eecsninja

I can forgive CNN for writing this article but I can't get over the glaring grammatical error in the second paragraph:

> and to his surprised it still turned on.

Who the hell does proofreading at CNN??

If any performance gains from Moore's Law get canceled out by inefficient software due to Wirth's Law, then what's the point of all the work that we technologists are doing?

You can call it a business decision, but that basically means the tech people are doing the work and making our execs rich without actually creating anything that's more beneficial to humanity compared to the computer systems of 10 or 20 years ago.

I think he means the big disconnect between the progressive rhetoric that Californians talk about, versus the policies that are actually enacted. The anti-transit, anti-development mindset that makes urban California unaffordable for most people.

What under the hood image?

I read the link but did not find any explanation of how the extension checks your login/password against the 4 billion known compromised credentials, without exposing your login/password to a third party.

Not only that, but even if you could create something in the traditional way (without having to go through all those extra hoops you described), how many of the younger generation know how to run an executable locally (either downloaded, compiled from source, or received on a USB stick) when they've been raised on computer systems where everything takes place in the browser?

Not to defend Apple, but I wonder how many bug reports they get from tech-illiterate people who think something is broken or a bug when it's working as intended, or is the result of operator error. If there's a lot of those reports, the real bugs can get lost in the noise real quick.

If you think this is predatory, what about the even higher late fees imposed by landlords?

27 percent sounds like a lot but it is about 2 percent per month. On a $1000 rent, that's $20. Late fees are much higher than that.

It does if you believe Apple was infiltrated by NSA agents.

Sounds like working with bad programmers.

I worked with a lot of younger programmers who were lazy and less diligent than I expected from others at the same FAANG company. Bad experience too.

But someone working on C++ prior to 2012 could still have encountered and experienced C++11.

Maybe the people complaining and the ones doing the hiring aren't the same.

Yeah. I've been with Google 8+ years. Got promoted once, 3 years ago. Then in two consecutive years, on two different teams, I had a manager leave me, and ended up reporting to a sub-optimal manager that I didn't choose to report to. That meant zero career progress for that time period.

Now I am 6 months into another team. I have a good manager on a good team who is unlikely to leave, and I'm on track to get promoted again.

How I would summarize the development of AlphaStar and Mana's strategy over the series:

1. AS studies games played by humans to learn what they do. 2. AS takes advantage of high-APM, high-precision blink stalker micro to defeat immortals (something no human can cognitively/mechanically accomplish). 3. Mana realizes he cannot play vs AS as if he were playing vs a human. 4. Mana discovers an AI exploit using the warp prism + immortals to force AS's army back, keeping his own base safe. This is a specific counter-AI strategy, not something that would have worked vs a human player. AS does not know how to properly react because it has not seen any replays of humans going up against an AI by exploiting it. 5. Mana gets enough breathing room to build up a large enough force to win the game.

In short, Mana won because he "solved the problem" of how to exploit this particular AI.

This is actually not a new strategy -- several years back, the stock SC2 AI would do the same thing: pull back when you attacked its base. I could win vs AI using the exact same trick that Mana used. Blizzard has since updated the AI not to fall for this trick.

The real test of DeepMind's learning abilities is thus: if AlphaStar had seen replays of that exploit vs AI, along with all other replays of humans vs AI over the years, would Mana still have been able to win?

Who says the company is all about disruption?

According to Keith Rabois: https://www.quora.com/Why-have-so-few-successful-startups-co...

"In addition, after Google became successful, the type of candidate who applied and was hired shifted from the entrepreneurial to the smart yet homogeneous type. (Shift was pronounced by 2005.) As I have observed previously, only disruptive people create disruptive companies. (Stated differently, great entrepreneurs do not tolerate rules and constraints very well). Google has screened out personalities of this sort since at least 2004 and maybe since 2002."

Major factual error in the article that undermines the significance of these findings:

> Like the Meadowcroft site, Monte Verde has been dated to as many as 19,000 years ago. Together the sites are important and do more than help us understand how and when North America was settled; they also show that there were people in North America well before the Bering land bridge formed about 10,000 years ago, throwing into dispute the theory that North America was settled primarily by Asiatic wanderers over the bridge.

The Bering land bridge was NOT formed 10000 years ago -- that's when it was covered by water.

All this proves is that people settled in one place 19000 years ago. They probably still came from Asia. Nothing revolutionary here.

> I think this helps us hire mostly kids who are book smart but aren't necessarily great (or even "good") employees... I'll do some hand waving here and define good as some combination of being driven and motivated, being able to work independently, and actually caring about what they're doing.

Absolutely. I'm at FAANG, been here almost a decade. I've met many fellow engineers who lack basic problem solving skills, curiosity to learn more about the environment they're developing in (e.g. Linux), and diligence to do a good job. School doesn't teach you those things, nor does conventional whiteboard interviewing select for these qualities.

I spent way too much time/energy on my last team covering for other people who were more senior than me.

Wow I had no idea until now. And I've been using Linux at work for close to a decade.

Hah, tell that to all the HN people who downvoted me for arguing that the immorality of plagiarism is largely a construct we learned from the school system, rather than a global immorality on the same level as theft and murder:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16969089

People pay lip service to questioning authority and thinking for yourself, but then immediately turn on those who do exactly that.

Computers too. E.g. Remember the 3d landscape Unix interface in Jurassic Park?

I've always been an optimistic and motivated person, so I can't speak for depression and laziness. But I can speak for burnout.

For me, burnout is the result of a long period of intense work and effort that accomplishes little. I experienced this in my last job, where I was brought in to a specific purpose by a motivated boss who quit the company a few weeks later. The rest of the org was too bogged down with politics, lack of tech leadership, and other organizational issues. I put in a lot of effort as an individual SWE to fix bugs and help other teammates when they got stuck, but nobody else was putting in so much diligent effort for the sake of the team. I burned out and a t the same time realized that I was on the wrong team, when (1) people kept coming to me for help with the same things I'd already taught them in the past (2) I had way too many moments teaching other people how their own code works (code that they own, that I'd barely looked at) (3) too much energy was spent dealing with other teams rather than on our own team getting work done (4) I had three managers in 18 months (5) everything was owned by multiple teams, and I wore myself out working with too many components that should have been strictly divided between teams.

I have since moved to a new team. This is a much better team -- no politics, no BS, just a few diligent individuals getting things done.

But being on the right team doesn't fix burnout. I'm still burned out from my last job. I took the last six months to ramp up on my current job but I need to take time off soon.

Being able to code and get degrees is quite different from actually thinking critically rigorously.

I think the median rent also includes people sharing a 2/3/4 bedroom home. There aren't that many 1 bedroom apartments to go around in SF, as I understand it.

Not exactly a valid comparison. Nippori to Kichijoji requires a change of systems (JR to Keio), and therefore multiple fares -- it would be like MTA+LIRR or MTA+PATH in NYC.

We're also building transit at 5x the cost per unit of distance. Compare the costs of NYC second avenue versus recent Tokyo and Paris lines.

Can't blame American families for choosing suburbia. US cities are a mess -- too many crazies, needles and trash everywhere, traffic congestion and poor public transit, expensive housing, and so forth.

And there's no political will anywhere in the USA, suburban or urban areas, to change any of this.

I love how life in Tokyo is so middle-class and family oriented compared to US cities like SF and NYC.

A lot actually live outside of NYC (not just Manhattan): Westchester, New Jersey, Long Island, etc

> If you can't find anything fun to do in the bay area but visit SF that doesn't require sitting in traffic on the weekends because everyone else had the same idea

FTFY

A further takeaway is to keep a hidden recorder when dealing with these academic authority figures. That way when they stab you in the back like that, you can expose them in front of your class.

Just make sure you have a way out when they give you a failing grade.

I'm a Googler who conducts interviews.

> It is my experience that interviewers from countries with rote-learning based educational systems ask canned questions and expect regurgitated answers. Interviewers from western educational systems performed more fluid interviews(where, incidentally, I excelled).

> I do not believe Google's current interview process selects for the type of smart people they claim to want. Then again, they're now a big, not-so-benevolent corporation with lots of grunt work(i.e. maintenance, bug fixing) so maybe they just want effective robots?

I can't speak for other interviewers directly, but the company really doesn't provide any incentives to do a good job or put in a lot of thought to doing interviews.

For example, the coding questions that I ask are not that complex. They mostly involve translating a process that a non-engineer might have to deal with in everyday life into code. This minimizes any kind of selection bias -- if you're giving a general coding interview but the problem involves implementing something domain-specific, e.g. regex, then your results are biased in favor of people who have worked with regex.

I don't know if other interviewers at Google have put in that kind of thought to improving the interview experience.

> I'm fully able to admit that I just wasn't smart enough for their organization. Then again, another leading tech company loved me and stuck me on their core design team. Based on my conversations with Google's engineers during the on-site, I did not feel like I was dealing with the best and brightest, whereas at my new company I felt awed by the depth, experience and accomplishments of the team.

Don't feel so bad. The quality of engineers and managers varies a lot. I've seen some of the best and some of the worst -- there's a huge range.