Puer

We can't know the full details of this particular case because nothing seems to have been independently verified yet, but there's a distinction between

1) Someone finding a suspicious package and falsely thinking it's a bomb, and

2) Someone calling the police and saying, "I'm going to bomb Facebook" (when they actually aren't)

All of your arguments thus far have pertained to 2. You have repeatedly cited the definition of "threat" underneath that context, and scenario 2 perfectly satisfies that definition. Furthermore, so does "terrorism", because a bomb threat, real or not, causes terror and has high potential for real physical harm.

Under your definition, someone threatening to shoot you in the street wouldn't be a threat unless they actually shot you. In reality, intent is almost always impossible to discern and doesn't excuse reckless behavior. Should you not be charged if you didn't happen to kill anyone while driving home drunk?

You may disagree with Facebook's influence on this world, but advocating for methods that only cause chaos, potential harm, and disinformation is not acting in the world's best interest.

> Yes, absolutely. Nonviolent terrorism is justified in many cases. Simply slapping the “terrorism” label on something to villify it doesn’t change the nature of the thing being described.

> I am not trying to diminish how serious this is; I find this to be an admirable innovation in nonviolent disruption of those that would harm our society. It is surprising it hasn’t happened more or sooner.

This is one of the most disgusting and disturbing comments I've read in 10 years on Hacker News, sneak. Calling in fake bomb threats isn't harmless or nonviolent and it increases the deadliness of real threats by diminishing their seriousness. I suggest you read the folktale "The Boy Who Cried Wolf." Furthermore, people have died as a result of false swatting and I don't doubt people have also died as a result of fake bomb threats. Calling it a nonviolent form of protest is disturbing.

I strongly suggest you find more productive ways to voice your opinions.

I've also found this enormously useful:

https://github.com/crazyguitar/pysheeet/blob/master/docs/not...

Not to mention they buried their option to turn off location tracking on Google Maps within some legal submenu in the app, instead of in the privacy settings menu. If that qualifies as "transparent" I don't know what the word means anymore.

I know HN is on a Facebook media train right now, but blaming them for the widespread discontent in France that's been simmering for years is disingenuous.

> Instagram has suffered less, but instagram isn’t really useful for anything but wasting time.

Is Instagram useless, or just useless to you? I understand that HN isn't Facebook's target market, but it's disappointing to read comments that dismiss its services and anyone who does find utility in them.

I'd imagine it's a lot easier and more effective to teach middle schools basic probability first. All you need is a coin or a deck of cards to introduce them to real world examples.

Lol, I usually organize tabs by location so pinning them (and minimizing their horizontal footprint) is good enough for me. Further, I personally found that when I had a million tabs open, at least 50% of them were duplicates so I just started using tab deduping extensions to cull them.

There are a few niche plugins I use for specific sites to enhance usability that I definitely don't expect to be ported to Firefox, but even the ones that are take an understandable backseat in terms of developer priority.

For example, for more than 10 years I've been using Chrome extensions that allow you to hover over image links to view them without clicking. There are dozens of these extensions in almost any browser, but they require constant updating to keep up with 1) new image/video hosts and 2) changes to existing image/video hosts.

For me, these extensions are an essential part of the browsing experience of many websites. I've found that the same extensions by the same developers often lag behind 6+ months on Firefox vs. Chrome which makes them really useless when gfycat, streamable, imgur, etc. all stop working.

Just my personal $0.02:

1. The biggest thing keeping me tied to Chrome over any other browser is the extension support. Extensions are second class citizens in any other browser. This is partly because other browsers keep overhauling their systems and deprecating old software which discourages extension developers, and mainly because (as an extension developer) why would you code for browser X when you can get more users on browser Y?

2. Anecdotal evidence, but every time an update of Firefox (and most notably Quantum) is released people laud how fast it is. On my 2015 Macbook running Mac OS Firefox has never been faster. Maybe there are things behind the scenes such as caching playing a role, but web pages load slower, scrolling feels sluggish, videos drop frames and freeze or get out of sync. It isn't an enjoyable experience compared to Chrome or Safari.

Some poor peon at the bottom of the ladder instead of the engineers/managers actually responsible for the mistake. The great thing about being at the top is being able to delegate away blame. After all, it's your job.

My most enjoyable interview was for an internship in college. I had a take home coding challenge where I had to write some simple code to fetch information from an API using whatever language I liked. I was given a week to do it, but it only took me an hour or so to meet all of their explicit requirements. I liked that there was no time pressure in that regard.

After the week was up I went into the onsite and in the "technical" portion of my interview two engineers went over the code I had written for the assignment and asked me about design choices I had made and what I would do if constraint X was added or feature Y. It was all very open ended and much more of a true discussion than an interview which I really appreciated.

I think this kind of format is ideal for interviews. The assignment requirements were simple enough that you could fulfill them easily and in your most comfortable language without any time pressure, but you could also go above and beyond and show that you really knew your stuff. For example, in the instructions they didn't explicitly ask for error handling on the input, but both of the engineers I interviewed with really liked that I had included it. You weren't penalized if you did just the bare minimum because you had the opportunity extend and build on the assignment during the onsite. I felt enabled to showcase my knowledge and justify my design decisions and that that effort was rewarded.

100% GPA related.

> Repost from yesterday's daily chat thread.

> Hi guys, kinda a big issue rnow.

> Got matched with a host for SWE Internship with Big G this summer. Had the match interview and it was a match, recruiter told me last monday that i should receive my offer within 2 days.

​

> Didn't hear anything until yesterday, when she emailed me asking me to write a statement justifying my lower than usual GPA. (2.6)

​

> I am pretty nervous about this. I turned down two jobs this summer because I thought I had already been matched. I can't find much online abotu this situation. What happens now?

https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/a13waz/b...

> "Was adjusting moving across the continent for school in fields I were not familiar with in highschool. Balancing real life responsibilities and focused on a lot of extra curriculars. Grades within my major were good and it has been upward trending."

> "I have rarely gotten Cs actually for some reason, especially not my major classes. Either way, i don't see how this disqualifies me from the job as it was not in the job description to have a high GPA, and I passed my interviews reasonably well."

Of course it's possible that the OP isn't telling the complete truth, but he's been a regular poster in that sub throughout the process so I doubt he's making much up. Also, if it really is based on your explanation that's just encouraging dishonesty and is a shitty hiring metric. If you're going to hire on something as arbitrary as GPA then the reason behind the number shouldn't be a factor. "We're sorry, we only accept candidates with low GPA if both parents died, but as only one of yours did during your undergrad we can't move on with your app."

I just read this post and thought it was a really shitty move on Google's part. For those that don't know, as part of Google's initial application you have to submit an "unofficial" transcript. This means that Google had this person's transcript through the entirety of the interview process from beginning to end, but only after extending them a verbal offer did they decide to inform them they can't hire because of their low GPA.

The coding challenges and whiteboard interviews are ridiculous enough as is. It makes me sad to see such a lack of courtesy, though. If the GPA was going to be the barrier they should have just rejected the candidate outright from the beginning and not wasted their time.

Agreed. My Google Voice number is my default for handing out, and I reserve my real # for important things. I just wish you could block numbers using Google Voice.

I considered working at Google last year after a recruiter reached out to me, but their decision to backtrack on their promise in China changed my mind. I do not morally condemn anyone who works at Google. I have many good friends that are both bright engineers and undeniably good people that work there. I just feel that as someone who's family is Taiwanese, I cannot in good consciousness support the company. I let the recruiter know this because I believe it's important that they know. I'm curious if anyone else on HN has had similar experiences.

Google with YouTube and Twitter? Even though most congressional hearings are a farce, Google didn't even show up to speak with congress. The amount of racist, nazi propaganda I'm exposed to on Twitter every day far outnumbers what I've ever seen on Facebook.

I would absolutely disagree with that assertion. While we're hypothesizing about the long-term effects of FB on democracy, I would argue that generations of smokers that die early and impose a huge strain on an already overloaded healthcare system have a much greater effect on the health of our democracy. I think that at this point it's ridiculous to compare FB to those very real and significant effects.

HN has always been super negative towards FB and their products (with perhaps the exception of Whatsapp) because HN has never been FB's target market. It's a lot easier to criticize a product that's never provided any utility to you personally. You don't really hear about the spread of racist, divisive, Russian sponsored content on YouTube or Twitter nearly as much here, and when you do you also don't get comments sections filled with moral grandstanding on how if you work at FB you're human garbage that should burn in hell.

> Implying lung cancer can happen because of smoking. In fact air pollution and a bunch of other things cause lung cancer too.

This is one of the most disingenuous comments I've ever read on HN.

> Google, for all the negative press and bashing they are getting lately, has not hidden what they collect, how they collect.

I'm curious what led to you to this conclusion and how you define "hide." What about how they were tracking location information even after you turned off location history??

It's much more than that. :) If you have a large collection of photos uploaded to google, you can make some pretty insidious searches that will return extremely accurate results.

Try searching "bikini" if you have any snapshots from your beach vacation uploaded. Even with all location metadata/camera information stripped from the images, Google was able to find 99% of them using keyword searches like that. You can go further and search specific body parts, too. I think that's pretty creepy as well.

The typical HN response is to dismiss arguments like this with, "Well, don't be so careless to upload photos in the first place!" but what happens when laypeople use Google Photos as marketed and as a backup service for their entire lives? I don't think those people would be comfortable knowing that Google can not only accurately identify 1) people and their friends implicitly and 2) identify when those people are scantily clad or nude.

Just imagine a bad actor getting access to your photos via Google and being able to instantly pull up any compromising or sensitive information you may have forgotten about with a simple keyword search because that's something they, for some reason, index.

How long until Tesla releases an over the air update that changes the behavior of familiar systems and causes an accident?

Yep, it makes no difference. I get up at 5:30 to go to work. Even during DST it's still dark in the morning, and it's not like I'm really getting any exposure to the light on the bus to work. But the consequence is that when I leave work at 4, it's pitch black outside where the sun would have been setting before.

DST is pointless and antiquated.

Convex Optimization by Lieven Vandenberghe and Stephen P. Boyd was the one my professors always recommended and I think it's excellent.

I agree. I hope that M.I.T. is able to consolidate these domains in a cohesive manner. The mathematics of ML is super unfriendly because it borrows from so many inter-related domains. You'll end up with notation that uses sigma to represent both summation and covariance within a single expression, or inconsistencies with whether vectors are column vectors by default or row vectors. It makes your understanding of the material dependent on whether you had the same background as the author.

I don't doubt it and I don't doubt that M.I.T. will create an intensive AI college. My point was that a lot of universities, even distinguished ones, are recognizing that there's a real demand and hype for "AI/Data Science" degrees and in an effort to maximize enrollment and appeal they often minimize the mathematical and statistical requirements.

I don't believe that you need an advanced degree to become a component ML engineer, but the math/stats is necessary pre-requisite and these pre-reqs are often poorly defined. At my college, the only pre-req to the graduate-level ML course was the freshman level intro to stats class and multivariable calculus. About 50% of the class dropped when they realized they didn't know how to construct Gaussian models or perform convex optimization.

Unfortunately, I think statistics will continue to be under-appreciated. All of my mathematics professors in undergraduate said that statistics and linear algebra are the two most useful fields of math to know and that dedicating time to studying them will pay dividends. It still surprises me when I apply for jobs today how few places, even financial or scientific firms, distinguish between statistics and mathematics in their application forms.

People want to be become machine learning engineers because it's the sexy thing right now, but they don't want to learn the necessary statistics/linear algebra/optimization necessary for the roles. In my experience, these "AI" and "datascience" programs are largely just cash-grabs at most universities. I don't doubt that M.I.T.'s will be rigorous, but I'm largely skeptical of how useful these programs actually are.

In what world would that cost the company "next to nothing"??? That person isn't going to be working for a year. The company either needs to hire someone else to replace them, which is an expensive process, or lose the productivity for that position for a year.