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tomtung

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declarative.quora.com 4y ago

Alan Kay: What paradigm is the successor to OOP?

tomtung
2pts0
www.nature.com 4y ago

SARS-CoV-2 is associated with changes in brain structure (even for milder cases)

tomtung
20pts8
www.quora.com 4y ago

Story behind the book cover design of Introduction to Algorithms

tomtung
5pts0
www.technologyreview.com 4y ago

Meet the scientist at the center of the covid lab leak controversy

tomtung
9pts5
www.quora.com 4y ago

Quora Programming Challenge 2022

tomtung
2pts0
quorablog.quora.com 4y ago

New Quora Subscription Products

tomtung
1pts0
www.quora.com 5y ago

How useful was the Netflix Prize challenge for Netflix?

tomtung
286pts198
twitter.com 5y ago

WHO scientists: NYT misquoted us to fit a prescribed narrative

tomtung
79pts69
apjjf.org 6y ago

A Fearful Asymmetry: Covid-19 and America’s Information Deficit with China

tomtung
5pts0
doi.org 6y ago

SARS-CoV-2 was already spreading in France in late December 2019

tomtung
541pts449
yang2020.live 6y ago

Andrew Yang answers policy questions in Quora session

tomtung
2pts1
www.quora.com 7y ago

Session with Keno Fischer (CTO at Julia Computing)

tomtung
3pts0
engineering.quora.com 9y ago

Engineering at Quora: Faster Paint Times

tomtung
3pts0
www.quora.com 10y ago

John Romero (Designer of DOOM and Quake) Taking Questions on Quora

tomtung
5pts0
www.quora.com 11y ago

In machine learning, more data always better than better algorithms?

tomtung
1pts0
hansmuller-webkit.blogspot.com 11y ago

Where Is the Mouse? (compute mouse location relative to HTML canvas)

tomtung
1pts0

Ah I have "fond" memories about once spending a good week debugging this, because I was also spawning threads/sub-processes in the loop, making this a Heisenbug that caused the program to crash every hour or so...

So true. This is one reason why I really miss my Pebble watch with its physical buttons, which allowed me to perform a lot of operations by touch without looking (e.g., play/pause/forward/rewind for media control). In comparison, fiddling with the small touch screen of my Fitbit Versa is such a poor user experience.

Not to mention Pebble's "low-tech" screen was so clearly visible in direct sunlight, while I have problem clearly seeing the fancier screen of Fitbit when it's slightly bright outside.

My previous employer used something very similar: either adding small features or fixing known bugs of a past build of some open source software in 1-1.5hrs. We prepared one such interview question for each supported language (C++, Python, and Java), and, to help calibration, each question consisted of a series of requirements that required progressively more complex changes.

Both interviewees and interviewers seemed to like these questions. I do hope this approach gets more adoption in the industry. It takes more time to prepare, but the high-quality signals it provides are worth the effort imo. Such questions are also harder to leak compared to typical whiteboard coding questions and thus more reusable too.

Agree. Not sure how much could be blamed on the poorly written dialogs. In contrast, for example, Witcher 3 was so engagingly written that I never minded the procedurally animated dialog scenes.

The rules are more clearly depicted on page 4, with different variations depicted on the pages following that.

Looks fairly straightforward to implement. Until this is more widely available "officially", I'll probably just hack up some Chrome extension for personal use and try it out.

The article didn't shy away from the potential conflict of interest:

Adding fuel to the mistrust, though, is the role of the EcoHealth Alliance’s Daszak. His close ties with Shi’s lab and his role as a member of the WHO mission’s international team are potentially in conflict. Critics say he can also be less than forthcoming. ...

And in his defense:

But scientists like the University of Utah’s Goldstein, who do not collaborate with Daszak, told me that there is no evidence that Daszak “wielded disproportionate influence” in the 11-member team.

Daszak told me in an email that his potential conflicts of interest had been declared to the WHO before he joined the mission team. ...

One method I've seen used to motivate people to move away from deprecated API is: after deprecation is announced, in addition to print a length warning message, also add a thread-sleep call, with the sleep length gradually increasing over time. Consequently, the API will remain usable for maybe months after deprecation, but eventually it will become unbearably slow to discourage any continued usage.

Totally agree. There's an inherent tension between protecting the freedom of speech and the potential harm that speech might cause. The current incentive structure motivates people to say the most click-baity outlandish things without worrying about any of the consequences. Fact-checking can never catch up with all the crazy sh!t people come up with. That's why censorship feels like a tempting "easy way out" for combating misinformation.

Maybe one mitigation is to make public figure / media accountable to the avoidable damage their speech end up causing? E.g., if I listen to your anti-vax radio program and consequently decide not to get vaccinated, before catching the disease and dying, then my family can sue you for damage as long as it can established that you have purposefully misled / failed to assess the potential harm.

After a few class-action lawsuits like this, public figure & media will probably be more careful when they want to spread misinformation.

the one thing I appreciated about FB/Meta's recruiters is that they were always honest about the process and what was expected - 2-3 Leetcode mediums/hards in 45 minutes and they only care about optimal solutions

A counter data point: I recently passed Google's interview a few months ago. In one round, I was asked to solve a certain kind of bipartite graph matching problem; not being a fresh new grad with ACM medals, I obviously couldn't solve it in polynomial time and just implemented a brute-force solution in the end. In another round, I came up with a solution the interviewer said they've never seen before, although it could be slightly slower than the "optimal" solution he had in mind depending on the input size.

As an interviewer in my last company, I always made sure the solutions were well motivated, and have rejected candidates who could write down the perfect solution but couldn't explain why. If I were to be asked by the candidate for the specific runtime I was looking for, I would probably just reply with "don't worry about it, just try your best" or "let's focus on correctness first and worry about efficiency and other trade-offs later".

Testing for problem solving ability is hard, but that's still one of the key signals we wish to extract whenever possible.

China also don't care to understand the west one bit. China has zero cultural understand about anything beyond its borders

Well, consider how many people in China have learned English, can read articles / online discussions in English, or have traveled to the west. Contrast that to the number of westerners who can read Chinese or have been to China.

China surely understands the west a lot better than the other way around. It just disagrees and has its own interests to look after.

What's his endgame? Buy time until the the pandemic burns out (if it does)?

Yep that's my understanding. Or if enough time has passed since vaccination to convince them that the vaccines are safe.

Anecdotally, my unvaccinated roommate is Chinese, holds a PhD degree in a very difficult field, and works as a researcher in a FAANG company.

I was very surprised to learn that they were unwilling to get vaccinated. They are actually very worried about infection, and have been very careful with wearing masks, disinfecting things, and avoiding in-person contacts whenever possible. They explained that they were mostly worried about the unknown long-term side-effects of the vaccines. Maybe having a PhD degree is correlated with having this kind of caution.