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The Lesson to Unlearn
91–100 of 588 posts
Re: The Lesson to Unlearn
#92As an engineer, this makes me wish there were a better path to FANG employment than hacking their whiteboarding interviews by leetcoding for weeks. They probably do this because it's more objective and simpler than something like the "long conversation with a professor" test that pg suggests.
Re: The Lesson to Unlearn
#93Are you in EECS? Most big data centers use FPGAs "on the wire" to do things like encryption on the fly or compression so that they get "wire speedups" without burning CPU cycles.
So FPGA solutions that "live on the wire" and can be "plugged into the LAN port" are a really useful area you can hack in your dorm room.
I worked in the security area. One of the key problems is "exfiltrations" where someone tries to copy valuable files off a server. I created a startup to attack this "on the wire" with hardware so it can't be hacked. (It failed because nobody knew what an FPGA was, nor how TCP packets worked. Sigh).
The idea is to create crypto-hashes of the valuable files. Hand-install the hashes into an FPGA using a read-only micro card. The FPGA sits on the wire, hashing files being sent. If the hash matches, scream.
THe same idea of "unhackable" malware virus scans can be done on an FPGA. Only someone with physical access to the FPGA card can modify it. It operates "at wire speeds".
The hard part is finding people who can spell FPGA and know what malware means. Be that person.
You could do this in your dorm room.
The side effects are that you learn a LOT very quickly, it is grounded in real code, and you could actually convince YC that your "homework" is worth a passing grade.
Besides, FPGAs are just plain fun. Make your own hardware Neural Nets. Hack your bike with a camera and an NN to warn of approaching cars.
Re: The Lesson to Unlearn
#94TLDR: The way to succeed in school is by gaming the system, but the way to succeed in business is by making a great product.
But PG is wrong. Startups can, and do, game the system. By showing unsustainable, artificial growth with no real value behind it, they can fool investors long enough to make a lucrative exit by IPO or acquisition.
Re: The Lesson to Unlearn
#95Yes, most tests are bad, but there is a quick advice that improves them immensely: never ask questions that are not at least Level 3 in Bloom's taxonomy of knowledge: https://blog.testdome.com/blooms-taxonomy/ I cofounded a technical screening startup, and despite our efforts to educate our customers that enter their questions on our platform, 95% of their custom questions are bad questions. They tend to ask trivia q…
can anybody comment on the difference between "understanding" and "applying" in that taxonomy. The examples provided don't seem very good to me.
is it the difference between understanding a language and not speaking it, perhaps? following a conversation, but not being able to participate in it?
Re: The Lesson to Unlearn
#96Are you in EECS? Most big data centers use FPGAs "on the wire" to do things like encryption on the fly or compression so that they get "wire speedups" without burning CPU cycles. So FPGA solutions that "live on the wire" and can be "plugged into the LAN port" are a really useful area you can hack in your dorm room. I worked in the security area. One of the key problems is "exfiltrations" where someone tries to copy v…
Wrong thread?
Re: The Lesson to Unlearn
#97There's a passage in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance about exactly this. --- Phaedrus' argument for the abolition of the degree and grading system produced a nonplussed or negative reaction in all but a few students at first, since it seemed, on first judgment, to destroy the whole University system. One student laid it wide open when she said with complete candor, "Of course you can't eliminate the degree…
Is it ironic that I'm going to quote this passage in my grad school admissions essay?
Re: The Lesson to Unlearn
#98Part of the challenge is society has organized the distribution of certain rewards and necessary services for playing along with the system.
For example - healthcare insurance. Generally a nightmare to secure unless you're with a large company or in a demographic group which statistically probably needs little beyond accident coverage.
Want to be a maverick? Better be a high earning one, since you're going to pay a fortune for a bunch of little things and get locked away from the rewards for being a top level corporate servant....
Re: The Lesson to Unlearn
#99That is a great essay. Thank you for sharing. I've worked in tech for quite a while now. I used to buy into the meritocracy cant but as the years wore on, I realized how much bullshit it was. I think the biggest moment came when I started to think about how to explain to people in my new home, South Africa, that working in tech would free you economically. There's some truth to that. But that's not the whole truth. T…
You are derailing the discussion and I hope you get downvoted into oblivion
Besides that: The (classical) financial industry (banks and insurances) has a relatively trival IT (of copying data around and displaying it). Combined with external pressure, they are -today- leading on progressive indicators, such as diversity, inclusion, near-shoring and far-shoring.
Re: The Lesson to Unlearn
#100> No one was pulling all-nighters two weeks into the semester. As a physics student, I can say we definitely pulled 2am-ers 2 weeks into the semester. Our Condensed Matter professor gave us some of the most random questions that no one could anticipate. To be honest, I was one of those "diligent" students who got good grades. I'll tell you right now his quizzes were not hackable. The following held true: |quiz subjec…
> A professor like my Condensed Matter Physics professor would go on and on about 3 fundamental causes and then quiz students about the 5 fundamental causes, giving a zero to anyone who couldn't think of all the base 3, then grading the remaining students who thought creatively of 2 additional causes against each other on a bell curve. :)
To me, this sounds like a plausible argument against such tests.
The issue of creatively grading responses to an ill-defined question often pops up in discussion here about interview practices. In those discussions, typically someone will say “I don’t do a generic whiteboard interview. Instead I do [idiosyncratic thing x]. It really gives me amazing insight into the candidate.”
Then someone else says “Yeah right, a weird test with unclear metrics just gives you a big empty space to fill in with all your biases and pick someone who answers the way you would”.
Of course, both sides are exaggerated here. But it’s not clear to me that “creative” tests are necessarily any better.