Use blur, but blur a different string then paste it over your text. "Nice try" is always a good choice.

I'm often surprised when someone will paste a screenshot of a tweet with the name blurred (presumably to protect them from harassment). The contents of the tweet are easily searchable...

Public tweets are a different scenario, they are things that have intentionally been shouted out into the void for anyone to hear. Blurring out names is a courtesy to prevent low-effort harrassment (which is most of it), while using the tweet for its intended purpose (i.e. showing its message to the public).

Generally I agree with this advice, but if the goal is to make the dork findable with a modicum of plausible deniability this is fine.

If the unredacted parts of the resume were entirely fabricated, what harm is there in having the lies out there? The candidate will be scrubbing from their honest version going forward anyway.

Agreed on the blur thing, though. Blur tools should come with warnings.

> Don't use blur to redact documents. Whatever blur was used can probably be reversed.

I just got mosquito noise when I sharpened. Are you confusing blurring with pixelating?

As long as the blur is strong enough, there's no way to get the text back.

Regular sharpening doesn't work.

But a deconvolution filter will. You can't do it in Photoshop but you can with a dedicated tool that tries different deconvolution kernels until it finds one that matches the exact original blur function.

This is how you can remove motion blur from a photo due to camera movement, for example. It's wild how much information is still there, in the exact precise levels and shape of the blur.

There are limits of course, but they're much further than you might expect.

Well, let's see you do it! Can you deblur something like the first 2-3 letters of a name?

> Well, let's see you do it!

That's a bit rude to be making demands when I was just trying to provide some helpful info.

If you want to learn more, you can google it. I'm not the person who invented deconvolution. It's not secret knowledge.

So then I'm going to interpret that as not being possible.

You can interpret it however you want. That doesn't mean you'll be interpreting it correctly. Good luck.

Knowing that it is possible is different than having the tools, having the expertise, and wanting to take the time to do it for a random HNer.

There are several papers on the topic if you're that interested.

3. This probably counts as copyright infringement, unless it's chatbot output.

IANAL, but I wouldn't be surprised if this was found to be legitimate fair use.

There’s a few red flags here on the hiring side too.

I’ve given a lot of interviews, candidates will always try to come up with the best story as an answer to your question because “I can’t think of an example” is not an acceptable answer. It’s a demand you’re placing on them.

Also having experience puffed up on a resume happens around 100% of the time. The point of the interview is to figure out how much real relevant experience the candidate has.

OP was right to end the interview as they were an unprepared candidate and a bad fit, but low-key threatening someone with “word gets around” who’s trying to find a job and probably starting to panic about not having one doesn’t make him the good guy in this story that he thinks it does.

OP could have just told them not to use AI in future, but even that’s unnecessary as the lesson’s already been learned.

(I’ve also noticed that towards the end of the post OP mentions this, but it doesn’t line up with the actual call as described unfortunately)

> having experience puffed up on a resume happens around 100% of the time

Maybe I am the rounding error. I have zero puffery, exaggerations, embellishments, stolen credit, or lies on my resume.

I'm together with sethammons in that "rounding error". I actually go further and explicitly list things which I'm not good at on my resumé.

If you’re really good at what you do, there’s no need to embellish. Company is looking for five years of experience in something that’s only been available for four years? Screw ‘em, you don’t want to work at such a stupid place anyway. Good employers know how to find good employees.

Yes me too, zero, and I'm pretty sure it's closer to zero than to 100% among others also, here where I live

Me, too.

But, sadly, OP is right.

When doing a technical screen I'll sometimes pick a skill the person claims to have, and ask them the simplest possible non-trivial question I can ask.

For example, let's say you list 'SQL' as one of the skills on your CV. I might show you a SQL statement like:

  SELECT id, start_date FROM employees;

(EDIT: I meant SELECT id, start_date FROM employees ORDER BY id;)

I'll tell you id is an auto-increment field, and ask whether the result would show the newest employee at the top or the bottom.

You have a 50/50 chance of getting it right. If you get it wrong, I'll tell you the answer. Getting it wrong wouldn't disqualify you.

Then I'll ask you how to get it in the opposite order.

I am expecting you to immediately say 'add DESC'. If you can't answer that question in under 2 seconds, you probably haven't written enough SQL to justify listing it as a skill on your CV.

You would be surprised at how many people fail simple tests just like this one.

(I won't use this particular one again.)

> You have a 50/50 chance of getting it right.

What is the right answer? Doesn't it depend on the DB? Postgres at least shows rows ordered by last updated time (simplified, I know).

I would be fine if it was "... near the top or bottom" though.

(Or maybe this comment is the correct answer?)

Sorry, I wrote this in a hurry. Of course I would have included an ORDER BY clause.

The one without that clause was still fun to think about, so no harm done!

I was sharing this story and responding to various comments (here) in my conversations elsewhere on the Internet, and as part of my statements I questioned about quoting/paraphrasing the "word gets around" to determine if this is best way to reference the point, and thought I may as well share it here too. https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5_c0378709-b716-48af-8996-a0e4...

Thanks, interesting point and it hadn’t occurred to me that it would read like a direct quote.

I can’t edit it now, so will leave this here to say that it’s not a direct quote.

On 2, I was surprised the author included the screenshot in their write up so I did some very pointed searches on some of the strings, and was surprised to see just how many profiles on LinkedIn were sourced for this farce. Good work LLMs