askyourmother

Sigh. If you hire using know it or not questions about binary trees, then you finally get to hire people who can study up and answer that specific question in a manner Pavlov would approve of.

That does not mean the candidate will be able to design clean APIs, know how best work with different types of data, or even how to troubleshoot existing code.

Still, pat yourself on the back, I mean, your entire team can answer a specific trick interview question, and that's all that matters, right? Right?

Sigh.

Edit: interestingly, this comment had five points before the uber fans modded away. Easier to click down then explain rogue apps I suppose...

They were lucky they didn't try the beta version of the new forthcoming uber app - that version wants access to the phones of all your friends, family, neighbours, your postman, the sister of the locksmith that helped you get the spare key last year, and the chap you met on the train to work last week called Brian. Still, go uber!

Very unnecessary overreach on android permissions.. Will be interesting to see how many of the fans of uber here on hn will try to spin this.

Just forwarded to some friends, they are uninstalling the rogue app as I type this!

All news sites carry a bias - all of them. Often main stream media in the home country wants/has to tow the line and omit details or not carry stories that might upset local authority.

So, to say a story is bunk because it appears in RT as a source demonstrates a wilful ignorance, or incredible naiveté.

I trust/distrust all media sources in equal measure, but the fun thing is that by reading a lot of them at the same time across the globe, you can more easily see the biases, and get to the root of the stories.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, but it is forested with flowering gardens from people who purposely stifle and opress others, to present a single biased viewpoint, in the name of "safe space".

I think personally tatchell and fry have been too generous and provide too much benefit of the doubt against the people who stifle open and full dialogue in the sinister name of trigger word or safe space.

Yes. When the fine is less than the overall profit, and they can write it off via taxes, then it is not even a tickle on the wrist.

CEO, every member of the board, every manager in that division that made and sold the products, fine 100% of their pay, fine 4x revenue - not profits for the products affected, and do not let them write the costs off.

We would not accept shitty ingredients in our food, being told it was a grade beef, when it turned out it was actually alley cat, sewer rat and suchlike mixed in.

How on earth did they get away with a grade securitised mortgage products that actually contained a stink load of ready to default loans?

Forget blaming a specific person, or whether it may have been technically legal, what can be done to stop them doing this again?

The key part here is that OpenBSD take a conservative approach to things, but when they do fix things, it is usually an elegant fix, not a hack to save time now, at a cost of security later.

It is always interesting when most tech folks, even most business folks talk down Yahoo, as a relic of the internet of yesterday, a company with arguably the worlds biggest online news site can see value in Yahoo.

Whether you like the content on DM, they know how to be commercially successful in a difficult digital time, and might have interesting plans for Yahoo!

Yet another browser aperture that will require the usual multitude of post-implementation band-aid security fixes.

Sigh.

We get it.

We could make the browser the OS.

But should we? Not, could we?

I actually miss the days where the browser would be an application to view and consume content, with a modicum of scripting to progressively enhance the experience.

I don't think the content providers have actually attempted to have that value conversation with their customers though. Why? Because if faced frankly, a lot of the content is crap, and their customers would flee if pushed to pay. Some sites, e.g. The Financial Times have managed to secure paying customers for their site, customers who value the content.

Sites that shy away from the honest conversation, with the risk their user base will walk en masse, have themselves to blame.

Some of the most famous self-made wealthy individuals in the UK were from poor backgrounds of varying degree. I remember more than one stating that they felt if they wanted to escape that world, they had to make their own luck, grab every opportunity, be ready to change direction if fortuitous winds prevail, and essentially be there in body and mind to really give it a go. In some cases they literally start with nothing - failed school exams, work to acquire a very small amount of capital, see their first opportunity and go for it. Which can be seen as a series of well executed gambles.

Businesses who expose their users to malware and harm via infected ads they choose not to screen or vet in-house, complain when those same users take steps to protect themselves.

Maybe we need to change the terminology: "I use a browser condom to prevent ad STDs from the various glory hole, sorry, glorious content, sites I frequent".

Regrets as a programmer: 1. Every piece of unpolished, unfinished code that management decided should ship to the customers regardless 2. Ever using node and npm. 3. Seeing and living through the train wreck of J2EE and the XML horrors that ensued. 4. Not seeing the beauty in simple functions early on. Not everything needs to be a class or module. 5. Most business problems are political/social - regret every time we were called in to try and provide a "technical" band aid to those same problems. 6. Again, any project with node and npm.

The takeaway is that work is a lot to do with working with other people, not just waiting for github to come back online, or waiting for the 5gb download to compile stuff on OSX.

People are far complicated than code, so we should take the time and make the effort to build and maintain relationships with our colleagues (professional relationships - shame it often needs spelling out!).

Treat others as you would be treated is a good start.

We can't always choose our colleagues, but we can choose to make the best of each and every situation.

It is complicated enough where the team decided to build the project upon the sinking sands of npm dependencies - at least make sure you are fighting together, not each other!

Lots of polarised views here. I think of it this way: if I am young and fresh from studying the latest woodworking theory from university, degree in hand, I probably think I am the shit compared to all the grandads out there who older than 35, why some even have kids! How can they keep abreast of the latest wood trends - us younger pups publish our one or two line theories on wood-npm! But.... My hands would be soft, inexperienced, and have no knowledge of actually working with real wood. If you bet your company on me, alone with other soft handed individuals, without older individuals whose hands show and have the real experience, you are screwed.

Rights of passage, and all that.

On the plus side, the really good companies who eschew shitty coding tests become even more attractive to good candidates.

If you are going to start a potential employment relationship by asking me to acquiesce so readily, it doesn't bode well.

Next blog post from the hiring company "why we continue to moan that we can't find devs despite having a shitty coding test".

I am with the blog poster here - fuck you and your coding test.

I lowered myself to do one recently, we walked through it in the next stage interview, where it became apparent the " tech leads" were incompetent muppets, who were intimidated when they saw a better solution then they had as their "approved" answer. Walking through slowly with them why their solution had poorer performance at both low and high volume, I was left with the distinct impression that the vast majority of the incompetent devs who would fail fizzbuzz are somehow doing the hiring.

Scary times!

I've said it before, and I am sure it will be as unpopular now as then: there are people here who should know better, who can see where this road leads, but they are selfish "I know DRM is bad, but I got ta have ma Netflix!".

Bad things happen because selfish people want to be spoon-fed digital junk food, and they will accept perverting the open web to achieve it.

At the point the W3C accepted eme/DRM, it was already finished as a standards org, it just didn't realise it yet.

What about the assumption (fatally flawed decision?) that malloc never fails when rust asks? Sounds like something that could affect concurrency

Food and drink fraud is a real problem in London, especially fake alcohol, which leads to organ damage, blindness and death. Lots of local smaller shops get caught selling faked wine and vodka, a market trader recently caught with fake spices (basically was flavoured dust and dirt with shoe polish colourings and fake flavours), and plenty of fake branded food goods.

On the plus side, all the devs running to Go from Node, maybe we can finally get all those great libs from npmjs written in go, like Kik, isArray, isThirteen, and so many more classics of robust software engineering that the js community excels at.

If they want ideas for shows, how about life at uni, in the us, for the year 2016. Over here in Europe, we either get the view that it is like back in revenge of the nerds movies, or worse, stuff like this:

Http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-03-24/emory-students-scared-pain-after-safe-space-violated-word-trump-written-chalk

Hopefully it is not like revenge of the nerds in 2016, and hopefully it is also not full of students crying in "safe" spaces.

Might even be interesting!

Spreadsheets can be a pain, but be careful what you ask for to replace them...

Having contracted at two big american banks (cough jp, cough boa) that decided to build their own proprietary technology sinking ship solutions (cough athena, quartz ), it is a horrible experience.

The business get sold on the idea of the "benefits" of this new "solution" so they pay lots for it. Lots and lots. Then all tech projects are guided towards it, otherwise it becomes a "political" problem if you don't use it, even if you can present a technical case.

Basically, it works, just about, if you are building the equivalent of a simple option spreadsheet pricer. Even then, the effort required should ring alarm bells. Still, job for life for those that maintain it...

Some will laugh because Kik started all this, and got affected by it. Some will laugh when they look at npm, and the state of js "devs". Some will then turn back to their current project, thank the stars it is coded in anything but js, and move on.

I heard one of js "devs" refer to npm as nano package management. It sounded more like abdication of duty as a developer to understand what you are adding as a dependency, why, and the long-term cost.

How many developers here would gladly add a rogue "dependency", like a developer they had never spoken to before, into their project without some care? And yet the willingness to open the front and literal back doors of the project to so many dependencies, like low-quality functions-as-a-module is astounding.

But surely the really concerning part is despite their very wide usage, these dependecies turned out in some cases to be poorly coded functions indeed. Throughout this whole thread are examples where these one or two line "modules" have poor runtime performance, miss key cases in the one single thing they claim to do, and in the very worst cases, those small "modules" themselves are depending on many more "modules".

Diseases turtles all the way down.

You think the only thing about the whole situation that is a problem is that npm let an author unpublish, rather than all the projects came to depend on so many external functions, sorry got to get the npm terminology the right, "modules"?

The laughter is mostly the same as in the crowd points out the "new clothes" actually aren't any clothes at all. The modern, funky, hip, js "devs" told us we didn't "understand" they are doing modularity, code reuse, all those good things. Then the larger crowd realised they are publishing gazillions "modules" each of which is barely a function, some of which have horrendous runtime performance despite their wide inclusion by the crack a-team of js "devs".

Uber got lucky - they banked on millenials being so self-centred, and so naive and myopic on the long-term costs of their actions, that they used them to basically use VC cash (like a billion a year in China alone) to basically buy the cabbie business.

Once uber are the only players in town for a cab, and the fares go north, the service drops even further, regulation ignored even more so, those same selfish millenials will be the first to moan (aren't they always...).