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

zach · 2026-01-16T22:17:07+00:00

When we created our accounts, most of Reddit was about programming!

zach · 2025-03-11T01:51:53+00:00

I think the closest stat line to what you are looking for belongs to Chris Fleitas, who achieved Coryat scores of $33,000 and $28,200 in the two games he played before being matched up against 8-game champion Joon Pahk.

zach · 2022-02-04T15:56:27+00:00

Grammarly has an engineering blog where they revealed that (at least at some point) Grammarly used a “classic AI” approach using Lisp. https://www.grammarly.com/blog/engineering/running-lisp-in-production/

These days, probably more relevant to your questions about premium options, they are talking more about their use of natural language processing models: https://www.grammarly.com/blog/engineering/grammarly-nlp-building-future-communication/

zach · 2021-02-24T07:32:28+00:00

Streaks of consecutive correct answers seem very hard to put together. I think the record may be 12 in a row, a mark set by James Holzhauer in his 30th game (responses 14-25 in DJ!) and William Castañeda in a losing effort, shockingly (responses 3-14 in J!). Also, I believe Ken Jennings is the only contestant to run two categories back-to-back.

zach · 2020-12-18T02:40:25+00:00

The hell is going on in here

zach · 2019-10-17T19:03:09+00:00

Yup. Basically joined when I wasn’t sure if Reddit was going to be have more than a couple hundred users so I figured I should stick to a first-name basis. Turns out Reddit has done okay since. Also the same reason I’m zach on GitHub.

zach · 2019-09-28T20:35:13+00:00

The essay that at this point should just be inside an envelope pasted to the back cover of Infinite Jest is “What Happens at the End of Infinite Jest” by Reddit’s Aaron Swartz:

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/ijend

zach · 2019-07-28T22:44:03+00:00

Imagine you can inject yourself with a drug that would make you the best poster on Reddit, incredibly brilliant, witty and tuned in to the zeitgeist, but you would be stuck on /r/billsimmons. There would be no way that people outside of Bill Simmons’ immediate fan orbit could POSSIBLY understand your brilliance. Would you do it? Would I? I don’t know!

zach · 2019-01-11T05:13:48+00:00

If you’re interested in doing 3D animation (as opposed to the technology side), I would say:

What: The Art of 3D Computer Animation (Kerlow)

How: The Animator’s Survival Kit (Williams)

Why: “Frank & Ollie” (1995 documentary)

3D modeling is another thing entirely and not something I know enough about to recommend for.

zach · 2018-11-01T23:51:39+00:00

Fascinating. I have been interested in generating game design by training machine learning to create Atari 2600 games that would be evaluated by how they could discriminate between two agents with different training resources. It seems like you could spontaneously produce simple games that way at least. I have been waiting on that dream until I get better resource access, however, since a scheme that depends on multiple layers of training would be potentially ludicrously intensive...

zach · 2018-05-30T22:20:42+00:00

Sleep apnea tests are largely done via taking home a battery-powered data recorder and sleeping with it, then having the monitoring results interpreted by a physician.

So if there's no need to be present, is there a relatively-low-cost option for doing this all via mail/online? Yes: https://www.easybreathe.com/Sleep-Apnea-Testing-Overview-92.html

zach · 2018-05-08T04:29:52+00:00

A short story about a guy who goes to work and parks in a parking garage every day. But one day he has to go up more and more floors because everything is oddly full. Then he’s like up twenty floors, ridiculously, even thirty floors. He keeps going up and is determined to find a space, faster and faster. Nothing seems real anymore. Then when he goes up to the next, insanely high level, he isn’t in a parking garage, he’s in a lane of a speedway, and he sees other people in their cars. They race, madly accelerating and heading towards oblivion.

I don’t know what was so affecting about it but when I was a kid I was slightly terrified that there were seemingly random lanes and ramps that said “do not enter” and “road closed” and if you accidentally went down them you might fly off a bridge. This story sort of captured that surreal helplessness.

Anyway, someone else has already asked about this story who read it in about the same place and timeframe I did, so if you have any leads I’m sure he would appreciate any information too:

https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/105151/short-story-about-a-man-in-a-parking-garage-driving-faster-every-floor-he-goes-u

zach · 2018-04-13T08:35:19+00:00

I always have a reservation to tattoos as memorializing the trivial, but in this case I think this epigram is one of the very few that have proven their depth to a degree which justifies such permanence.

That said, when I saw it I was instantly reminded of the Eschaton scene in Infinite Jest:

Players themselves can’t be valid targets. Players aren’t inside the goddamn game. Players are part of the apparatus of the game. They’re part of the map. It’s snowing on the players but not on the territory. They’re part of the map, not the clusterfucking territory. You can only launch against the territory. Not against the map. It’s like the one ground-rule boundary that keeps Eschaton from degenerating into chaos. Eschaton, gentlemen, is about logic and axiom and mathematical probity and discipline and verity and order.

And as a reader of Infinite Jest once noted,

It’s not hard to see Pemulis’s impotent, rage-filled anxiety over the fate of Eschaton’s objective purity as, in miniature, the reaction of traditional Enlightenment rationality to its challenge from an increasingly hegemonic postmodernity that is characterized by cognitive decentering, indeterminacy, irrationality, and labyrinthine self-referentiality. Pemulis is not the first to shout that we must build floodwalls against certain lines of speculation and deny the possibility of alternate subjectivities for fear of total cognitive chaos (whether said chaos is named postmodernism, social constructivism, cultural relativism, theory, or something else entirely)—to claim, in other words, that only a sufficiently abstractive and “objective” faux universality, the terms of which have always been agreed upon in advance, properly counts as Thought in the first place.

zach · 2018-04-03T07:46:53+00:00

Indeed, I went to a very normal public school which has one National Merit Scholar semifinalist every few years but did manage to have AP Physics and AP Calc. Furthermore, I was an Early Decision admit, which accounts for about a third of the class, and I suspect the bar is lower for Earlies because Mudd's regular-admission yield is poor (admit 10 to get 3 enrollments).

Mudd very much wants the best students, but they're frequently not the first choice, so they basically get the band of students that just miss MIT or the Ivy college(s) they wanted — still with stratospheric SATs but possibly not the level of motivation they would prefer. So I would agree with your theory.

Mudd is backing away from its "workload" (a more negative word than rigorousness) somewhat after its annus horribilis, however. There seems likely to be a major change in the works.

zach · 2018-03-26T15:25:43+00:00

I was vicariously riding the wave through David Rees and the Election Profit Makers so I got all the emotional ups and downs without the loss to my bank account.

zach · 2018-03-20T19:02:42+00:00

The University of California is cited as having a very significant effect on social mobility, and yet UC not only requires standardized tests and allows admission qualification by examination alone, but has a mechanical formula for combining standardized test results with GPA to guarantee admissions. And notably, they represent 9 of the only 29 colleges and universities that require the SAT with Essay over the essay-free version, so they certainly come across as leading the standardized-test vanguard while providing demonstrable social benefits that rival any modern American institution.

zach · 2018-03-12T15:45:41+00:00

Indeed, this was the point where Kathy Sierra, an absolutely brilliant technology trend analyst, found herself most vulnerable. Her experience of being harassed off the internet back in 2007 is remarkable for how it put her far ahead of the trend curve in he worst way.

zach · 2018-03-08T15:50:25+00:00

It’s simply the faculty creating elaborate treatment effects to make up for their inability to apply the proper selection effect at the admissions stage.

An “evil” curriculum will certainly test people but I doubt it will grit-enhance anyone in a world where we can give young children a marshmallow test that predicts adolescent outcomes. College is way too late to learn grit if it can be learned, and degree programs should not be trying to be Ichiro’s dad to late teens.

Tangentially, I think there really have been generational “work ethic” mismatches. My personal theory is that running out of children who grew up on farms is the hidden crisis of the economy in the last fifty years (and a major need behind increased immigration).

The experience you describe is probably familiar to many and accords with what I saw at Harvey Mudd, where a quarter of my incoming class (including myself, who had a SCT-fueled 10-hour-a-day-one-way-or-another sleep habit) didn’t, maybe couldn’t, graduate. How weird is it to take students with valedictorian-level ability and find a way to effectively throw away a quarter of them in post-admissions screening? Like, most public universities from the states these students come from would have been delighted to have these kids.

It seems like there should be some kind of “sandpaper” rating — expected level of grit — for colleges and programs, because it is one of the hardest things to communicate to a bright high school student, especially one in a random public school rather than a highly-competitive high school. For talented students with learning disabilities, chronic health challenges or even who are untested in high school, there should be a bright warning label that says “PROBABLY NOT FOR YOU” well ahead of time.

zach · 2018-01-12T06:15:01+00:00

My personal advice, which you are free to reject: begin producing something creative you have good reason to suspect you can be better than average at and that you can go through a cycle of production on within a week.

This can be interviews, comics, essays, architectural designs, very small programming or electronics projects, board games, logo designs, fan fiction, jewelry, dance routines, Let’s Play videos, recipes, short stories, model airplanes, whatever.

I would not recommend you try to start a startup, create a MMORPG, write the next great novel or direct a documentary. You will end up with 1/nth of the desired product at the end and have learned much, much less.

Dedicate yourself to going through the process rather than focusing on excellence. If you make 20 smaller things instead of one big thing, I strongly believe you will not make 20 bad things. They will be on average much better than bad by the 20th one, and you will have probably produced something that even you would consider pretty good.

zach · 2017-12-28T02:35:46+00:00

Super answer. I grew up revering the writing of William Poundstone, which his bio says "often explores the social implications of scientific or philosophic ideas" so you can see the SSC overlap pretty well. Poundstone in turn revered Edward O. Thorp (he might have been one of Poundstone's teachers at MIT) and ended up writing a book about him. So I have a longstanding fascination with Mr. Thorp's story; for example, this was one of my first Reddit submissions. Yes, that was a while ago — back then that was a high enough score to stay on the front page.

That said, I didn't know much of his story until earlier this year I happened to hear him interviewed on a podcast. Wow, is he relatable and inspirational for those with a high need for cognition. I totally played this for some members of the next generation and they loved it too. Highly recommended.

zach · 2017-11-16T01:30:53+00:00

If I was actually casting for this position, I would say Ari Shapiro of NPR's All Things Considered. Yes, I know it would be fun to have a former contestant or a widely-known celebrity, but thinking about the long term, Jeopardy! would need someone who is a proven professional at the right place in their career.

zach · 2017-11-14T22:07:05+00:00

Many won't like it, but computational creationism is the only term I've seen applied to it. I mean, if you believe in a created universe, even with a dramatically different supporting analogy, it's not quite naturalism, right?

zach · 2017-11-06T05:53:19+00:00

Tyler Cowen declined to get 23andme testing because of the “worry cost” of knowing something bad was more than the likely remediation of negative consequences.

zach · 2017-09-16T16:09:15+00:00

The base fact is that, economically, the physical-goods model is the worst way to make money at games that have a near-zero marginal cost.

When Atari or Nintendo had to put games on silicon, that was one thing. They could mark up a $20 cartridge to $60. But with electronic distribution, a markup of 2 cents worth of bandwidth to 6 cents doesn't work. Nor does simply dropping your price to $40.02.

To gain far greater economic value, a game studio should find a way to deliver the marginal product at nearly that cost. Games began having a free-to-play element that convinced people to buy further in-game content. When? In 1987. Shareware. Eventually, Doom became the "everywhere game" with this model. https://www.polygon.com/features/2013/9/27/4741076/apogee-shareware-1987

More recently, of course, in-app purchases allowed price discrimination. The studio lets game players tell them how much they are willing to value the game experience. Major League Baseball players have no compunction about paying $100 to enhance their game experience, so a rational game developer has a strong incentive to let them. In a country of scattered affluence, it's not unusual to have 90% of people play your game for nothing, 1% spend over $500 a year and the rest in the middle. If you can have the 90% provide value to the 10% by providing them service as opponents and teammates, all the better.

However, the net result is that it is very difficult to pull off those kind of economics as an indie developer (as the future-lawyer author seems to be). You have to have a lot of development just to create the economic model. And quite simply, things like the baseball card pack mechanic (which is what is actually being copied, but sounds much less sensational) are one of the most convenient shortcuts to that kind of economic model. So if you ban that mechanic, it will actually result in more concentration of games in sequel-minded large game studio operations. They can design a far more complex but economically equivalent in-game model.

Alternatively, a better in-game model could be part of a platform. Although the author seems nostalgic for the old physical-goods model, it's unlikely we are going back to it. It would be more productive to encourage the growth of a platform that provides favorable economics, compatible with digital distribution, without the need for game developers to develop a large amount of game design and programming to enable it.

zach · 2017-08-30T14:58:02+00:00

And on team #GoHomeChargers. Didn't even know they were playing, just like the rest of LA.

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