ethbr0

Not this time!

But for every candidate that could answer, I think so.

I've also had good luck asking about a project they were on that went off the rails and what they'd do differently next time around.

You can tell pretty quickly how involved they were and if they were thinking through solutions vs just doing as told.

That's why I try to ask open-ended questions. Get to a solution. Might not be my solution, but at least get me there.

How do you run candidate interviews?

My high water mark was the basics... and then the candidate drawing an analogy between char as primitive and char-array-based-strings as object oriented classes that offered additional functionality on top of chars.

Customer-facing implementation engineer, more or less.

It's a grab bag, tell-me-something-interesting icebreaker question. I'm looking for some evidence of the fact that you can differentiate the two in some meaningful way.

Not intended to be a gotcha question! Just a quick test of basic CS knowledge to get the candidate comfortable.

I interviewed a guy the other day.

CS degree.

"I have a proven track record of building and leading amazing engineering teams."

"Okay. What's the difference between a character and a string?"

*crickets*

We all have our specialities, but jesus ¢@&#ing christ: if you're interviewing for an engineering role, of any sort, you should be able to answer basic questions.

tl;dr - Output nuclear fusion power, plasma volume, and magnetic field strength scale differently with reactor size increases

In detail, I'll let someone smarter than me in nuclear physics explain: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/175830/nuclear-f...

The wrinkle about "modern Game Genie" is that when the original debuted, there were no microtransactions.

Now, hastening grind runs directly counter to most(?) game revenue models.

Interesting times!

Indeed. My mental rule of thumb is to assume that if we're at the point of a legal argument then bridges have already been burned and neither party is inclined to do any favors to the other. Ergo, the legal language is the only language that one can depend on.

Stupid question that I've always been curious about, driving around.

Can an old C-band (large) satellite dish be used for transmitting as well as receiving?

If so, would there be any benefit to doing so, versus smaller/K* dish dimensions?

Know this is a basic question, but RF isn't my field.

People say lawyers are assholes, but they don't think about why lawyers are assholes.

It's a lawyer's job to imagine the worst future outcomes and guard against them in the present.

Everybody focuses on "It's crazy you put that clause in there that was never needed," but few folks appreciate "Thank god we included that clause just in case."

Which isn't to opine there's a right or wrong, only multiple parties each negotiating (skillfully or poorly) in their own interests.

If you're a developer and don't want your code to slide into corporate controlled ownership... well, there are licenses for that.

https://github.com/readme/guides/open-source-licensing

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/02/how-to-choose-an-ope...

This happened a few week ago, but I didn't see any discussion on here.

Google shipped the newest iteration of FLoC in Chrome 115 in July.

Direct Google blog link (HN marks duped) https://developer.chrome.com/blog/new-in-chrome-115/#topics-...

I can only tolerate modern YouTube at 1.5 or 2x playback speed. Principally because speaking slower to stretch video length has become endemic.

The gallery has an excellent video of an R/P FLIP... flip. Complete with suitable ONR/SIO music.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:FLIP_turns_50.ogv

Oof, those are some gnarly waves. Wave structure as a surfed experience is my favorite part so far: there are so many wave nuances I never noticed before.

Things funding for atomic warfare has given us:

   - Nuclear power
   - Access to Earth orbit
   - GPS
   - Mapping of the world's oceans
   - Miniaturized circuits
   - The Internet
   - Interstate road systems
   - Hubble Space Telescope
   - Earth observation satellites

As someone who recently started surfing, I understand the cultural timing a lot more now.

Good surfing requires pretty particular types of waves. Which in turn requires particular wind. Even at good locations, these are transient conditions that can appear and disappear at the whim of nature (even over the course of an hour).

Ergo, surf's up = drop things that don't need to be done ASAP

They'll be there later. Good waves probably won't.

The fact that this appears to be mobile-targeted suggests the intent -- restrict free information flow to the masses.

Hearing the British government care about "the risks of excessive surveillance" is a new one.

Although I guess it's because they're talking about companies, not the government itself.

Snap Circuits looks awesome! LEGO + breadboarding

To date myself, for me it was the computer game The Incredible Machine, which was a Rube Goldberg physics puzzle game... in 1993 on DOS. ;)

Critically, the failure-iteration loop was tight, which really impressed "if at first you don't succeed, try try again" on my younger self.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pTbSMKGQ_rU&t=27s

Ah, the Venus Defense.

It'll be fascinating to learn whatever grey/black ops details come out after the war hopefully ends.

The naval drone question is especially fascinating.

IMHO, they have to be transported closer to impact site by some other vessel.

Ukraine doesn't have submarines, and Russia has 6(?) Kilo's in the Black Sea, so traditional submarines would be insane in that environment anyway.

And whatever transport method would need to be stealthy with respect to Russia's sensing methods: acoustic, radar, to a lesser degree visual.

Given Ukraine's technical capabilities and traditional shipbuilding expertise, I'd hazard there's a somewhat-stealthy drone carrier boat (probably also unmanned).

They could also be hiding/launching the drones directly from commercial shipping, but that's an awfully big risk for the flag country/ship owner with respect to Russia boarding and searching, or even back tracing launch points.

Not author, but I've always wanted to approach programming from an algorithms-first perspective with younger kids. Not called algorithms, of course.

If they can create/combine algorithms to solve a problem... that's most of programming.

I'd start with the "robot" problem: have them write a set of steps to complete a simple task, and then have them (or better, someone else) go through the steps precisely (no cheating and assuming they meant something they didn't write!). Then iterate and add/remove steps until the task is actually doable. (Disclaimer: idea cribbed from someone else)

That gets them to grok the "everything needs to be in a program, and a program is only everything that's in it" idea.

The traveling salesman problem (recast in whatever form would be most interesting to the kids) and graph theory problems are also especially visual and explorable.

In my experience, it's an unknown-unknown problem (don't know what we don't know).

Is it important you can recite cache eviction algorithms from memory? No.

Is it important you know there are such things as caches and roughly how they work? Yes. Because then you can quickly look up the details when/if you need them.

But not illegal, no?

I actually kind of respect Neumann. Not in a moral/ethical way, of course, but in a defend-yourself-at-all-times way.

He never would have gotten that payout if he hadn't legally fortified his position like he did, and then successfully maintained it through SoftBank's initial due diligence.

"Heads, I win. Tails, I win." type stuff.

Liquidity. It's the difference between initial equity holders being able to sell and not.

'We paid Neumann too much to exit quickly, because we knew the company prospects were bad and we needed an IPO to exit ASAP' probably isn't a crime, assuming there weren't errors on financial disclosures.

But it's certainly dubious enough to warrant a lawsuit to see if there were false claims made.

This would have been categorically true circa-1970s.

Unfortunately, US industrial vertical integration now includes foundations placed in global low-labor-cost countries.

The crash vaccine manufacturing scaling program was possible because we were rich enough to throw mountains of money (of which we have the most) at any international supply problems.

If the Atlantic or Pacific had been hostile to commercial shipping, or countries hadn't cooperated, it would have had a very different result.

We are decimating (and then some) Russia's military by giving away second tier equipment to Ukraine, and the amount we're giving away is basically an afterthought. A one-time superpower is scraping the bottom of the barrel for equipment fighting against largely NATO supplied spare equipment.

"We" are not. Ukrainians are dying and holding their own against a much larger country, with the help of NATO surplus equipment.

20,000-50,000 Ukrainians now have at least one limb amputated as a result of the war. [0] [1]

And Russia's military is not being decimated. It's holding its own with an elastic defense, that's making progress difficult and costly for a Ukrainian army that's trained halfway between Soviet mass doctrine and Western maneuver warfare.

At some point the Ukrainians will hopefully manage to exhaust Russia's logistics sufficient to break through their defense, but that's in no way a sure thing.

[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-ukraine-a-surge-in-amputatio...

[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/05/19/ukraines-amputee...

The problem with laissez faire economic allocation has been timescales.

It's an extremely efficient allocator... on a certain timescale, itself determined by the market.

It's an incompetent allocation on different timescales, typically when you get into the 5+ year range.

The ideal blend is when capability is centrally planned, but implementation and tactical scale is market-demanded.