Hiker, software engineer (primarily C++, Java, and Python), Minecraft modder, hunter (of the Hunt Showdown variety), biker, adoptive Akronite, and general doer of assorted things.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 10th, 2023

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  • It’s the old trope … the perception of the future gets worse for some group and then society fractures into people that are willing to take ownership and do something about it vs people that accept polarized answers that “it’s not their fault, they’ve been treated unfairly, and the other guy caused all their problems.”

    Once you have a significant portion of people blaming “the other” society just stops working right and fights with itself. In many cases it’s self imposed, but social media has added fuel to the fire and festered and inflamed old wounds (with the help of foreign governments seeking to do just that).

    We have half of society blaming liberals, gays, blacks, the poor, the colleges, and immigrants. Then we have the other half of society blaming conservatives, christians, old white men, the rich, hillbillies, and the uneducated.

    Frankly, we all need to take a chill pill and realize most people want to be left alone to do their own thing. Then we need to sit down at the table and look at which politicians are building bridges and which politicians are burning them. Most of us want similar things, we’ve just been conditioned to focus on our differences.






  • I had some pretty terrible Thai in Poland, so it’s definitely not uniquely Mexican food 🙂 That’s just one that I’ve had a few more encounters with that was more consistently bad.

    Fair point about the cultural influence; it’s probably less cultural influence than number of immigrants (and the US definitely has a lot of immigrants from asia and Mexico). I live in Ohio, so I’m fairly far from the border, but the Mexican food still ranges from “pretty good” to “fantastic.”

    Meanwhile finding like good French, German, or Belgian cooking, even in areas with historic immigration from those areas in decades or centuries past is quite difficult.

    Even more traditional “early European American immigrant” food (like chicken and noodles, mashed potatoes, corn on the cob, mush, turkey, roast beef sandwiches, etc) can feel endangered outside of Amish country, family kitchens, and large chain restaurants that do it badly.


  • It’s not just the US that has bland restaurants and/or is afraid of spice.

    I’ve been to restaurants in the Czech Republic, Germany, Poland, Austria, and Bulgaria.

    I’m sure there are places that spice things up more and some of the restaurants were really good, but some were also some of the most bland food I’ve had at a restaurant.

    It’s the same thing in the US; there are places that won’t put any spice on and there are places that will leave you crying the food is so hot and everything in-between.

    Also every “Mexican” food dish I’ve had in Europe has just been bad. Y’all are doing it wrong.












  • The problem is you’re effectively leaving “can I program and work through the kinds of tasks this job entails” and entering “how do you work through a complex theoretical research topic” land.

    White board questions should be relative softballs related to the work you’re actually doing to see how you think… Now that’s often forgon for “welcome to a game of algorithm and data structure trivia!” but this is just a much more extreme version of that.

    Also if you don’t actually know the answer, how can you judge the direction? Even if you do know the answer for a problem that complicated, can you say the interviewee isn’t solving the problem in a novel and possibly better way?

    I presume he was looking for specific terms like DAWG (directed acyclic word graph) and things like that as well… Which I know because he would teach me the names of things as I slowly rediscovered them in conversation. Personally, I don’t put much stock in grading someone on their knowledge of obscure data structures and algorithms either.


  • I think the interview I least enjoyed was with an unnamed big tech company.

    It was the first interview of the day and the guy came in with “so me and my buddy have been trying to solve this algorithm problem for years. I’d like you to try and solve it for me.”

    Like… Dude, that’s not a reasonable interview question! You should not use algorithm questions that you don’t know of any answer to in an interview. You’re effectively asking someone to give you a solution to something way too complicated of a problem without even a few hours to think about the problem or sit down with it on their own.