bcaine

Do you know how to publicly comment? I couldn't find a way on the press release or their website.

It's actually not linear, its a power law. That means we need exponentially more compute, data, and model parameters to see linear improvements in performance.

Not to pour too much cold water on this, but the claim of 100% accuracy has a huge caveat. In the paper (Page 4) they state:

Interaction. The original question may not be a prompt that synthesizes a program whose execution results in the correct answer. In addition, the answer may require multiple steps with clear plots or other modalities. We therefore may interactively prompt Codex until reaching the correct answer or visualizations, making the minimum necessary changes from the original question

Which to me basically sounds like they had a human in the loop (that knows how to solve these math problems) that kept changing the question until it gave the correct answer. They do measure the distance (using a sentence embedding model) of the original question to the one that yielded the correct answer, but that feels a bit contrived to me.

Nevertheless, its still really cool that the correct answer is indeed inside the model.

It looks like this is just Pilocarpine, which has been used for decades to treat glaucoma, available at pharmacies everywhere, and is commonly used (perhaps off label) to shrink pupils. I wonder what if anything they changed compared to the generic version?

I've been using Pilocarpine off label to shrink my pupils at night after ICL surgery (an alternative to lasik) to solve debilitating halos caused by my pupils growing larger than the implanted lens.

In my experience, it does increase close range vision (at some minor expense to long range vision). That said, it also gives a mild headache, and blurs your vision substantially for the first 5-15 minutes after use. I don't really see the appeal of using it daily unless you really have to.

Was there any statistically significant changes in compensation at each level based on more unique skills or more granular classifications of engineers?

In particular I'm curious about Machine Learning/Data Science, Robotics, Distributed Systems etc, but I would imagine Web vs Mobile vs DevOps vs Data may look different too.

My first ever internship in software engineering (in 2012) was in the MUMPS world! I worked on a project for a contracting company building an automated testing framework (in python) to interface with and allow the VA to refactor their massive VistA EHR that was entirely written in MUMPS.

The fact that the system works at all is total magic to me, with hundreds of subsystems and millions of lines of code, all with the same shared global variable pool. I remember having to spend a few days digging through hundreds of pages of kernel documentation (it has its own kernel!) to simply find out how to write to a file..

What you can remember seems largely correct. I think commands and syntax were case insensitive, and variables were case sensitive too? All kinds of insanity like that.

In this specific case, it was probably further from the strike zone than the pitcher wanted. That said, pitchers throw balls often to see if hitters will swing at them, and some hitters are more apt to swing at bad pitches (and therefore pitchers exploit this).

Pitches at the bottom of the strikezone, or pitches that are low and drop below the strikezone (that would be called balls) are generally hard to hit, so a lot of pitchers throw sinking pitches there hoping to either get a very borderline strike or a swing and miss.

No, the position most definitely had absolutely nothing to do with longest path or combinatorial optimization.

Anyway, my larger point is that what I've been seeing interviewing is that these tests are becoming much more common at US startups without companies removing/reducing the rest of their technical evaluation process, nor really structuring the problems to be a good signal.

In an ideal world where companies do take home tests right, I think its a great solution. But what I've been seeing more often than not doesn't support that, making it hard to support.

I'm really curious what you've been seeing at Starfighter. Are partnering companies still going on to do a full technical interview? Or does Starfighter largely replace their normal technical evaluation?

Ignoring the fun of the challenges themselves (which probably isn't entirely fair), the latter makes it very compelling for a candidate. The former does not.

I think that's fair. I've had both the former and the latter, but unfortunately most of my experiences fall into latter case, where it's simply been hoop jumping. Most of my friends (all about to graduate, so a good number of examples) are experiencing the same.

For example one company gave a problem with five parts, with the final part being solve longest path on a bipartite weighted graph (which is quite a hard and time consuming problem). After that, the next step was a phone technical screen, then an on-site with 4-5 more interviews, most being white-boarding. It was basically hazing instead of an evaluation criteria.

An alternative is my last job, which had a take home test that took about 6 hours, but that was the whole technical part of the process. Being on the other side reviewing them, the problem absolutely gave enough information.

I totally get there's a right way to do it, but like most interviewing trends, companies seem to just be adding this as a step instead of revamping their process.

I agree that this is "better" than the alternative, but it can be absolutely exhausting for candidates actively searching for a job. I feel like it's recently become much, much more common (from my small-ish sample of me and some friends).

My issue with this approach is fourfold:

1. Most companies have no idea how to structure a problem that is both informative to them and also not abusive to the candidates time.

2. Companies generally do this right after the recruiter phone screen, which most likely doesn't give the candidate enough information to decide if the next steps are worth their time.

3. Most companies still do a whole suite of normal tech screens after you work on a take home problem.

4. If you're actively looking, getting a bunch of these over a short period of time is likely. I know during my full time search, more than 50% of companies had a take home test right after the recruiter screen. Most of these were 4-8 hours of work each, due within the week.

A lot of startups structure it more like hazing or a barrier to entry than an evaluation criteria. I have some fun (read: horrifying) anecdotes from my recent search that illustrate the problems above, but I don't think any of my points are surprising.

A nice alternative would have been to simply have one or two projects completed that are straightforward to evaluate and walk companies through them, letting them ask me questions.

Is the Boston team and office part of The Echo Nest's in Somerville, or somewhere new?