68 karma · joined March 19, 2014
and I'm "potentially" the next president of the U.S.
It seems that using the VPN 100% of the time has trained many of these smart services to fingerprint that as my default fingerprint.
Of course, this doesn't help when interacting with services that detect/block VPNs. Or the even more annoying situation where VPNs are blocked and also all traffic from the country you are in is also blocked (occurs occasionally when trying to access US sites from SE Asia)
edit: WRT comments mentioning that you can call your bank or set a travel notice: that is how things used to work. Chase, for example, no longer lets you set a travel notice as they use a "smart" automated system. That said, my Chase travel card used via apple/android pay has never given me trouble so their system does seem better than most
Code is also on github if you want to learn from it: https://github.com/lunu-bounir/allow-right-click
if you go back to the first few commits you see it started similar to some of the small JS snippets people have suggested here. It is interesting to see how it has evolved
HN treats it like it is some sort of objective, academic study
some commenters even use this opinion piece to complain that the NYT runs opinion pieces
> We are home to over 1500 engineers, architects, chief architects and engineering managers who work on projects from Fortune 1000 clients.
Typo maybe?
I guess it seems like a non-issue to me.
Then again, applying my own reasoning:
There is no need to ask this question, but it's fine to ask it anyways.
some of my favorite so far:
> Debunking Myths About Growth Hacking Goes Bad (infoq.com)
> First Firefox OS developer to come (businessmandi.com)
> Modern science and art go to jail? The law is dead in cinema (techcrunch.com)
Agreed.
> But white boarding is excellent for answering all those questions.
I disagree. There is no team social dynamic in a white-board interview. There is one person in a position of power who is judging you with a critical eye. The other person is being judged and either really wants this job or, worse, needs the job.
That is the social dynamic in the room.
That doesn't go away by saying "Let's play pretend like we are working on a project as equals".
Interviewers will often discuss their rationale as if the candidates know what it is, or that they should be able to know it.
For instance, "I want to see if they can take suggestions and run with it".
Great, how does the candidate know that's what you want? Maybe the last interview they were in wanted to see if they could take bad advice and quickly explain why that strategy wouldn't work.
Those both look the same from a candidate's point of view. They need to toss the dice and assume they interpret your intentions clearly.
> Being willing to jump through hoops means you're willing to cooperate and go the extra mile
I don't know if I fully agree, but working at a big company does involve a lot of hoop jumping in your day-to-day, so I guess it is something good to test for.
Pretty interesting discussion both for and against this type of hiring process.
I think it became standard because it scales, at least in some sense. Once big companies started doing it (because of scaling issues) small companies started doing it (because of "hey, it works for Google" issues). If I was in a small company, I am sure I would have a little more freedom in how I hire, but I am not.
I think I am actually okay with the white-board puzzle quizzes if you have nothing else to go on. For instance, a college graduate who only has course projects. However, we use them for everyone.
Maybe once you get to X years of experience (maybe 10?) the white-board interviews become easy, you're used to them.
> For my interview, I spent a day at Google headquarters in Mountain View solving problems on a white board.
So what's the point? A phone screen takes what, 30 minutes? This is a lot of time to put in only to have to do it all again on a whiteboard.
I guess it would be better than a phone screen for Google, but this seems like just another hoop for candidates to jump through.
One of my gripes with the tech industry is that companies keep adding more onto the funnel part of the hiring process, but once you get the interview none of it matters. You can contribute to open source, have substantial github projects, complete coding challenges, have years of experience: all of this just helps you get the interview. Once you are in the companies hiring pipeline everyone is put through the same process, none of the other stuff really matters after that point.
Maybe I'm just bitter that my team just hired one candidate over another because they did better in the whiteboard interviews (but had no side projects or real code to show us) while the other person had a lot of (good) code and pretty creative projects to look at.
Also, if you interview with multiple people for a position (and do multiple white-board problems) you can get an offer without acing all of them.
2. You will not get an offer if you do not get a solution
3. Everyone ever: "White board interviews can be awful, but my company actually does a pretty good a job and I find them useful."
edit: for a slightly less snarky comment (and to expand on point 2) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9522400
If you go through a 3 person loop and get 2 problems right and 1 wrong, you might get an offer, but I guarantee that the voting would be two "hire" votes from the questions you aced, and a "no-hire" vote from the one you failed.
There are a couple of reasons for this. The most obvious is that, given two candidates, the better choice will (at least appear) to be the candidate who got the most questions right.
The more common scenario that I have seen is that engineers simply work backwards. If you got the solution wrong (or didn't finish) their thinking will go something like: they got it wrong -> they went down the wrong path since they chose a hashmap instead of a tree -> they are weak in data structures -> no hire
I am at one of the bigger tech companies, and it really is a roll of the dice on if you get a question on a topic you have studied. Especially if you have been out of school for awhile.
The worst part is that bigger tech companies force hiring on the engineers. Hiring candidates becomes part of your own career advancement. If it is a big company, you will go to a day of training and suddenly be a professional interviewer. It is even worse since my opinion (that this system is awful) seems to be the minority. All of my colleagues think they are great at hiring, pontificate over lunch on what makes a good candidate, and discuss their favorite questions (well, their favorite questions from the standard set of questions from the company bank. This is science here, obviously we use standardized questions.)
Of course, if you fail in the interview, you can always come back. It's not like I've ever heard a colleague say, "sigh I am not looking forward to this interview; We've already turned them down once."
I was a research intern at Oak Ridge National Lab. They put on several educational events for the interns. One event was a guy from the group doing forensic science to come in and talk about it. He talked about rate of decay of corpses and things like that.
Then he brought out dowsing sticks. Said something about the bones of buried bodies giving off magnetic fields that affect the sticks.
He then took a leg bone out of a trash bag, put it on the ground, and walked passed it holding the sticks. The sticks moved when he did it, but of course when anyone else in the room tried nothing happened.
Honestly, all the interns in the room were dead quiet. I think we were all really confused, thinking that maybe it was some sort of joke or hazing. Or maybe a test of some sort? It was really weird, but destroyed my regard for forensic "science".