ctrl_freak

> If I went to a bank with a billion dollars I could likely negotiate an even higher rate for such a savings account.

I don't think that's how it works. As others have mentioned, FDIC insurance only covers 250k per depositor per bank. Typically when entities have that amount of cash (think Apple, Google, etc.), they put them into US government bonds, which are effectively equivalent to deposit accounts.

Edit: this is an interesting point, though. Ignoring the insurance issue, what would a bank do if you asked to open a deposit account with a billion dollars (paying, say 2%/year)? My uninformed layman's speculation would be that they would reject you because they wouldn't know what to do with that much money: they have to somehow lend out enough of it to at least break even on the 20 million/year that they're paying you for interest, but at the same time they have to be able to give you back your 1 billion at any time you ask for it.

Are "Senior" titles meaningless in many companies? Absolutely. But they also matter in many others.

It seems as though the author's "juniorness" is showing through while writing this. In particular, the assertion that "programming skill is the most important skill for senior developer". I'm not sure that's true. You cannot write code in a vacuum; software development requires communication and understanding of the business to ensure you're solving the right problem. Doesn't matter how great your code is, if you write a solution to the wrong problem, you provide zero value. At companies where seniority is done well (FAANG, etc.) your performance is measured not just on the quality of your code, but the impact you provide to the business: this includes code quality, but also working on projects that matter to the bottom line of the business, enabling teammates to do their best work, bringing in new people, basically acting as a multiplier force.

UW grad here. Running has really helped me maintain motivation and life outlook throughout the years. When I was at Waterloo during the winter I would switch to swimming, which while not quite as enjoyable for me as running, was still hugely beneficial. I dealt with a sprained ankle last year and had to switch back to swimming while it healed. I don't know how much you enjoy it, but if you're just inexperienced at it, it's definitely worth the effort to become better.

Therapists are also great. PM me if you ever want to talk.

I actually don't even like -Werror for development. When I'm developing/testing/debugging, I frequently want to run partially implemented functions (a good example of this is repeatedly commenting out blocks of code to bisect a problem). Trying to deal with warnings about unused variables/parameters is extremely cumbersome.

I'm surprised you place so much trust in our system of laws. With that proposal, we'd be one small step away (e.g. terrorist attack, etc.) from something truly Orwellian. Look what happened with 9/11 and see how fast our civil liberties can go down the drain.

Yeah, it was decent. My experience was that it provided a lot of leads in a short amount of time. In a matter of a week, my plate was completely full, doing phone screens, take-home problems, and on-sites. Got several offers from some pretty cool startups at the end of it, and it was nice to have salary expectations up front.

I would say that I completely underestimated the amount of time required for it. It skews more towards startups, and it seems like take-home problems have become the norm in their application processes now. If you're going to take this route, I would recommend taking 2 weeks PTO from your day job to dedicate to this.

For my last job change, I took a much more passive approach. Over a period of a couple of months, I engaged with a couple of recruiters who reached out to me, only interviewing at 2 companies, and then took this job. Far more relaxing and less pressure. The only downside is that I felt like I had less negotiating power at the end.

I work at a large, well-known Silicon Valley company. I interned at the company while I was in college, but decided to work elsewhere after I graduated. After a few years, one of their recruiters reached out to me via email, went through the normal interview process, and ended up with the job.

Past jobs/internships have been a mixture of applying directly on college job boards, recruiters reaching out through email/LinkedIn, and Hired.

I don’t think that’s what “intrinsic” means. Would Bitcoin have any value if no one else were using it?

FogHorn Systems | Mountain View, CA | ONSITE | Full-time | Software Engineer

Senior Staff Engineer (C++): https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/249907949/

Quality Engineer Lead: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/303024806/?lipi=urn%3Ali%...

Principal Staff Software Engineer: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/249776276/?lipi=urn%3Ali%...

FogHorn is an early-stage startup in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT) space. We specialize in edge computing, meaning that we do real-time computation near the source of the data, which presents unique technical challenges with respect to CPU and memory footprint of our software. We've developed a functional programming language, VEL, and an associated compiler. We also work on machine learning, low level optimization, and building distributed systems.

Fair enough. But it sounds like this technology is being developed for airports, not land crossings or ferries. How would you setup this facial scanning when people leave the country in a vehicle?

As the report notes, though, they already have exit information from passenger manifests, and land border entry sharing from Canada and Mexico. I would have assumed this information would have already been sufficiently accurate.

The reason I posted the workaround is because I feel like the publisher is trying to have their cake and eat it too. In other words, they enjoy the publicity they get from having their articles shared on Google, Facebook, Hacker News, but these sites usually don't want to feature articles that require their users to pay, so WSJ sets up a soft paywall that lets some of these users view the article for free.

But of course that becomes a bit of a blurry moral line. If I start browsing Google News in the hopes of stumbling upon a WSJ article so I can read it for free, is that immoral? What about if I google the headline of an article I'm interested in? Automatically setting my referer to facebook.com whenever I visit wsj.com probably goes too far, but then where do you draw the line?

Anyway, I feel very strongly that either everyone from HN should be able to freely read an article shared here, or no one. If no one can read it, then the link shouldn't be allowed here.

If anyone's looking for another workaround, the article actually hints at the solution: Facebook's l.php redirect that it uses when you click on a link shared through the platform. It functions similarly to the Google redirect, and you don't even need a Facebook account for it to work.

E.g. https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.wsj.com/article...

As brilliantcode mentioned, Facebook, Microsoft et al are using Vancouver as a visa staging ground for people outside of North America. Most Canadian software engineers can work in the US on the TN (which doesn't have a cap like the H-1B) so they don't have visa issues. They bring them over to Vancouver, basically training them there, and once they've worked there for a year, they're eligible to use the L-1 visa, because it's considered an intra-company transfer, so they can move them into the US.

The Vancouver offices are not an investment in the Canadian tech industry; they're just taking advantage of our more lenient immigration laws and the convenience of the city being geographically close to San Francisco. Waterloo and Toronto seem to be taken much more seriously as remote engineering offices for American companies (possibly because of the universities and amount of tech talent in the region).

It's kind of a shame though. Vancouver is a beautiful city, conveniently located, and there's no good reason why it couldn't be Silicon Valley of the north. If they could just figure out how to make it more economical to live there for software engineers (i.e. cheaper housing and higher salaries), it could quickly become a booming tech hub.

Wow. That's almost straight out of an episode of Black Mirror [1]. Looks like the episode premiered just days before the news story came out.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shut_Up_and_Dance_(Black_Mirro...

To add on to this, my understanding is that technically "calories in, calories out" is correct in the sense that weight gain/loss depends on the net caloric intake for your body. But your base metabolic rate, and as a result your daily energy expenditure, is affected by many different things, including the composition of the calories and the timing of the consumption. Insulin plays a major role in weight gain/loss, and simple carbohydrates have a tendency to spike it.

> I think you're also wrong that local governments are frequently committing abuses; the federal government seems to do that much more frequently

I think I read a study not too long ago that indicated state and local governments actually had much higher corruption than the federal government. I tried to find it now; the best I could come up with was an article from nymag [1]. It's an interesting read, and one of the interesting tidbits it notes is that state house elections track US house elections with a correlation of 0.96, in other words, much less accountability at that level. Perhaps one of the reasons why the federal government seems more abusive than local governments is that it gets more media attention.

[1] http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/09/ferguson-worst-...

Admittedly I'm not an expert in this, but isn't demand for housing relatively inelastic? I have no idea whether 13% foreign buyers is considered high for a city, but it seems conceivable that it could fuel a large boom in real estate. Especially if a lot of these units aren't even being lived in.

I have a hard time believing that Vancouver real estate prices have been driven by 'organic' demand. It's a beautiful city, for sure, but the economy isn't exactly stellar. Canadians are probably overextending themselves, but I doubt the average young Canadian with 60k income can quality for a 1 million dollar mortgage.

Vancouver's market isn't really comparable to the Bay Area. They have actually been building quite a lot of new housing, and have been for some years. Vancouver's real estate boom was mostly caused by foreign buyers (Chinese) using it as an investment vehicle and a place to park their money. This is a reason why Vancouver is among the top 2 or 3 most unaffordable cities, because the median wage (~60k CAD) there doesn't support owning a family home, which could easily be over a million CAD.

I doubt a foreign buyer tax would have much of an effect on the Bay Area, since much of it is driven by internal demand and high salaries. On the other hand, places like Sydney, Auckland, etc. have similar problems with foreign buyers and could probably benefit.

US CBP definitely can ask for your passcode/passwords. There was a post on HN last week about a guy who refused to turn over his passcode: https://vc.gg/blog/so-its-been-a-while.html

The original post should be updated to point to this link.

Interesting read. Also seems like a subtle jab at Microsoft and Apple when they said, "We're happy to have such a good working relationship with our friends on the Chrome and Firefox teams." Conditional requests were actually higher on IE and Safari than Firefox, so chances are they tried to engage with those teams but were shut down?

Yes, I just found out yesterday that setting your referrer to facebook.com/l.php allows you to reliably bypass the paywall.

E.g. http://facebook.com/l.php?u=http://www.wsj.com/articles/poli...

This is so true. When I first moved to the Bay Area after finishing college, I was astounded by the amount of recruiter spam I got, but at the time I didn't recognize it as such. To someone who's never seen these before, the initial impression when you see these types of messages is, "Wow, look at all these different companies that want to hire me." Of course you know it's not an actual job offer, but you sort of think in your head, maybe I'll just have to come into the office and have a brief chat with some of the engineers, and then they'll hand me a formal job offer. Because clearly they already recognize your technical aptitude, since they're reaching out to you!

In actuality, once you decide to respond to one of them, you quickly realize that you're not fast-tracked in the application process in any way. Really, the only step that was skipped was that you didn't have to manually apply on the company website. In fact, the application process is usually longer and more difficult in Bay Area companies than elsewhere (at least in my experience), where it's typical to have to do

1. Initial phone call with recruiter 2. One or two algorithm interviews on the phone with an engineer 3. "Take home coding challenge" which they claim only takes an hour or two but often ends up taking you 4 or 5 hours because you don't want to submit subpar code 4. "On-site" interview that can take 4 or 5 hours

Meanwhile the recruiter has no problem lying through their teeth about the details of the role. Like, I've had a number of applications where I tell the recruiter I'm looking for a role that's math/ML focused, only to find out once I get to the final onsite that, no this is just a pure engineering role. They don't care how well your experience or interests fits with the role; all they want is for you to do the interview so their numbers look better.

Right, I wasn't suggesting Uber was hopelessly behind the other major players, but that it seems unlikely they'll beat everyone else to market.

If they can't maintain their market share in a driverless car world, it's difficult to imagine how they can justify their current valuation.

Is there any evidence that Uber is even on par with the self-driving technology of Google, Cruise, or Tesla?

This analysis strongly suggests that there isn't economies of scale in ride service:

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/11/can-uber-ever-deliver...

From what I read, he gave up the SSL cert by printing out a hard copy in a tiny font, and when he was ordered to provide a digital copy, he shut down the service.

> At approximately 1:30 p.m. CDT on August 2, 2013, Mr. Levison gave the F.B.I. a printout of what he represented to be the encryption keys needed to operate the pen register. This printout, in what appears to be four-point type, consists of eleven pages of largely illegible characters.

And:

> On August 8th, rather than turning over the master key, Levison shut down Lavabit.

That was according to this article from the New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/how-lavabit-melted-do...

Sorry if this is off-topic, but is anyone else having trouble getting around the WSJ paywall? The usual trick of redirecting through Google doesn't work for me any more, even with an incognito window or using another device.

> To be fair, Gmail does support the IMAP IDLE extension, which is the standard way of doing push email over IMAP.

IDLE would become a major battery hog on the iPhone, which is why it was never implemented. I don't believe Android supports it natively either.