Ah, it sounds like a rebranded "Personal Development Education". Having being introduced to it from secondary school onwards, it was always a pleasure to have a double period of PDE at the end of the day. Zero study involved. No real homework. If we were lucky they'd roll out the big telly and an old tape about bullying or hormones. Even when they put it before the first bell, it worked out well as a place to do your maths homework.
Probably for the best they're starting younger these days. They might find real buy-in from actual children.
I'm not entirely surprised you'd feel that way - the British seem to be uniquely self-flagellating on topics of nation and state. But I'm not sure how you can support the European Union actively punishing the _people and businesses_ of the United Kingdom in response to the 'conduct' of the _government_ of the United Kingdom, when you think said government hasn't provided proper representation for their people. Whether the United Kingdom deserves it or not has little bearing on this technically unusual and rather petty decision.
I'm also thoroughly opposed to the idea that the European Union is always strict with its rules. It can be. And it is right to be, particularly in the case human rights. But it's impossible to pretend that there hasn't been gross flouting of rules over the last decade. When the stability of the Euro has been at stake, rules always take second-place.
> And it is right to be, particularly in the case human rights.
The European Convention on Human Rights is not an EU institution. The EU has had problems causing conflict with it, such as with the European Arrest Warrant.
> When the stability of the Euro has been at stake, rules always take second-place.
And when the Euro isn't at stake either, after all, they integrated Greece when it failed the checks and balances, pushing it through anyway.
Ignoring for the moment the insanity of Brexit in the first place, I'm particularly unimpressed that it also includes leaving ECHR. That was never mentioned until much later as the "hard Brexit" madness got going.
The Tories must have forgot it was their beloved Churchill who was a huge advocate for its creation and promoted it from the end of the war and through the 48 Congress of Europe. Atlee's Labour was against it, whilst the Conservatives signed it for the UK in 51 or 52.
I have to agree with your sentiment here. A vote to leave the EU didn't mean leave the ECHR.
To add to your point further, the Good Friday agreement (which brought some peace in Northern Ireland) actually is supposed to bind the UK to the ECHR.
Of course you can support punishing the people and business of the United Kingdom. The government is not a separate entity, it represent the people and businesses of the UK and acts on their behalf. Whether the government properly represents its people is not for the EU to concern itself with, that is a matter between the people and the government.
Is there anything you could compare it to, for people who haven't had the chance? I'm vaguely aware the postwar British government promoted corned whale meat an unrationed alternative to normal meats, and that it (unsurprisingly) tasted quite like corned beef.
It tastes like a good steak, just with more umami and tenderness and perhaps a slight hint of fish oil, depending on how it's prepared. There's also something about its deep dark red wine color that feels luxurious.
It's easy to avoiding the fish oil taste of you're careful.
"We had one SSD fail in this way and then come back when it was pulled out and reinserted, apparently perfectly healthy, which doesn't inspire confidence."
We've experienced exactly the same thing. Our general course of action is to perform a hard power cycle of the server through IPMI - a warm cycle doesn't seem to work. I've always presumed it was down to dodgy SSD controller firmware given the way it suddenly stops appearing in the output of fdisk -l.
I have three SSDs in three different laptops/desktops. In their current host machines they've been working flawlessly for a couple of years. Prior to my figuring out which SSD paired best with which host machine, I experienced intermittent strange and catastrophic problems (unreadable sectors to complete data loss) with each one. These were different brands, different capacities, bought in different years.
It's sort of a devil's bargain - the performance of SSDs is so much better that I can't pass up using it over a spinning disk even if they occasionally lose everything. There was a great game for the original Nintendo called "Pinball Quest". As you advanced through the game you could get upgrades such as side stoppers, stronger flippers, etc. You bought these items from a demon in between levels. After the red "Strong Flippers", the next upgrade was the purple "Devil's Flippers". The trick was that occasionally they'd turn to stone when you needed them and possibly cause you to lose the pinball. But they were such an upgrade over the Strong Flippers (when they weren't turned to stone) that you bought them anyway.
It also doesn’t help that at least Windows 10 is seemingly now ”Optimized for SSD” in the sense that performance is quite terrible on a traditional HDD. I imagine this will become more and more common as seek times and hard drive thrashing becomes practically invisible to users as well as developers. It will just get harder to go back as time goes on.
I just don't keep anything important on my SSD. My desktop's SSD is for Windows and games. All documents and other stuff goes on my mechanical drives and my AppData folder is backed up every night too. Everything on my laptop's SSD is either in cloud storage or in an external git repo. I'm 100% prepared for the certain eventuality of any of these SSDs going tits up unexpectedly and catastrophically.
I'm more worried about everybody else who gets an SSD and doesn't take the right precautions, because everybody sells SSDs as being so much more reliable than mechanical drives.
I worked as a PC technician for a while recently. Of the handful of catastrophic failures of mechanical drives we had, the majority of those were ones that were physically dropped, resulting in a head crash. Otherwise, we generally always managed to save data from failing drives. Any failing SSD we encountered was just dead, since there are really only two states: Fine or failed. There was nothing we could do except refer them to a data recovery company that charges thousands of Euros.
"possibly the most important piece of software on OSX"
I'm earnestly trying to avoid downplaying his work, but it's only a package manager. Unless he was interviewing to be Google's next head of package management on OSX, I'm not sure why you think assessing him on something other than his useful side project is bad form. I'm also not certain how an answer being 'easily-googleable' makes it arbitrary or pointless. Someone had to write that answer on Stack Overflow, and the chances are you'd rather hire that guy.
> I'm earnestly trying to avoid downplaying his work, but it's only a package manager.
I'm earnestly trying to avoid downplaying your comment, but you sound like you have no clue how much engineering effort and talent is actually required to build and maintain a reliable, functional, production-grade package manager that a huge number of people use.
Being able to completely implement and support a sophisticated software product end-to-end is a FAR better indicator of engineering talent than isolated algorithm puzzles on a whiteboard. Whiteboard problems are used in interviews simply because individually executed complete projects are so rare (at all, let alone publicly visible).
In fact, whiteboard interviews have all but been proven to be among the least useful at distinguishing good vs bad candidates. The only reason it works is because everyone knows it's a game, studies the game, and gets tested at the same game. It's essentially a disguised IQ test that you have to study for.
The problem is, if you don't study for it specifically, you're at a huge disadvantage. This leads to famous engineers (clearly talented) getting rejected because they don't practice jumping through the particular hoops the company makes everyone jump through.
It seems there are more than several cases where Google needs a high profile engineer more than that engineer needs Google, and as a result the engineer doesn't study the hoop-jumping Google wants. Google rejects them out of bureaucratic process, and loses out on a good hire.
On the opposite side: I'm not a famous engineer, so I suck it up and practice whiteboard algorithm problems like most everyone else -- and as a result, I've never had a problem passing coding interviews. But just because most everyone jumps through hoops to play the game, doesn't mean everyone should have to.
To add to your points, the problem is not just missing good engineers because they don't study and play the game, but also hiring bad engineers because they study and play the game.
I personally know of people who habitually study FAANG interview questions, and make it their career to jump ship every few years for salary boosts. I've worked with some of these people; while they are nice and friendly folks and I consider some of them good friends of mine, they are much less-good engineers compared to many others I know, who stay in smaller startups and want to get things done and don't want to play the interview game.
I'm one such 'engineer' who is good at whiteboarding algorithms. I can do well on 'system design' questions but dont feel confident at all about really designing such a system from ground up. I, for one, am glad that I can find gainful employment by memorizing 200 pages.
I'm happy for you, but I hope you're also that honest with yourself and your employers about your limits when they want you to built something that you know is over your head
> I'm earnestly trying to avoid downplaying your comment, but you sound like you have no clue how much engineering effort and talent is actually required to build and maintain a reliable, functional, production-grade package manager that a huge number of people use.
It's also entirely possible that Google saw Homebrew as neither reliable, functional, or production-grade enough for their taste. While Homebrew is somewhat decent today (though, it's still broken in some ways that I will not go into here and I'm under the impression that it's being worked on), but it wasn't always particularly reliable or stable. The only real benefit it had (and arguably still has) is that it has massive traction.
That's a very good point -- I've never had any issues with it, but I've also not used it very extensively, so my anecdotal experience doesn't count. If it's true that it's more broken and unreliable than alternates, then I'd agree with you.
> I'm earnestly trying to avoid downplaying his work, but it's only a package manager.
I don't really know what to tell you, except I feel like you may be new to software engineering or have forgotten much of what goes into it. The vast majority of engineers at Google will never lead a software project with the utility and breadth of use as the most popular package manager for mac OS for almost a decade. Most engineers at Google will contribute to a small portion of software that will be run by a large fraction of the planet's computers, but owning the architecture, project management, testing, community support, and coding? No.
A package manager that works as well as brew (though it's not without its faults!) is non-trivial to say the least. We suffered through fink, and things got better with macports. But brew clearly works better.
It's reasonable for a company to reject a new graduate applicant based on their freezing during an interview, for an algorithm that is part of freshman year courses in Computer Science. It's also reasonable for us to comment on the absurdity of a company making the same determination for a senior software engineer at a top software company, the vast majority of whom do not touch binary trees for an entire career!
If a Google engineer were to reimplement a binary tree or quicksort in a backend service, that code would fail code review with the comment: "use the library."
> Someone had to write that answer on Stack Overflow, and the chances are you'd rather hire that guy.
The popularity of his tweet indicates that no, chances are that engineers interviewing Max Howell would absolutely choose him over a binary-tree-implementer. Evidence indicates your viewpoint is in the minority.
I think you answered it yourself. His skill set (running, managing, community, etc) are not what Google needs (as they see it). They need someone who "will contribute to a small portion of software that will be run by a large fraction of the planet's computers, but owning the architecture, project management, testing, community support, and coding? No."
Your "etc" includes writing the damn thing in the first place, which indicates he is more than qualified for "will contribute to a small portion of software that will be run by a large fraction of the planet's computers".
Furthermore, for L5 and up Google is most certainly looking for systems design and engineering leadership skills.
> he is more than qualified for "will contribute to a small portion of software that will be run by a large fraction of the planet's computers".
Maybe, but for that part he was in competition with people that were simply better to "contribute to a small portion of software that will be run by a large fraction of the planet's computers".
Additionally, the public perception of the Google hiring process (a perception cultivated by Google themselves) is that candidates are not in competition with anybody. It's just "do you clear the bar or not".
Companies rarely hire people in a vacuum; almost always, it's because they are looking for someone to fill a certain role (be it "we need another competent engineer who we can assign arbitrary work to"), and there are always other people that can do the same job.
If you take the tweet at face value, being dinged for a whiteboard exercise is pretty silly. But people do get hired for specific roles and just having demonstrated you're great at X doesn't mean you should clearly get hired for an only somewhat related Y.
I like to think I'm pretty good at certain things but that doesn't mean I'm a good candidate, especially at a senior level, for lots and lots of roles that, while somewhat related to my skills, aren't really in my wheelhouse.
Package manages often determine the success of an entire ecosystem. To give you an idea of how hard this is, Go still has not been able to come up with proper package management. Some of the best engineers in the world built that language.
> Package manages often determine the success of an entire ecosystem.
Nobody said it wasn't great, just that whether he is good to make a package manager, doesn't determine if he is a good fit for anything else. If that hiring position was to build a system to manage packages, sure, he is probably the best hire for that, but theses skills are specific to exactly this task.
A great interviewer though would have kept his contact information though and would have tried to put him somewhere else though. He may have not been a good fit for what they were looking for, but they can clearly use his skill in some ways some where else.
You're acting like all the engineers at Google work on search algorithms and incredibly research-focused work.
I bet you they still have the footsoldiers out there building consumer facing products. You're telling me the guy who built Homebrew can't sprinkle some awesome dev ux to some of Google's tools?
We're in the middle of a rollout of CoreOS. We'll finish the deployment, but won't be going in on any of the differentiators like locksmith. If only to make our possible migration to either (1) Debian or (2) The inevitable fork of Container Linux easier.
The parent above wants a way to stop people that can't shoulder the financial burden of children intentionally placing that responsibility on society, and suggests removing subsidies that allow that reallocation of burden is a way to achieve it. It isn't clear what part you disagree with. Is it the solution he proposes that you don't think will work? Or the implication the government would have the right to restrict parenthood to those it feels capable?
I know I disagree with the latter, but I don't have an alternative to the former. Which is (I think) exactly what the parent means when they say 'That is the issue nobody likes to address'. I think if there's anything in the post I do agree with, it is that education feels like a good starting point, and that personal responsibility is a necessity.
I believe boot chess also does not implement two of those three, which makes it a fine comparison. Promotion is something I expect most people know, castling is something they might know, but en passant is hardly common. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the number of people who play chess without knowing that rule exceed those who play by FIDE rules.
Whatever the case, it is still a variant of chess, so I see no problem calling it chess.
Promotion shouldn't be compared to castling/en-passant here.
A game without castling or en passant would be similar enough in spirit that we could call it a "chess variant". Removing promotion, on the other hand, would result in a wildly different game.
I actually suspect it'd be impossible to win against any non-beginners, making it more similar to tic-tac-toe than to chess.
Probably for the best they're starting younger these days. They might find real buy-in from actual children.