w0mbat

It's not a static situation. The questions have changed, to the point where solving them in interview conditions is a separate skill. When I interviewed people at Google, I asked interesting but quite simple questions and they gave me all the information I needed. As a candidate doing interviews elsewhere I have often been asked questions that are way too complicated to actually solve in the time.

How we got to this point : as average candidates train more in interview-coding, the interviewers pick harder and harder questions. It's got to the point where the only way to reliably pass is to have pre-canned memorized solutions to hundreds of existing questions. It's an arms race divorced from the reality of the job, which is done with real world tasks, privacy, little time pressure, and access to reference materials.

I can't code with somebody looking over my shoulder. I need to relax and think about the task. They expect me to code while being judged by one or more strangers, against the clock, with high stakes involved. If that was the actual job I would not apply for it.

Tyson was fighting Jake Paul, not Logan Paul. That’s Jake’s brother.

My Mac IIcx with Apple Portrait Display was a lovely system. Luckily most modern screens like my LG can be pivoted to vertical, and then the Mac lets you specify the rotation. There's no more need for vertical-only screens.

Otherwise known as Linux.

This is the area where I grew up. The Angel is not just that corner, it's that whole neighborhood, although it is named after The Angel pub (which no longer exists). The Angel extends from the corner pictured, north to Islington Green, and includes the surrounding streets on either side.

Notably, Angel Tube Station actually moved in 1992, when London Transport opened a new station and entrance along the line, equipped with a long escalator, and they closed the old entrance around the corner which had a big lift. For some reason, Apple Maps stubbornly refuses to use the new location and marks the entrance on the wrong street. Google Maps gets it right.

I wonder how long the "pair of" phrasing can stick to things that were once a pair of items and got redesigned to be one thing, like trousers, or scissors (originally a pair of knives). My wife always says "scissor" singular, which I thought was weird but now think is the just way the language will go eventually.

How long can we stick with "hang up the phone" and "off the hook" now there is no separate handset and no hook or base? And finaly, why is it "a pair of underpants" when that could never have been two garments?

The ruling also ordered Hamas to release all hostages, and Hamas has previously claimed they would abide by any ruling of the court. I find it unlikely though that they will comply.

Apple should buy one of the local EV companies like Lucid or Rivian, it would save them years of R&D on the hardware, give them valuable automotive guidance on the software and how things work in the car world. Lucid's software R&D is run by many ex-Apple people.

Also, I don't think self-driving is a must-have feature and I speak as the driver of a Tesla with full-self-driving. It's just not that useful. Traffic-aware safety features are more valuable and easier to achieve.

“Gladius” was also the common Roman slang word for “penis”, so much so that the accompanying Latin word for a sword holder or scabbard, “vagina”, became the standard English word for a body part, losing its original meaning.

The Apple app store is a disaster for making a living as an indie. People can't find the apps so sales are low, market rate prices are also low. The only way to make a living is to rip-off users with misleading subscriptions, which I won't do. I made much more money writing $20 shareware in the 90s.

That's why I write apps for a corporation now.

The gene that causes sickle cell anaemia actually provides partial immunity to malaria, which is why this gene has not been bred out of the population over time.

I missed the old Mac calculator desk accessory so much I wrote a new version of it for current Macs (you can buy it if you want at CalculatorDA.com but I wrote it for my own nostalgia purposes and use it every day). Like the version Chris Espinosa handed to Steve Jobs it has lots of options for changing the look, but they are all modern choices, like jaggy versus anti-aliased, modern traffic light window controls vs old school close box, etc. I change up the settings depending on my mood.

“There are not a lot of photos of Icons of Filth. Apparently they encouraged people not to take them because there were animal products used in the processing of film.”

LOL I suppose film is technically an animal product, as it contains gelatin, normally obtained from boiled up cow bones. They didn’t kill the cows to make film though, it’s a byproduct. This is the first time I’ve seen anyone attack old-fashioned photography for not being vegan enough.

Although the user should have been polite, I totally understand being annoyed that the manual was intercepted and thrown out. Users who actually read manuals are like gold. They want to learn and they want to solve their own problems if they can.

I find this kind of domain name reuse unsettling: for years, Kagi.com was the address of a payment service for shareware authors. Man those were the days. Lots of people were perfectly willing to pay me $20 for a useful little utility app and now they won't pay $2 in an App Store.

If you pull new ethernet, make it cat 6 or better. Times change.

I'm not using ethernet beyond the switch room, I threw money at the problem and got a 3 pack of those wi-fi 6 Nest units which form a mesh network. Works fine, covers the house and front and back yards. Costco is selling a 4 pack of those for $450 which is even better. https://www.costco.com/google-nest-wifi-pro,-wi-fi-6e,-4-pac...

It'd be way cheaper to drill some holes and run ethernet in your situation though.

It's really annoying as Japan has lots of wonderful vintage secondhand synthesizers for sale, but being domestic market models they often have non-switching power supplies that require 100 V.

Except people just hearing about Fig now can't sign up.

Acquihires generally get a better comp deal than hires, they just don't tend to make much off the acquisition deal unless they are high up. If their comp includes accelerated vesting rather than the terrible Amazon slowcoach vesting it could be decent.

Yeah, now I see it.

Banning signups just when they get an inrush like this seems a boneheaded move. You never know who you can upsell on AWS later.

brew remove fig

I installed Fig just now and got "Something went wrong. Signups are currently disabled." when I tried to use it.

Their servers have been overwhelmed by Hacker News traffic presumably.

In those days I wrote exclusively system extensions, plug-ins and XCMDs, using a mix of 68k, C and Pascal. Each project was quite small, so compile time was never a problem and MPW was a paradise. My largest XCMD actually had bits in all 3 languages which MPW happily linked together, and some projects had various little blocks of code to stick in the same file, all of which could be automated easily.

I remember these error messages coming up and laughing out loud when I saw the rare ones. Nice work, whoever did it!

Murphy’s Law of app stores applies here:

Any crashing build will be approved instantly, and the next build won’t be approved for days.

MODS

It is “protobuf” with a T, not “profobuf”. I know the typo is in the headline on the original article, but it is bad to spread it, and it looks bad on the front page here.

I am possibly confused, getting moreso the more I read the code. As it is ignoring the sign of the result of compare I don't even see how it would work at all. The sign is what tells you which half to throw away as you search.

Is that still lower_bound? Maybe I am misreading the code but it looks like this returns any match, not the earliest match (when there are dupes).

It’s common to have multiple matches even in a unique list if the comparison function is say looking for a certain string prefix to do autocomplete, but we want the earliest in the list.

The battery pack does not have to be expensive, and they have in fact been getting cheaper and more energy dense year after year. Technology moves on.

It doesn't just remove the need for an ICE engine, also the gearbox, fuel pump, fuel tank, radiator, exhaust system including catalytic convertor, etc.

An ICE engine is intrinsically complex to make, has many moving parts that wear out, is hot because it is inefficient at turning fuel into power. Plus, you know, the pollution.

A battery pack that holds sufficient joules is not intrinsically large and expensive any more than a 100 megabyte disk had to be the size of a washing machine and cost as much as a house, which was once the case.

Battery packs, even with current technology, cause little to no environmental damage, that is oil industry propaganda. Lithium and cobalt are fairly common, and all the cobalt we would ever need is accidentally produced as a side-effect of copper and nickel mining all over the world, that we would be doing anyway.

I love that this article was posted 6 years late.