murgindrag

Yeah. I'm aware of that. It's a bunch of straightforward questions, a pretty high bar for how many you need to answer, and so it's pretty random how many of them you mess up, so it's kind of like a die roll to get a job. I had a really bad interview at a peer company once, and I'm well aware how it goes.

But I kind of miss the old Google where you DID need to be a genius. I interviewed with Google probably around the year 2000, and there was a genuinely hard ball packing problem. I'm kind of curious what happened. Anyone who could answer that question would find this one trivial -- and not just the dynamic programming solution, but the O(log n) one which apparently no one at Google (or even applying to Google) noticed.

What I hate about Google is that everyone there still thinks they're a genius. In 2000, it felt okay, since for the most part, they actually were. Today, it's kind of obnoxious.

So here's the thing. And I know I'll get knocked to r/iamverysmart for this. It timed myself. It took less than 10 minutes from reading the problem to coding up a working dynamic programming solution (no peaking at the rest of the article). A big chunk of that was (unsuccessfully) trying to come up with a closed-form solution.

I didn't get the log(n) solution until I found it existed at the bottom, but once the author mentioned it's existence, that took less than 5 minutes to figure out. I didn't code that up, though.

I'm probably an above-average programmer, but I'm not a 99.99% outlier. I interviewed early Google. The questions were tough for me (much more so than this one).

Things which jumped out at me: "The better the candidate, the fewer hints I tend to have to give, but I have yet to see a candidate who required no input from me at all."

I read this as "We're scraping the bottom of the barrel for candidates. Our candidates are nothing like those who applied to Google circa 2000"

And: "I didn’t even know it existed until one of my colleagues came back to his desk with a shocked look on his face and announced he had just interviewed the best candidate he’d ever seen."

I read this as: "Our employees are dumb. In using this interview question for years, none of us ever noticed the obvious."

What's going on there? I mean I can see messing up an interview question like this under the stress of an interview (I literally confused linked lists and arrays in probably my worst interview ever). But no candidate? Ever? And no employee? Come on.

There's something deeply wrong at Google. It's been deeply wrong for a few years. I hope someone fixes it.

A lot of the discussion is about federal taxes and subsidies. The federal government funds a lot of local stuff too. It maintains a lot of control over cities and states through funding. For example, if your roads and schools don't meet federal standards, that's okay, but you're not getting federal funding.

Everyone opts for federal funding.

Electoral college. Boondock states get two senators each. Urban states get two senators each.

California's 40 million people have the same representation in the senate as Wyoming's 580 thousand people.

I should have a 2d line chart, and I should be able to draw magnitude at each frequency. It rotates and filters. Right now, a line chart consists of 1 between two frequencies, and 0 elsewhere.

Or I should have a 2d image, and I draw dark/light. It reflects appropriately to get the other half, and multiplies the image (without rotating). Right now, this image looks like a donut.

I'm drawing the filter, you see. It applies the filter, and shows me:

* The source image FFT(what I drewFFT(image))

The point spread function / convolution kernel FFT(what I drew)

I don't want to draw an image. I want to draw a filter of an image. Right now, I have a rock-hard cutoff at two frequencies. I'd like to draw a curve, and have it Fourier filter based on that curve.

I think the trick might be outer pane of glass, inner pane of non-glass. Glass would cut UV and handle the elements. Wood would be safer and insulate better.

Or buy a $5 headset from your local gas station, so the microphone is close to the mouth and doesn't pick up the speaker...

I'd love to be able to draw on the Fourier side. What's not neat is the rock-hard cliff cutoff, which leads to a ton of ringing on the image side.

The evaluation process is quite sophisticated, with thesis committees, talks, reviews, etc.

That's much more sophisticated than for software engineers. I'm not trying to imply SEs are evaluated by sprint planning points and velocity, but a lot of that comes down to sprint planning points and velocity. Beyond that, you have performance reviews, and I've never been in a company which did that well.

Code reviews are nice. But even a lot of that is pattern matching sanity checks, little better than a lint program, when a team is rushed.

I mean, do Ph.Ds know how to architect maintainable code? Perhaps not. Have they been encultured in a culture which rewards cowboy individualistic douchebags? Without a doubt. Are they arrogantly convinced of their own superiority? For the first few years after graduating, at least from the "better" schools, more likely than not, yes.

But I think your comments about lacking esoteric knowledge are completely off-base. Ph.Ds thrive on esoteric knowledge.

You're confusing a Ph.D with an extension of a BS.

A Ph.D requires independent creation of new knowledge, and being able to go deep in a field. That's neither consensus, nor easy to evaluate academically. It's far more nebulous than most industry work. In many cases, they also require deep algorithmic and mathematical maturity.

A freshly-brewed Ph.D isn't going to be an expert in the mechanics of software engineering (e.g. setting up CI/CD, microservices, etc.), but will outclass most people with BS degrees in other areas. 5-10 years down-the-line, they will pick up the applied skills, while the BS won't pick up the theoretical skills.

Ph.D is also a signalling mechanisms: They were admitted, and they finished.

I'm not arguing for or against Ph.Ds, but your stereotypes seem grounded in, well, nothing. Ph.Ds have their problems, but those ain't them.

I think your statement confuses who has the burden of proof when proposing a new theory (or just how sorry the state of science is).

I liked the web better with HTML2.

There were simple technologies which did a lot too, like Hypercard.

The creeping complexity of the web isn't something which had to happen. I understand the reasons it did happen, but in an alternative timeline, without Netscape vs. IE, the dot-com boom/bust, and the whole Netscape meltdown, it might not have happened.

People were building sophisticated applications which did a lot in the days of NeXTStep, BeOS, SGI, and Amiga, without this massive complexity build-up. Altavista scaled well too.

It's locked up behind a paywall, but people confuse "correlation" with "equivalence." For this to be a catch-22, you'd need an amazingly strong correlation.

Also, most psychology results fail to replicate. A single paper has about a 60-70% chance of being nonsense, probably more.

Big contracts too, surprisingly. We had a dedicated team of Google engineers supporting us, and we still ran into this !@#$%. Many, they could facilitate. Some, they could not.

It sounds like you're keeping a list. What's on your list so far?

1) Interacting in online forums, pre-search engine, where such discussions where considered more-or-less ephemeral, and only available to a closed group of "Internet users" wasn't super-public. All of that is now archived and indexed. If you search for me, you'll find it.

2) Giving my data to super-credible companies, pre-spam. Wouldn't you know it? A few went out of business, and my data was neatly packaged up and resold to the highest bidder. One was an enterprise database company.

3) Personal web page ended up on archive.org, before anyone really knew others were grabbing/indexing/archiving things. It had more of the feel of your front yard. Yes, someone could take a photo, but it wasn't common.

4) The whole Yahoo thing. My emails become property of some data broker who now mines them for marketing and sales.

I obviously won't talk about more personal ones. And no one will talk about litigations. But those sorts of things happen too.

The things I worry about now are the really sophisticated fingerprinting mechanisms, where your typing patterns, your vocabulary, your linguistic quirks, etc. become biometric identifiers. I'm not sure how all that data will be archived, integrated, and combined 25 years from now.

History suggests Google won't be Google forever, though.

Oh, and let's not forget what happened with data, Jewish people, WWII, and Germany. That's beyond my timescale, but these things happen.

It's not resolve. It's experience. At a young age, you think through short timelines. Crises don't happen. At an old age, once you've been through a few crises, wars, pandemics, law suits, and whatnot, you start calculating expected outcomes a bit differently.

I use DuckDuckGo not out of resolve, but because I used the Internet in the nineties, and saw how data I put out then came back in some cases a decade or two later in counter-intuitive ways.

That's not how contracts in business work. It's not a promise. It's a legal contract. In business, you're allowed to break contracts, and there is no moral harm. Rather, there are damages.

If I promise to buy a car from you for $100,000, and you spend $10,000 to make it, and I discover I don't need the car anymore, in most cases, I can walk away paying you $10,000. If you continued doing unneeded work, that'd be bad economics. If you could rake me over the coals and ask to me to pay $50k, that'd be exploitative. In most cases, the outcome of a broken contract is that I try to set things right for you by either:

* Paying you costs incurred

* Paying you expected profits

* Or similar.

Courts calculate damages by a range of formulas, which then sets standards for how business is conducted, and in most cases, people don't go to court but just agree to pay damages.

This is foreign to how most people think about agreements; it's a very different culture. But if you talk to lawyers or executives, that's how they reason about contracts.

There was no hysteria. There is standard decision-making with uncertainty. Early in the pandemic, ramping up ventilator, mask, and other production made 100% sense. That's a $1 billion hedge to help with what's turning out to be a multi-trillion dollar problem.

Indeed, it's a no-brainer decision. The expected ROI of a $1 billion ventilator order in April was astronomically high.

Conversely, cancelling the contract makes sense too, now that ventilators don't seem to be the solution. Generally, when a contract is cancelled, you pay for costs already incurred, so it's generally not unfair to do so.

Korea has a nice new mask. AirQueen. Reusable. Reasonably comfortable. N95-equivalent for filtration.

The seal isn't quite as good as a proper N95, but it beat surgical, and even surgical gets you almost all the way there.

Yeah, that just didn't happen here.

Pessimizer pointed out the moderation fallacy. For an argument from fallacy to have happened, he would have needed to use that to invalidate some conclusion from that argument.

> Yes, all proprietary software vendors are stereotypical mustache twirling villains.

Markets force businesses to act in certain ways. You're making the fallacy of assigning personal malice to normal organizational dynamics. The goal of a good regulatory regime is to have businesses operate in the public good (from a 100,000 foot view).

Yes, if we legalized slavery, we'd have slaves and plantations again. If we legalized arbitrary pollution, businesses would kill the environment. If we got rid of employee safety protections, people would start losing limbs. It's a free market economy. That's what happens. If I produce a product for a buck less than you, I'll stay in business and you won't. That drives low prices and high efficiency, and then regulations constrain that to prevent those from happening.

My own opinion is that anything which isn't open ought to have a 2% sales tax on it. If my microwave ships with source code, mechanical, and electrical schematics, Walmart can sell if for $49. If not, they can sell it for $50. I think that's actually enough to push the economy to where everything which can reasonably be open becomes open. Mice, keyboard, printers -- all the basic stuff.

And the stuff where closed is the secret sauce would stay closed.

I'll give a concrete example. Health care systems. Free market works okay. Socialized (a la Britain) works okay. The middle -- where the US is, with a mixture of free market and regulation -- is prone to corruption and works less well than either extreme.

Killing, stealing, rape, and murder are bad. I'm going to go to the far extreme there too.

If I'm running a business, focusing on one thing and doing it well (and outsourcing everything else, or following "industry practices") works better than trying to innovate everywhere. That's actually pretty general -- if you're extremely good at a few things, that works better than balance on a personal career level too.

It's a fallacy to split down the middle and balance. There are times that works, and times that doesn't.

Life ain't about balance. It's about thinking things through.

Three things:

1) If I buy a table, I can, in fact, modify it, resell it, and understand it. I can understand the world around me.

2) If I buy a book, it doesn't come with an EULA which makes me promise my firstborn to a trillion-dollar company. I had patents which expired, and copyrights with fair use provisions. There was a legislative balance.

3) Until a few decades ago, cars and electronics did come with service manuals which, for radios and TVs, contained the full circuit schematic.

The sorts of rights Stallman is talking about are ones which software is new in taking away.

I'd like them back.

> Life is about balance; extremes are rarely useful - especially long term.

Well, you shouldn't commit genocide, but to say you shouldn't kill just a few dozen people? I mean, why be a zealot about this whole murder thing?

The right choice is rarely exactly in the middle. Life isn't about balance. Life is about doing what's best, and sometimes that's in the middle, but more often than not, it's at one extreme or the other.

The #1 platform in schools is Google.

Google doesn't provide support either.

Or to be specific, there is a support email with obnoxious, egoistic minimum wage drones who make Comcast look great. There are all sorts of broken self-serve automated systems too. Empowered employees capable of understanding what they're talking about? They do their best to shield them from customers.

Google stuff mostly works. When it doesn't, you're mostly SOL. It's like that even if you pay for the fancy enterprise stuff.

Microsoft has support. They're also nowhere close to being the #1 platform in schools. Apple has support. Ditto.

I've been in similar environments. Kids are flexible, resilient, and don't really notice things like this after a very short time. I was in a summer program in high school where we used Unix, and I think there was a one or two week curve before it was just in the background. In schools, kids put up with much more bizarre things. At the end of the day, they just come to understand that's what the world is.

That case was about patents, but I'm not sure patents are as central here. Right now, there is a patent minescape of mutually assured destruction between everyone. If anyone exercises their patent rights, no one can make anything modern, and the whole industry would come screeching to a halt.

Oddly enough, integrated circuits have their own IP scheme. IP has copyright, patent right, trade secrets, trademarks, and mask works. You rarely learn about mask works, since they're so narrow.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_circuit_layout_desi...

I think a lot of this would hinge on that corner of the law.