progn's comments

Eh. I'm in Facebook bootcamp now. Between this article about the ranking system, a truly uninspiring (to me --- YMMV) choice of teams to work on, and the press Facebook has been getting lately, I'm seriously considering parting ways and going somewhere else. Nobody can beat Facebook's pay or food, but what good is it if I feel like I lack direction and purpose? How much would it damage my career to say I tried FB bootcamp and didn't feel it was a match?

> included unethical, anticompetitive and illegal

Oh, like Uber and AirBnb?

> I always assumed cryptography is slower than IO

Cryptography is a CPU-bound operation that often has specialized hardware support. Here's a rule of thumb: in modern computing, IO incurs a greater cost than pretty much anything you can do locally on-CPU. IO is incredibly expensive: cryptography, not so much. If you pipeline your crypto operations and disk fetches, you won't increase response latency at all.

See, that's what I love about this profession: it's never boring. If something _is_ boring, then almost by definition, it can be automated. The automation itself is usually interesting, and once you've automated your boring task, you can go on to do other interesting things.

Actually, no. That wouldn't be nice at all. Large government solves the collective action problem and is necessary to have a modern, functioning civilization. I'll take a welfare state over your Randian hellpit any day.

The stack rank is the _reason_ there's so much dead wood: managers have to keep mediocre performers on the payroll so that star performers don't get bad reviews and leave. You need star performance to get anything done, since Microsoft is not somehow exempt from the power-law distribution of programmer productivity. The accumulation of mediocre performers makes the organization "trust sparse" (the average employee is a low-net-value robot who exists only to absorb the bad reviews in place of the few who get stuff done), which seriously damages long-distance collaboration, since you can't tell in advance which employees are the bozos. The review system also creates a culture of extreme risk avoidance, as you can't trust the bozos you have on your team to actually code features properly, but you still have to give them work.

Optimization problems like that are fascinating. We can treat them generically without having to teach our program about the specific problem it's trying to solve. All we have to do is come up with proposed solutions and pare them down.

For starters, we need a "cost function" so we can see which solutions are better than others. That's the easy part: render the model on 3D hardware, lighting it with a distant point light source. The "cost" (the value we're trying to minimize) is 1 - Σ(face_brightness); modern hardware can easily handle precise geometric shadowing using a stencil buffer or similar well-known technique. Handle the thermal constraints by setting the "cost" to 1 when the space station disintegrates.

Now we just need to find some ways of coming up with proposed solutions and pruning all but the best solutions. This problem has path dependencies, so we can't just apply a greedy algorithm. That is, solar panel actuators take time to move, so the best solution for time [T_1, T_3] isn't necessarily the concatenations of the best individual solutions for intervals [T_1, T_2] and [T2, T_3].

What you're left with is actually a graph search problem, where our graph nodes are actuator inputs at specific (quantized) times; I feel like something like the veneralbe A* algorihm would be a good place to start looking for paths through this graph.

With the creator of Python on your team, what can't you do?

(See http://neopythonic.blogspot.com/2009/04/final-words-on-tail-...)

I'm sick of Google being hailed as a magical place you'd have to be crazy to leave. Look: Google sucks. All technology companies suck, albeit in different ways. It's possible for a talented, rational person to hate working at Google, and I don't care for all the Googlers on HN saying otherwise.

Are Swedish startups (or EU startups in general) interested in talented American programmers?

It sounds just like Seattle, then: perfection.