It seems like a moot point since there are already too many people who can clear leetcode hard than there are available positions that require it.
It’s like scoring over 2 standard deviations on an IQ test, great, but by definition millions of people can do that.
Edit: I’ve heard HFT firms are now moving to doing it on paper in person to prevent any kind of cheating for their interviews, which would make it a better signal.
Yes,that is better.
From my own experience, LeetCode does indeed enhance one's logical thinking and coding skills. I believe this is the reason why FAG has always tested algorithm and data structure skills in interviews over the years.
It might not be sensible for the organization as a whole, but there’s no way to determine that conclusively, without going over thousands of different possibilities, edge cases, etc.
I have already documented, in writing, in multiple places, that the automated software has raised a false alarm, as well as providing a piece of code demonstrating that the alert was wrong. They are asking me to document it in an additional place that I don't have access to, presumably for perceived security reasons? We already accept that my reasoning around the false alarm is valid, they just have buried a simple resolution beneath completely stupid process. You are going to get false alarms, if it takes months to deal with a single one, the alarm system is going to get ignored, or bypassed. I have a variety of conflicting demands on my attention.
At the same time, when we came under a coordinated DDOS attack from what was likely a political actor, security didn't notice the millions of requests coming from a country that we have never had a single customer in. Our dev team brought it to their attention where they, again, slowed everything down by insisting on taking part in the mitigation, even though they couldn't figure out how to give themselves permission to access basic things like our logging system. We had to devote one of our on calls to walking them through submitting access tickets, a process presumably put in place by a security team.
I know what good security looks like, and I respect it. Many people have to deal with bad security on a regular basis, and they should not be shamed for correctly pointing out that it is terrible.
If your sufficiently confident there can be no negative consequences whatsoever… then just email that person’s superiors and cc your superiors to guarantee in writing you’ll take responsibility?
The ops person obviously can’t do that on your behalf, at least not in any kind of organizational setup I’ve heard of.
As the developer in charge of looking at security alerts for this code base, I already am responsible, which is why I submitted the exemption request in the first place. As it is, this alert has been active for months and no one from security has asked about the alert, just my exemption request, so clearly the actual fix (disregarding or code changes) are less important than the process and alert itself.
So the solution to an illogical, kafkaesque security process is to bypass the process entirely via authority?
You are making my argument for me.
This is exactly why people don’t take security processes seriously, and fight efforts to add more security processes.
Ops are the ones who imposed those constraints. You can't impose absurd constraints and then say you are acting reasonable by abiding by your own absurd constraints.
I'm not dumping on the ops person, but the ops and security team's processes. If you as a developer showed up to a new workplace and the process was that for every code change you had to print out a diff and mail a hard copy to the committee for code reviews, you would be totally justified in calling out the process as needlessly elaborate. Anyone could rightly say that your processes are increasing friction while not actually serving the purpose of having code reviewed by peers. You as a developer have a responsibility to point out that the current process serves no one and should be changed. That's what good security and ops people do too.
In the real world case I am talking about, we can easily foresee that the end result is that the exemption will be allowed, and there will be no security impact. In no way does the process at all contribute to that, and every person involved knows it.
My original post was about how people dislike security when it is actually security theater. That is what is going on here. We already know how this issue ends and how that can be accomplished (document the false alarm, and click the ignore button), and have already done the important part of documenting the issue for posterity.
The process could be: you are a highly paid developer who takes security training and has access to highly sensitive systems so we trust your judgment, when you and your peers agree that this isn't an issue, write that down in the correct place, click the ignore button and move on with your work.
All of the faff of contacting different fiefdoms and submitting tickets does nothing to contribute to the core issue or resolution, and certainly doesn't enhance security. If anything, security theater like this leads to worse security since people will try to find shortcuts or ways of just not handling issues.
If a sewer system can be designed such that dumping sewage need never occur, you can earmark some of the budget for gradually introducing this property into your sewer system. The more such improvements you make, the less often you'll have to dump sewage, until you never have to. Thames Water could have done this.
Who would even hire an MBA to improve such difficult to measurre things?
Maybe it will make a significant enough cumulative impact 5 years later that it can actuallly be noticed and defended in a meeting against other priorities.
But I’ve never heard of anyone hiring someone on minimum wage and deferring a huge bonus to 5 years later.
Even if it does makes a big impact, would anyone even take a such a job?
It seems really unlikely so many elements of American society decided to prioritize returns simultaneously… but more like those who didn’t… eventually couldn’t compete anymore and left the market.
Leaving behind only those completely focused on returns.
I'd reframe that slightly. There is a vast foundation of stable, optimized businesses that are in commoditized/low-growth ares. They function as the underpinnings of the American economy.
When turning the spotlight to capital that is seeking returns, it is true that these areas may be mediocre places to deploy fresh capital, but it doesn't mean that these players aren't competing, and they will probably be cranking out sheet metal and port cargo logistics optimization well after 90% of the AI startups fold.
The caveat is of course Private Equity, which is about 10 trillion in assets. They can derive high returns from these areas, but it requires leverage.
Not only leverage, but also destabilizing those optimized businesses to harvest the capital assets from their balance sheets to pay for the leverage, while destroying the underlying business.
PE is arguably much worse than VC. VC's business model is well understood and by taking VC funding, you are committing to their expected returns.
PE is, usually, unsolicited and is designed to exploit what appears to be a "lazy" balance sheet, but which is actually a stable business producing output and providing a reasonable ROI.
PE played a part in manufacturing leaving the US. Often the buyouts were of sick companies, and it was just the optimum way to monetize their death. But without PE not all of them wouldnhave eventually died, and it would have given policy makers more time to react to what was happening.
It’s just natural that nobody wanted to pay for outdated machines and tooling in developed countries.
Labor costs, permits, fees, etc., means that buying used just doesn’t make sense unless it’s almost free.
Whereas developing countries were willing to pay a lot more, sometimes as much as 50 cents on the dollar compared to brand new equipment and they would send a team to rip it out too.
I’ve heard that applied to almost everything too heavy to move by forklift during the 80s, 90s, and 2000s.
They're very much yin and yang. PE's operating model is to take businesses that are operating inefficiently, squeeze all the inefficiencies out, sell off assets that would be more productive under other management, and basically strip the company bare. If it kills the company, that creates fertile ground for new startups funded by VC.
Think of PE as the decomposers of capitalism, and VC as its seeds. Most people don't like to think of it that way because they don't like to be reminded that death is a part of life. But if you view capitalism as a living ecosystem and your role within capitalism as someone to accelerate growth and then accelerate death so that new growth can take its place, it all makes sense. And you can probably profit pretty handsomely from it, because most people don't view capitalism like that and instead seek stability in the dying parts.
In the US there have been a few, i.e., apparently less than 20, universities with an applied math program up to date in and teaching optimization.
Sooooo, anyone at all seriously interested, long, for decades, would, could, should visit some of those math programs, meet some of the profs, get recommendations for their former students, call them, chat, and offer a job better than their current lawn mowing, fast food restaurant kitchen cleaning, or car washing. Instead of just the US, might also consider Waterloo in Canada. Actually the Chair of my Ph.D. orals committee specialized in optimization in logistics. After sending 1000+ beautifully written resume copies and hearing back nothing, can begin to conclude that optimization is not a hot field and for highly dedicated optimizers who want to sleep on a cot in a single room, forgo bathing, most days eat bread, other days peanut butter, have no children, wife, or family contact, don't own a car, and must get any needed medical care from some of the last resort special clinics. Ah, real optimization!
Even the term itself is pretty misleading, as the answer notes, the vast majority of purported ‘summons’ are not actually made with the threat in writing that they will be punished if they don’t show up.
Clearance rates for violent crimes are below 60% in Canada… and even literal stabbing victims often go without any sort of closure, in pretty much every major city across Canada.
And it’s been like that for some number of years without any sort of fundamental reform, or enormous police/prosecutor budget increases, in sight.
From that perspective it’s amazing any car thefts gets solved at all…
Looking at homicide, which is the most unbiased indicator (not much under/over-reporting), it was at historic lows in 2013, when the homicide rate was 1.45. It has been growing nearly every year since. The latest data I can find is for 2022, which has a 2.273 homicide rate. For reference, that is a little more than 4x the homicide rate of Italy, which is at 0.545, and a little more than 2x Bulgaria's 1.088 rate.
Unfortunately, covid is proving to be a huge outlier, so ending in 2022 isn't that useful. This is the US, but the reactions to covid caused huge crime spikes, which are now retreating fast: https://www.govexec.com/management/2025/08/fbi-us-crime-rate...
Also, some jurisdictions have been known to engage in a practice where criminals are charged with lesser crimes in order to make the violent crime numbers look good.
Are these numbers reliable? Or are people just not reporting them because police won’t do anything? Also, are you accounting for improvements in medical technology? E.g., as of 2013, the rates of murder + attempted murder were 50-60% higher than in 1962:
https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/crime-in-canada-falls-to...
For murders and serious violent crimes like stabbings and robber/assaults resulting in major injuries, or for serious thefts, in a country like Canada or the U.S. i'd believe the numbers are. Very few people in these countries, where perception of police as useful more or less exists, would fail to report such crimes.
On the other hand, just to showcase a counterpoint, in countries like the one I live in (Mexico) even violent crimes and major thefts often don't go reported simply because in many parts, police are considered so useless (or even sometimes collusive with criminals and thus counterporductive) that even for serious things, they're not contacted unless absolutely necessary.
Even with these tendencies however, you'd be surprised how often people do go through the formality of filing a report just in case it turns up a result, particularly for murders and kidnappings, where desperation obligates them.
e.g. Whether there are 1000 stabbing victims per year, or 5000, a low clearance rate means there are still many victims that can only pound sand, without even a remote prospect of seeing any action taken.
It's very relevant. Prevention is the best cure. One set of statistics might paint a grim picture, but a different set might be far more encouraging (of course these could have been fudged but i'm taking op at his word), if violent crime is falling people are safer even if the police are doing a worse job and that's much more important. This runs deeper then that. It's a common theme for people to complain how everything is worse now and the gradual failure of institutions. Any positive news should be highlighted and celebrated.
I'm not saying to ignore the problems, but it's important to get a better perspective.
An 95% clearance rate with 100 crimes leaves the same number of unresolved cases as a 0% clearance rate with 5 crimes. If you have fewer crimes you don't have to spend as much money prosecuting them to get the same results.
As long it’s more than single digit cases per year per city not getting cleared, it seems practically irrelevant to car theft recovery what the number is beyond that. Since police forces have finite staffing and budgets.
Anyone proposing extra resources to be spent or diverted to car thefts would not be taken seriously, if it’s clearly insufficient to even clear most violent cases.
That’s the fundamental issue with most “analysis”, and most discussions really, on HN.
Since the vast vast majority of writers and commentators are not literal geniuses… they can’t reliably produce high quality synthetic analysis, outside of very narrow niches.
Even though for most comment chains on HN to make sense, readers certainly have to pretend some meaningful text was produced beyond happenstance.
Partly because quality is measured relative to the average, and partly because the world really is getting more complex.
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