Hacker News Reader

Mystrlon Whiteboard interviews are a test of obedience, not intelligence

Oh hey that's the question I got for my recent amazon onsite (slightly different constraints). I couldn't find the exact question online and I thought it was a "fair" medium question. IMO this is a pretty good question there's a really easy suboptimal solution so people don't get completely stuck, the optimizations are pretty straightforward and there's a lot of room to demonstrate you can write clean code.

*Fair meaning there's no crazy tricks to it or any obscure algorithms just applying DSA fundamentals.

Mystrlon Augment, a GitHub Copilot rival, launches out of stealth

He's talking about something different (https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2024/04/04/full-line-code-co...). I also found this significantly more comfortable to use than copilot. Completions show up faster, don't try to overpredict (when I was trying out copilot it would often try to suggest large blocks of completely useless code) and doesn't cost anything extra.

Mystrlon Netflix: Piracy is difficult to compete against and growing rapidly

I think media like TV/Movies might be fundamentally different than games because of how easy it is to serve pirated content. With games there's a lot of friction with getting cracks working and risks with malware while with TV/Movies you just watch them in your browser. Recently my friends showed me a pirate site that I'm in awe hasn't been taken down. Don't think I can post a link here but it has all the things I'd expect from a paid streaming service (slick and fast ui, large catalog with good discovery options, high quality streams, no lag, random ui niceties like a dimmer switch, skip op/ed and multi language subs). Being honest as long as something like this is available I don't really see what a site like netflix could offer that would convince me to pay.

Actually the more I think about it the less I understand how it hasn't been taken down.

Mystrlon Why the Culture Wins: An Appreciation of Iain M. Banks (2017)

> For bonus points, energy weapons weren't really used because if one hit a shield, it would cause an explosion

This never really made much sense to me. IRRC when an energy weapon hits a shield either the emitter or the shield generator blows up. Since shields are protecting something while the emitter can be anywhere to me the logical outcome seems to be energy weapons everywhere and no shields at all.

Mystrlon I applied to 250 jobs and timed how long each one took

Funny story. When I was going the coop workshops in uni they invited in some people from microsoft to talk about what they look for in a cover letter and they straight up said they don't read them.

Mystrlon Fallout from Blizzard Hong Kong Incident

> But how do they justify this when their personal economic well-being requires trampling the freedom of other people?

The same way every one in every other country on earth deals with the awful things their country does I guess. By ignoring it.

> By that logic, would pro-China people would support China going to war with and taking over other countries if it brought them "economic well-being"?

Looking at world history probably?

Mystrlon Young People Are Going to Save Us All from Office Life

That's sounds pretty reasonable as long as they get their work done? Someone on my team went remote for a quarter for personal reasons and this was at a giant 40 year old company.

Mystrlon Google admits listening to some smart speaker recordings

Honestly what risk is there? Outside of some internet echo chambers no one really cares and all this will be forgotten by tomorrow if it even takes that long.

Mystrlon Please Google, let us revert to the classic Gmail look

Might just be you. It loads in under a second for me.

Mystrlon Google Memory Loss

https://ccse.lbl.gov/BoxLib/

Is it this thing at the very top of the search results?

Mystrlon Flexbox and Grids: your layout’s best friends

Do you mean something like https://jsfiddle.net/Mystrl/9uj40kam/1/

Mystrlon What We Get Wrong About Technology

Can't remember where this quote is from but: A reaction drive's efficiency as a weapon is in direct proportion to its efficiency as a drive.

Mystrlon Studying how Firefox can collect additional data in a privacy-preserving way

Because firefox as it is now is slowly dying. It looks like data collection is such a huge advantage that anyone not doing it is doomed in the long term.

Mystrlon Should we break up the big tech companies?

And how would this be implemented? Are you proposing every country creates their own equivalent of the great firewall?

Mystrlon An email list’s open rate drops over 50% after changes to Gmail spam filtering

At least personally as far as I can tell the spam problem has been solved by gmail. I can't even remember the last time I saw a spam message in my inbox and can count on one hand the number of times I've had to go into the spam folder to find a legitimate email.

Mystrlon Defense Contractor Left Sensitive Pentagon Files on Unprotected AWS S3 Bucket

I don't see how that's absurd. There is absolutely no way I could run a system myself that's more secure than what I could get by paying someone else to do it.

Mystrlon Show HN: 'Hack' the user cursor

I'm seeing a block box where my cursor actually is. Chrome 57.0.2987.133 (64-bit)

Mystrlon Apple receives permit in California to test self-driving cars

General AI can drive but a self driving car doesn't have to do everything a general AI can do therefor driving is easier than general AI.

Mystrlon Apple cuts Tim Cook's pay 15% for missing sales goals

I have a computer that can run vr (i7-6700k + 1080) enough disposable income to afford a headset and I'm still not interested. There just hasn't been anything released for vr that doesn't seem like a gimmick.

Mystrlon “AV is my single biggest impediment to shipping a secure browser.”

AV is already obsolete as far as I can tell.

Mystrlon Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking

put a little extra effort in

So it's hopeless then. You're never going to convince anything resembling a sizable portion of the population to put in more effort for no easily appreciable benefit.

Mystrlon Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

I've lost so many posts from hitting backspace without realizing I didn't have the input box focused I'm more than happy with this trade off.

Mystrlon ‘Security Fatigue’ Can Cause Computer Users to Feel Hopeless and Act Recklessly

I have no idea what you're talking about. I tried it and after the first popup there's a checkbox to disable any more popups. It didn't affect any of my other tabs and I could kill the process of that one tab through task manager.

Mystrlon Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google

I'm assuming he doesn't want a community with only people he doesn't like nor a community with only people he likes. So he wouldn't move to a service where all the people he dislikes moved.

Mystrlon Millennial men with different incomes

Do most people actually have short commutes? I think I've grown so used to commuting an hour + each way doesn't faze me at all. In high school it was 45 mintues on a bus each way. University was bus bus skytrain bus for about an hour and 45 minutes and work now is bus bus train skytrain taking about 80 minutes. Honestly I would rather spend 80 minutes on transit than 45 minutes diving since I can sleep on the train in the morning and I'm usually reading on the way back not to mention the cost of owning a car.

Mystrlon A Soccer Con Man Who Couldn't Play the Game

Huh neat I actually didn't know that.