To equate immigrants who have followed due process to a homeless person insisting on staying in a property owner's living room is appalling.
It's understandable for everyone to have varying views on immigration and immigrants, but this sort of rhetoric is a vile, racist and xenophobic dog whistle.
It is sufficiently incoherent as to suggest you aren't interested in the serious discussion you are requesting in response. You could better refute this by starting with a policy you would consider cruel, and the in turn demonstrating how this one doesn't fit it.
Historically i've tended to agree that "the cruelty is the point" was too dismissive for the policies in question. But with immigration policy of this admin, I'm not sure that's the case. For a while they were deporting people to the equivalent of a Gulag, and literally suggested that if people were afraid of that outcome they should self deport. I think that would be a pretty fair example of a policy where the cruelty was the literal point: The hope was it would be viewed with sufficient fear as to dissuade people from staying in the country illegally. However seriously you think immigration should be taken, and however many people you feel should be deported, there are policy choices that do not involve that level of cruelty that could be chosen instead. That they are intentionally not is what the term "The cruelty is the point" is meant to imply.
>You could better refute this by starting with a policy you would consider cruel, and the in turn demonstrating how this one doesn't fit it.
I actually don't think it is that common for policy to be cruel just for the sake of being cruel ("the cruelty is the point")
>For a while they were deporting people to the equivalent of a Gulag, and literally suggested that if people were afraid of that outcome they should self deport. I think that would be a pretty fair example of a policy where the cruelty was the literal point: The hope was it would be viewed with sufficient fear as to dissuade people from staying in the country illegally.
The point of law enforcement is to deter and prevent lawbreaking, not be cruel for its own sake. Suppose you observe that meals in prison aren't very tasty. Would you criticize this policy on the grounds that "the cruelty is the point"?
You can argue that the punishment is too harsh, but that still doesn't prove that cruelty was the point.
Government cruelty as such has been an explicit subject of American constitutional discourse since the founding - its in the Bill of Rights even. It comes out of a political tradition deeply suspicious of rulers using punishment to terrorize, humiliate, or vindictively hurt people.
Case in point Obama was deporting just as many people as Trump and it didnt require cruelty to do so. Which begs the question, why is a Gulag needed by Trump? The "cruelty is the point" argument is that 1) it isnt, and 2) they know that.
An immigrant who has followed due process is equivalent to a homeless person who has convinced the property owner to willingly let the homeless person stay in the property owner's living room. The property owner is allowed to change their mind about the arrangement at any point, unless and until the person obtains part ownership of the property (citizenship).
I'm looking for the view you guys have beneath all the performative outrage and I haven't been able to discover it yet. For example, this user wasn't able to explain why foreigners shouldn't vote in US elections: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49465747
I think you responded to the wrong post. Try going to your link to respond to a post about your link.
Back to this topic: have you yet considered the possibility that people might simply have different views from you on what constitutes unreasonable cruelty? Doing that consideration yourself might help you understand why people do not agree with you, or take seriously your performative outrage on the matter.
This is a vile analogy, whose implication so twists the American tradition that I blush with shame to read it from a possible countryman.
What American tradition? I'll let Lincoln speak, since you have already given voice to his opposition.
"As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty – to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy."
Yes, all men are created equal. They have the equal right to live in their country. A Russian has just as much a right to live in Russia as an American does in America. And I have just as much a right to move to Russia as a Russian has to move to America—i.e. none at all, it's a privilege than the government of each country may or may not grant.
Btw, I am a naturalized US citizen. I'm talking about myself here. I'm very grateful for what this country has given me, because I know it had no obligation whatsoever to do so.
If "all men are created equal" applies to foreign citizens, why not just go all the way and let them vote in US elections? We can elect the US president on the basis of the entire world population. Is that the American tradition?
Leftists tell me the US is an irredeemable and illegitimate settler colonial project founded on slavery, white supremacy, and genocide.
When the US has an active foreign policy, I'm told we are "destabilizing foreign nations", or engaging in "neo-imperialism".
When we have a passive foreign policy, I'm told we are "complicit", or "abandoning allies".
There's nothing the US can do, or not do, which doesn't get demonized to the Moon and back. Right here in this thread, someone is trashing us for our WW2 involvement.
HN has been basically silent on the Swiss referendum to put a hard stop to immigration to Switzerland. But all the US has to is pause immigration for a bit, and I'm told we are "vile".
And now, I'm told about an "American tradition" that we are supposedly "twisting". You sure that isn't a good thing? Look where those "American traditions" got us. Our nation is a DISASTER, right? Shouldn't we be keeping out brown people for their own safety?
You're not arguing against leftists, you're arguing against Abraham Lincoln.
If you want to know the answers to your questions, read about Abraham Lincoln.
And no I will never agree that policies created out of racism will somehow bear sweet fruit from poisoned water.
All over this thread you have been misreading and strawmaning others in order to seem more reasonable. Even in this thread you misread me: the vile part was the homeless analogy, not the policy.
It's just time to draw the line in the sand: yours are the ideas lead to suffering and genocide and nobody whose words are worth reading wants that.
It sounds like you haven't actually thought much about these issues, and you're quoting Lincoln, and fearmongering about "suffering and genocide", as a sort of thought-terminating cliche.
If you want to argue against the administration policies, I suggest you articulate a coherent and attractive philosophy of immigration instead of mudslinging. I'm not arguing with Lincoln--I'm arguing with you.
"yours are the ideas lead to suffering and genocide and nobody whose words are worth reading wants that"
Why aren't you saying this about the much harsher Swiss policy which was proposed?
I just don't think a country closing its borders is equivalent to "suffering and genocide". It's not the policy I favor for the US. I think you and I might even agree in terms of our preferred policies! But I still find your rhetoric annoying as heck. I want people to argue about immigration on the merits, not engage in melodramatic pearl-clutching.
Let me guess: You would probably claim that when white settlers first came to this continent, if they settled on Native land, and the Natives attacked them for being unwanted immigrants, that would be an act of genocide on the part of the settlers. Am I right?
It's unfortunate, but all the companies are doing this.
Here's what a Google lead said in a tweet:
> Hello, my name is Tim. I'm a lead at Google with over 30 years coding experience and I need to look up how to get length of a python string.
DHH:
> Hello, my name is David. I would fail to write bubble sort on a whiteboard. I look code up on the internet all the time. I don't do riddles.
Max Howell:
> Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but you can’t invert a binary tree on a whiteboard so fuck off.
And yet, everyone is asking these questions about print a string in zigzag fashion or something silly like that.
Engineers are gaming the system because the system is garbage. None of us are looking forward to waking up and solving HackerRank, LeetCode and CtCI problems till the joy of programming leaves our bodies.
There's a difference between not being able to write bubble sort and realizing that looking it up is a better use of your time. But when it actually comes time to do something you can't copy/paste off the internet, what do you expect a programmer who can't reinvent a half-decent bubble sort to do? The interview is to convince the other person that you can think logically about programs. Bubble sort is a low, low bar, and basic data structures are not much higher.
Maybe he's being hyperbolic, maybe not. But that's entirely besides the point.
I'm absolutely certain that there are many, many engineers who failed interviews because they couldn't write a zig-zag string and could yet come up with good solutions to problems at a real company.
> what do you expect a programmer who can't reinvent a half-decent bubble sort to do
But interviews aren't testing for that. The guy who invented Homebrew was judged by a Google engineer to be not good enough. Heck, I bet the engineer interviewing him probably had his/her entire dev machine setup via Homebrew.
DHH invented Ruby on Rails, which was used at Twitter for what, 4+ years? And yet if he anonymously gave an interview at Twitter they would probably reject him because he can't find a cycle in a linked list in 30 minutes.
> The interview is to convince the other person that you can think logically about programs.
It's supposed to be about that. The modern CS interview is, however, absolutely not about that. It's whether or not you've grinded through CtCI enough to be able to answer something taken from a vast pool of useless questions.
Tell me, is the Homebrew guy just really not good enough? Do you really think he does not know how to think about programs logically?
Good CS fundamentals are important because they are transferable skill to a wide array of problems a startup may face. Just because someone wrote an impressive framework or library doesn't mean given a complex problem outside of their known domain (web framework design or package management tool), they would be have the necessary background to solve it. With strong math and CS knowledge, you can reason through almost any problem.
Yes they are. Except, these interviews aren't testing for that. Finding the maximum sum subarray isn't testing for any fundamental.
> Just because someone wrote an impressive framework or library doesn't mean given a complex problem outside of their known domain
Why are you even hiring them for something that's not their expertise? Seriously, that's literally the whole point of the interview. I don't think Max Howell was trying to get in to the DeepMind team.
Calling these just some other web framework or package management tools is doing them an incredible disservice. Twitter used Rails. Airbnb uses Rails. If Airbnb hired DHH, it would be Airbnb's fault if they made him tune hyperparameters of some ML model rather than see how their web performance could be improved.
Honestly, at this point I'm convinced I could get HN to talk poorly about John Carmack's programming skills.
> Finding the maximum sum subarray isn't testing for any fundamental.
There is quite literally nothing more fundamental to computer science than data organization and access.
And for what it's worth, Google and others are very open about their hiring process: they want generalists. I assume they have the data to justify that's a better investment. So maybe DHH or whoever gave the impression they weren't interested in doing anything they haven't already mastered. We have at least a little bit of evidence that attitude could be the problem: many of these anecdotes are disgruntled people who (often profanely) publicly vent when a company rejects them. Maybe that attitude comes out during the interview when they're asked to do something they deem to be beneath them.
> Good CS fundamentals are important because they are transferable skill to a wide array of problems a startup may face
I'm really skeptical of this claim. Nothing about CS fundamentals prepares you for debugging mobile browser performance, or machine learning, or setting up a sharded database. Maybe the big companies have a reason for asking these questions, but few startups benefit from these types of questions.
From the POV of the large tech companies, it's mostly a matter of keeping the interviews short since the questions can be complicated yet fit in under an hour. The top companies are constantly growing, have ~3 year turnover and are flooded with applicants due to their name recognition. Why all the smaller ones copy this approach, I have no idea. The alternatives usually are just as unpalatable: pair programming, a long project, language triva questions, etc. So nothing changes.
>>I'm really skeptical of this claim. Nothing about CS fundamentals prepares you for debugging mobile browser performance, or machine learning, or setting up a sharded database. Maybe the big companies have a reason for asking these questions, but few startups benefit from these types of questions.
To summarize this statement, there's a reason why algos and datastructs is taught only for 1 semester out of 8 in college.
I'd much rather say a company like Google might have problems that require deep knowledge both inside and outside of someone's domain, but startups - no. They need to ship and optimize on the go, rinse and repeat.
> With strong math and CS knowledge, you can reason through almost any problem.
Until you can't. Math and CS, while certainly giving new perspectives, don't add much to the actual solution. What makes developers great is experience and not some text book knowledge of a topic. Hands on experience is a game changer.
Majority of the developers don't work and will most likely never work on something life-changing that they need to know every algorithm and data structure out there. Their time is better spent elsewhere.
That's a good one. My friends in engineering (physical sciences based, e.g. aerospace) and I have decided that the analog in that industry to programming interviews would for the candidate to be bombarded with questions asking him to evaluate complicated integrals from the CRC or something like it.
Yes, I can see the confusion. You see, we are looking for the very best Translators, and it has been proven by major companies that the people that are able to do the job best have a very solid foundation in the science translation is based in, such as Linguistics and Classics.
I would not be surprised if there were other, non-technical issues during such an interview. I know many people who are supposed to be smart, but they consider the basics beneath them and refuse to do anything by hand in the presence of people that might be subordinate in another context.
I'm sure I could do it in something pseudocodish, but it'd probably take an embarrassing amount of time. Honestly I could probably do almost as good a job of implementing quicksort, at least in a naive version based on the stack.
Seems to me that what interviewers should be looking for is not savants who can whack out particular odd bits of code but developers who can look up some things to use as reference as they go and most important who know how to determine what it is that they need. Proper evaluation and decision making is at least as important as actually writing the code, because those are the skills that can keep you from writing the wrong code.
With all due respect, I hear what you mean, but further supporting an interview system so divorced from actual problem solving (because most everyone who really really wants a job just endures the empty tediusness and memorizes these algorithmic puzzles from CTCI and Interview Cake and other sources) just enforces a kind of innane candy-empty arms race just like the SAT did, before it was clear that there were proven ways to master it. (the SAT has become just another pay wall at this point) The ultimate effect of this race is to render every programmer with the money and time to practice this equal. It is, forgive me, an infinite loop (sorry) -- and the bar will just get higher and new innane hoops will be added to the performing monkey obstacle course. Then, employers will be (or already are) selecting for a kind of navy seal squad of pedantry-- coders who like to submit and follow directions and behave themselves. Creative problem solving requires a bit of the rebel/subversive spirit. These kinds of interviews may test for an intrepid spirit. But honestly, There is no more intrepid spirit than that of an actual well-programmed machine. This popular interview method reveals that we are merely looking for programmers to be as similar to intrepid, well-programmed machines as possible. It results in machine-like workers working on machines. In effect, perhaps, the blind leading the blind. Is that what we want? I could be wrong, but I think we need to more highly value what humans bring to the task/process/team that computers can't. It seems less nihilistic, anyway. Or do we not know what that is? Maybe that is the real problem. Ironically, so many job ads say they are looking for "passion" in their programmers. Passion is at odds with what they select for. I wonder if the employers even realize this. My puzzle for them is: Given n programmers (all have memorized CTCI etc) ... so how do you decide what to select for and how would you implement an efficient, blind process that is more likely to include a diverse array of programmers who could work together hapily?
Ah, the perennial apologetics of weaponized mediocrity. If you can't write a simple recursive algorithm that swaps two values (Max Howell), two nested for loops (DHH), or show me that you used Python at least once (uhh length? yes, there is this builtin, I forgot its name...), why would I want to hire you over someone who has seen a computer before?
And to avoid being called hypocritical, here's off the top of my head how the answers would look like (I don't use Python very often either):
1. len(thingie)
2.
def bubsort(arr):
if not arr: return None
for i in range(len(arr)):
for j in range(i+1, len(arr)):
if arr[i] > arr[j]: arr[i], arr[j] = arr[j], arr[i]
return arr
3.
def revtree(node):
if not node: return None
node.left, node.right = revtree(node.right), revtree(node.left)
return node
> why would I want to hire you over someone who has seen a computer before?
Because, you know, they invented Ruby on Rails and Homebrew? Incredible, really. You were so adamant on being hostile that you managed to put yourself over Max Howell and DHH in a couple of sentences. These people have made valuable contributions to the tech industry as it stands today. This is a fact and not an opinion. They invented Homebrew and Ruby on Rails.
Good job, you solved the problems and are more likely to be hired by Google than Max Howell. Except he created the most popular package manager in OSX history and companies still can't see that.
> Except he created the most popular package manager in OSX history and companies still can't see that.
First, Homebrew is just a rehash of package managers that were available on
unices for more than a decade. Then, from what I hear, Homebrew was (still
is?) badly designed and implemented for quite a long time, which is not an
evidence of author's high skills (as a programmer, anyway).
Which part is ridiculous? The fact that Dpkg, RPM, their peers, and
infrastructure on top of all that (APT, up2date, Yum, BSD ports, Gentoo
Portage, and so on) existed for a long time before Homebrew, the fact that
people were constantly complaining about Homebrew breaking their installed
packages on update, the fact that it used to require /usr/local to be
user-owned, or the fact that it wasn't using (still isn't? I haven't checked)
cryptographic signatures for downloading software to install?
For the simple option of length, depending on what you've been working in you might be thinking of len, length, .length, strlen, sizeof, and undoubtedly many other variations of the same thing. Things that may come seamlessly and automatically when you're in the flow of actually coding in language X may be very difficult to choose between while standing at a whiteboard in a conference room
Ah, the perennial apologetics of weaponized mediocrity.
Don't look now, but you just failed every interview I've ever conducted. Maybe consider a field where the skill you've just demonstrated would be useful -- politics, perhaps?
Would it be possible for you to send me an invite? This is the first time I've come across this site, but it seems interesting. I'm a developer, but I've liked the discussions I've read here so far. Thank you!
Have there been many cases of this? I mean, I know people who can't wear 3D glasses for long, people who can't stay in front of a computer screen for very long and so on. So is it a problem with the technology?
On an unrelated note: Does anybody know when Glass will be available in other countries? I've been interested in obtaining a pair for a while but I'm not sure how to go about it.
Hi Thomas, can you provide me with your email so I can get in touch with you? I'm interested in applying as an intern but I have some questions. Thanks!
I came across your site a couple of weeks ago. Just wanted to know if you guys have plans on expanding to other countries any time soon or accepting remote freelancers?
If I haven't gotten back to you, then you're on our waitlist. I've been scheduling interviews with folks on the waitlist as quickly as possible, but we're actually getting applicants faster than I can respond to them. We're working on streamlining the process and are getting faster at it each week.
I had the same experience. I understand if this is hard to do, but from my perspective it would help if I can expect to hear back from you in a few days, a few weeks, or a few months.
It's understandable for everyone to have varying views on immigration and immigrants, but this sort of rhetoric is a vile, racist and xenophobic dog whistle.
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