- Augmented reality glasses will now work as intended

Except for parallax. If you move your head at all, the overlay no longer lines up with the background. Could maybe be solved with eye-tracking software in the camera. (Is there a camera in the display? Or is it one of those stupid up-the-nose cams on the keyboard?)

- Museums and exhibishion halls/events

This might be about the only useful application.

- Windows with smart features.

See above about parallax, but eye-tracking won't solve it for multiple viewers at a time.

- could be used in an ATC tower

Parallax, again.

The best use for a transparent display is so you can show what's being displayed and the faces of the actors looking at it in the same shot. Even that's questionable because it makes your set designer look like an idiot. (Ditto for those transparent whiteboards that seem to be all the rage on TV shows.)

I agree. As I said, I'm happy to answer such questions in the interview, though it's not really the appropriate time to question our choice of language. C wouldn't be my first choice either, but that's what we're stuck with. It's not like we're going to rewrite a 20 year old codebase at this point. I'd probably invite the candidate to stick around after all the interviews were over and we could discuss such matters over a beer. But right now, let's just see how you'd code it as asked, okay?

We have several coding problems for various languages, some based on actual product code. I had a candidate tell me flat out that the actual product code was using the wrong algorithm. (Narrator: It wasn't.) He just didn't understand the reason we were doing it the way we were, didn't listen when I tried to explain, and refused to code the solution asked for. He did it the way he thought it should be done. That kind of arrogance is something I don't need in a co-worker.

I had another one who couldn't code C. No worries, we can do this with other languages. What's your best language? He said Python. Cool. Here's a Python problem. Go for it. "Can I access Google? NOBODY codes without Google any more!" Dude, I'm not asking for exotic language features, specialized libraries, or even perfect syntax. You can literally solve this one with an 'if' statement and a 'for' loop. "This isn't a realistic test! It's not fair!" He actually said those words. I thanked him for his time and showed him to the door.

Both these were on-campus interviews with graduating students in CS-related majors, so not exactly "senior positions", but still.

You're incorrect here. You're counting the bits in the lower octet from the wrong end. It should be 128+64+32+16+8 = 248

The way I'd calculate it is:

10.0.0 -- 24 bits, need another 5 to make 29
91 dec = 5B hex = 01011011 bin
5 bits of mask = 11111000
AND with mask = 01011000 bin = 58 hex = 88 dec

So the network address is 10.0.0.88/29.

The tricky part for me would be the decimal to binary (or hex) conversion. I can't do that reliably in my head.

P.S. What kind of lame-ass "news for nerds" site doesn't have a way to preserve whitespace in monospace text? Sheesh!

Perfectly valid questions and ones I'm happy to answer in the interview. Yes, C is a requirement. While we have some C++ in our products, the vast majority of it is plain ol' C. And yes, of course we have libraries that handle linked lists, as well as hashes, b-trees, and other types of data structures.

There are a few reasons why we ask a linked list question. First, it's a basic data type that anyone who claims to be a programmer should be familiar with. Second, it involves pointer manipulation which is something anyone programming in C specifically needs to be familiar with. A basic problem like this lets us check some language-specific skills (pointer manipulation) as well as general programming skills (loops and debugging techniques). It makes a good jumping-off point into discussing things like algorithmic complexity and unit tests. The third (and possibly most important) reason is that we have limited time in the interview. We can't possibly teach you enough about our problem domain to give you a "real world" programming task. And that's not what we want to test, anyhow. We can teach you the specifics of what we do on the job - if you know how to program. We can't (or rather, we don't want to take the time to) teach a non-programmer how to program.

I know some people find this kind of thing beneath them or demeaning. But as I said in my original post, you would be *amazed* at how often candidates talk a good story but fall apart when it comes to putting talk into practice.

When we were hiring like crazy a few years ago I did a lot of on-campus job fair interviews. By the end of the day I was always ready to say, "Pick a language. Any language. Write 'hello, world'." Because so many people, even seniors graduating with a CS-related degree, were unable to answer even the simplest questions.

People give us shit for giving a simple coding test like, "reverse a linked list" for C programmers. But oh my god, the number of people who can bullshit their way through the phone interview but can't code themselves out of a wet paper bag is mind-boggling. (The test is done in-person and we talk through it with the candidate, giving hints where needed. We understand that people can choke under pressure. We don't care about misplaced semi-colons. Hell, I don't even care if you use a real language, as long as you can demonstrate that you understand the concepts. Too many people can't even do that much.)

Not just any AI. Quantum blockchain AI. Ancient traditional medicine, all-natural, quantum blockchain AI. With a homeopathic infusion of serpens oleum. NOW how much would you pay?

It makes perfect sense to me that this is just a natural consequence of Apple obeying the EU's rule.

• Web apps require a browser.
• Apple must allow a choice of browser.
• There is no standard mechanism to tell a browser to render a page without displaying its UI (aka kiosk mode).
• So web apps end up getting launched in the user's default browser with full browser UI. Including in Safari, because if they treated Safari differently they'd get sued for giving Safari privileges not afforded the other browsers.

I don't see a way Apple could, in the near term, do anything differently. In the longer term they could define some sort of standard "web app" flag that any browser could detect so it could hide its UI or take other appropriate steps. Or not, however it chooses.

Why is shipping so bad in the US? It's not just UPS, people complain about FedEx and USPS as well. I dare not buy anything shipped from the US because of the chance of it getting wrecked.

I think it all depends on where you live. People in larger population centers probably have worse luck with deliveries because the drivers are more overworked. I have a friend in Chicago who regularly has deliveries skipped due to him "not at home", even though he has video evidence that no one even stopped to ring his doorbell. I think there's a perverse incentive system for the drivers to file false reports instead of stopping at every location.

Personally, I live way out in the boonies. Judging from the tracking data, the nearest FedEx or UPS hub is over 150 miles away. I often see, "Arrived at {hub 150 miles away}" immediately followed by "On truck for delivery". With a route like that there's no incentive to falsify "recipient not home" claims, and doing so may mean an extra long drive the next day to try again. My packages always arrive within a day of the expected date and in good shape, regardless of carrier. USPS, UPS, FedEx, no problems.

I doubt you'll have any particular issues ordering items from the US. The bulk of the problems seem to be with local delivery, not the transportation infrastructure that gets it to the nearest hub.

You're right, it's a solved problem. Perhaps the Slashdot coders should use that solution to actually support UTF-8, which has been in existence five years more than Slashdot itself has been. Or if it's crucial for some reason to restrict posts to 7-bit ASCII, recognize the well-known byte sequences for common UTF-8 characters to translate to the nearest ASCII equivalents. All it takes is a single regex. And maybe clean up uncommon or untranslatable Unicode characters as well so we don't have to see absolute garbage if someone dares to post a character with a diacritical mark or something.

It's not the user's fault that this website is stuck on a 20 year old code base and refuses to modernize.

Let those who loke to go to the office go to the office, and let the ones who prefer working remotely do that. Why is this so difficult to understand?

The thing is, it's not just personal preference. Most people who prefer to work in the office don't prefer it because of the office itself, they prefer it because their co-workers are there. Myself, I'm one of those people. I prefer the office because I find value in overhearing people talk about work-related issues. Fairly often I happen upon a conversation about some feature that I'm familiar with (or wrote!) and can help with, or someone overhears me talking about something they can help with. I also find that being there lets me pick up scuttlebutt (hirings, firings, retirements, the latest from upper management) that don't necessarily get announced via official channels. Lastly, I enjoy the camaraderie developed by seeing people and informally interacting with them. All of this is diminished if you let people individually decide to work in the office or at home.

That said, I understand that there are others who don't get the same value out of those things. If I were in charge (which I'm definitely not!) I wouldn't insist on people working in the office even though it would personally benefit me. I'm willing to take a hit on some of those things I value to let others work in ways that are best for them.

I'm in kind of a weird position to comment on this, because I've actually been working remotely since a few years before COVID hit. When I moved out of the office I had my teammates set up a two-way video link in our shared office so I could still get some of the benefits of being present. When COVID came it didn't really make sense for everyone to have always-on video connections from home, so that died out.

Flip side, my great uncle had it, caught it too late, and it metastasized to his bones. He did hormone treatment for a while, and eventually died from it, I think.

Ditto for my uncle. He was in denial about his prostate cancer and put off treating it until it was too late. It ended up killing him.

To the point of the article, there's a lot to be said for keeping people from freaking out over a scary word. One reason screening for various types of cancer isn't done more widely is because false positives can be as damaging as actual cancer if the person flips out and insists on really aggressive treatment. (False positives can be damaging from another perspective too, leading to bullshit stories like "My cancer was cured by a juice cleanse!" when there was no cancer in the first place.)

That said, if it looks like I have cancer I don't want the doctor to pull any punches about it. "How's it look, Doc?" "I'm afraid you have Happy Funball Syndrome. But we caught it early, so if you don't taunt it you should live a long time."