Yep. Cory Doctorow has talked about this: how the universe "makes it easy" to secure communications because mathematically, it's really easy to encrypt (verify that a number is prime) and really difficult to decrypt through hacking (factor a huge prime number).
And because of that, outlawing encryption is really outlawing math, which is ridiculous. Math is a universal API everyone has access to simply by existing. You can't outlaw math.
I'd have to disagree. I think the interview process desperately needs an injection of pragmatism. If the actual job never requires Big-O analysis, then asking it during the interview is a waste of time. I've never had to do Big-O analysis in the real world, but I have had to fix N+1's. Ask about that.
I have the same feeling toward them. They're chosen for the same reason new technologies are often chosen: because they're new. The people doing the choosing aren't concerned with effectiveness or improvement, only that they're keeping up with the cool new thing.
Couldn't agree more. The "innovations" SV has brought to the interview process are more to satisfy the need to "disrupt" the traditional way of interviewing, with no thought to whether they're actually improvements. Take-home tests that are 8 hours long, talking to 14 people over 12 hours (actually happened to me), and tricky questions that will never happen in the day-to-day at that company: all useless and/or unfair.
Exactly. And this is why surveillance is so difficult to fight. The actions are far removed from the consequences, and the public just isn't very good at long-term planning. But we can't wait for the negative effects to show, because by then it'll be too late.
I have to say, I hate take home tests. They move all the burden of time commitment onto the candidate. And even if the question says it should take 2-3 hours, there's a game theory situation where you have to assume others are spending more than the recommended time to make their answer more polished, forcing you to spend more than the recommended time.
Finally, companies never pay you back appropriately for your time investment. If you fail the question, they don't give you a detailed report of why you failed. I'll always politely turn down a take home test.
There was an experiment with this called Mincome in Canada. They found that the only two groups of people who worked less were new moms and teenagers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome
Yep. If the government represented the will of its people, we'd have sensible gun control and readily available contraception. The government hasn't represented us for a long time.
That's exactly why the users can no longer trust the service or the government to do right by them. Client-side encryption is the only way to be sure your rights aren't being trampled.
Nick Merrill tried to crowdfund an ISP way back that automatically encrypts all traffic, making surveillance impossible. Of course it ended underfunded.