I don't get full day interviews. My work history and experience is the most important thing and we can go over than in an hour.
Your work history and experience are nearly irrelevant, because it's too hard to confirm that they're actually true. It's easy to check that you worked the places you claim, moderately difficult to verify that you had the titles you claim and completely impossible to determine whether you did the things you say you did. I used to think that it was possible to discuss the details of someones work to ascertain whether it was really theirs, but it's too easy for people who were really carried by their teammates to describe in detail the things that others did. Since they were present, they are knowledgeable, but that doesn't mean they could have done it.
I'm not a graduate so all the other silly tests just tell me they don't know what they are doing and I probably don't want to work there.
At least at most of the upper tier tech companies, the "silly tests" are comprised of asking you to design solutions to problems then code your solutions, explaining along the way the various tradeoffs you considered, what the time and space characteristics of your solutions would be, what testing approaches you would use, etc. This is extremely difficult to fake. It also wouldn't take all day to do once, but there's a chance you may get a problem that for whatever reason you find particularly difficult, or an interviewer you just can't communicate with, even though you're good. So the solution to that is to have you repeat the process a few times with different people, then get feedback from all of them and discard outliers. This adds up to an all-day interview.
It's a lousy process with all sorts of problems but it's like democracy: the worst possible system, except for all of the others we've tried.
Doing so makes Chrome the Phisherman's friend. Pale Moon seems to be the only modern browser that has the courage to show the full url by default.
The Chrome team believes that URLs are the Phisherman's friend. IMO, we made a mistake when we allowed general Unicode URLs. We should instead have defined for each language the precise set of characters allowed, and required every URL to use characters from a single language.
You have no idea what you're talking about. Really. You should read Blackmon's book, and a few others. I'd list some for you but you're not going to read any of them, so I won't bother.
Obviously debt peonage and sharecropping existed before, and in other contexts. That in no way means that the post-Reconstruction south implemented them in the same way.
I disagree. Being mealy-mouthed about calling bad things bad is what got us this mess. Being afraid to have a real fight is what got us this mess.
You're exactly wrong. The left being overly eager to call people names is what got us into this mess. Attacking people divides them, and it's the division that is the source of our current political woes. We need to focus on finding common ground and building from that. Demonizing our opponents will just exacerbate the current trends.
Unless the left can learn to stop denigrating people who disagree and engage with them enough to actually understand their motivations and their issues, Trumpism will continue to be a force in American politics.
For example, if you ever find yourself saying that people are voting against their own interests, stop, because you're wrong. They're voting for their interests... it's just that you don't understand what they are.
It's not in any way "America's peculiar institution".
Not that this has any bearing on your core point, but although slavery is not peculiar to America, America's version received the moniker "peculiar institution" because it was peculiar, in a couple of key ways. First, it was explicitly race-based. Not originally, mind you, especially if you included indentured servitude in your definition of slavery. And even after it permanent chattel became the norm, for a while there were still a few white slaves and a few black slaveholders. But as Europe abandoned slavery entirely, American slaveholders constructed this explicitly racial version, based on a theory of black inferiority.
Which leads to the second difference: the hypocrisy. Throughout most of human history slaves were slaves because their masters were stronger and conquered their people in war or similar. It was awful, but honest. But American slaveholders argued that blacks were both mentally deficient and bore "the mark of Cain", meaning their souls were stained, and that it was therefore the whites' Christian duty to enslave them so they could be cared for and taught. Of course, in practice, their treatment of the slaves was nothing remotely similar to the Christian morals the slaveholders theoretically held to.
It's worth pointing out that the hypocrisy only deepened after the Civil War and Reconstruction ended. See Blackmon's "The Re-enslavement of Black America" for details, but in a nutshell the deep south re-imposed full slavery under the guise of debt peonage for nonpayment of criminal fines for a subset of the black population, and near slavery for most of the rest in the form of the sharecropping system. The depth of hypocrisy in the structure of the system of selling criminal debt peonage was staggering, a supposedly impartial "justice" system having been rigged top to bottom to create and keep slaves, and continuing until a few years into WWII. It's no wonder black Americans distrust the justice system, and no wonder that there's a lot of sensitivity around the terms "master" and "slave" in the US.
When battery electric vehicles displace gasoline-powered vehicles because they're better, and *cheaper*, then we get paid by having quieter streets, cleaner air and a cooler planet.
Watch Dick and Jane get lung cancer and spend many tens of thousands on medical treatment and hospice costs.
End of life care for smokers costs a small fraction of what it does for non-smokers, because it's they die much faster. Smoking accelerates death, but actually reduces health care costs / revenues.
the process negotiates an ephemeral shared secret between them that can be combined with a pre-shared secret to provide strong authentication that is secure against relay attacks.
Mifare does exactly that
No, Mifare does not support a bounding protocol, at all, much less one that negotiates an ephemeral shared secret as a side effect. Mifare is subject to relay attacks. Yes, Mifare -- like most everything else in this space -- does negotiate a session key, but that's not at all the same thing.
Except that trees return most of the CO2 they collect. In most places they do this when they die and decompose. Trees in California seem to prefer a more rapid and energetic method.
Mifare is closed source proprietary, very weak and very broken.
Mifare is a brand which covers a whole range of specific technologies. Only the oldest ones are very weak and very broken. This is like saying "TLS is old and broken", because TLS 1.0 has known vulnerabilities. Yes it does, but that doesn't mean TLS 1.3 isn't quite solid.
However, Mifare is close-range and wouldn't be convenient for this application.
We regularly have a reminder that it is a bad idea to develop in house crypto.
Always true.
In this situation, it seems that reusing something like Mifare was the way to go.
No, Mifare (or ISO 14443 contactless smart card protocols in general) are too short-ranged. You'd have to pretty much tap the key to some part of the car to activate it. That's much less convenient than the "walk up, get in, drive away" process that Tesla and other high-end automakers want to provide.
It should also be noted that there's another sort of vulnerability that's even harder to prevent: relay attacks. Good crypto will make it impossible to clone the key, but if I can put one transceiver near the car and another near the fob and relay messages between them, I can also get in and drive. There is a solution on the horizon for this problem, though: secure range-bounding protocols. The forthcoming Ultra Wideband Wifi spec includes one that allows the precise range between radios to be determined, and in the process negotiates an ephemeral shared secret between them that can be combined with a pre-shared secret to provide strong authentication that is secure against relay attacks. UWB Wifi can do this with extremely low power consumption as well, making it a good candidate for use in a key fob.
I gave up and settled on full service business class cable.
Cable isn't available where I live, only DSL and WiMax. There are no business class options on the DSL, because it's just laughably slow. The WiMax provider offers a business service, but it still shares backhaul with the residential users, so it gets really slow during late afternoon and evening hours.
I had to step up to enterprise-class service, from the WiMax provider, via a dedicated microwave point to point link. It works very well (100 mbps symmetric), but it's crazy expensive.
If you do any service work at home, spring for business class. Even in the country, it's stupid fast.
In some places. Not everywhere. In some places satellite is the only option and it comes with nasty data caps.
It's not going to work for games that need super low latency but satellite delivers decently high speed for everything else.
But only if you don't use that speed very much. Satellite services all have rather tight data caps. They're more generous than mobile data services, but low enough that even moderate laptop/desktop Internet users will have problems with them. Forget cord-cutting; streaming video will destroy your data limit in a hurry if you're on satellite.
I know, because I've looked into it. At my (rural) home, there are three options[*]: DSL, at 5 mbps down 768 kbps up; WiMax which is nominally 10 mpbs down, 2 mbps up but in practice is much less than that, especially during peak usage hours, or satellite.
I'm not complaining; I knew I was choosing limited options when I chose where I wanted to live -- and as a software engineer who works from home full time I have almost complete freedom in how I make that choice. But many of my neighbors live here because they need to live near their fields; farming doesn't have nice 9 to 5 work hours.
Rural Internet is a problem for many. I'm not sure it's a problem that the government needs to fix, but it is a problem and satellite Internet is not a good solution in its current incarnation.
[*] I actually found a fourth option, achievable by spending a bunch of money: I bought a microwave relay link from the WiMax provider. 100 mbps symmetric, with backhaul bandwidth dedicated for my use, and an SLA that guarantees I get all of my bandwidth all the time. It's ridiculously expensive, though. I also found a way to get a fiber provider to run a line out to my house, but that was even more expensive at $60K.
Not only is Big Brother watching you, he has convinced you to pay for the privilege. For this I give a big Orwellian facepalm.
How is this different from the hardwired telephone we had in the kitchen when I was a kid? And how is it different from all of the smartphones lying around the house now? I suppose the microphone on the smart speaker is higher-quality...
"Smart Speakers" and "Smart Appliances" seem like silly fads to me. I can't imagine where they would be useful
Apparently half of Americans have more imagination than you do:-)
In all seriousness, we find ours pretty useful. Enough that I've put them in most rooms in the house. They serve as an intercom system as well as alarm clocks, timers, shared grocery list managers, music players and general information lookup devices... all voice-controlled. I put one in the TV room, and that's turned out to be quite nice; I especially like when someone asks "What did he say?" I can just say "Hey Google, back up 20 seconds"; no fumbling for the remote.
Even worse, they raise troublesome privacy issues
Not really. At least, no more than telephones do -- and I include not just modern mobile phones but old hardwired land-lines as well.
Seriously? That many people want an ever-listening microphone in their home?That was fast.
That many people understand that it's not an ever-listening microphone, at least not one that listens for anything other than the activation keyword.
You may consider them naive for believing the tech companies are telling the truth about what it does and does not listen for. If so, I consider you naive for believing that the tech companies could get away with such a lie. It's pretty easy to monitor network traffic, and not too much harder to crack one open and check out what it's doing from the inside. Obviously the percentage of people that could or would do that sort of analysis is very small, but it only takes one to blow the whistle.
I'm still waiting for the left to figure out that you can have mass immigration or you can have nice things like universal health care but you certainly can't have both.
I'm not a leftist, but this is obviously wrong. Just provide the nice things only to citizens, while taxing immigrants and citizens alike. Then make the path to citizenship sufficiently difficult to keep the system in balance. There will be the small issue of the fact that children of immigrants are citizens, but history shows that the children of immigrants are more economically productive than the children of citizens so this is a non-problem; they'll pull their own weight.
This leaves open the question of whether you can afford the nice things even for all citizens, but it's trivial to separate that question from the question of immigration.
How am I obviously wrong? I don't think you grasp the magnitude of the number of anchor babies (ie children of illegals born here who thus become citizens). It's far more than a small issue, it numbers in the millions. History shows that *legal immigrants* are more productive, not illegal immigrants children.
I'm not talking about illegal immigrants. I'm talking about legal immigrants.
Sure. But if you take one more step you get to one device. One small enough to fit in a pocket. And all of your non-phone functionality has a data connection even when Wifi is unavailable -- unlike your tablet, unless the tablet has a cellular modem and you pay for service for it.
Of course, I'm not trying to tell you that your solution is bad. If it works for you, great. But the AC above was trying to say that people are stupid for wanting a smartphone when a dumbphone is all you need. My point was that a dumbphone is not all many of us need. Which you agree with, because you augment your dumbphone with another device that fills all of those other niches.
Whether you let your smartphone take over your life, making you check your Facebook feed every two minutes, is a separate issue.
It's great that that works for you, but for many people, me included, not having a smartphone means having to carry a whole bunch of other devices as well. A PDA for calendaring and contact management, a GPS receiver for navigation, a camera, an ebook reader, an MP3 player, a portable game console, a fitness tracker, etc.
Oh bullshit... I have a tablet that has every single function you just named. ONE DEVICE. But, I don't carry it in my pocket. It's not a constant distraction. Normally it's sitting on the passenger seat and, if I need it, I can retrieve it quickly. I carry a flip phone for phone calls.
I'm not saying that works for you.. I'm simply saying that every function you just described can be accommodated without a smart phone and without multiple devices.
So you carry a phone and a tablet. How is that not "multiple devices"?
Have you looked into Google Inbox? It some of the distraction-reduction things you ask for. Bundle related emails together and then have the bundle appear only once per day or once per week. Snooze emails that you can't address right now to a later date.
Slashdot Mirror
You didn't read all of the first paragraph of my post. I explained why that doesn't work.
I don't get full day interviews. My work history and experience is the most important thing and we can go over than in an hour.
Your work history and experience are nearly irrelevant, because it's too hard to confirm that they're actually true. It's easy to check that you worked the places you claim, moderately difficult to verify that you had the titles you claim and completely impossible to determine whether you did the things you say you did. I used to think that it was possible to discuss the details of someones work to ascertain whether it was really theirs, but it's too easy for people who were really carried by their teammates to describe in detail the things that others did. Since they were present, they are knowledgeable, but that doesn't mean they could have done it.
I'm not a graduate so all the other silly tests just tell me they don't know what they are doing and I probably don't want to work there.
At least at most of the upper tier tech companies, the "silly tests" are comprised of asking you to design solutions to problems then code your solutions, explaining along the way the various tradeoffs you considered, what the time and space characteristics of your solutions would be, what testing approaches you would use, etc. This is extremely difficult to fake. It also wouldn't take all day to do once, but there's a chance you may get a problem that for whatever reason you find particularly difficult, or an interviewer you just can't communicate with, even though you're good. So the solution to that is to have you repeat the process a few times with different people, then get feedback from all of them and discard outliers. This adds up to an all-day interview.
It's a lousy process with all sorts of problems but it's like democracy: the worst possible system, except for all of the others we've tried.
Doing so makes Chrome the Phisherman's friend. Pale Moon seems to be the only modern browser that has the courage to show the full url by default.
The Chrome team believes that URLs are the Phisherman's friend. IMO, we made a mistake when we allowed general Unicode URLs. We should instead have defined for each language the precise set of characters allowed, and required every URL to use characters from a single language.
You have no idea what you're talking about. Really. You should read Blackmon's book, and a few others. I'd list some for you but you're not going to read any of them, so I won't bother.
Obviously debt peonage and sharecropping existed before, and in other contexts. That in no way means that the post-Reconstruction south implemented them in the same way.
You do know that Google doesn't sell people's information, right?
I disagree. Being mealy-mouthed about calling bad things bad is what got us this mess. Being afraid to have a real fight is what got us this mess.
You're exactly wrong. The left being overly eager to call people names is what got us into this mess. Attacking people divides them, and it's the division that is the source of our current political woes. We need to focus on finding common ground and building from that. Demonizing our opponents will just exacerbate the current trends.
Unless the left can learn to stop denigrating people who disagree and engage with them enough to actually understand their motivations and their issues, Trumpism will continue to be a force in American politics.
For example, if you ever find yourself saying that people are voting against their own interests, stop, because you're wrong. They're voting for their interests... it's just that you don't understand what they are.
It's not in any way "America's peculiar institution".
Not that this has any bearing on your core point, but although slavery is not peculiar to America, America's version received the moniker "peculiar institution" because it was peculiar, in a couple of key ways. First, it was explicitly race-based. Not originally, mind you, especially if you included indentured servitude in your definition of slavery. And even after it permanent chattel became the norm, for a while there were still a few white slaves and a few black slaveholders. But as Europe abandoned slavery entirely, American slaveholders constructed this explicitly racial version, based on a theory of black inferiority.
Which leads to the second difference: the hypocrisy. Throughout most of human history slaves were slaves because their masters were stronger and conquered their people in war or similar. It was awful, but honest. But American slaveholders argued that blacks were both mentally deficient and bore "the mark of Cain", meaning their souls were stained, and that it was therefore the whites' Christian duty to enslave them so they could be cared for and taught. Of course, in practice, their treatment of the slaves was nothing remotely similar to the Christian morals the slaveholders theoretically held to.
It's worth pointing out that the hypocrisy only deepened after the Civil War and Reconstruction ended. See Blackmon's "The Re-enslavement of Black America" for details, but in a nutshell the deep south re-imposed full slavery under the guise of debt peonage for nonpayment of criminal fines for a subset of the black population, and near slavery for most of the rest in the form of the sharecropping system. The depth of hypocrisy in the structure of the system of selling criminal debt peonage was staggering, a supposedly impartial "justice" system having been rigged top to bottom to create and keep slaves, and continuing until a few years into WWII. It's no wonder black Americans distrust the justice system, and no wonder that there's a lot of sensitivity around the terms "master" and "slave" in the US.
When do we get reimbursed?
When battery electric vehicles displace gasoline-powered vehicles because they're better, and *cheaper*, then we get paid by having quieter streets, cleaner air and a cooler planet.
Watch Dick and Jane get lung cancer and spend many tens of thousands on medical treatment and hospice costs.
End of life care for smokers costs a small fraction of what it does for non-smokers, because it's they die much faster. Smoking accelerates death, but actually reduces health care costs / revenues.
the process negotiates an ephemeral shared secret between them that can be combined with a pre-shared secret to provide strong authentication that is secure against relay attacks.
Mifare does exactly that
No, Mifare does not support a bounding protocol, at all, much less one that negotiates an ephemeral shared secret as a side effect. Mifare is subject to relay attacks. Yes, Mifare -- like most everything else in this space -- does negotiate a session key, but that's not at all the same thing.
They're called "trees"
Except that trees return most of the CO2 they collect. In most places they do this when they die and decompose. Trees in California seem to prefer a more rapid and energetic method.
Mifare is closed source proprietary, very weak and very broken.
Mifare is a brand which covers a whole range of specific technologies. Only the oldest ones are very weak and very broken. This is like saying "TLS is old and broken", because TLS 1.0 has known vulnerabilities. Yes it does, but that doesn't mean TLS 1.3 isn't quite solid.
However, Mifare is close-range and wouldn't be convenient for this application.
We regularly have a reminder that it is a bad idea to develop in house crypto.
Always true.
In this situation, it seems that reusing something like Mifare was the way to go.
No, Mifare (or ISO 14443 contactless smart card protocols in general) are too short-ranged. You'd have to pretty much tap the key to some part of the car to activate it. That's much less convenient than the "walk up, get in, drive away" process that Tesla and other high-end automakers want to provide.
It should also be noted that there's another sort of vulnerability that's even harder to prevent: relay attacks. Good crypto will make it impossible to clone the key, but if I can put one transceiver near the car and another near the fob and relay messages between them, I can also get in and drive. There is a solution on the horizon for this problem, though: secure range-bounding protocols. The forthcoming Ultra Wideband Wifi spec includes one that allows the precise range between radios to be determined, and in the process negotiates an ephemeral shared secret between them that can be combined with a pre-shared secret to provide strong authentication that is secure against relay attacks. UWB Wifi can do this with extremely low power consumption as well, making it a good candidate for use in a key fob.
I gave up and settled on full service business class cable.
Cable isn't available where I live, only DSL and WiMax. There are no business class options on the DSL, because it's just laughably slow. The WiMax provider offers a business service, but it still shares backhaul with the residential users, so it gets really slow during late afternoon and evening hours.
I had to step up to enterprise-class service, from the WiMax provider, via a dedicated microwave point to point link. It works very well (100 mbps symmetric), but it's crazy expensive.
If you do any service work at home, spring for business class. Even in the country, it's stupid fast.
In some places. Not everywhere. In some places satellite is the only option and it comes with nasty data caps.
It's not going to work for games that need super low latency but satellite delivers decently high speed for everything else.
But only if you don't use that speed very much. Satellite services all have rather tight data caps. They're more generous than mobile data services, but low enough that even moderate laptop/desktop Internet users will have problems with them. Forget cord-cutting; streaming video will destroy your data limit in a hurry if you're on satellite.
I know, because I've looked into it. At my (rural) home, there are three options[*]: DSL, at 5 mbps down 768 kbps up; WiMax which is nominally 10 mpbs down, 2 mbps up but in practice is much less than that, especially during peak usage hours, or satellite.
I'm not complaining; I knew I was choosing limited options when I chose where I wanted to live -- and as a software engineer who works from home full time I have almost complete freedom in how I make that choice. But many of my neighbors live here because they need to live near their fields; farming doesn't have nice 9 to 5 work hours.
Rural Internet is a problem for many. I'm not sure it's a problem that the government needs to fix, but it is a problem and satellite Internet is not a good solution in its current incarnation.
[*] I actually found a fourth option, achievable by spending a bunch of money: I bought a microwave relay link from the WiMax provider. 100 mbps symmetric, with backhaul bandwidth dedicated for my use, and an SLA that guarantees I get all of my bandwidth all the time. It's ridiculously expensive, though. I also found a way to get a fiber provider to run a line out to my house, but that was even more expensive at $60K.
Not only is Big Brother watching you, he has convinced you to pay for the privilege. For this I give a big Orwellian facepalm.
How is this different from the hardwired telephone we had in the kitchen when I was a kid? And how is it different from all of the smartphones lying around the house now? I suppose the microphone on the smart speaker is higher-quality...
"Smart Speakers" and "Smart Appliances" seem like silly fads to me. I can't imagine where they would be useful
Apparently half of Americans have more imagination than you do :-)
In all seriousness, we find ours pretty useful. Enough that I've put them in most rooms in the house. They serve as an intercom system as well as alarm clocks, timers, shared grocery list managers, music players and general information lookup devices... all voice-controlled. I put one in the TV room, and that's turned out to be quite nice; I especially like when someone asks "What did he say?" I can just say "Hey Google, back up 20 seconds"; no fumbling for the remote.
Even worse, they raise troublesome privacy issues
Not really. At least, no more than telephones do -- and I include not just modern mobile phones but old hardwired land-lines as well.
Seriously? That many people want an ever-listening microphone in their home?That was fast.
That many people understand that it's not an ever-listening microphone, at least not one that listens for anything other than the activation keyword.
You may consider them naive for believing the tech companies are telling the truth about what it does and does not listen for. If so, I consider you naive for believing that the tech companies could get away with such a lie. It's pretty easy to monitor network traffic, and not too much harder to crack one open and check out what it's doing from the inside. Obviously the percentage of people that could or would do that sort of analysis is very small, but it only takes one to blow the whistle.
Never had to install a special package to log into my bank. Never needed a special package to track a package.
I used desktop apps for both back in the mid 90s.
Yep. Lots of US alfalfa is fed to Asian cattle.
I'm still waiting for the left to figure out that you can have mass immigration or you can have nice things like universal health care but you certainly can't have both.
I'm not a leftist, but this is obviously wrong. Just provide the nice things only to citizens, while taxing immigrants and citizens alike. Then make the path to citizenship sufficiently difficult to keep the system in balance. There will be the small issue of the fact that children of immigrants are citizens, but history shows that the children of immigrants are more economically productive than the children of citizens so this is a non-problem; they'll pull their own weight.
This leaves open the question of whether you can afford the nice things even for all citizens, but it's trivial to separate that question from the question of immigration.
How am I obviously wrong? I don't think you grasp the magnitude of the number of anchor babies (ie children of illegals born here who thus become citizens). It's far more than a small issue, it numbers in the millions. History shows that *legal immigrants* are more productive, not illegal immigrants children.
I'm not talking about illegal immigrants. I'm talking about legal immigrants.
Sure. But if you take one more step you get to one device. One small enough to fit in a pocket. And all of your non-phone functionality has a data connection even when Wifi is unavailable -- unlike your tablet, unless the tablet has a cellular modem and you pay for service for it.
Of course, I'm not trying to tell you that your solution is bad. If it works for you, great. But the AC above was trying to say that people are stupid for wanting a smartphone when a dumbphone is all you need. My point was that a dumbphone is not all many of us need. Which you agree with, because you augment your dumbphone with another device that fills all of those other niches.
Whether you let your smartphone take over your life, making you check your Facebook feed every two minutes, is a separate issue.
It's great that that works for you, but for many people, me included, not having a smartphone means having to carry a whole bunch of other devices as well. A PDA for calendaring and contact management, a GPS receiver for navigation, a camera, an ebook reader, an MP3 player, a portable game console, a fitness tracker, etc.
Oh bullshit... I have a tablet that has every single function you just named. ONE DEVICE. But, I don't carry it in my pocket. It's not a constant distraction. Normally it's sitting on the passenger seat and, if I need it, I can retrieve it quickly. I carry a flip phone for phone calls.
I'm not saying that works for you.. I'm simply saying that every function you just described can be accommodated without a smart phone and without multiple devices.
So you carry a phone and a tablet. How is that not "multiple devices"?
Have you looked into Google Inbox? It some of the distraction-reduction things you ask for. Bundle related emails together and then have the bundle appear only once per day or once per week. Snooze emails that you can't address right now to a later date.