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Gnolfo

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vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

I totally agree. The npm ecosystem and the generally accepted practices in js these days come close to the bash style of composing & chaining a bunch of solid, specific little programs together to solve problems trivially that would have been a bear to do in many other platforms like java, C++, etc. I cringe at the idea that you should find yourself implementing l-pad in 2016, at least for the vast majority of projects that a typical engineer will encounter in their career. A similar case can be made for something as small as "is positive integer".

While I agree, there are two counter arguments:

1) As noted in other comments, this is a reflection of the core libs of javascript not covering enough of the basics. This is a subjective thing when it comes to where to draw the line, but wherever the border lies between "core" and "community" libs, on the other side you start running into things like "L-pad" and "Lib-L-Pad" and "L-pad2". If there's a great enough fundamental need, you experience a lot of crowding where lots of people offer up their solution to this, and reconciling that across larger dep. chains that disagree on which one to use can become a real burden.

2) Have you ever had the conversation with an auditor (PCI, HIPAA, etc) that your application is actually built on top of a huge substrate of software written by unaffiliated 3rd parties? And that between your own iterations you could easily have different versions for any/all of them? It's a difficult conversation. Much less the explanations to QA about why a build failed because lib X was updated to a new hotfix version in the 14 hours since yesterday's build, after a couple hours of wasted time of initially suspecting your own diffs, and trying to navigate through all the indirection between the actual stack trace and what actually caused the blow-up...

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

You can't reliably beat the market. People who say they can are saying so out of some combination of:

  1) lying (to others and/or themselves as well)
  2) cheating (insider trading, boiler rooms, etc) 
  3) drawing conclusions from too small of a sample size

Also I also disagree with the statement to not buy individual stocks because others know more than you. It might be true even, it doesn't matter, because it's not the reasons not to buy individual stocks for retirement.

You don't buy individual stocks for retirement because your risk exposure is a lot higher compared to indexes and just riding the market (x10 for every dollar spent like this before taking maximum advantage of tax deferred retirement options).

If you have enough money that you are able and willing to lose some % of it for the chance of better gains, then buy individual stocks with that money (or play in derivatives if you're into stronger risk-seeking behavior). If you are trying to avoid living off of cat food in your winter years, it is far smarter to surrender the marginal chance for larger gains for a very highly likely chance at modest gains. If you don't have a retirement planned out, then every dollar you get towards it needs to be spent with the retirement goal in mind, and for that goal, the risk profile of individual stocks, historically, is prohibitively high.

vor 12 Jahrendiscuss

In addition to what others are saying (location spoofing, etc) another factor to consider is this was in Littleton, CO. Specifically, about 5 miles away from Columbine.

vor 13 Jahrendiscuss

That's Pynchon. You're describing Pynchon. At least some of the time, and FWIW the reviewer definitely seems to get him & his style.

The 8th paragraph in there is an excerpt from the new book, you'll notice it is 3 sentences, and the 3rd sentence begins about 10-15% of the way in and the 2nd sentence is a mere 8 words. This is typical and there are times where you will stop and take 5+ minutes to review and unpack and digest a single sentence of his when he's really digging his heels in. The payoff however can be absolutely immense.

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

"They're not important" as a rationale for being selectively discourteous and/or unprofessional will put you under the adage of "Beware the person who is nice to you but rude to the waiter" in the eyes of those who you deem are worth keeping an in-tact relationship. Would you want to work with or for someone who you know will only treat you fairly and respectfully while you remain valuable to them?

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

Yeah, I had a limiter put in mine as well so that it only made a request every 6 or 8 seconds.

No worries on the suggestion. Those threaded comments can be tricky sometimes.

Hey, if you do hear back from them about their stance on this sort of thing, I'd really appreciate if you could let me know what they say. I sort of halted my project after a certain point because I had the fear I'd just have to take it down as soon as I completed it.

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

User comments, but going by users rather than threads. That way you could get a profile where someone posts, or turn it around and see what prolific posters existed in a given subreddit.

The thing is it wouldn't sweep everything. Instead a user would only get scraped if a request was made to my app, and I had a tool that would go through a request queue (storing to my own DB) in a metered way so that reddit only experienced a handful of requests from me per minute.

Nonetheless it still breaks robots.txt and if I could dig it up admins have said in the past that don't want automated/batched requests hitting their site.

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

I ran into the same problem. I started a pet project that involved scraping reddit (though for a different purpose than AMAs). Their robots.txt and an admin writeup from somewhere on their site made me realize that I'd probably just have to take it down and/or my scraper would just get blacklisted. It's a bummer because there's 1001 great ideas out there for filtering, categorizing, and viewing reddit's data in different ways. And it seems like they encourage 3rd party interaction to some extent with their API and all, yet scraping is kind of needed in most cases.

I do like the format for sure. The only thing I would consider is maybe nesting the Q/A divs (.qitem) for threads because a lot of times the Q/A content is contextual to past Q/As. You already order them that way and that helps a lot but on one of the ones I was reading it got confusing on whether they were speaking in the context of a thread or if it was a fresh Q/A. Maybe set it as a view option to toggle or something (maybe have it be a carousel where each frame contains all the Q/A divs in a thread starting with the root level, and keep it displayed flat like they are now).

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

That's all well and good but we're a far cry away from concluding there's a lack of sufficient power to effect change. We're not counseling someone who's just become paraplegic about their hopes of running a triathlon, this is a situation with room to improve. And just because we may not be able to improve it 100% doesn't mean we don't try. Criminal behavior will always exist as long as society exists but that doesn't mean you disband the police.

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

> I suspect though, that its extremely hard for someone to police themselves to avoid giving a candidate points for giving the "right answer".

It can be hard. But I'd argue getting caught up with what to say and what to ask only makes it harder. Questions and answers both shouldn't be doing all the heavy lifting for an interview. They do some, certainly, but IMO the best interviews are when we get out of the Q&A cycle and wind up talking about our views on X, Y, Z (topics that are: a) business related, b) company specific or c) tech appropriate, about 90% of the time).

> The trick is to completely ignore their initial response as signal, and then engage them with their response, whatever it may be.

I think I'd agree, but would modify that with "the trick is to not make a snap judgement on their response, but first engage ....". I mean really we could hash out all the initial responses we'd expect to hear from the question. Advancement opportunities, Salary, Autonomy, Culture, and so on, and that list by itself is not all that interesting, so it's dubious to make any conclusions on someone on their 3-5 choices until you get into the reasons behind them. And we're not really trying to make any judgements or conclusions about them, with this question. This is more a backdrop to their professional persona and their career goals along with their day-to-day work goals, and will come up as support behind your decision later on whether or not to continue with the hire, one way or another. EDIT: I should also note it helps the employer communicate back what areas they think will or will not work well with what the employee is looking for, so it is useful to both parties for making a decision.

> You're right, hiring is an arms race. Especially when we have endless blogs about the next hack for hiring rockstars, and thousands of job seekers studying these to get that edge. As a candidate I know that I better give him the answers he expects, even if they don't paint a completely accurate picture.

When you're talking to a recruiter or someone in HR who is several layers removed from those you would answer to or work with, then yes that interview will be more about aligning skillsets and experience and so on, and I've had only a rare few interviews with recruiters who didn't just stick to a script. For someone with real say in the final hire, though, I would highly advise against contributing to that arms race and instead treat the interview as a real no shit normal conversation (but about important stuff to both of you). If they get even a whiff that you're calibrating what you say with what they want to hear instead of actually considering their prompt and discussing it like an honest adult, it doesn't matter if you are months ahead of them on the latest interview game theory or not, they're going to weigh that behavior against your other good qualities.

> Case-in-point: for this question my #1 would be salary. This answer would likely immediately disqualify me with 95% of the people who would ask this question.

What's the rationale behind that assumption? I imagine salary/compensation will make the short list for most commonly occurring response to the original question. I mean, the company you're applying to is a for-profit entity, most likely, so why would they count it as a mark against you (much less "immediately disqualify" you) when you have the same motives as they do for getting out there and working hard every day? It's an obvious and unimaginative response, yes, but then they go "Okay, why salary? would you look primarily at salary or would other forms of compensation supplement your salary considerations, such as: more vacation/PTO, quarterly/annual bonus programs, insurance plans, misc. stipends, share options..." and you can respond on down the line and go into what exactly they offer or would consider offering. It shows you are comfortable navigating the different employer/employee dynamics that can exist (NOTE: Startups especially tend to have wide ranges of different compensation packages and we devs often find ourselves at one or another during our career) and also have a good sense of what you're looking for in those regards. I don't just want to hire the one who will cost me the least on paper, and I won't take offense when someone is looking to make good money working with me and is confident they can add enough value to the company over time that it will be justified; I will be willing to pay more for someone who knows what they want and what they're doing and isn't guarded about talking about it when the time is appropriate, they'll probably be a far better investment than someone who says (or acts like) they don't really care what you pay them as long as it covers their bills. (That being said, people starting out in their career usually don't think much on this sort of stuff so it's not like I always expect a new hire to have all this sorted out)

Anyway, I don't disagree with you all the way or anything but in my experience it's best to walk away from the game of tricky questions and stock "best" answers. Anywhere you are hired will be needing you problem solving and communicating by your first week, which are the two things those trick questions are imitating. So (ignoring technical acumen and so on) demonstrate you can do those in the interview and look for that when giving an interview.

Disclaimer: I actually love interviews, either side of the table, so I'm a little weird.

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

If they think a question that gets at "What are your main priorities in looking for new employment?" is bullshit, I hope they do walk out of the interview so I don't waste anymore time on them.

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

If they ask for your input and then move on to the next question, absolutely. But at that point you're blaming the tool and not the user. The conclusion to draw is the interviewer is lazy / doesn't know what they're doing if they ask a question like that and move right on without inviting 2-way discussion over it.

The article clearly intends this to be a jumping off point to talk about what you're looking for in an employer and work environment in more detail. And it gets the ball rolling a little faster rather than just saying, "talk about what you're looking for in an employer and work environment in more detail".

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

I really don't see how this is manipulative, who exactly are they trying to fool? The "tapping into something deeper" isn't some tricksy ploy to reveal more than you want, it just means the question is crafted to address several layers of discussion about what you're looking for, all at once.

Unless you're trying to dig into their compensation priorities so you can lowball them in the right areas, this is just a question aimed at seeing how well they'd fit in to the company in terms of their own career/strategic goals, working environment, QA/testing standards, etc. I'd rather get those things out there in the interview and find out "Oh, yeah we have source control, and staging/dev servers, but I'd say our devs push about half their code changes straight to production via scp right off of their workstations. Saves time that way.", rather than on my second week when I've made X number of changes and commitments in my lifestyle & career for this job.

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

Nothing is stopping people from knowing proggit/HN/etc as a short list of tech sites that they should say they keep up with in case the question gets asked. This becomes cyclical when you view the interview as a meta-game of right answer seeking vs. right answer providing. Viewing interviews this way turns it into an arms race and in the end you will just come off as being guarded/mistrustful no matter what side of the table you're on.

It's not about the questions you ask, or at the least it counts for less than say 20% of the interview. It's about the discussions that come out from them. You'll get noticed if you're BSing when it comes to holding a 15 second to 2 minute chitchat about tech news sites, or your big factors when considering an employer/employee and why.

It's totally fine to have a set list of questions in mind before going in (for employer and employee both), and the content of those questions do matter a bit, but it's all about what discussions it can lead to and how easily it can. But if you only focus on what questions you bring and expect them to do all the heavy lifting of evaluating an employer/employee then you're already doing it wrong. You need to follow through or else anyone can BS anything you throw at them (excepting detailed technical skillset type questions).

That being said, there are some questions that are stronger than others. "What are your weaknesses?" isn't a strong question because it is far too direct. It is seeking a quantity in an area where you should be seeking a discussion. So it's of some value to seek out new questions every now and then, but only if you're keeping the goal of an interview in mind and not using new questions as bland ammunition.

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

The takeaway is you don't want spineless employees, you want them free thinking and unafraid to speak up when they sense something is wrong. That being said, "argumentative dick" doesn't immediately equate to star employee, in fact I'd say that moniker is for people who have some of the qualities you are referring to, but haven't learned to adapt themselves to team environments and/or are unable to apply their challenges and criticisms constructively.

In regard to the original situation, I think the interview question in the link is a reasonable one to ask for most places and most positions. The question in reverse is also pretty useful and any candidate genuinely asking it in return (after answering yours) would be a Good Sign. A candidate who doesn't answer, however, and just fires back the question in reverse is showing flags of being an argumentative dick.

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

The most dangerous thing about this controversy is that people will take knee-jerk reactions to Daisey as an indication that nothing is wrong with the world of electronics.

What's more dangerous is what this suggests the proper reaction is to be. You're right, it is a tragedy that the message people take away from this might be that things aren't as bad over there as we hear. And it's a tragedy of his own doing because he directly contributed to that message by telling us things that weren't true.

I guess nobody told him the story of the boy who cried wolf when he was little.

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

In Daisey's response: "I am proud that my work seems to have sparked a growing storm of attention and concern over the often appalling conditions under which many of the high-tech products we love so much are assembled in China."

He doesn't seem to get why lying and exaggerating and sensationalizing a topic for the sake of its awareness doesn't work out in the long run.

If it's accepted when you do it for your cause, it's accepted when others do it for their cause. Now all you've done is diminished the attention garnered by the nature, impact and realities of a given issue by legitimizing the use of hyperbole and alarmism spun by its champions. To take a page from The Power of Nightmares, in the end the winners aren't the issues that genuinely need more attention, but the issues whose supporters can pitch the scariest stories to the public.

Any issue still needs good supporters and good supporters still need to frame strong, influential narratives, and there's plenty of room in journalism for creating a narrative while staying within the bounds of facts. There's also room in theater and the arts in general to contribute fictional narratives towards an issue but the distinction is very important. To lower that gate of verifiable facts and evidence for journalism does nothing but to erode the important role journalism has in society at large.

If what TAL says is true about Daisey misleading them with the fact-checking rounds, then Daisey certainly crossed a line and knew full well that he was passing off performance as reporting. His peers in this respect are the likes of Fox News where it's considered acceptable to spread information you want others to believe as truth, for the sake of the issues you yourself feel are important. It's a shame because I think objectively most would agree the working conditions in china are an issue that doesn't deserve the same tactics used by say the Obama birth certificate "issue".

Saying he regrets doing so now, while simultaneously saying he's proud of the attention raised on the issue, shows that he is in fact not regretful at all. It's even easier to see it since he never expressed regret until now. His only regret is that he was caught.

vor 16 Jahrendiscuss

Eerie. Having been in/around Tempe for the last 16 years, as soon as he said "There's a coffee shop here in Tempe..." the first one that came to mind (of the many, many non-starbucks coffee shops in this area) was the exact one he meant. I've certainly logged my share of hours there studying, reading something interesting, chatting with friends, etc.

And going by that, the nearest library (likely the one he is referencing--and i went there a lot in middle/high school back in the 90s) is about a mile from the coffee shop and all in all is in a pretty suburbanite, middle class part of town. It's pretty fair to say that for an area with a good median income, high but not extreme property values, etc, something like a public library is going to be hit hardest by the advent of the internet, since the "public" is going to be pretty thoroughly plugged-in.

Not that it's a bad idea to consider bringing libraries along into the newer age...

vor 16 Jahrendiscuss

Sorry, I should have been clearer on what I meant. Google/etc CAPTCHAs don't work 100% against anti-CAPTCHA. As those articles suggest it's a fluctuating 80% or so, and obviously an ongoing arms race.

My point was more to the fact that the slider solution wouldn't retain anywhere near the same stats if it were put up against the same level of effort and sophistication spent towards breaking it. It would get solved and then bypassed completely.

vor 16 Jahrendiscuss

"Spammers are lazy" does kinda work for the multitudes of small-traffic sites out there. Put together some unique or custom validation to keep out spambots and odds are that's all you'll ever need.

The thing is, for big sites like Google or Yahoo that won't work. If Google implemented the slider I'd bet a month's salary that it would be flooded with spammers overnight. The CAPTCHA's they use have been put through the ringer and are proven to work against spammers who are focused and resourceful. By lining the two up like that, the post tries to equivocate big site CAPTCHAs with user-friendly client-side-only validation, but the latter is not even in the same league, much less an alternative. It works for the same reasons "Enter the sum of 3 and 5: ____" would work.