I agree about noise, but you'd need to be careful. People would try to game it by giving themselves as many random chances as possible, by making many accounts or doing whatever was necessary.
It could undermine the legitimacy of the system, as well as put more load on the server.
As far as I'm aware, the rule is if the first syllable starts with a vowel, phonetically.
In your example "MVP", the first syllable starts with an "em", so a vowel. In "Minimal Viable Product" the first syllable starts with the consonant sound.
I had a major pain with this rule when dealing with auto-generation of some API documentation. It ended up just being an issue of detecting/guessing if the text was an abbreviation or some weird CamelCase thing.
No, it means he expected that particular person's code quality to be better than that, because he lasted at a 'Big Four' company for three years and thus should have decent coding chops, but apparently didn't, thus the incongruence made him laugh. It doesn't mean all Amazon coders are shit.
I like figuring out how to look at a sentence how others do (like those images that can be viewed two ways). But I'm having trouble with this one. Amazon devs being generally bad would not be suitable for use as a defense ("in my defense") for his behavior. I think it would require the assumption that he thinks that Amazon devs are generally bad as well as the assumption that he thinks that laughing at them is something that's generally permissible.
I too originally read it as saying that it was expected to be bad coming from Amazon. And the "in my defense" part is that, if you know the coder is from Amazon, then you understand why the code might actually be truly bad enough to elicit a chuckle (as opposed to just chuckling at normal bad code). In other words, it's like saying "in my defense, it was super bad code".
That said, I think the interpretation that "he had 3 years experience at a big company, he should have been better" is probably the correct one.
> I think it would require the assumption that he thinks that Amazon devs are generally bad as well as the assumption that he thinks that laughing at them is something that's generally permissible.
They are so bad that laughing is permissible.
Maybe you just don't spend enough time around arrogant people to interpret this sentence this way :)
I'm guessing from other comments that it checks logins on a wide variety of sites, some of which may be NSFW. Some employers might not like you accessing NSFW sites.
If a filter is set up to not just block access to but also flag based on something as trivial to embed as a URL one would hope the technology would be a little bit more involved than a single hit on a .ico file for a flag.
A web filter / proxy does not have any way to tell whether any individual HTTP request was requested as a result of HTML embedding, bookmarking, user entry or clicking on a link.
If your position is that monitoring HTTP traffic is useless because favicons can be embedded into webpages, what method would you propose to monitor employees browsing habits then?
Furthermore, how would you monitor the HTTP traffic of suspected terrorists? After all, anyone can embed an image to "www.isis.com/blackflag.jpg" into any webpage, so shouldn't we stop monitoring all such traffic?
Your original assertion was that "it's a pretty crappy check", but I think what you are missing here is that it's the only possible check, minor irrelevant flaws and all.
No, it isn't the only possible check, but besides that the 'HTTP traffic of suspected terrorists' will be nicely encrypted in a way that you won't be able to intercept the URLS.
Lots of fearmongering here, if you want to monitor your employees browsing behavior then you're going to have to supply them with the hardware they do the browsing on, lock that hardware down and install some nannyware to do the monitoring. That way you won't have to MITM each and every connection and you'll have a more secure setup overall.
I haven't played it yet, but I've played several of Zachtronics games in the past.
They generally don't teach you technologies that exist in the real world. Real-world concepts are usually just used as a way to make the mechanics of the game more accessible (Spacechem and KOHCTPYKTOP are good examples of this)
However, their games are very programming-centric, having programming skills makes them much more accessible. Their game TIS-100 is literally just assembly programming on a made-up architecture. I wouldn't call them "educational games", but they're certainly very mentally involved.
KOHCTPYKTOP seemed like building things with transistors should work about the same way, but I've only built things with logic gates (and that, only a little). Could you not actually build circuits the way you do in the game? I've actually been thinking of buying a few thousands of transistors (2N3904) (and resistors as needed, which aren't used in the game) to see how far I could get building a (tiny) computer.
It is close to real CMOS circuits, but idealized -- I don't remember all the idealizations (and I'm really not an expert), but e.g. it'd accept a solution that depends on a race condition working out deterministically.
I worked at a fast food place back in high school, I often used this approach to a pretty effective degree. The only issue that can arise is when your increasing friendliness causes the person you're dealing with to get irrationally angry and do something rash, such as throw a cup of coffee at you.
It was pretty painful, but the laughter the situation induced was a nice distraction.
I'd imagine that increasing friendliness in such a situation could easily be interpreted as mocking or patronizing (no matter how sincere you are) and in that case the hostile reaction isn't to the friendliness it's to the mis-perception of it.
in most cases it is patronising; that's the entire point of how you psychologically "win" the encounter by being friendly to someone who is being a jerk to you.
...which is why using social manipulation techniques like these area great for working with strangers or people you will never see again, but mostly a bad idea in more permanent relationships. E.g. with colleagues, repeat customers that you want to see again etc.
