I personally do not care about Problem 1. I mostly use Twitter in a passive way -- following people that are experts on the topics that I'm interested in. I assume if you want to get a reasonable following you need to put quite the effort in it.
Problem 2 appears but I've noticed that muting works well enough to avoid it.
Problem 3 does not seem to be Twitter-specific but again blocking and muting seems to work for me as well.
My personal take is that something brings value to you or not depending on how you use it. Here is a quote from (https://perell.com/note/the-paradox-of-abundance/) that resonates with me:
"The Explore Tab on Twitter is the most important newspaper in the world. It’s littered with celebrity gossip and exaggerated political drama — both of which yield a wide reach but incentivize empty content. And yet, as the Paradox of Abundance predicts, Twitter is also one of the world’s top intellectual communities. It’s the bedrock of my social and intellectual life. It’s a place to make friends, raise your ambitions, and connect directly with people at the top of their fields. And yet, most people use Twitter to consume information with no nutritional value."
1) This is anecdotal evidence but as far as I know it's difficult for non-EU people to get a work permit in Switzerland. I know quite a few students that completed the CS Master in ETHZ and that are from Egypt or China, etc. that could not get a job in Switzerland because it was hard to get a permit. Similar for Indian students that did their ETH Master in mechanical engineering, etc. All the students that I know wanted to stay and work in Switzerland.
2) Again, I might be wrong, but I feel a number of CS PhD students in ETHZ and EPFL are getting paid by European programs (e.g, ERC). So, it's not necessarily Swiss taxes that pay these people.
3) At the end of the day, the Swiss government or any government is making an investment on those students. As any investment, it might be profitable or not. Some students might stay in the country and pay back the investment by founding companies, getting good salaries and paying higher taxes, etc. versus some students that might just go back to their country. Actually, to me, it seems like a pretty good investment. If some student studies in China and then comes to Switzerland, Switzerland might have to pay for his/her education for a Master and a PhD, but Switzerland never paid for his kindergarten, primary, high-school and college years, etc., because for example China already paid for this.
4) Most of the papers getting published in universities (at least for CS) are published due to the hard work done by graduate and post-graduate students (with the help of their supervisor of course). Even if the students decide to leave Switzerland afterwards, they still increased the research-throughput of the Swiss university in which they worked. I believe we can agree that, that in itself is good.
I have read most of the chapters in this book.
I would say it's mostly about learning the concepts themselves and in this regard the book is extremely helpful. Additionally, each chapter has a historical context about Lamport's work and how it influenced future systems, research, etc. It's more like a related work section in a paper. But you could easily skip these parts if you're not interested in them.
The book is not hard to read. Each chapter is written independently and hence the chapters can also be read independently. Each chapter presents in an accessible manner some ideas taken from a couple of Lamport's seminal papers.
In this sense, I believe reading Paxos from this book (chapter "Chapter 4 State Machine Replication with Benign Failures") would be much easier than reading Lamport's "Paxos Made Simple" paper. Actually, chapter 4 is a great read even if you know Paxos.
What I found really helpful in reducing Youtube viewing time, is to use a browser-extension that hides recommended video all together. This way, you only watch videos you explicitly searched for.
Not necessarily. To suggest that souvenirs are only used for showing off is pretty cynical. For example, I cannot fathom how people buying fridge magnets use them to let everybody know about their trip. I doubt they buy them with the intention of signaling to their house guests every time the guests look at their fridge.
A lot of people buy souvenirs (memorabilia) just for themselves because they evoke nice memories.
If the goal was to let everybody know that you went travelling, you can simply post pictures in some social media network.
If you liked this page, you might also like the excellent book "Designing Data-Intensive Applications" that among others surveys many characteristics of large-scale systems and presents some. Note that it's not a book for preparing you on system design questions, but it can definitely help.
I feel TLA+ would be too much to ask in a system interview which is what this site is about.
In case anybody is interested, there is a nice talk by Hillel Wayne on youtube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9B__0S21y8) that provides a high-level overview on what TLA+ is about.
If you are interested in this post, you might want to have a look at an older post on hackernews that gained some traction back then (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17134668). In contrast to this post, the aforementioned emulator was written in Java instead of C.
I recently noticed that bookdepository (belongs to Amazon btw) has different prices depending on your region. In other words, their "free delivery worldwide" cost is being hidden behind the different prices per country. So, by using VPN and ordering a book let's say from the US (even though you live in Europe) you might be able to save quite some bucks. I saved $15 recently when buying a technical book.
Also, in abebooks.com you can sometimes find textbooks at much lower prices, even if you include the shipping fees compared to amazon/bookdepository. Most likely these textbooks are much cheaper because they are supposed to be sold only in India. Still, some sellers ship them all over the world.
You can find a multitude of free and new books on b-ok.org, but I guess it would be illegal to use in most jurisdictions.
Lastly, wherever I've bought a book from, I always refer to Amazon.com for reviews.
Jokes aside. My guess would be that it is highly unlikely a half decent secret service would use such a method to spread a virus or a trojan. On the other hand, I would also guess that no serious journalist will contemplate using a free device provided by a rogue nation just in case.
Coincidentally, the "Practice of object-oriented programming" course in EPFL has as a project this semester to build a Game Boy emulator in Java. You can have a look here (https://cs108.epfl.ch/). Although it's in French, google translate does a decent job.
Couldn't agree more. This kind of misunderstanding is also described in Brewer's paper "CAP twelve years later: How the "rules" have changed" (http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6133253/).
"Children who rebel may be threatened with being sent to stay with family in China, and they know from relations there that teenagers in America, even Asian ones, get off relatively lightly compared with those in China."
This seems quite naive. We all have been children and something like this seems unlikely to work (at least my personal opinion).
Problem 2 appears but I've noticed that muting works well enough to avoid it.
Problem 3 does not seem to be Twitter-specific but again blocking and muting seems to work for me as well.
My personal take is that something brings value to you or not depending on how you use it. Here is a quote from (https://perell.com/note/the-paradox-of-abundance/) that resonates with me: "The Explore Tab on Twitter is the most important newspaper in the world. It’s littered with celebrity gossip and exaggerated political drama — both of which yield a wide reach but incentivize empty content. And yet, as the Paradox of Abundance predicts, Twitter is also one of the world’s top intellectual communities. It’s the bedrock of my social and intellectual life. It’s a place to make friends, raise your ambitions, and connect directly with people at the top of their fields. And yet, most people use Twitter to consume information with no nutritional value."