anyfoo

That is exactly the assumption I was operating under, I even called it a "veto". Does not change anything I wrote.

(And of course the CEO can override any hiring decision anyway. The question is if they will.)

Good points. My hypothetical had the implicit assumption that the interviewer was acting in good faith when asking the weekend question. But that doesn't mean that interviewers necessarily are, of course.

Well, I have no idea what they actually specifically asked or didn't ask, because the article is light on details. So I just elaborated on what I consider crossing into unacceptable (which I believe is based on commonly shared conventions), and everyone can draw their own conclusions for any particular situation.

We weren't there, and the article is light on details, so we can only speculate. I see two options here:

a) The potential employer vastly overstepped commonly accepted boundaries.

b) It was totally implied that the questions were to be answered in the context of work. "What was the hardest challenge you had to overcome?" in that context relates to e.g. debugging a hard concurrency problem, not your divorce.

What stood out to me is that whatever interpretation is the correct one, the candidate was willing to give (apparently) deeply personal answers. That's just something to adjust for in upcoming interviews, we live and learn.

And even if, for the sake of argument, they legitimately did ask about your personal life instead of your work life... you normally wouldn't answer any of that. (In fact, it could very well mean the end of the interview, from the interviewee's side.)

That's vastly overstepping commonly accepted boundaries. Sure, some surface level smalltalk is normal and expected: "Any hobbies? Ah, you like hiking? Nice. Where do you like to hike? Oh, I did that, too. Might I suggest hiking there and there? I bet you'd like it. Anyway, moving on!" Common ground helps conversations flow.

But an employer asking about your personal relationships? Your needs, fears, and desires outside of any technical context? (My needs, fears, and desires from compiler toolchains are totally within scope.) Your traumata? That's a level of intrusiveness crossing into "rude" territory. They have no business of asking.

I don't know your particular situation, so it might be totally different, but I think this is commonly just a formality and a friendly chat.

It's a chance for you to meet the actual CEO (or VP or whatever in a larger company), and also for them to get to meet you in advance, instead of effectively getting "blindsided" by a new person (to exaggerate a bit).

Usually, by the time you've gotten to that point, the decision to hire you has well and truly been made. I don't know what then would need to happen for the actually rather secondary function of giving the CEO the opportunity to veto to become relevant. I'd be curious hearing about anyone who's ever experienced it (on whatever side). I guess it can be a safeguard against vastly unaligned values, but I suspect it's very rare.

But primarily, and effectively, it's usually just a meet-and-greet. And it's hard for me to blame a CEO (or VP etc.) for at least getting to anyone who's going to enter a mutual contract to effectively become part of their company.

I guess. This is a good answer, it did made me recontextualize.

Maybe it was always that much obvious to me that what should have been a good night of sleep had no, or maybe even a negative, effect on my wellbeing, and therefore something must be wrong during the sleep.

But if the effects are a bit more muted and accumulate more gradually, and you've never heard much about sleep apnea, you might not directly attribute it to the sleep itself.

Yeah, but I've met people who think it's "normal" to wake up tired and exhausted even after multiple (or even many) nights of sufficient sleep, time-wise.

I remember one person who thought waking up tired is just part of being an adult?

The original comment said "multiple folds higher chances to be depressed, unemployed", for me that's a bit like saying that being on fire has a very high chance to make you depressed and unemployed.

Yeah, of course that's true, but the effect on performance and well-being after a sleep apnea night is so obvious to me, I don't have to look for the proximate cause...

EDIT: Through the other answer came to me that maybe in other cases, it's not so directly obvious just after waking up.

> People should be more aware of the symptoms of sleep apneas

I'm always a bit puzzled that this needs to be pointed out? I don't have sleep apnea per se, at least not chronically, but I've definitely had bouts of it due to allergy, sickness, stuff like that. The symptoms are the same because the mechanism is the same: I didn't get enough oxygen in the night.

It's always glaringly obvious to me the next day. I feel way more tired and exhausted than I normally would given the amount of sleep. I sometimes had instances of waking up gasping for air.

I really don't need to be told in those instances that there was an issue during the night. My sleep didn't sleep, of course there's something wrong and needs to be looked at?

Like, one time's a fluke, but if it happens a lot...

niobe's excellent reply covered it already, but just to be blunt: You usually share the channel with some of your neighbors' networks, so the assessment that only you are using it is usually not correct.

This is also why it's often better if everyone uses lower transmit power (while still retaining coverage), as networks farther away will see less interfering networks.

Hah, I do the exact same. (Only in zsh.)

That is exactly what I expect, or did I misread you? I expect its text output on stderr, and stdout being reserved for its video (or whatever) output.

Maybe the name “stderr” is a bit misleading. It’s totally common for non-error output to be in stderr as well, like verbose/debug logging.

I know what "exponentially" means, I know what "quadratically" means (and how it's not exponentially), and I know the inverse square law. Hence my question why the article claims "signal strength" decreases exponentially, when the raw power received by an antenna definitely decreases quadratically, not exponentially. That's just physics. But there might be some convoluted thing about stepping down symbol rate which affects throughput (which I guess could be colloquially called "signal strength" if I squint really hard) that I don't understand here.

Glad you were able to sort it out properly. I guess maybe I'm also lucky to much less rarely work with, shall we say, consultation-resistant engineers than discussion forums sometimes make you believe.

Kind of irrelevant, because you could also ask "Do you also think that f(x) = x^1 is polynomial? How about f(x) = x^0?" The distinction was clearly between polynomial (specifically quadratic) and exponential, leaving those trivial cases out.

I'm actually not sure that they don't actually mean exponentially. There's something about not only increasing the distance, but potentially also the modulation (and thus the symbol rate) stepping down, which maybe in total causes the decline to be ~exponential? But it's not clear to me at all. That's why I ask, I have a hard time parsing it.

But then again, the sentence uses the term "signal strength", not "throughput", so that would suggest quadratically. But I guess "signal strength" could be meant colloquially and mean more than just the raw signal power received by the antenna, here.

It's all very fuzzy to me, as it stands.

> Wi-Fi signal strength decreases at an exponential rate as you move further away from a router.

This is surprising to me. I'd have guessed it decreases quadratically (i.e. due to the inverse square law), not exponentially.

The paragraph below seems to contain an explanation, but I don't really understand it (namely because I don't know what that percentage "Coverage" column actually means, or what we mean with "the total distance at each QAM step").

I just said that I always do `command --help 2>&1 | less`?

Due to boring circumstances outside of my control, I have to use WiFi for the most part, so I've got quite some experience with making it run optimally (or rather, as optimally as I managed to, not as optimally as I would like it to).

And yeah, you pretty much already have to have a visible line of sight to get anything even close to 1 Gbps. And still be on channels with little interference. (DFS helps if you're not near radar, which intentionally causes you to get kicked off those channels and lose connection entirely.) And even then you might have to mess about a lot with positioning, because of reflections and generally multipath propagation.

I'd say it's not worth the headache. I would love to lay down Ethernet cable, even if it was just cabling only suitable for 1 Gbps (for which there's no good reason to, might as well do 10 Gbps).

But yeah, any mesh system worth its salt figures out the topology and absolutely favors wired links over WiFi for the back haul. Anything else wouldn't make any sense at all, there is basically no situation where you'd prefer an RF channel over a wire, unless the wire is maybe made of wet string.

I guess this is a point where I disagree with GNU. Then again, the reasons why I disagree are subtle enough that I don't care too much... I think this particular thing doesn't matter very much in practice, so go do your thing GNU...

I'm sorry, but "they committed some debug code that made the program exit(0)" for me is pretty much equivalent to "they committed some debug code that made the program not work correctly".

Why not have the program exit with exit code 0 on success, and non-0 on failure, like almost every program in a POSIX environment ever?

Just make it fprintf(stderr, ...) debugging instead.

Then that's utterly and horribly wrong? And in my decades of experience, I've fortunately only relatively rarely had to deal with that particular kind of atrocity.

Disagree. stdout is only reserved for actual processed command output. It may be empty, it may be invalid because the input was invalid (shit in, shit out), but it may never be things intended for a human to read.

If one wants to use a pager (like I sometimes do, though most of the time I just scroll up), they'll just use `foo 2>&1 | less`.

Does no one know what exit codes and stderr vs. stdout is anymore?

I work with old and new code bases used by many clients in complicated setups, but adding a warning to stderr while stdout was left untouched, and proper exit codes maintained, was hardly, if ever, a problem so far.

Of course, there's always some unpleasant exception, but it's rare.

And of course, I also understand that the author might have found themselves not only in one of those rare-ish instances, but also one where reasoning with the other side was fruitless.

Netsplits, where the entire IRC network would "split" into two (or more) effectively independent networks because some a link between two servers went down, were extremely common. I don't know if daily, or weekly, but common enough to be perceived as normal and expected in any case.

In the earlier days of IRC, netsplits were sometimes used for channel takeover. If someone was on a split off part of the net where there were so few people in the channel that they could obtain op status, they could kill and ban the "legitimate" ops when the nets joined back together.

I haven't had this in a long time, except for on the (fortunately rare) occasion that I have a fever. Fever dreams are already hell, but if they're non-sensical programming/computer science fever dreams, they were extra hell.

I remember one particular one a few decades ago, where I was feverishly (pun intended) trying to achieve something with XML, only it being a fever dream, nothing of it made sense, so I was wracking my brain for nonsense those entire hours.

Wow. Did anyone else have some serious trouble with this?

The first color was obvious to me, as it was designed to be (it even tells you if you intentionally misclick). But at the very next color, the first "test color", I literally face palmed and said "oh my god" out loudly.

It was so, so hard for me to decide. I really just wanted to pick a non-existent "teal" option. Both "blue" or "green" felt wrong and equally right at the same time.

It just got harder from there. At the end, it told me that my threshold is "bluer than 80% of the population", but honestly, I don't think that's really true in my case. I was so ambivalent, my choices really felt random to me very quickly.

Unless instances are sparse, higher code density is of course always better, because of the instruction cache (and the microcode cache, if this doesn't get "pinhole optimized" away or something like that, I know nothing about the microcode cache).

But yeah, it may not make a real impact yet anyway.