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Comment Re:35 days is an underestimate (Score 1) 179

People come and go from Google all the time. It's becoming common for SV engineers to work at Google twice or more in their career. I know a guy who was at Google three separate times before he was 19 (once as an engineer, at 16, then both the companies he left to found got acquired) -- although he's of course a bit of an outlier.

It has also become a revolving door between Google, Facebook, and several other big tech companies -- people get a little bored, go elsewhere, eventually realize the grass was greener, and come back.

Yes, the Google lemonade is good, but the lychee lassi is even better.

Comment 35 days is an underestimate (Score 4, Interesting) 179

I'm in this process right now. It has taken between 3 and 4 months to get to the end of the interview process with each of the big companies in Silicon Valley, depending on the company. Google alone has had me onsite for 8 separate interview days, not counting 3-4 phone screens. I'm highly qualified (PhD in CS from MIT, postdoc at Harvard Medical School, and as a Xoogler, I technically don't even have to interview to return to Google), but that hasn't expedited things. The hiring climate right now is ridiculously stringent. It wasn't this way even 3 years ago, I could walk into almost any job, and go from sending in a resume to getting an offer in a week or less.

Comment Re:Wow (Score 4, Informative) 28

Yes, foreigners have had Internet access for about 3 years now. (There are a few hundred foreigners posted in North Korea at any given time.) Of course network traffic is monitored, and everyone using the network knows that, but journalists visiting North Korea have used the network to get stories out quickly.

There are two different cellphone networks in the country -- the network used by locals, with up to 2 million subscribers already, and with only country-wide intranet access, and the network used by foreigners. You can't place calls between the two networks, and the phones on the two networks look different, so that North Korean minders can easily spot a local using a foreign cellphone illegally.

Comment Re:Koryo (Score 5, Interesting) 28

Actually, Koryo (Goryeo) is the name of one of the most important and longest Korean dynasties, following Silla, Baekje and Gogoreyeo. It's where the English name "Korea" comes from. A lot of things have the name "Koryo" in North Korea, and some things in South Korea. The North Korean name for Korea is Choson, the name of the dynasty that was built following the overthrow of the Koryo dynasty.

The South Korean name for Korea is Hanguk, "country of the Han" (that's the Korean Han, which uses a different Chinese character than the Chinese Han character representing the Han people that fought the Manchurians). To a South Korean, "Choson" sounds like a very backward name for Korea. To a North Korean, "Hanguk" sounds like a label imposed by imperialistic invaders.

Comment Completely irrelevant (Score 5, Insightful) 298

First law of politics: any resolution adopted by a political figure that requires action beyond the end of the next election cycle can be safely ignored, and will soon be completely forgotten.

Second law of politics: most resolutions that claim future action within the current election cycle can also be safely ignored.

Comment Graceful degradation (Score 2) 250

The plane's control systems should have several levels of degraded-mode operation, so if one system stops working, the plane still hobbles along the best it can without the non-working system. Google's self-driving cars have something like 7 layers of nested failure modes, each with slightly degraded functions relative to the next higher level. It's almost impossible to trigger enough failures to completely shut the system down, which is a good thing if you're traveling at highway speeds. It's very concerning that a company like Boeing didn't catch this before product release, but even more concerning that they didn't design the system to be resilient against this sort of failure.

Comment Re:Even worse. (Score 3, Interesting) 289

It's much worse than that. The president, by himself, created and enacted a law which carries a criminal penalty.

I agree that is bad. I don't know if the alternative is worse though: Congress has effectively become completely useless, because no bill on any issue can ever get pushed through Congress these days without major blockades from the non-sponsoring side, and (usually last thing on a Friday afternoon) without large amounts of unrelated legislation (riders) being stuffed into the bill after hundreds of pages of fluff so the riders won't actually be read by anybody before they're signed into law.

Comment Pales in comparison (Score 0) 198

The amount of energy used by game consoles in sleep mode across the world pales in comparison to how much energy is wasted running VMs and JIT compilers on Android phones around the world. And that pales in comparison to the number of Petawatt hours (Exawatt hours?) of electricity is wasted per year running Javascript in browsers across all devices. Seriously people, higher-level languages that aren't easy to compile (or don't compile into efficient code) are ridiculously wasteful.

Comment Re:Permian–Triassic (P–Tr) extinction (Score 1) 74

Not if the asteroid hit between 300 and 600 million years old, and the Permian-Triassic boundary is at 252. The other issue is that people have already looked for signals of impact at the P-Tr boundary- iridium, shocked quartz, spherules like you get with the Chicxulub impact that wiped out the dinosaurs- and found nothing. The leading hypothesis right now is that massive volcanic eruption drove the P-Tr extinction.

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