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Issue #100 - January 31, 2021
Here are the top threads of the week, happy reading!
Top comment by mroche
https://twitter.com/VerizonSupport/status/135410988957298278...
There is a fiber cut in Brooklyn. We have no ETR, as of yet. You can use the MY Fios app for updates. *EAG
2. Tell HN: My entire company's Gsuite access has been banned
Top comment by scottrogowski
While unscientific, I've noticed an increasing frequency of "[FAANG company] banned me from [service I literally need to live] and I don't know why" posts over the past few months. My personal google account is permanently suspended from Adwords over my, no joke, chess-over-videochat website that I tried to advertise last year. Just like you, Google refused to let me know what exactly I had done wrong even after multiple emails, appeals, etc.
At some point, we need to recognize this for what it is - unregulated monopolies having no accountability.
I'm wondering whether there are legal actions that people can take. Many years ago, I was having a problem with Anthem "losing" my insurance claims. Eventually, I got sufficiently frustrated and filed a complaint with the California Attorney General. Shortly after that, I got a long letter of apology, a promise to open an internal investigation, and most importantly, finally got my insurance claims processed.
3. Ask HN: Remote workers in a non-tech city, what's your experience?
Top comment by moconnor
I’ve worked remotely for 15 years, variously in a bustling major city with a startup scene and currently do so in a small seaside town a few minutes from the beach.
Quality of life depends where in life you are. City is better for meeting people, seaside town for raising children. Remote work is generally good for work-life balance, nobody cares if I stay at home with a sick child or finish early for a school play, but I probably travelled a lot more than I otherwise would have.
I thought (and was told) remote work would be a career limiter, but I have still ended up where I want to be (ML research).
What I miss most is being around many like-minded colleagues. What I enjoy most is being able to close the door to my office and work uninterrupted for as long as I choose.
I think I’m more productive because I can’t just “show up”; if I’m not making a difference I might as well have spent the day at the beach.
4. Ask HN: Questions to ask a company to know you don't want to work there?
Top comment by bhuga
I've given hundreds of interviews, and here's some that have gotten real-talk answers out of me (both good and bad):
* What's one thing you'd change about
* Tell me about the last time you worked past 7pm.
* How surprised were you by your last performance review?
* When's the last time you referred a friend to
* Tell me how the last incident you responded to went.
* Tell me about a time you were able to work on something you identified and selected.
* What question is always tough to answer as an interviewer at
The one I liked asking as a candidate was:
It's 2 years from now, and
I got some good real talk about that one, and some smoke and mirrors. It was a good baloney extractor.
I think an important thing is to ask interviewers to pick a concrete instance of a thing you're interested in, such as poor work/life balance, and talk about the most recent one. It's easy to say "oh, we have great work life balance," but that's different for everyone, and frankly it's just too easy to gloss over. Ask them why they worked late the last time they worked late.
For example, with your question:
When interviewing perspective employees, does the entire team participate in the interview process and make a hire / no hire decision as a team?
I'd instead ask:
Had you talked with the most recent person who joined your team before they were hired?
5. Ask HN: Is low level progarmming job more satisfying?
Top comment by foobiekr
Embedded is a lot of fun. A lot of fun. It's "real coding" to me, though I haven't done any in fifteen years.
But .. embedded vendors can suck. A lot. Terrible docs, epic levels of errata (e.g., a PowerPC vendor who, at one time, shipped a bigger errata document than the entire manual set for an x86 of the same era), and just.. marginal everything. In some cases, they are really interesting - the Broadcom Fastpath SDK was actually a good mix of excellent and terrible.
But the SDKs can be absolute trash even from name-brand vendors. Without naming names, I'll give an example: SDK contains a linux distribution from an CPU ASIC company shipped as a tar file. You have no indication whatsoever what the reference point for the linux kernel is, no idea what patches it has or does not have, and so on. When you ask them, they don't even understand why you care. Get ready for the fun of massive diffing. The network stacks on the really low-end can be shockingly bad.
From a career standpoint, embedded is a bit of a niche. You will probably always have a job - especially in the IoT era, but even without that. It is typically a somewhat solitary role - you do the code for the XXX block (if drivers) or for some set if functions (IoT-style embedded), but you don't end up doing "broaden your scope" things as much - no system-level nor distributed systems work, which can be somewhat limiting.
6. Ask HN: How is GME not a pump-and-dump?
Top comment by nowherebeen
If the stock was <100% shorted, it would be a pump and dump. The moment it was >100% shorted, the hedged fund exposed themselves to financial risk.
No matter how much people buy, they can't buy >100% of the shares on the market unless GameStop issues new shares. The people buying are betting that when these hedge funds need to cover, they will be covering ~120% of the number of shares (the amount of shorted stock) on the market. That covers everyone that has shares right now.
So right now, its a tug of war (hence the volatility). Its a zero sum game where one side will definitely lose. You can argue that the company isn't worth anything and that buyers will get hurt, but only when <100% of the stock is shorted.
edit (below):
The loser will be the one holding 100% of the stock. At that point the stock would plummet because all the buyers have left. Meaning if the hedge fund loses, they are not just covering at a higher price (and thus continuing to drive it up even more), they will effectively be buying worthless stock.
I consider this a battle of trading strategies. The fundamental value of the company is beside the point. Hedge funds have done this to each other before, that's why there's an existing term for it - short squeeze. Its definitely covered in a textbook for first year business school students.
7. Ask HN: What if Stack Overflow suddenly decides to shut down?
Top comment by nonameiguess
The US intelligence community actually keeps a clone of Stack Overflow that is updated every 12 hours and copied to servers on the classified version of the Internet so that people developing classified software can use it without needing to turn around to their unclassified workstations. I'm sure they're not alone in this, so the entirety of the answers there could be restored from mirrors or just used from the mirrors if the main site disappeared.
Nearly all of the information there is also available in the public documentation of whatever the question asker is asking about anyway. Forcing developers to use real documentation instead of Stack Overflow would not likely hurt everyday work. It might become harder to find literal worked examples, but even those are mostly duplicated elsewhere and SO is just making it easier on search engines to find it.
8. Tell HN: Someone seems to be trying to make people more fearful through YouTube
Top comment by gpas
Nice find. Seems like something created by a script. Show descriptions scraped from imdb, the trailers too I guess. I watched some and the crime featured in the news was perpetrated by black people... Also the first has the title wrong, Quad instead of Adam, this led me to think about automation. But the Hot Wheels one has a news report about a teen hijacking a car, automated or not, that seems done on purpose.
9. Ask HN: What the heck is happening with GameStop?
Top comment by King-Aaron
Its an imgur link I know, but this is the most succinct run-down I've seen so far: https://imgur.com/a/DCCpuZA
10. How can I get list of textbooks being used in top colleges?
Top comment by BitwiseFool
Consider searching .edu sites for syllabi - every syllabus I have ever received had the required textbooks on it.
You could also try searching for ISBN's on university domains, but I imagine this will be less consistent.
My university partnered with Barnes and Noble and published a list of required books per course as a bundle option. If a course catalog is available you can further refine your search based on course numbers (like FIN 4401 or CSE 4096, etc). Look for any partnerships a university has with a bookseller.
Those are some thoughts... good luck!