• Placed some small limit orders for option calls. They didn't execute.
• Eric got me the athleanx inferno size program, started looking through the website.
• Supercontest.
• Odds:
• 0: 1/32
• 1: 5/32
• 2: 10/32
• 3: 10/32
• 4: 5/32
• 5: 1/32
• Obviously a coin flip is a binomial distribution, just like a dice roll. As n gets large, this approximates Gaussian (normal).
• Standard deviation of coin flip = 1/(2*sqrt(n))
• Created ticket: https://gitlab.com/bmahlstedt-group/supercontest/issues/140.
• Push sauna meditate.
• Scheduled amazon onsite for mon jan 13.
• Flew SFO LAX.
• Ashish called about the NCL telem site.

• Committed lines, submitted picks.
• Final week 17, we'll know the season winner on Sunday.
• This week was a pain in the ass. The iframe table format was completely different for the lines. Different order, different column, etc. The autofetcher didn't know how to understand any of it. I entered the lines manually.
• [[u'TITANS', u'TEXANS*', u'SUNDAY, DECEMBER 29, 2019 1:25 PM', u'3.5'], [u'BROWNS', u'BENGALS*', u'SUNDAY, DECEMBER 29, 2019 10:00 AM', u'2.5'], [u'VIKINGS*', u'BEARS', u'SUNDAY, DECEMBER 29, 2019 10:00 AM', u'1'], [u'COLTS', u'JAGUARS*', u'SUNDAY, DECEMBER 29, 2019 1:25 PM', u'3.5'], [u'FALCONS', u'BUCCANEERS*', u'SUNDAY, DECEMBER 29, 2019 10:00 AM', u'0'], [u'COWBOYS*', u'REDSKINS', u'SUNDAY, DECEMBER 29, 2019 1:25 PM', u'11'], [u'SAINTS', u'PANTHERS*', u'SUNDAY, DECEMBER 29, 2019 10:00 AM', u'13'], [u'EAGLES', u'GIANTS*', u'SUNDAY, DECEMBER 29, 2019 1:25 PM', u'4.5'], [u'STEELERS', u'RAVENS*', u'SUNDAY, DECEMBER 29, 2019 1:25 PM', u'2'], [u'BILLS*', u'JETS', u'SUNDAY, DECEMBER 29, 2019 10:00 AM', u'1.5'], [u'PATRIOTS*', u'DOLPHINS', u'SUNDAY, DECEMBER 29, 2019 10:00 AM', u'15.5'], [u'PACKERS', u'LIONS*', u'SUNDAY, DECEMBER 29, 2019 10:00 AM', u'12.5'], [u'CHIEFS*', u'CHARGERS', u'SUNDAY, DECEMBER 29, 2019 10:00 AM', u'8.5'], [u'RAMS*', u'CARDINALS', u'SUNDAY, DECEMBER 29, 2019 1:25 PM', u'3'], [u'49ERS', u'SEAHAWKS*', u'SUNDAY, DECEMBER 29, 2019 5:20 PM', u'3.5'], [u'BRONCOS*', u'RAIDERS', u'SUNDAY, DECEMBER 29, 2019 1:25 PM', u'3']]
• dbsession.commits._commit_lines(week_id=34, lines=lines)
• core.scores.commit_scores()
• util.email.email_picks_open(season=2019, week=17)

• Happy Hollow Park/Zoo in San Jose.
• LAMP = linux apache mysql php. I always forget this one. It's old.
• Rivian, big ev company.
• Power rankings (nfl and espn) have the niners 3rd after the saints and ravens.
• FF ESPN: 5-7. 11/12 PF. 11/12 final rank.
• FF Yahoo: 5-8. 7/10 PF. 10/10 final rank.
• Worked with amazon to schedule the date of the onsite. Suggested the second week of Jan.
• Went over their documentation of the onsite process: https://www.amazon.jobs/en/landing_pages/in-person-interview.
• Confirmed the citadel coding challenge for Jan 7.
• Ordered a whiteboard ($18) to practice. My old one was stained/dry.
• STAR = situation task action result.

• Received results for the amazon coding test, passed, got invited for a day of onsites.
• Markets.
• Boeing fired their CEO.
• S&P up 3.5% in the past month. Record highs. Such a strange time, with every indicator shouting bear years ago.
• Pivotal went public last year, 2018-04-20. Earnings tomorrow.
• TSLA hit $420, and rising. People are so weird.
• More practice problems. Mostly leetcode.
• Getting better and faster with every one.
• Writing out a couple BASIC examples of the iteration/recursion, like the first two loops/stacks, is extremely helpful for developing the algorithm. Makes it much easier to extrapolate if the whole problem is too complex to wrap your head around in code or thought.
• Reversing an array is obviously O(n). Same for linked list.
• When you see a problem that expects a logn solution, expect something like a binary search where you're halving the problem space each time.
• Started looking on redfin. 1-2br, 1bath, garage, $1m. There are some options in places like south city, rwc, epa, santa clara.
• Marshawn Lynch might play for the seahawks next week against us. So conflicted.
• Lunch at little lucca's. They were out of dutch crunch.
• Updated the banner so I wouldn't have to on christmas. Redeployed.
• German bar with all the kids from the block.

• Did some leetcode problems to practice.
• When doing something with only two elements (like check to see which two items in an array add to a target sum), you might be tempted to check the permutations of the remaining array, with each iteration. This is not the fastest. You can get it down to O(n) time by storing a complement map as you move through the array, then you can compare each to the complements to see if it fits.
• Pretty much finished all my specific prep for interviews. Now it's just going through the generic problem repositories, practicing a few each day:
• Hackerrank. Leetcode. Careercup (CtCI). Glassdoor. Youtube.
• So far I think I like leetcode the best.
• 5 directly-interview-relevant docs in gdrive. 1 for general process/approach, and then 4 from book notes:
• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Algorithms and Data Structures, Programming Interviews Exposed, Cracking the Coding Interview.
• Reminder of great youtube channel for interview questions: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNc-Wa_ZNBAGzFkYbAHw9eg/videos.
• Alpha = how much you outperform a generic benchmark, usually the S&P500. If that rises 5% in a year and you rose 15%, your alpha is +10.
• Beta = how much more volatile than a generic benchmark. If your stock gained 3% in a day and the S&P500 lost 1%, your beta is -3.
• Manacher's algorithm is O(n) for longest palindromic substring: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longest_palindromic_substring. Fantastic.
• Longest common subsequence = a common problem. Look it up.
• When palindromes are mentioned, you can reverse the string and then it becomes a longest common subsequence problem (check indices tho).
• An 8yr youtuber who reviews toys made $26m last year.
• Helped dad backup/update his iphone 6.
• Did the amazon coding interview (90m). Each question basically has 20 unittests, 2 of which are shown and 18 are hidden.
• On the practice exam, I got 20/20 and 20/20, and finished in 35m.
• On the real exam, I got 19/20 and 2/20, and finished in 90m. The first one was good, but something was up with the second one. It passed both visible testcases and then showed "passed 0 of 18 for the invisible testcases" - not sure what happened, but my program was correct so who knows.
• Was also possible to have another computer googling the problems and copying the answers. I did it honestly, so I worry about the bar I'll be compared to. I much prefer a voice/video call, for both authenticity and the ability to prove comprehension verbally.
• Went to sunnyvale, madras and fam.

• Walked 4 miles around Atherton.
• Chan Sung Jung knocked out Frankie Edgar (38), and now there isn't an event for the next 4 weeks until McGregor Cerrone.
• All presents wrapped and ready. Dec 21st. World record.
• SCORE_DAYS was the nominal th/sun/mon. I had to add saturday for these week 16 games. Deployed the supercontest change. Recompiled reqs.
• Did a few hackerrank problems:
• https://www.hackerrank.com/challenges/tree-height-of-a-binary-tree.
• https://www.hackerrank.com/challenges/tree-level-order-traversal.
• https://www.hackerrank.com/challenges/balanced-brackets.
• https://www.hackerrank.com/challenges/contacts.
• https://www.hackerrank.com/challenges/find-the-running-median.
• Side note: hackerrank has a terrible problemsolving interface. The inputs are given via stdin with line separations lol, and the outputs are compared to stdout. This is probably laziness to accommodate multiple languages, but it's shrouded and detracting.
• The difficulty is also widely variant. I finished some "medium" level questions in (literally) 60 seconds, and some "easy" questions took my 20 minutes to read the problem statement and 40m to answer.
• Some complexity notes.
• Recursion with 2 recursive calls is exponential in time complexity.
• Binary trees require 2 recursive calls to traverse, one to walk the left edge and one for the right.
• Fibonacci sequences require two recursive calls as well, but you can memoize each one to reduce it from exponential to linear.
• For iteration problems, usually just run a while loop and add items to array, or do something else to keep track as you traverse.

• There are so many python dep managers out there now, like my sx-setuptools. Poetry: https://github.com/python-poetry/poetry.
• Awesome js recap: https://2019.stateofjs.com/. Typescript/express/react/redux/graphql still king. Jasmine is no where near the top for testing frameworks (jest is #1).
• Ear buds died. Ordered 2 more. I still continue to be impressed. Great quality, people around can't hear, only $7.
• I always forget amortization: pay off periodically.
• Permutations > combinations. Combos don't care about order.
• Finished CtCI. Went through some of the problems.
• Flew LAX -> SFO.

• The Ducati has been stalling a bit. I had originally thought it was misconfiguration of my nonstock levers (I think CRG) where the clutch couldn't fully engage, but it happens at speed sometimes too. Did a bit of reading and it's not uncommon. Can pursue a fix if it gets more frequent.
• Charged the BMW.
• Haircuttt.
• Sick. All sorts of weird temps and delirium.
• Dentist. The cut should go away in about a week. Good health, just need to not brush as hard. It's causing more recession. They can fix with bonding if it starts to get sensitive. Deep cleaning scheduled for beginning of jan.
• Read more of CtCI for interview prep.

• Some notes from matthew walker:
• Practice doesn't make perfect, practice + a good night of sleep makes perfect.
• While asleep, we can't eat, we can't run, we can't take care of our young, we can be hunted, etc. If sleep didn't serve an absolutely VITAL purpose, evolution would have made the biggest mistake of all time.
• We sleep better in slightly colder temperatures. When our hands/feet are warm, vasodilation occurs. Blood flows outward to the skin more, reducing core body temperature. This is why you get better sleep with socks. The same vasodilation occurs after a bath.
• We don't have a "credit" system for sleep like we do for fat (eat more before winter, use fat stores) because we are the first species in the history of time that has ever faced lack of sleep. No animal has ever had to evolve to handle this, and it's self-inflicted.
• 20hrs awake = same impairment as 0.08% bac.
• More record highs for stock market yesterday. My ZYME surpassed 45. DJ 28367 s&p 3193 nasdaq 8823 10yr treasury 1.878. Bitcoin is down to 6613.
• Finished programming interviews exposed. Tons of notes, practice problems, brainteasers, coding tests, and behavioral examples.
• Started cracking the coding interview.
• Pro bowl selections: http://www.nfl.com/news/story/0ap3000001089218/article/nfl-reveals-rosters-for-2020-pro-bowl-in-orlando.
• First day without the cat!
• COMPOSER DAY.
• John Williams: star wars, indiana jones, harry potter, home alone
• Klaus Badelt: pirates, time machine
• Danny Elfman: nightmare before christmas, lots of superhero movies
• John Powell: dreamworks
• James Horner: titanic
• Hanz Zimmer: everything
• Howard Shore: lord of the rings
• Multi-year university hospital study has good things to say for keto: https://medium.com/@JPMcCarter/the-top-12-keto-myths-debunked-after-150-000-days-of-patient-care-9502383d4e8c.
• At ~8:35am ZYME was up 6.06% giving me a day return of $666.86 thus far. Devilish.
• Scheduled dentist appointment for tomorrow.
• Still sick but run gym push.
• Runner's "neck check" - if your symptoms are below your neck, you're probably better off resting than exercising.
• Being cold doesn't give you a cold, but airborne bugs spread more easily because the medium is denser.
• Remember of the terrible complexities: n^2 (quadratic) then 2^n (exponential) then n! (factorial) is the worst.
• Remember stack is static. It's the variables, function calls, scope, etc. It's very fast. The heap is for dynamic allocation. It's a little slower. Both are in RAM. Threads share heap, but each have their own stack.
• Big endian = most significant bit stored first. Little endian = LSB first.
• TSLA about to hit 400, doubling in 6 months. I remember it being in the 170s in June.
• Committed week 16 lines, backed up prod db, submitted picks.
• Updated the widgetbot shard back to the main one, disweb.dashflo.net. They seem to have fixed their dos problem, so greatplainsmodding was no longer needed (and was offline). Verified on desktop and mobile in dev.

• In december, mutual funds drop in market value by ~5-10% because they're distributing capital gains for tax purposes. That drop in equity is coming to you in cash. Think of it like a dividend.
• Cleaned and vacated most of the house. Started packing. Everything is so organized now.
• The bluetooth headset arrived and I set it up. Works well. Did some tests. My voice is not as clear as regular speakerphone, but typing is much quieter.
• 737 Max halting production, Boeing dropped 4%.
• 10 years old, but a good AMA from an individual algotrader: https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9s9d7/iama_100_automated_independent_retail_trader_i/.
• Finished all christmas shopping. $300.
• Netflix confirmed the tech interview with the CI manager, which totals 5 phones now.
• Ordered more post oak and maple chunks.
• Installed new kitchen and bathroom bulbs.
• Butterflied and oven-roasted a chicken. Fresh garlic, butter, and some of my red rub. Added to fried rice with egg.
• Interesting JRE with a sleep scientist from berkeley: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwaWilO_Pig.

• New major version of coverage. sqlite storage, json report, contexts, relative filenames, dropped support for py 2.6/3.3/3.4.
• Compiled new sbsc requirements and updated the banner.
• Ordered a headset for the coding phone interviews where I need my hands to write.
• Remember js spread operator or rest parameter: ...obj
• Played with coderpad to familiarize myself. Can write in many languages, set key bindings to vim, etc.
• Webcammed practice interview, both tech and worklife questions. ~20m/350MB@720.
• Placed grocery order with amazon (whole foods). Arrived a couple hours later.
• Citadel tech test was moved to first week of Jan when the proctor is back from holiday.
• Disney reached out for a senior software engineering position.
• Scheduled a phone call for later in the day.
• Spoke for 20min, discussing the opportunity.
• React/node/docker/mongo/k8s/aws/lambda.
• Exciting projects. Thrown right in. Move teams quite a bit.
• Almost all enter as contractors before full time. 50% insurance, no 401k. Paid hourly, but usually ~175k. No equity.
• Shorter hours.
• They're an entertainment company before a tech company.
• Just one 30m coding call, then onsites.
• Review of old notes. Consume again and again, commit to memory.
• Bazel, c++, java. Lighter on python rules. Build and workspace files. Still similar to my old sx-setuptools, just files that take inputs and produce outputs. What files to build, what to do with it, etc.
• Computers perform tasks. Humans should be solving problems.
• Trees are just linked lists with multiple pointers, really. Graphs are just trees with no root.
• DP is generically named. Just solve subproblems and cache/memoize.
• C++ headers contain the declarations, source files use them.
• Polymorphism. Two children inheriting the parent but using a method/attribute differently (e.g. parent animal with noise() method, child cat would noise('meow') and dog would noise('bark')).
• let = block scoped. var = function scoped.
• Lists and dicts are basically the only mutables in python. All the primitives are immutable.
• Groovy is part of the java ecosystem.
• Python > byte code (pyc) > machine code.
• Netstat and wireshark.
• Can think of websockets as just persistent http connections with a server over tcp/ip, where a socket is any general tcp/ip connection.
• Every thread has its own stack (and registers), but all threads in the process share a heap.
• A$ap and chance most of today.
• Fed mouse.
• Went through Amazon's leadership principles and wrote examples of each: https://www.amazon.jobs/en/principles. Having gone through all, examples came readily. The principles were generic.
• Received the online test for amazon. It takes 2 hours, and I can complete at any time in the next 2 weeks.
• The coding portion is 90m, 2 explicit "write a function that returns this" questions.
• I did a full demo test, finishing both after ~35min.
• They use Aspiring Minds (not codepen or google docs). No proctor.
• Asked Renee if it scores higher by submitting earlier, or if all extra time should be used improving/cleaning/commenting.
• Amazon has such a crazy list of products: https://aws.amazon.com/products/.
• Did some research and took some notes in gdrive. Main ones:
• EC2/Lambda for cloud servers and compute.
• Aurora/DocumentDB/ElastiCache/DynamoDB for all types of databases.
• Beanstalk/Amplify for building web/mobile apps.
• S3 for storage.
• Bought new bathroom and kitchen light bulbs.
• Run gym pull.
• Washed all mesh running shoes with soap.
• Scheduled haircut for thurs.
• Started reading ctci.

• Disneyland yesterday. Club 33.
• Late picks: franky, cam.
• The ufc card last night was stacked but looooong.
• Patriots cheating again, confirmed shady footage of bengals sideline: https://twitter.com/FOXSports/status/1206265478596816896.
• Bamboolib is a python package which acts as a GUI for pandas. Kinda silly.
• Cleaned terrarium.
• Saw black christmas.
• Uncle Bill's.

• Metaflow is Netflix' datascience kit, built on python/aws. It's open-source now. https://metaflow.org/.
• Phase one trade agreement with china. The bidirectional tariffs that were going to start this sunday have been cancelled.
• Robinhood offers fractional shares now, down to $1.
• 3 coding interviews scheduled for next week so far: google, citadel, amazon. Netflix has passed on to hiring manager to schedule assessments next week, nothing on calendar yet.
• Eric got me a dexa scan, which I had wanted, but hadn't mentioned!
• Great whites run away from orcas lol: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/great-white-sharks-are-completely-terrified-orcas-180972009.
• Consolidated all my notes/stances. Some spacex, some political, some software, some personal. Many topics. 2 reasons: some are great responses for interview questions, some are great vlog topics.
• CLI for all unicode! https://github.com/arp242/uni.
• Apps use in-mem hash tables while databases used b-trees for persistent storage. https://www.evanjones.ca/ordered-vs-unordered-indexes.html.
• Read a bit more of PIE.

• White elephant gift arrived in compton. It better get here by friday, ordered over two weeks ago.
• Remember paging secondary mem on disk.
• Livelock is like deadlock, but both the programs are changing state still (and still locking each time).
• Radix sort goes digit by digit, from LSD to MSD (tens -> hundreds etc). It's faster than quicksort (linear vs nlogn) if the number of digits is low.
• Went over all the resources in the responses.
• Amazon leadership principles: https://www.amazon.jobs/en/principles. Important. Give example of each.
• For each interview, amazon has a "bar raiser" - someone who is not on the team that comes in to assess the general quality of the candidate.
• Citadel, google, notes.
• Checks can bounce after a few days. Federal law requires that the bank release the deposit to you sooner than some banks can actually clear the check. Be careful of scams.
• The office released the full 25min version of threat level midnight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iPyz6Yqwl4.
• Remember that an option can be exercised to get shares, but the contract for the options must be purchased as well (when traded on public markets, not like when your employer gifts you options). These contracts can be bought/sold.
• You usually have to put in a minimum amount into your account for short positions as collateral, since you can technically owe infinite amounts if things go south.
• Wrote a basic app for paul/ncl: https://gitlab.com/bmahlstedt/ncl.

• Webcam arrived. No driver installation, just have to go into cheese (the gnome default webcam software) and change the device.
• Recorded 1min on 1920x1080. Was 53MB. Resolution was nice, but framerate was too low and the video was not smooth.
• Switched to 960x720. Still looks good, and is muuuuch less choppy.
• Picture res is set to 2304x1536.
• Autofocus is nice. Sound quality is good.
• Ask specifics during the "do you have any questions for me?" round. If you have a new idea, what's the process for getting it approved for implementation? How many reorgs have happened in the last 5 years? How is software viewed by the other departments here?
• NAFTA = north american free trade agreement (us, mexico, canada =  USMCA).
• Placed whole foods order.
• Made new batch (~5lbs) of protein bars, half pecan and half hazelnut. Added oats/sesameseed/cinnamon and a touch of water to make them less dry.
• Joe Pesci has some albums on spotify. Some are rap, some are christmas. What.
• 30m phone with netflix.
• Culture doc is accurate. Will scale as company does. https://jobs.netflix.com/culture.
• Instead of hiring in general then finding team fit (like google), they hire for a role specifically.
• This allows questions to be more focused, rather than generic DS&A.
• HR, then specific hiring manager, then take-home coding assessment, then onsites.
• Onsites have a tech round first. Mostly real-world problems, design. Then second round mostly culture, work scenarios, etc.
• Going to speak with the hiring manager for my role (CI) next wednesday the 18th.
• Emailed Holly's friend Ben at GitLab.
• lol checked linkedin after, turns out he works at GitHub, not GitLab.
• Castle rock season finale. Loved the misery crossover.
• Committed sbsc lines and submitted picks.
• The new spreads failed for the first time. Just ssh in, make restart-prod, then try again from the admin interface.
• Talked with Paul about the ncl groundstation.
• Just a static template on aws right now, but want to be able to talk with the radio (bidirectionally) to show data and send commands. Went over flask, posting to endpoints, writing to db, etc.

• Dec 15th US-China tariffs.
• Installed a bidet and separately did some sink plumbing.
• Bought spacers. Arriving tomorrow.
• ZYME shot back up 6.4% today.
• Retyping old investment notes for memory:
• Most common index funds: S&P500, DJIA (30 large cap), Russell 2000 (small cap).
• Mutual funds are not traded on exchanges, like regular stocks. They are pools of money that are collected from investors, then the asset managers choose the underlying securities for highest growth. Mutual funds are both an investment and a company.
• ETFs are exchange traded funds that you CAN trade like any regular old stock, and they track underlying index funds.
• Bull. Good. Rearing horns UPWARD. Bear. Bad. Swiping claws DOWNWARD.
• Money market funds are in things like government treasury bonds. Very low risk, low return (like a CD, little better than savings account).
• SPY is the ETF for S&P500, DIA is the ETF for DJIA.
• Hedge. Complement an investment with the opposite to reduce risk (and gains). Example: buy 1 stock for $100 and buy a $80 put option (year) for $5. If it goes up, you lose the $5 insurance policy but if it goes down, you can sell for $80 instead of $0.
• Derivatives are assets based on other assets, like a futures contract to hedge an initial buy, or options. They aren’t stock, but are derived from stock.
• Options. ISOs are like call options, buy at strike price and hope it goes up. Put options hope it goes down. If it drops, you buy the shares at the lower market price, then force the original contractor to honor the options and buy them from you at the higher price. Options have an expiration. Usually 1 put/call is for 100 shares, so a 50/50 hedge would be to buy 100 shares and buy 1 put.
• Futures. Like options, just an agreement to buy or sell at a future date, but you HAVE to fulfill the transaction. This is commonly done for raw materials to hedge.
• Shorting is betting on decrease. A put option is a short, a short position in futures is a short.
• Straddle. Buying a put and call option at the same strike/expiration. You profit if the price moves sharply in either direction.
• EPS = earnings per share. Not normalized, because a company can have an arbitrary number of shares.
• P/E = price earnings ratio. Normalized. Just the current price/eps. S&P is about 15. Higher doesn't necessarily mean better; it can mean overvalued.
• Sharpe ratio is the risk-adjusted return. Basically take your average return (usually daily), subtract the risk-free return (usually 0), then divide by the standard deviation of returns, then annualize.
• Football scrimmage.
• False start = offense moves, ball is not hiked.
• Neutral zone infraction = defense moves, ball is not hiked.
• Encroachment = defender touches offender, ball is not hiked.
• Offsides = ball is hiked when defender is past line, free play.
• Remember belly breathing and 4-7-8.
• Amazon lost to Microsoft on a 10b/10y deal with the DoD for cloud services.
• Made new powders.
• Replenished sesame seeds, cinnamon, ground flax, and coffee beans.
• Ceylon over Cassia, much lower quantities of (toxic) coumarin.
• Brainstormed a few ideas/stances.
• Disabled abp/privacybadger/ublockorigin on lumen so gdrive would stop asking me to connect.
• A bit of interview question practice, mostly reading (Programming Interviews Exposed).
• Deployed new banner. Had asked a bunch of times but nothing yet. Compiled new reqs. 

• Got about 5 sentry errors last night, same thing about db connections failing when the server threads restart.
• The psycopg errors are all downstream. The actual error is that uwsgi is getting workers killed (sig 9) and trying to respawn. In looking through the digital ocean resource plots, it's under heavy load.
• I believe the OOM killer is doing this deliberately. No error in the application itself. This will resolve once I self-host with a much better machine. No action for now.
• This also makes sense because it happens regularly ~sunday, 4 days after the application is restarted every wed for banner/lines.
• After a fantastic month, ZYME has dropped quite a bit over the past week.
• 30m with Citadel. (hi Jack!)
• Main is asset management, other business is market making (citadel securities).
• SRE positions open in securities, NY and Chicago.
• Umesh CTO: https://www.citadel.com/leadership/umesh-subramanian/.
• Finance is starting to pull a lot of people from big tech: google and such, not just jpmorgan and goldman sachs anymore. Not necessarily an 80-hr workweek industry anymore (although that's what I'm used to).
• Comp is close to most parallel software positions. ~200 base and maybe 200 more target bonus (rather than equity).
• Work content is still finance, not quite the same purpose as spacex, but excitement from the challenge/community of tech colleagues.
• 20m with Google.
• Could do onsites in LA, even if the position is in the bay.
• Can expedite the interview process, skipping phones and moving straight to onsites.
• Process is basically the same as 2017. Refresh on algorithms and data structures.
• Type multiple times to remember. Most sorts are nlogn. Most searches are logn. Direct data structure operations on a hash table are usually constant. Space complexity for structures/searches are n. Space complexities for sorts are n, logn for quicksort, constant for bubble sort.
• For logn, each iteration is going to reduce the total by ~half. This is like binary search.
• For nlogn, it's like quadratic, but instead of n*n, you still have to iterate over the whole thing once but each step reduces the remainder by half. This is like quicksort, mergesort, etc.
• 30m with Amazon.
• Hiring is usually isolated to a product (prime video in this case), but lateral movement is very possible within.
• 3 positions: software development engineer (mostly backend), frontend, webdev.
• You interview in general, then pick team after offer (same as google).
• Locations: santa monica and seattle. The recruiter called me from a 650 number!
• Java, python, react, js, aws.
• Prepare this week, tech phone interview next week (basic coding assessment, culture fit), onsites first week of jan (ds&a, system design, leadership).
• Tried a vlog recording with my raw laptop. Not great.
• The cam is at the bottom of the screen, not the top, so the keys/fingers are in frame unless the laptop is open well over 90deg. Mounting it would be weird.
• Resolution was pretty bad. Mic was quiet. Would definitely need to buy decent hardware for both.
• Recorded 2m raw, was 17MB (.webm). Goes to ~/Videos/Webcam
• Bought the logitech c920. Should have much better video and audio. Reviews say it should be fine with ubuntu. $58. Will test when it arrives wed.
• Tons of financial research. Instead of keeping here, added all to a new doc in my notes. Removed the old, elementary ones.
• DJIA, ETFs, SPY, MMMFs, hedging, futures, options, sharpe and other ratios.
• A Netflix recruiter reached out today as well. Set up phone call for tomorrow.

• Remember closures are scope. setTimeout and such, with a function def within, need let in outer scope (not var) if you want access in the inner.
• Got a massage.
• Great football day, solid niners win. The seahawks lost. The patriots lost. 3/5 sbsc. Both ff leagues are in playoffs, I am not.
• TechLead has some decent youtube videos.
• He currently has ~600k followers and makes about that much annually from it.
• I've been playing with that idea for a while. Started making a list of topics.
• Silicon Valley season finale.

• Interview examples on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNc-Wa_ZNBAGzFkYbAHw9eg/videos.
• Bucks and Lakers at the tops of the conferences, by decent margins.
• Bought a new protein (Naked Pea). It's 37g per dollar, compared to Anthony's 48, but comes in a 5lb plastic tub instead of the pouch.
• The standard 5lb tub of optimum nutrition whey protein is 31g per dollar, for comparison.
• Applied to multiple positions at BMW, senior software and test automation, as well as a few gov jobs. UFC.
• Replied to Amazon reachouts, replied to the GitLab recruiter.
• UFC. Lots of college football conf championships.

• Was reached out to by citadel (via njf), a hedge fund. They have offices all over the world, including LA and SF. Looks like comp packages are around 200k? Lower than expected. Scheduled a phone call for Monday.
• Listen to griz most of today. Could listen to horns and other wind instruments with drops all day.
• Lots of newsletters today.
• UTM info should not be in url params. It's annoying. It makes the link bloated when copying. It is information the user does not care about. It's only for the service. There should be a place in metadata. I don't care if it's a field in the http headers or elsewhere, but it should not be in the full url.
• Didn't read it, but a good summary of cryptography: https://www.garykessler.net/library/crypto.html.
• The most recent version of unicode is 12.1. It has 137,994 characters.
• Remember the utf-8 and utf-16 encodings are variable-width. utf-8 can use 1-4 bytes (each 8 bits) to represent a char. utf-16 can use 1 or 2.
• Good list of db lectures: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSE8ODhjZXja7K1hjZ01UTVDnGQdx5v5U.
• Ordered much better heat gloves for the smoker.
• Watched a couple "day in the life" videos from devs at larger companies to get the internal feel.
• Instead of having employees recollect their opinions once a year for reviews (and company survey), amazon asks a daily question instead. Do you find your work important? What can be improved? etc. Some will repeat to get multiple data points. This is much better.
• Sean Lee's video is always a good one. It's geared toward college/entrylevel, but he still speaks impressively.
• The basic sorts (dumb ones like bubble) are bad in time complexity (quadratic) but good in space (constant).
• Mergesort. Divide into smaller pieces, sort those, then reassemble by iteratively comparing the first elements of the pieces.
• Heapsort is pretty great. A little slower than quicksort, but better worst case. Is not stable. It's in-place, so constant space complexity.
• Created a gdoc to summarize the structure of the ds&a interview, and to prepare.
• Smoked 8lbs of curry/mesquite beef ribs.
• I don't think GitLab is very likely. All of their vacancies are explicit about ruby/rails experience as a hard requirement. Gonna hound the people who have emailed me, since this is a top choice.
• Made 2lbs of roasted pecan butter and 2lbs of roasted hazelnut butter.
• Burned a hole through the bottom of the food processor because I transferred the nuts straight from broil.
• The hole (gash) was maybe 2x2x30mm. I didn't collect any of the butter from the bottom to be safe. This is a small amount of plastic. The body will just pass plastic in about a day because it's not digestible. The worry is the chemical (pthalates), which can be cancer causing. The amount in the batch is small, and the batch is about 1-2 months worth, so I'm not too worried about the ingestion.
• I did throw the food processor away. It's old and I needed a new one anyway.
• Downloaded pdfs of Cracking the Coding Interview and Programming Interviews Exposed.
• Reviewed some old notes on complexity theory. P vs NP. Easy to solve, easy to verify, hard to solve, hard to verify.
• Cryptography (and other one-way functions, and jigsaw puzzles) are implicated by NP (hard to solve, easy to verify).
• Np-hard and np-complete. While most in np are verifiable in polynomial time, some aren't. These are the most difficult problems in np.
• Exptime = hard to solve, hard to verify.