Hacker News Reader

Serious_Cheeseon Elon Musk: During the darkest days […] I reached out to Tim Cook

  >> Bringing Tesla’s manufacturing up to Apple’s quality might just be more work than getting a chinese contractor to round up another million Uyghurs.

Serious_Cheeseon Mark Rober (former NASA) launches a 30 day Creative Engineering Class

Not OP, but NASA is very old school and the tech stack is old, not to mention that things move slower than a turtle (so much bureaucracy) and the fear of losing funding. It's just not a great place to work for anecdotally speaking. At best, it's an ok place to work for. Oh and I forgot to mention the crazy low salaries across the board, and yearly raises that are below inflation rate.

Serious_Cheeseon Advanced Compilers: Self-Guided Online Course

This is amazing. Thank you for sharing.

Serious_Cheeseon More Americans are shoplifting food

Someone said that "winners write the history books," but how true is that today given that most developed countries are connected through the internet and information spreads as fast as the speed of light (literally).

Anything to backup your claims about Eastern Europeans living in the 80s? Anything I can read? Not trying to refute your argument, but I'm just curious to see things from their perspective.

Serious_Cheeseon More Americans are shoplifting food

You're right. I agree with you. Thanks for clarifying.

Serious_Cheeseon More Americans are shoplifting food

It's sad to see HN users just downvote something they don't agree with instead of responding to the arguments made berg.

berg, what other options do we have besides capitalism? We saw how millions of people died of starvation with communist/socialists societies.

Serious_Cheeseon More Americans are shoplifting food

>“People will say, ‘I was just hungry.’ And then what do you do?”

People stealing food to survive while the super wealthy and rich becoming richer and richer[1]. What a great time to be alive.

[1](https://www.forbes.com/sites/sergeiklebnikov/2020/11/18/elon...)

EDIT: I don't particularly dislike Elon (the man has done alot of good), but he was the easiest example I could think of. Stock market is a better indicator of rich people's wealth.

Serious_Cheeseon Major Reddit Outage

Ah an excuse for me to work.

Serious_Cheeseon Ask HN: Things that are high quality yet cheap?

It's very hard finding high quality things that are cheap, and it's very easy finding low quality things that are expensive.

Rule of thumb is to read the 3-start (and below) reviews for anything that you're planning on buying. 4 and 5 stars are generally customers who had been paid to write those reviews.

Serious_Cheeseon GitHub Gets Dark Mode

You can choose light/dark/auto mode in your GH settings https://github.com/settings/appearance

Serious_Cheeseon GitHub Dark Mode

Is it just me or is the dark mode too dark? My eyes are having a hard time finding things.

Serious_Cheeseon California’s new contact-tracing app: What you need to know

Summary: California, working with Apple and Google released an app called "CA Notify" to contact trace COVID-19 spread. The app uses "Bluetooth to determine when two devices have been near one another for more than 15 minutes." iPhone users can activate the app by enabling "Exposure Notifications" under settings.

Serious_Cheeseon Why Senior Engineers Hate Coding Interviews

Then you keep interviewing until you get the ones you know. There's luck involved with everything. Luck in the sense of the right time at the right place.

Serious_Cheeseon Why Senior Engineers Hate Coding Interviews

A lot of down votes, but I have yet to see a response to the valid question of "what other scalable solution do we".

Don't attack the person. Attack the argument.

Serious_Cheeseon Why Senior Engineers Hate Coding Interviews

When you say "someone who can't code", what exactly do you mean by that? Does it mean that they have no idea what a for-loop is? Or that they have basic understanding of a programming language, but lack the fundamentals? And how do you define fundamentals?

The phrases "can't code" and can't pass "fizz-buzz" are loosely used. What exactly is fizz-buzz? To me, it's writing a for loop to reverse a string, but to someone else, it's implementing Dijkstra's algorithm in a 40 minute period to solve some made up problem.

Serious_Cheeseon Why Senior Engineers Hate Coding Interviews

Agree that the system is broken.

Not to defend the current interview system, but what other scalable solution do we have other than LeetCode type of questions? How would we be able to show that someone knows how to write code without testing them on the fundamentals of CS?

Genuinely curious.

Serious_Cheeseon Controversial Programming Opinions (2012)

Or at least they should be able to understand the project from a technical point of view.

One of the most frustrating things working with non-technical managers is their lack of understanding of the effort needed to accomplish a task. Oh you need to re-write an entire library from scratch, work with Joe and have it done by Wednesday (today is Monday).

Now good luck explaining and convincing them that two days is not enough.

Serious_Cheeseon Virtual Cybersecurity Escape Room

I got frustrated trying out different passwords, so I looked at the source code.

The username is "anne.kingston". I found the password hash, but not sure how to go back to get the password itself.

Password hash: (hashy == "3880" && saltedhashy == "2425")

The hash is computed in a loop as: `prehash += (s[i].charCodeAt() * (i+1));`

I'm not sure how to go reverse this. Maybe someone can help?

Here's a tuple of passwords tried and their hash and salthash:

(Password, Hash, Salthash)

(daniel, 8221, 2197)

(hello, 7004, 3970)

(password, 3970, 1268)

(123, 302, 4415)

(something, 4814, 2749)

Serious_Cheeseon I Made a Self-Quoting Tweet

Looks like someone is working really hard.

Serious_Cheeseon Ask HN: Best place to live for climbing, skiing and surfing?

Los Angeles, California.

Serious_Cheeseon Tesla Tequila

Is Tesla running out of cash?

Last time they pulled such a stun was with the flame-thrower and that was a huge success.

Serious_Cheeseon A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack

What's wrong with Java?

Serious_Cheeseon 'Person in jetpack' spotted flying again near LA airport

Obligatory share: [0] An interesting story onboard an SR-71 Blackbird

[0](https://theaviationgeekclub.com/sr-71-blackbird-pilot-tells-...)

Serious_Cheeseon Show HN: Low-Level Academy, an explorable systems programming course

Hi Nikita, this is a fantastic idea. I've have been working with low level programming for a long time and would love to contribute new lessons. How can I do that?

Serious_Cheeseon Show HN: I built a Rotten Tomatoes-style platform for durable products

Exactly! We can help out. Please let use know if you need any contributions from the community. Myself and (I'm sure) others are willing to help with this.

I am sick and tired of wasting money on buying products that last a year or two. It's also very bad for the environment. It increases the pill of trash that we're going to have to deal with someday.

Serious_Cheeseon An AI can simulate an economy millions of times to create fairer tax policy

The headline is misleading (click-bait). Reading the headline, I imagined they have simulated the entire economy of the world and have used reinforcement learning to find optimal policies, but they only simulated 4 workers and are making generalization to the entire economy.

Serious_Cheeseon Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

+1 Very well said. I've actually experience this first hand while interviewing for one of the FAANGs. I have a background with embedded software engineering, working with C/C++, and working with low level I/O and bare-metal + using RTOS, and also Unix/Linux, and the position I was being interviewed for was for an "Embedded Developer." The job description described the role working on their RTOS. During the phone interview, the interviewer asked a question that (later I found out) can only be solved optimally using splay trees or red-black trees.

I have worked in the embedded industry for 6 years, and have worked on a wide variety of projects (from WiFi to drones/airplanes to medical devices), and have never needed to use this, yet the interviewer expected me to know this.

Anecdotally speaking, when recruiters throw this kind of curve balls, it's because they already have someone in mind for that position and are interviewing candidates just to fill paperwork.

Serious_Cheeseon Ask HN: Why is Tesla worth $420B?

Since the FED lowered interest rates to zero and started buying corporate bonds [0], I predicated dollar inflation would rise. How should someone like me (a blue collar working lower class) prepare for the storm? Should I invest in stocks? Buy property? Buy things like cars? How should I prepare for what's about to come?

It might seem speculative, but OP's comment is based on how economics works, so the storm is about to hit. The big question is when? And how should we prepare?

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/29/the-fed-is-buying-some-of-th...

Serious_Cheeseon Ask HN: Why is Tesla worth $420B?

> Fed is spraying cash all over the country clubs and gated communities

Can you please elaborate on this? How exactly is this happening? Why specifically country clubs and gated communities?