Alex

There is a difference between reviewing code and the feedback when you have the job and during an interview when trying to get a job. I’m not saying you should never expect to be pulled up on mistakes just that an interview experience is very different to the work experience.

Maybe there are ways to ameliorate the stress during the interview to get a better view of how a candidate will perform once hired but I think it’s a tricky balance to strike.

I think there is a difference in setting. Pair coding is a useful exercise but demands a degree of trust that the two of you are working together on a solution rather than one of the pair judging the other.

If you’re expecting to be stressed all the time at work then that is a red flag. Some professions may involve a degree of stress, which should be mitigated, from time to time but software engineering shouldn’t.

Civ, Balatro.

In my first interview they put me in a room with a PC with Borland C and a copy of K&R and a sheet with a simple problem to solve and some extra enhancements if I had time. They said they would be back in half an hour and left me to it. That I passed fine.

Some twenty-ish years later I was asked to write a C function to reverse a string on a white board and I failed because I’d misformatted the for loop. I don’t think it was because I’ve become a worse C coder in the intervening years.

When I’m actually coding I’m sat with my editor configured Just So with completion, compilation and unit tests at my finger tips. My favourite coding music blasting my speakers and a handy browser window for looking up anything in unsure of. This is my most productive setting and expecting the same performance in a stressful interview setting is foolish in my opinion.

Working through problems on a white board can work well but you are looking for the problem solving approach, not an encyclopedic knowledge of regex syntax. Those same problems get immeasurably harder when explained over a phone call.

My personal preference when evaluating candidates ability to code is reading their actual production code, the break down of commits, the commit messages and the sort of unit tests they add with a feature. The interview is more focused on their soft skills, what about the work excites them and what they are looking to get out of the role.

Yeah I felt short changed as everyone was marching off to war. Hopefully the next season delivers on the actual dance of dragons.

I like the writing, acting and general production values of the show though. Given the history is already set I hope it avoids the problem of the show runners outpacing GRRM’s books.

Directors have a fiduciary duty to the shareholders and that includes a legal liability if they don’t do their job. That said if the chairman has a controlling majority of the shares they can run the company into the ground if they want to as it’s their money to waste.

Generally if you want to bring investment into a company it will come with strings attached like nominated seats on the board of directors to prevent this sort of thing. Voting shares can be different normal shares or there can be several share types with different levels of voting rights. However the structure of the shares will be disclosed to the board and for a publicly traded company this will be public.

My parents had one his albums on vinyl which we used to play all the time. They were funny even when i didn’t know the people he satirised in some of the more political songs.

Down 6.5% year on year. https://assets.simpleviewcms.com/simpleview/image/upload/v1/clients/lasvegas/ES_May2025_ed1142ef-9992-4a32-b44d-5404dba18b8e.pdf

I found it quite a charming show but I haven’t watched that many shows with autistic leads to see the tropes. It did seem to be trying to present a sympathetic portrayal.

Well Trump had a go in his first term but unsurprisingly didn’t get far.

Are you familiar with the Korean war? There was a massive conflict which got drawn out into a stalemate and everybody agreed a temporary ceasefire was preferable to even more destruction.

Trying to topple a regime that has nothing to lose and a highly indoctrinated population is not an easy ask. We can only hope that like most authoritarian regimes they eventually succumb to the weight of their own opression. It’s better than torching the whole continent in the name of freedom.

While they were younger the kids only had access to YouTube on the main TV. You can’t underestimate the need to review and prune the watch history to keep it on track.

Interestingly I’ve noticed the recommendations tend to change depending on the time of day with more stuff appearing that grabs the whole families interest in the evenings when we are likely watching together or with one of the adults in charge of the remote.

I was so confused that episode - did Saw just recruit Will to safe crack a fuel line so he could huff more toxic fumes? Were all his crew down with this?

I reckon he just enjoys showing what he has.

The adaptation of Cleon to the genetic dynasty was an interesting approach and certainly avoided the show becoming a confusing rotating cast as we barrel through the centuries.

Isn’t that like a short holiday?

So back in the days of the Atari ST we had compact disks (sic).

Most games shipped on a single floppy disk (so 720k or 1.4Mb) and rarely used compression given the base system only has 512k of RAM. The crackers would strip the protection, repack the data and patch the loading routines to handle that. Depending on the games they could fit 3 or 4 games on a single disk.

Nowadays the dynamics are different - games on consoles do use compression but they have to favour speed because they are streaming assets just in time. The PS5 even had dedicated decompression hardware to keep up with the data rate on it’s fast SSD.

Why would you? Effectively you are storing the address of the address at the address. It would get more complicated if there where post/pre increments or index offsets involved.