Viewing profile — jpeterson

Code submissions either meet the standards of the project or they don't. Whether it was generated by human or AI is irrelevant.

How do you deal with Hawking radiation?

It's all really just basic calculus, with a couple nifty tricks layered on top: 1) Create a bunch of variables and initialize them to random values. We're going to add and multiply…

You don't always want to use them right away.

The probability of [HEADS, TAILS] is always the same as the probability of [TAILS, HEADS], no matter how the coin is weighted.

You're not testing for "basic math skills" here. What you're testing for is more like "immediately retrieves an irrelevant math fact after many years of having no need to think abo…

Having "extremely basic understanding" of prime numbers immediately at one's command is important for approximately 0% of software engineering jobs. If you instant-fail a candidate…

"There’s a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that happens in hallways and kitchenettes." I've seen this idea repeated many times, but in over 20 years in the tech ind…

If crypto has an "ethos", it's decentralization and departure from human institutions. The FTX fiasco is the opposite of that.

Exchanges and trading firms are not "Crypto". They're human institutions which happen to sit atop cryptocurrency instruments. What we're seeing play out in realtime is what happens…

Yes. Implicit in these "free speech" arguments is the idea that the government should be able to force private companies to publish user content that violates their policies. This …

I've been doing this for a long time, and I've never seen any kind of correlation between how well someone solves silly algorithm puzzles in a 45 minute window and any kind of real…

I've worked remotely for almost a decade on my own. It works.

I'm guessing he's relying on common knowledge of variance here. If you know that variance is always nonnegative, and you also know that variance can be defined as (mean square - sq…

That 90%+ of the hiring signal can be projected onto "hours spent on leetcode" is exactly why this process has become a parody of itself.

"they work for avoiding false positives" Citation needed. I have many years of experiential evidence that suggests otherwise.

Investment markets operate on relative gain, not absolute gain. E.g.: if you invest in a stock and it gains $5, this would be a great return for a $1 stock but a poor one for a $10…

Is the p-value really not the probability of your results being due to chance? No, it's the probability of a particular observation, given that we assume the result is due to chanc…

Yeah. The revisionist hero worship and sanctification of Steve Jobs has reached absurd levels since his death.

Let's set aside for a moment that the exact means by which people keep up with friends is not necessarily "world changing", and also that this has been mostly enabled by the intern…

These apps "change the world" only if your "world" is the silicon valley echo chamber. The real world is only moderately impacted, and only for a limited time, even by an anomaly l…

The basic idea here is actually a very old approach -- clocks have been powered this way for centuries. But it's very cool and refreshing to see a modern electrical spin on it.

In 15 years as a software engineer at companies large and small, I have never seen anyone code on a whiteboard (outside of interviews, anyway), nor have I.

First of all, the browser environment is the asynchronous part here, not JavaScript. JavaScript is a language that happens to be interpreted on top of that environment. You'd run i…