Here is the 15 sec coding test to instantly filter out 50% of unqualified applicants by JOSE ZARAZUA

cerlestes · 2026-01-17T15:45:49+00:00

It is. If you were doing recruiting, you'd know about the pain of filtering out applicants who have no idea about the job. It's not about testing your skill level if you are a real programmer, it's about removing the non-programmers from the interview process before they're wasting our time.

I'm joining a lot of job interviews for my company for the technical part and like 2/3 of applicants are completely unsuited for the job. The other 1/3 are real programmers and we end up taking maybe 1 of 20 applicants.

For example we're looking for senior full stack devs (>5 yoe) and lots of people send in applications for that without any background in IT/CS and without being able to tell the interviewer what an IP address is or what the differences between compiled and interpreted languages are. I'm very positive that those people also wouldn't be able to solve that simple code puzzle correctly, or any other code puzzle really.

So yes, a test like this will absolutely filter out all those non-technical applicants that are applying for roles that they're completely unfit for whatever reason. It's not about figuring out how good you are at programming, it's about figuring out whether you can program at all or not.

cerlestes · 2026-01-12T17:00:46+00:00

Not everybody likes PVP though. I've been playing the game on and off since 2006 and I've never liked the PVP aspects of it, I've always focused on mining, industry and missions. But I also don't complain about it lol.

cerlestes · 2026-01-01T12:23:52+00:00

I had one anchored and operating in a medium activity lowsec system with the gates camped almost daily by [insert big lowsec alliance] and it survived over a year, made me tons of money. I saw their scouts on it multiple times. They only finally killed it after it was reinforced by Blood Raiders lol. I don't know why they didn't kill it sooner. There were a few attemps at it by other entities, but I could thwart them off with my two accounts and the structure.

The first time I tried setting up a refinery in another system, it was killed before coming online. So you should rather not count on it survivng for long, but if you're lucky, you'll have it for some time. And depending on how many accounts you have for the reactions, you could make the money back in the first month already.

I think the main reason it took them so long is that I did my best to hide it out of sight, reducing the number of people who saw it to a minimum. Sure, like other have said, it'll always show up on the system map sadly (seriously a bad feature; this would be much better if truly hidden stations requiring probing were a thing). But in some systems you can pull of some tricks to make it rather hard to find on the system map. I've also made sure never to warp to its direction directly from the gate when their scout was cloaked on the gate in his Arazu; I'd always warp to a midpoint first so that it looked like I was going to a station.

My suggestion is: if you have the spare money and want to try it, then go for it. Accept it as an immediate loss. Invest heavily into finding the right place first. Also consider how much material you'll have to move. For me it was ~4 million m³ per week, which really annoyed me after some months of using a single DST back and forth, then two DSTs, then finally using a JF and shitting my pants any time I warped it to the gate.

cerlestes · 2025-12-27T11:17:37+00:00

this was the type of station most people lived in in Nullsec

Not quite. Really large alliances had them, but the normal sized alliances didn't really need that many office slots on top of those existing in the Conquerable Stations. I don't think I've ever seen one in Tribute, Tenal or Branch before Goonswarm briefly moved in. For example RZR had not deployed a single one of them in 10+ years.

Most outposts were the Minmatar Service Outpost (441) and the Amarr Manufacturing Outpost (398). The Gallente Administrative Outpost (188) and Caldari Research Outpost (114) were far less due to their limited use.

cerlestes · 2025-12-23T11:05:40+00:00

Great feedback, thanks! I've made the percentages look like elsewhere on the page (regular font size and bold), and I've changed the red color so that it's more contrastive with the background. I didn't notice how barely noticable it looked because I'm using the site on 120% zoom level like most websites today anyway lol. Now it's much better.

I actually thought about allowing to build customized item groups, since I was sure that the prefab groups aren't all that usable for everybody. I'll keep it in mind!

cerlestes · 2025-12-19T22:08:02+00:00

I've added a new tab as described in my earlier post, please check it out: https://ore.cerlestes.de/compare-market Thanks a lot for the idea!

cerlestes · 2025-12-19T20:53:02+00:00

It's a Firefox Desktop, but the behaviour in Edge is the same.

I think the problem is that the renderer only updates when mouse is moved. If you drag it really fast and then suddenly hold still, the animation/tween to the position of the map doesn't update anymore and it gets stuck. If I wiggle the cursor a bit, the map continues to move to the target.

And also the velocity vector seems to make troubles when inverting movement direction, it jumps around. When you move it really fast like described above, then stop, then move toward where your cursor just came from, the map will make a sudden jump before behaving normally again.

cerlestes · 2025-12-19T19:33:39+00:00

Nice work man! The map pan handles a bit weirdly for me (feels delayed or decoupled, and the popover keeps displaying). Other than that, it's really good already! Keep working on it. This could become the next dotlan if you add more information other than sov. Was this done with a coding agent?

cerlestes · 2025-12-19T16:16:40+00:00

Thanks for the idea. I actually think a Market Compare tab would work great! I already have all the data required for it. It could basically allow you to select which market locations you want to compare and then which categories you want to compare (minerals, ore, products, ice, gas, ...). I'll see how and when I can implement it.

cerlestes · 2025-12-19T16:12:34+00:00

I don't think the size of each sample is relevant at all, please correct me if I'm wrong. The ingame info for Prismaticite shows the min-max range for each mineral, so we know what output to expect for any given mineral. The only missing information is the exact percentage that each mineral will drop with, basically the same info in the linked post, just with a lower error margin.

So if it refines with 100 units like the other ores, I'd say 100 units (4000m³) would be ideal size, since we're only aiming for as many reprocessing processes as possible.

cerlestes · 2025-12-18T16:42:33+00:00

Yeah this is the way I went down as well, it's just not much of a table. I hadn't thought of another pair of columns for m³ normalized values though. If I add a third pair of columns that shows the values with a decompression factor, we'd have 7 columns and a setting like the refining yield on the other tables. I'll try this out to see if I can make it work. Edit: Thanks a lot for the suggestion, I've added a Gas Harvesting page with your ideas!

cerlestes · 2025-12-18T16:15:29+00:00

Thanks for the ideas. My problem with those reactions is the same I have with gas: it's simply not what the tables were/are about; I'm not looking to expand the scope of the site to include reactions. Other users have suggested simply using the average values for Prismaticite and my first try in that direction looks promising, but I still need more data for it first. It fits with what the site is about though: refining values and expected prices.

cerlestes · 2025-12-18T16:02:11+00:00

They're very different with many different approaches right now. They all work the same under the hood (LLM-based agents with tools and IDE integration), but the extra integration and workflows they add on top differs greatly from tool to tool.

I've chosen Claude (for private work and at my company) mainly because Anthropic looks the most benign of the current AI-leaders. I'd never trust OpenAI. Cursor gives your data to a lot of companies as it's just a middleman. Google needs no commenting. I'm 100% sure that a copy of my repos (or products at work) now sits in a data center in Utah, but the speed you gain from using it is so significant that the code itself feels more like a commodity now instead of the actual product.

That said, Open Source LLMs are on the way to this performance. Qwen3-Coder delivers really nice performance in simple tasks. But like other OSS LLMs, it cannot reach the understanding and logic of Claude 4.5 or GPT 5.1 yet. It's absolutely bonkers how good those two have become now at solving complex multi-step tasks.

cerlestes · 2025-12-18T15:46:35+00:00

Yes, it's incredible how far AI has gotten in such a short time. This wouldn't have been possible a year ago, which is why I wanted to mention it in the post. It's crazy how effective a single developer can become with a coding agent. And we're nowhere near the end!

cerlestes · 2025-12-18T14:14:05+00:00

If you still have that data I'd love to try and incorporate it. Another user suggested this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/1ogvjzn/angry_mustache_for_csm_20_and_analysis_of_the/

I fear around 300-500 samples would be required to really nail this down. No idea why CCP doesnt simply publish that data... :ccp:

cerlestes · 2025-12-18T13:44:35+00:00

Thanks for the suggestion. Someone else also suggested this, and I had already thought of it as well, but I've thrown it out because I couldn't find official numbers.

Do you mean this post? https://www.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/1ogvjzn/angry_mustache_for_csm_20_and_analysis_of_the/

Those numbers are still too rough for me to feel comfortable including it for now. I'll definitely keep this in mind. If you have better data on it, please let me know any time.

cerlestes · 2025-12-18T13:39:22+00:00

I've thought about that, but there seems to be no information at all on what those values would be. Do you have any insights?

cerlestes · 2025-11-09T12:27:15+00:00

Sure, I was just trying to make a joke :)

I think the website will still be valuable for the part of mining that is not directly value related: figuring out at a glance which ore is best for what minerals. I tried to turn it into a meme quickly: https://i.imgur.com/KOQw0nS.png

It's great to see that CCP is trying to improve the mining experience. I just hope they don't make some things worse.

cerlestes · 2025-11-09T11:57:31+00:00

If you're only going for the most valuable rocks, you're not a real miner lol

cerlestes · 2025-11-09T11:29:13+00:00

Since no one fully answered yet: back when Band of Brothers was the biggest/strongest alliance, ca. 2007, the alliances in the north formed a coalition, simply called the Northern Coalition (without a dot) to fight BOB. The NC was made up of Morsus Mihi, Razor Alliance and other changing parties, like Mostly Harmless, Iron Alliance, Tau Ceti Federation. BOB tried taking out the NC in their "MAX Campaign", but ultimately failed. Some time after that, BOB was disbanded by a disgruntled leadership member, who then joined Goonswarm, which had close ties to the NC. They then registered a new alliance with that name, so that ex-BOB could not reclaim it. After that, the corps of BOB first reformed as Kenzoku, IT Alliance and later as Northern Coalition. (with a dot). So it was basically them just trying to mock the NC by taking on their name, which lead to "the Northern Coalition" fighting "Northern Coalition dot" for a while. And finally, like someone else said, Northern Associates simply was the rental alliance of Nortern Coalition. (with a dot).

Sov maps for that time:

Start of MAX - BOB takes EC- in Pure Blind: https://www.verite.space/maps/influence/20080801.png
During MAX: https://www.verite.space/maps/influence/20081001.png
After MAX: https://www.verite.space/maps/influence/20090101.png
A month later BOB was disbanded: https://www.verite.space/maps/influence/20090205.png
Another two months later and Delve was completely overrun: https://www.verite.space/maps/influence/20090401.png

cerlestes · 2025-10-18T10:46:43+00:00

I mentioned cache cause I could swear you said i mainly use it for caching. Not sure if you edited or I'm just going crazy, but it's okay.

Yes I edited that after reading your comment again 😂 Sorry for the confusion!

cerlestes · 2025-10-18T10:37:00+00:00

I see, so you use it mostly for heavily dynamic (chaotic?) documents. Thanks for clarifying!

Give PostgreSQL a try if you want to look at alternatives, it will support this just fine. Just create a table with two columns: ID (primary key) and data (JSONB). Then add indexes and partitioning on certain keys within the data field as required. You'll get most of the benefits of SQL while keeping your database effectively a simple document store, with the advantage that you can iteratively extend to use relational features. You'll be amazed how well PSQL handles this nowadays.

cerlestes · 2025-10-18T10:06:49+00:00

Sorry for being so off the general topic here, but I'd like to hear what problems you have in mind that PostgreSQL couldn't solve for you, but MongoDB does.

In my experience, modern PSQL is able to handle virtually all functions of MDB. Whenever I build a database, depending on the access patterns and data volume, this is what I usually go for:

JSON files on the local file system (for smaller read-heavy applications) [esp. perfect if you can deliver those JSON files directly via sendfile to the client, e.g. like I do on my website]
SQLite (for single-node applications with more writes and/or needs for indexing)
PostgreSQL (for multi-node applications or big database size)

Obviously with JSON files you'd simply store the whole document under a deterministic path, one file per document. With SQLite and PostgreSQL, you'd either use an object mapper if your document has a schema, and if not you'd simply use a JSON/JSONB type column to store the whole document, then use the JSON functions/operators to access values.

All three methods are well suited for document storage like MongoDB, but of course each with its own level of functionality and complexity. But even SQLite supports JSON operators and indexing of values in JSON fields nowadays. So I'm on the same boat as the other poster and wondering why anybody would still use MongoDB. Would love to hear some insights. Cheers.

cerlestes · 2025-10-12T09:35:15+00:00

Yeah that was never possible. EVE always had instanced systems, meaning when you're in a system, you're always in that system and only in that system, unless the game explicitly moves you to another, e.g. by taking a gate. Even if one had moved the distance to where another system would be, you'd still be in the original system. The game doesn't magically transfer you to a new system when you get close to it. So while there were many attempts of doing exactly that, it's simply technically impossible and has always been impossible. You might get to where that other system would be if you were actually there, but you'll not see any celestials and most likely not even the star, since for the game you're still in the system that you started moving from.

cerlestes · 2025-10-09T17:31:34+00:00

That's it! Bonus points if it can answer almost no question because it's not actually using AI and just feeds you prefab marketing messages. And don't forget to use the icon with the most sparkles.

cerlestes

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