Microscopic black holes disappear quickly due to Hawking radiation. So if your goal is to destroy the earth, creating a microscopic black hole is not the way you want to go.

The bigger a black hole is, the more slowly it evaporates. So if you want your black hole to do any damage, it'll have to be more than a certain threshold size. Turns out that minimum-size black hole you'll need to destroy Earth is roughly the mass of Mt Everest.

If we take the density of such a black hole to be 3 * 10^18 kg/m^3, then our black hole will look like a ball with a radius of about 12 cm, i.e. it looks like a soccer ball.*

See here for more details.

* no idea if my density assumption is reasonable. I'm not a physicist -- I got the number from 20 seconds of googling. The volume of your black hole may vary.

> As a hiring manager, I can tell you that I almost never have the time to go dig through a prospective candidate's open source code

I also have had the responsibility for hiring people from time to time. And OMG you are hiring a *programmer*. This is the *primary* thing they are going to be doing after you hire them. Their code is their main work product. The information is available to you and you're just going to *ignore* it? Who cares how charming and articulate they are if their code is crappy?

You could assess these things in 15 minutes in a 13kLOC code base. Did they write clear and useful comments? Is the code well organized? Is the high-level structure obvious? It's an excellent second- or third-pass method, and I've always found it pretty weird that it's not a more common practice.

Okay, maybe you have some reason to doubt that they actually wrote it or whatever. And of course they will be showing you the awesomest, cleanest little gem they ever wrote. Weigh it appropriately. But don't weigh it at 0%!

I want programmers who can write code AND are articulate and charming. Someone who is articulate and charming but cannot write code should not be hired as a programmer.

OTOH someone who can write code but is not particularly charming can still be a great contributor if they are not a total asshole, and can explain their code clearly in comments or in small meetings.

Probably the reason most hiring managers don't want to review candidates' code is because they are not particularly skilled at reading code quickly and making a useful judgment about its quality. This just means that the hiring manager isn't qualified to judge the candidate on this critical dimension. They should admit this limitation and farm out the task to someone else in their company whom they trust. (If there is no such person in their company then their company is pretty well fucked anyway.)

> Not to mention, most of the time open repositories like that are blocked from my work network anyway

Okay, but this is not a statement about the objective predictive utility of a hiring process that involves code reviews. It's just a statement that your company is toopid. :-) And you can always have the candidate email you the code. They key problem here is that *you* do not believe that reviewing people's code adds a lot of value, and on that point I believe you are quite mistaken.

> can the candidate speak, in detail, to their resume. Many can't, by the way

Totally agree with you on this point. It's amazing how many people just blatantly lie on their resume. In my experience it's, like, way more than half.

This makes it frustrating for people who are honest on their resumes, since managers have to take steps to weed out the significant population of liars out there.

"So what's the difference between TCP and UDP?"

"I have been writing network protocol stacks for 138 years. I sleep with a printed copy of the TCP state machine under my pillow, and all night little synsies and finsies dance through my dreams. I hang out with Vint Cerf every weekend. It says so right on my resume. Why don't you believe me?"

"Because 95% of people who say that cannot articulate a reasonable answer to my question. :-("

I guess until we can get most people to stop lying on their resumes, that will just be a fact of life.

It would have been even better if it were not wildly incorrect. You can't cancel an order once it has been executed. The grandparent sounds super confident, but is largely making stuff up.