Former Hacker Schooler and also a novice programmer at the time of applying.
Nicholas' edit is true in my experience: HS cares more about your desire to become a better programmer, which is not a function of how good you are now.
I just got Trader Joe's Instacarted yesterday. I had no problems with produce - the shopper picked out possibly the best red bell pepper I have ever seen.
I also received a free upgrade because I ordered for three tomatoes and it turns out they come in packs of five.
I was in the batch with dillonforrest. Like him, I was a beginner. The only code I had written was in MATLAB. I am not sure if I am a rare exception or not, but your level of programming knowledge should not deter you from applying. If you can code FizzBuzz and want to improve, you should apply!
I may be misunderstanding you, but you may want to opt for a noise-canceling headset or IEM + white noise rather than complete silence. The reason is that if you have just quiet, any noise that makes it through is guaranteed to be a distraction (fragile). With white noise, almost all outside interference will just blend into the white noise (robust). (By white noise, I mean any sound that you find easy to ignore. This could be certain songs, ambient sound, or white noise.)
Could you please explain your reasoning? It seems to me that a bubble implies that there is a surplus of available capital, so that good and bad companies alike are funded. I'm not sure how a company would only be able to raise capital in a not-bubble.
The cost is negligible with respect to the total carrying capacity of your brain. I don't have a source, but I've seen this stated in a few books.
It is often mentioned that there is a cost in that an additional association seems like more work. (To disclose my bias, I find visual memory techniques to be a boon to my apparently concept-driven mind.) Consider, however, that work must be done both when constructing the memory and also when repeating it. Visual memory, mnemonics, and the like, all work, I believe, because they increases the strength of the encoding, decreasing the need for repetition later. So, there may be more work upfront, but there is much less over the lifetime of the memory.
Interestingly, Godel gave a presentation somewhere within 5 - 7th September at Koningsberg presenting the first incompleteness theorem. At this time, he did not have the second. [1]
Von Neumann was in attendance and he wrote a letter to Godel on November 20th announcing his discovery of the second incompleteness theorem. As it turns out, Godel had just sent a paper for publication on November 17th with the proof of the second incompleteness theorem. In reply to Godel, finding out he had just been scooped, von Neumann wrote:
"As you have established the theorem on the unprovability of consistency as a natural continuation and deepening of your earlier results, I clearly won't publish on this subject." [2]
The following was a real eye-opener for me, as I always thought from someone's speech, you could infer how much mental horsepower they had [1]:
"
"Spontaneous eloquence seems to me a miracle," confessed Vladimir Nabokov in 1962. He took up the point more personally in his foreword to Strong Opinions (1973): "I have never delivered to my audience one scrap of information not prepared in typescript beforehand … My hemmings and hawings over the telephone cause long-distance callers to switch from their native English to pathetic French.
"At parties, if I attempt to entertain people with a good story, I have to go back to every other sentence for oral erasures and inserts … nobody should ask me to submit to an interview … It has been tried at least twice in the old days, and once a recording machine was present, and when the tape was rerun and I had finished laughing, I knew that never in my life would I repeat that sort of performance."
We sympathise. And most literary types, probably, would hope for inclusion somewhere or other on Nabokov's sliding scale: "I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child."
I'm sorry if this was intended to be facetious, but I think Yegge's point was that you need to remove some of the information so that Bezos can fill it in himself and not get bored. I don't think the implication is that this quality is unique to Bezos, but it certainly is uncommon.
At any rate, removing every third word removes less informational content than every paragraph: an idea can often be recovered in your case, whereas it is quite difficult to recover an idea if it has been removed altogether.
Nicholas' edit is true in my experience: HS cares more about your desire to become a better programmer, which is not a function of how good you are now.