with the kind of impressive difficult projects will keep working on difficult projects.
This is just a reality of hiring, I think. People with more experience tend to find it easier to get hired, thus granting them even further experience.
IMO, the best way to avoid this chicken/egg is with government subsidized technical internships like we have in Ontario. It's a great deal, businesses get junior technical labor at 50% on a fixed contract, and the students get access to learning they'd never have during school.
That's not meant to see who works on impressive projects. It's meant to see how you work in projects you find difficult and how you face that kind of difficulty.
why is that signal on how well they'll perform at the job? If someone doesn't code for fun but is a great programmer you don't want to hire them? Why is that considered acceptable?
You parsed it incorrectly. It is the other way, in fact.
Several times, people do very interesting personal projects, but fail to perform at the same level at work. That gives a clue that it may have been an unsuitable work environment that impeded their performance. It could also be a difference pertaining to their orientation to structured vs. unstructured working conditions. It could be related to explicit objectives with tight deadlines vs. exploratory development with open deadlines. And, more.
Knowing what my work environment is, I usually could understand their medium-to-long term fitness.
So, if you have a candidate that thrives at fun projects but not at work you put them to the next round, because you think your work environment is sufficiently different to make them thrive at work instead of their fun project?
The fact that someone builds something of their own volition is an excellent marker of initiative, of breadth. If there is a choice of potential hires, this signal factors in.
If the universe is static, then there is no "repeatably observable causality" or indeed any causality at all. In that scenario any perception of time and causality would inherently have to just be our perception lying to us about a past that we have had not part in, if it exist in any sense at all. If so, we have not had this conversation, and your experience of it is just a static momentary perception of having had it.
Maybe time is a spatial dimension, and there are infinite moments of consciousness fixed in the same spatial location with no time passing.
Consider how you'd tell if a drawing is an individual drawing or a frame from a cartoon if all you have to go by is that single frame. You can argue that the drawing hints convincingly at motion, but that does not require that this motion has taken place.
Or consider a trace of a simulation, sliced and diced into snapshots of individual moments. We can argue that it's unlikely any entities in such snapshots would have consciousness, but if we're arguing on the basis that we appear to experience the motion of time, we'd equally make that argument if we were wrong about consciousness and indeed locked in snapshots of individual moments. We can even construct simulations where individual parts look causally connected but where the existence of one calculated frame tells us nothing about whether any individual other frames have even ever been instantiated (e.g. imagine a very complex function over time, where only punctuated values have ever been calculated).
I'm not saying I believe that is our situation - I'm saying we can't distinguish between that and an infinite set of other possible options, because "from the inside" there is an infinite set of possibilities that could all look the same from our vantage point. We can debate which possibilities seem more likely, but they will always be speculation as long as we're locked inside the asylum, so to speak...
Incidentally, this is an argument for a materialistic view of the universe, not against it, on the basis that absent a way of "peeking out" and seeing our situation from the outside, it's meaningless to treat the world as anything but what we measure and perceive - it doesn't matter whether or not this world is what it seems like to us or not as long as it is the only view we have of it. We just can't say if it is some inherently true objective view of the universe, and most likely it won't make any difference to us.
It only makes a difference when we tinker with philosophy around the edges, like these conversations about whether what we experience can tell us anything about the experience of other entities.
> If the universe is static, then there is no "repeatably observable causality" or indeed any causality at all. In that scenario any perception of time and causality would inherently have to just be our perception lying to us about a past that we have had not part in, if it exist in any sense at all
Is it possible to have perception in a static environment? It seems like perception requires flux of some sort.
Clarification: meaning the machinery of the perceiver must have flux, otherwise it's not perception, it's just static state.
Is it? If we are in a static environment, then it would mean it is possible, and that this intuition is wrong. Since we don't have a way of determining experimentally if is wrong or not, then at least for now it does not even help us quantify the odds. If we're not in a static environment, then maybe, maybe not - we don't know what the subject experience of consciousness is at all.
We so far have no way of splitting perception or conscience down in slices of ever shorter moments to see where it stops being whatever it is and becomes something "inert", but even if we did, we would not know whether that was an inherent limitation of objective reality or of our subjective reality and whether those two are the same or not.
The one thing that baffles me with SEO is how it's just guesswork yet is a massive business. It's like promising to someone that you'll get their name listed sooner in the phonebook without any control over the phonebook itself, and then that person pays you to do it.
It's no different, since we have no control over Google's ranking mechanism and they won't explicitly tell you what the algorithm is (and change the rules daily), so it's just guesswork.
Baffling an entire colossal "industry" is built from guesswork.
Helix really is amazing, even with it's current level of maturity (or should I say immaturity) I just can't stop using it, I can't wait to see how well it works in a year or two.
Firstly, not many kids and young adults are capable of assessing and understanding what they "truly want".
Secondly, someone "truly wanting" something does not always make that "something" good or correct. When I was an adolescent myself, there were several things that I "truly wanted", which would have led me down paths of ruin.
Thirdly, engaging the adolescent / young adult in productive ways - that don't necessarily need computers - is one thing that I have seen to be demonstrably beneficial. This involves a certain degree of interaction with them and doing things together.
It is quite simple to implement pagination in the application layer using a unique record identifier (primary key or ULID or ...) as an anchor for the navigation. From that unique ID, we can then fetch the previous `n` or the next `n` records, depending on the direction of the navigation.
This way, the server remains stateless, since the anchor (possibly sent as an encoded / obfuscated token, which can include some other parameters such as page size) is supplied by the client with each pagination request.
Pagination only makes sense in the context of an ordered collection; if there is no stable sort order then you can’t paginate. So you identify the last record seen with whatever fields you are ordering by, and if the last record has been deleted, then it doesn’t matter because you are only fetching the items greater than those values according to the sort order.
Anyway, there is plenty of documentation out there for cursor-based pagination; Hacker News comments isn’t the right place to explain the implementation details.
I made a crude proposal for generics in 2011[1], in which I proposed a pair of concepts ("storage class" and "type class") that are somewhat similar to the concept of this "gcshape".
I proposed it as a compromise between full monomorphisation and runtime code generation.
