They could also do it at arm's length. A lot of MTurk-style sites have loads of jobs along the lines of, "click this ad, fill out this form, get $0.02".
857 karma · joined September 13, 2020
Quick tip: interviewers often design that kind of question to be intentionally vague. If you get a question like that, they probably want a bunch of questions before you start on an answer. Like, "which part of the process are we designing? The software stack, interfacing with logistics companies, customer service?"
It seems frustrating, but they're looking for people who will drill down and make sure they fully understand a task before they run off to solve it. Asking for clarification is usually a good thing in an interview, especially since the interviewers don't always think the problems through completely.
The lack of feedback seems like a liability thing. A very small number of people will sue because they don't like the reason they were given, so the company decides not to give detailed feedback.
"Social-media-using" should be treated like an adjective that modifies the individual, not a noun that defines them.
It's a shame that nuance seems like the first thing to go out the window when we use social media sites like this, but maybe someday we'll be able to do better.
My pet theory is that we can thank Chromebooks and SBCs like the Raspberry Pi. About 5 years ago, my preferred development machine was a 10" Chromebook with Crouton. The project gave you a full Linux chroot environment with shells and X windows surfaced as ChromeOS browser tabs.
I loved it. I could run EDA tools while sitting in the middle of the woods, and the battery would always outlast the sun. It was tiny and light enough to fit in an inside pocket. And I never felt nervous taking them anywhere, because I could write a few of them off for the price of a "real" laptop.
The only hurdle was the ARM SoCs. You could only run software that you could build from source, because almost nobody built proprietary applications for ARM ISAs. But the relevant tooling saw a lot of development and improvement during that time period, because suddenly a lot of people were giving them a workout.
So 5 years ago, you still needed a backup x86/64 machine for proprietary applications. But the myriad benefits were clear, and I'm glad to see that these power-sipping RISC chips might finally get their day.
And if you think this is exciting, just wait until more people start making RISC-V SoCs on modern process nodes!
Sort of like smoking: people used to do it because it was cool, even after the enormous health problems were well-understood. And it didn't stop being cool until enough people started to treat it like a gross and dirty habit.
They are running and maintaining the infrastructure for a modern-day Stasi, and they steadfastly refuse to do anything about it.
The targeted dissidents are regularly detained and "interrogated". How is Facebook not complicit in that, especially after they have been alerted to the abusive behavior many times? Don't their own terms of service prohibit calling for violence against individuals?
And what's to stop it from happening here?
But then you'd have a new problem: what if someone posts an image of the Tianenmen Square protests? They'll get added to the "illegal" lists despite their value.
So maybe you'd also need a few community-maintained "not illegal" lists with some sort of voting system to decide whether to host something...it'd be messy, but it's not an unworkable problem.
But I should have said "treating" instead of "fighting". Hurting someone in retaliation for doing something should never be seen as a viable treatment option; that's just punishment for the sake of punishment.
I wish that Americans didn't enjoy hurting other people so much. It makes it hard and even a little bit traumatizing to live here on a day-to-day and year-to-year basis.
It makes me wonder why we haven't been spending anything close to 1/5 as much time and effort on ~~fighting~~ treating opioid abuse as we have on covid. Especially since we've been grappling with it for so long, the societal effects have been so visible and acute, and we do have some workable treatments for addiction.
I guess it's not like the federal government tried very hard with covid either, to be fair. But those numbers are incredible.
Hey speaking of, I just found this cool new game called Borderlands - it's a shame that the intro music is so classical, because the setting seems like a cool sort of dystopian punk sci-fi. I wonder if that'll catch on, because it sort of reminds me of some books that I read a few years ago...
See? It's fun!
Don't worry, there are more things to do than there are years in your life. Try something else. Go visit some tall mountains, learn to drive/pilot something new, make an art, volunteer somewhere new, or just live differently than you have in the past.
It might not be fulfilling, but at least it'll be less boring. There's nothing worse than getting stuck in a rut, and telling yourself that you're only trying something for a few months is a good way to find interests that you never knew you had.
But I do have a lot of them, and no actual tickets from those areas. I have had multiple K-9 searches with a clean car, and I did regularly get pulled over for doing less than the posted speed limit.
I can't prove that civil asset forfeiture is the reason, but my vehicle would have been a juicy target because of the things attached to it.
Say that you like the parks and forests in places like Montana, Arkansas, Utah, New Mexico, etc. You're going to do a lot of driving along state highways with a lot of nice things packed away, and maybe a small water/dirt vehicle.
Most of those state highways have small towns every 20-80 miles where the speed limits briefly drop in increments of 10mph down to 30-40mph. In these towns, if you have out-of-state plates, you will regularly be pulled over for doing 5mph below the speed limit. You can expect a dog to sniff around your car if the patrol has one. You can feel the desire to just take everything that you own; it's palpable. I've gotten enough "warnings" to make a suit out of carbon-copy paper.
That's to say nothing of racial prejudices in many areas of the US, and you'll probably have to stop for CBP checkpoints in states like New Mexico, even in the middle of 80mph+ interstates.
It was a bad situation in 2018-2019, and I can't see it getting much better when restrictions start to lift in 2021. We badly need our courts to strongly re-assert the 4th Amendment.
It's easy for recommendations to get stuck on a local maxima if they only look at one metric at a time, like "similarity" weights. But if you have a lot of metadata about each title, you can break out of those "loops" by sprinkling in metrics like ratings/genres/release date/popularity/etc. This doesn't have to hurt from a performance perspective, either; you can filter on the same single metric, but request more recommendations than you need and pluck out a pseudo-random set in the application logic.
That also lets you provide context for the recommendation. "It's like this, but [older/more obscure/with vampires]."
Most teachers didn't use the advanced featutes, disliked that students played games on them during class, and had to jump through hoops to tamp down on cheating during exams. Many parents also had difficulty finding an extra $130 per child to pay for them; the schools wouldn't provide returnable ones like they did with textbooks.
In contrast, when I went to college (also in the US), we got a simple one-line "+-*/^" calculator for the first few years of calculus, engineering maths, etc.
Personally, I learned much better with the simple calculator. Complex graphing calculators do seem more suited to professional use than education.
Fundamentally, the government can't dictate what anybody chooses to publish (or not) on a website that they own. They can seize it and prosecute the owners if the content is illegal, but they can't force editorial decisions.
This whole arrangement drove a lot of traffic to Twitter and helped to keep it relevant; they just didn't want to kill their golden goose.
They'd probably want to look at a representative sample of "cloud overrun" events and see how much they cost, how likely they are, what reasonable measures could help prevent them, etc. But they aren't strangers to taking unusual bets.
Apparently a lot of big moonshot / X-prize type competitions fund their prize money through insurance. You present your research stating why the problem is hard, the insurance company works out how likely it is for someone to manage the challenge, and they come up with a quote for footing the bill in the unlikely event that someone wins.
And if Apple's authentication servers are up.
Using them at work is a blessing and a curse.
I frequently wonder how many devices actually adhere to that requirement. Probably not many.
When I find "good jobs", they almost always crop up from serendipity in areas that I am genuinely interested in at the time. Looking back it feels like dumb luck, but the sort of dumb luck that is helped along by trying to make your own opportunities.
If you ever have a chance to talk candidly with an executive or entrepreneur about a subject that you are passionate about...well, at least take the meeting. Those sorts of discussions aren't interviews per se, but sometimes your vision will click with someone else's, and that's where the magic happens.
Sort of like Lost meets Lord of the Flies.
But when you've been futzing around with quaternions all day, and your camera finally stops acting like a hyperactive husky who hasn't had a walk in days...well, I imagine that's close to what it felt like when they got the internal combustion engine to stop being an external combustion engine.
The order of magnitude lower speed is an expected byproduct of the hardware. If you don't have a use for it, don't use it.
It was fantastic; I got a whole year of not being able to see work emails after I went home, and then they let us opt out of the invasive MDM software that they wanted to put on Android phones to let them access corporate email. All for a bug that my phone wasn't even vulnerable to.
By the time I left, I had gone 4 years without ever responding to unexpected evening emails. And now that I know it's possible, I'm never going back! :)
Yes, it was. ~10-20 years ago, local restaurants and businesses would pay high school / college kids a pittance set up a simple website for them. No online ordering, but they would usually have a menu, phone number, and hours.
The result was that the pages didn't all look like SquareSpace templates, and a lot of young people got their first leg up into a tech career.
Espruino: https://www.espruino.com/
JerryScript: https://jerryscript.net/
Running javascript on microcontrollers is surprisingly popular. Personally I keep returning to C, but these frameworks can be nice when they "just work".
Does this framework support general-purpose SPI communication, or only SPI displays?
It's not really that bad, and plenty of microcontrollers lack atomic operations.
Finally! An Espressif chip with WiFi, Bluetooth, and USB!