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The Last Technical Interview

https://steve-yegge.medium.com/the-last-technical-interview-bc13ddcf4564
25•headalgorithm•3h ago

Comments

sameers•3h ago
I couldn't find the text of this joke, attributed to Dirac. I'll paraphrase.

A man walks into a pet store. There's a parrot for $100, it says this parrot speaks perfect English . The one next to it is $1,000, and says, This parrot speaks 12 languages fluently.

Then there's a bedraggled looking, droopy, parrot, and its label simply says One Million Dollars.

Does it sing opera and has successfully run for President? the man asks with a sneer.

This parrot, says the store owner, _thinks_.

That's what this entire post is about - how to evaluate people with a series of attributes, score, correlate, blah blah blah.

Hire them, see if they think. If they don't, fire them. It's cheaper than this credential/signal rigmarole, most of which is about CYA legal b+llsh1t. Yes, it's a simplistic strategy and it doesn't work for Shoogle, Banthropic, Goober, whatever. You know what, boo f*cking hoo. You're a trillion dollar company, suck it up. You have a zombie horde at your doors and you're just upset the "true gems" are hard for you to spot amongst the slavering masses. You're going to heartlessly lay them off anyway in a few years. You SHOULD feel this pain and anguish of having to sort through them, constantly regretting all your choices. That's the only way to have balance in the Universe.

roxolotl•1h ago
There’s an old Malcom Gladwell podcast episode, I think the show was Revisionist History, where he says he’s an interview nihilist. As long as the person seems reasonably capable, and can probably do a bit of what you need, hire them. Interviews are so hard to get right that what you’re saying ends up being most effective.

Edit: Didn’t link it initially because I thought it would be hard to find. Turns out it’s not. https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/hamlet-w...

Ancalagon•1h ago
And good riddance.
eikenberry•32m ago
His idea has some merit but will require the old system to completely crash out before anything new will be considered and I'm not sure if it will crash or just keep limping along. If it really does crash out hopefully we will see multiple new strategies emerge as there are many possible options once the current one is off the table.
nitwit005•20m ago
I gave the feedback at one Google interview that they should send Google employees through to see how many get hired. Good to see they basically tried that.

The conclusion at the end that bringing someone on board is the ideal method is true I'm sure, but even that runs into the issue that employee evaluation is an even worse situation than the interview process.

You can openly see some managers panic when they realize they have no idea what their employees have been doing for the last 6-12 months when they're asked to provide feedback.

SQLite is all you need for durable workflows

https://obeli.sk/blog/sqlite-is-all-you-need-for-durable-workflows/
294•tomasol•5h ago•177 comments

The dead economy theory

https://www.owenmcgrann.com/p/the-dead-economy-theory
591•WillDaSilva•7h ago•781 comments

You can just say it

https://noperator.dev/posts/you-can-just-say-it/
60•antirez•7h ago•7 comments

Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

https://koenvangilst.nl/lab/mistral-ai-now-summit
297•vnglst•7h ago•100 comments

MCP Is Dead

https://www.quandri.io/engineering-blog/mcp-is-dead
35•nadis•38m ago•23 comments

Shift will clean homes for free to train future robots

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/939765/ai-training-data-startup-shift-free-cl...
60•evilsimon•4h ago•84 comments

Show HN: Tiny-vLLM – high performance LLM inference engine in C++ and CUDA

https://github.com/jmaczan/tiny-vllm
63•yu3zhou4•3h ago•7 comments

Print with dozens of colors: Our new open-source ColorMix for PrusaSlicer

https://blog.prusa3d.com/our-new-open-source-colormix-model-in-prusaslicer-and-easyprint_136079/
35•rented_mule•3d ago•1 comments

It's hard to justify buying a Framework 12

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/its-hard-to-justify-framework-12/
190•watermelon0•8h ago•347 comments

Bijou64: A variable-length integer encoding

https://www.inkandswitch.com/tangents/bijou64/
197•justinweiss•8h ago•71 comments

On Rendering Diffs

https://pierre.computer/writing/on-rendering-diffs
129•amadeus•4h ago•31 comments

Liquid AI reveals 8B-A1B MoE trained on 38T

https://www.liquid.ai/blog/lfm2-5-8b-a1b
135•simjnd•7h ago•40 comments

The California state assembly has passed the 'Protect Our Games Act'

https://www.invenglobal.com/articles/22330/stop-killing-games-movement-gains-momentum-california-...
157•TechTechTech•3h ago•158 comments

Free full BGP feed. IPv4 and IPv6

https://lukasz.bromirski.net/post/bgp-w-labie-3/
11•pm2222•1h ago•2 comments

Rothko for your current weather conditions

https://rothko.joonas.wtf/
111•jxmorris12•5h ago•11 comments

Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

https://mastrojs.github.io/blog/2026-05-23-is-AI-causing-a-repeat-of-frontends-lost-decade/
270•xyzal•12h ago•232 comments

GTA 6 Developers Unionize

https://rockstarintel.com/gta-6-developers-announce-rockstar-games-union/
532•AndrewKemendo•8h ago•362 comments

Letter from the Duke of Wellington to the British Foreign Office (1809)

https://wellsoc.org/society-member-pages/anecdotes-of-wellington/
46•backuprestore•5h ago•12 comments

Show HN: Zot – Yet another coding agent harness

https://www.zot.sh
52•patriceckhart•17h ago•59 comments

Show HN: TV Explorer. Adding advanced UI to free online TV

https://tvexplorer.live
91•dtagames•6h ago•20 comments

Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-05-27/uc-math-professors-demand-return-of-sat-for-s...
428•brandonb•1d ago•646 comments

Why I collect DLES

https://dles.gg/blog/dles-gg-manifesto
20•trizoza•2h ago•5 comments

The mysterious Hy3 LLM is topping OpenRouter Model Rankings by a large margin

https://minimaxir.com/2026/05/openrouter-hy3/
97•freediver•23h ago•93 comments

Finding Miscompiles for Fun, Not Profit

https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/finding-miscompiles-for-fun-not-profit
8•tmoertel•1d ago•0 comments

CAPTCHAs can still detect AI agents

https://research.roundtable.ai/captchas-detect-ai/
56•timshell•7h ago•47 comments

Microsoft 0-day feud escalates as researcher threatens another exploit dump

https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/05/28/microsoft-0-day-feud-escalates-as-researcher-thre...
135•Cider9986•3h ago•35 comments

Show HN: Free activity calendar for schools, sports clubs, and organizations

https://freecal.eu/?lang=en
3•glenn_vc•50m ago•2 comments

The Last Technical Interview

https://steve-yegge.medium.com/the-last-technical-interview-bc13ddcf4564
26•headalgorithm•3h ago•5 comments

Cedana (YC S23) Is Hiring

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/cedana/jobs/d1vYocG-forward-deployed-engineer-ai-hpc
1•neelm•11h ago

We should be more tired than the model

https://vickiboykis.com/2026/05/28/we-should-be-more-tired-than-the-model/
142•tosh•11h ago•128 comments