With just the stock tools, I can push my GeForce pretty far (relatively spoken, absolutely nowhere near what "professional" overclockers can achieve, of course), and it may appear stable for many hours, until suddenly it crashes anyway.

So what's the qualification of a "successful" overclock? Is it just passing a benchmark, and after that for all we care it can go up in flames?

Even though it's rare, I actually do use it if I want to talk to another host on a very specific interface. Sometimes there's multiple paths.

I must say, I rather enjoy both IPv6s autoconfiguration, and the fact that my non-link-local addresses are actually unique (and if I want to, routable).

Just yesterday I tried to use rsync (like I do all the time, in my mind there's no reason to use scp when rsync does everything better), but this time I needed to specify an IPv6 address. On the (admittedly ancient) rsync version that comes with macOS, this doesn't work:

rsync foo 'user@[fe80::4]:/tmp'

Note already, how I had to put the second argument in quotes, because otherwise the shell tries to expand the square brackets as filename expansion.

But even then rsync just complains, because rsync itself separates host from path through colon. I think the only workaround is to do something like `rsync -e 'ssh user@[fe80::4] ...'`... but I just used an updated rsync from homebrew, which is of course the saner method. Still, just another colon/bracket-caused issue.

Nonetheless I do agree that the choice of colons isn't great due to how it ambiguates their meaning.

I'm an avid user of IPv6 by the way, I don't share a lot of the criticism. For me personally it's a net positive. But this is a wart where I wish they went a different direction.

Source ending in “/“: You want what’s inside. Source not ending in “/“: You want the thing (i.e. directory itself). For the destination, it does not matter whether it ends in “/“ or not, but for consistency I like adding a “/“ anyway (I want to put thing inside the directory).

a) The potential employer vastly overstepped commonly accepted boundaries.

b) It was totally implied that the questions were to be answered in the context of work. "What was the hardest challenge you had to overcome?" in that context relates to e.g. debugging a hard concurrency problem, not your divorce.

What stood out to me is that whatever interpretation is the correct one, the candidate was willing to give (apparently) deeply personal answers. That's just something to adjust for in upcoming interviews, we live and learn.

What would be the point of conducting an entire hour+ long interview where the candidate is only giving you irrelevant answers and you make no attempt to get them on track?

That's vastly overstepping commonly accepted boundaries. Sure, some surface level smalltalk is normal and expected: "Any hobbies? Ah, you like hiking? Nice. Where do you like to hike? Oh, I did that, too. Might I suggest hiking there and there? I bet you'd like it. Anyway, moving on!" Common ground helps conversations flow.

But an employer asking about your personal relationships? Your needs, fears, and desires outside of any technical context? (My needs, fears, and desires from compiler toolchains are totally within scope.) Your traumata? That's a level of intrusiveness crossing into "rude" territory. They have no business of asking.

"Innocuous" icebreaker questions about hobbies, the weekend, or whatever, can be surprisingly problematic.

The questions and answers often inadvertently imply things about family status, religion, physical ability/disability, socioeconomic class, age, heritage, etc. that interviews are supposed to steer clear of.

For me, this was best illustrated by one of the https://www.linkedin.com/in/lornaerickson/ funny video skits, in which the interviewer character was using "innocuous icebreaker" chat aggressively to try to extract information all over the no-no list of things you aren't supposed to ask.

(Then the skit was funny again, after the fact, when I was in an interview with some barely-out-of-school founder, who was intentionally doing one of the things from the skit...)

I had a bizarre interview (at an extremely well-known company with an eccentric, controversial founder) where the recruiter asked me directly questions that "BigTech interview training" explicitly taught me to never ask or even walk close to. I was actually shocked and stammered out an awkward "Uhh, I'm pretty sure it's fraught with risk to even ask those things" non-answer, but she seemed genuinely surprised I wouldn't go into personal family details during a professional job interview. So, it seems not everyone has gotten the memo...

Example: At the very start of the interview, candidate suddenly feels like they have to hide something about their religion, sexual orientation, or whatever, in how they answer. Or feels like their candid answer to the icebreaker was not received well.

Which is the opposite of what the interviewer intended, with an icebreaker, but their training didn't include how tricky casual icebreakers can be.

> Sure, some surface level smalltalk is normal and expected: [...] Common ground helps conversations flow.

`smalltalk` is a misleading term for an interesting form of protocol negotiation.

OP didn't say that, he said "hardest day of my life, my biggest life challenges" and then characterized it (his opinion) 'similar “trauma-baiting” questions'

asking a young person (I don't know that he was young, just saying) "what was the hardest day of your life" is a pretty standard question. Like on a college application, they expect you to answer it. Young people often don't have enough other experience to fall back on, and in a context in which you are expected to make yourself look good, the filter that is expected is to emphasize something that you were successful/resourceful at.

I would suggest that this is a misremembering. As someone who's hosted thousands of interviews at companies big and small, all of the questions were scoped to professional work. Why? because when you ask things like "what was the hardest day in your life" you have a non-trivial chance of getting your interviewee tell you about the time they saw someone die, cleaned up a suicide attempt, or developed a new fear. That or you see someone make something up on the spot.

Its just not a useful question. If they answer honestly, then they are going to just going to remember that sad feeling of re-living trauma. If they don't answer honestly, they are more than likely going to be pissed off at the weird prying question.

These questions are emotionally expansive, you could have been getting on really well, shared a joke, had a great conversation. All of that will be blotted out by remembered pain.

The reason why people ask "can you tell me a time you overcame a big obstacle to achieve a business outcome" is threefold:

1) can you describe a blocker with the right amount if context

2) can you talk about improving things without insulting the people blocking you

3) can you think of ways to non-destructively overcome problems

Asking about when your pet died doesn't give you useful information

Someone working for the police could say: "Yeah, my boss made me clean up a triple homicide."

Or a janitor at a fast food could say: "We found a dead addict in the toilets."

Like these are all profession related answers. Yet they are not answers you want. Stop asking dumb questions.

I much prefer asking about things the candidate would take from or actively avoid from the previous job.

Is that true? Is that a cultural thing that I do not get? I am in the same boat as OP and consider these questions, if intended for no-work specific context, very inappropriate. The age is irrelevant. If you are interviewing a young applicant who is not expected to have work experience, ask them about sth in the school context instead of work context.

Young people can still have really bad experiences. Especially when you interview a big number of people, you are guaranteed to fall upon some pretty bad. It seems to me that the right expected way to answer such a question is to find some personal experience that is bad, but not _that bad_, and then try to flip it and show you persevered. It seems to me that you are selecting for people who are better in making up stories this way, than anything else, because there is very often no way to answer such a question in any truthful, factual manner.

Personally I would only give answers in a work related context, and make sure to be clear that this is the way I interpreted the question.

This is not a standard job interview question at all.

In fact if you tried asking this at any company with a legal or HR team, you'd get pulled out of interviewing people until they could train you appropriate job interview questions.

When I ask that kind of question, I'm not asking you to share about a breakup, or death of a parent, or some other non-working issue, and I would think it very inappropriate for you to do so (thus, the quick rejection email). Instead, I'm asking about how you navigated losing all your code due to a backup issue or how you dealt with a difficult client or coworker or even some problem at work that threw you for a loop for weeks. That's the subtext of these questions, as the original commentator also made quite clear.

Cubicle drama, hey?

Easy stuff. I've got a million+ SLOC behind me, no real cubicle stories worthy of note resulting, just had a few days at work clearing air strips at high altitude in Papua, had to work for a couple of weeks at gunpoint after one of our lovely clients detonated a nuclear device near enough our plane for the shock wave to affect the flight dynamics, nearly lost a whole boat to a fire under the kerosene filled float cables in the Spratly Islands region (after getting boarded constantly by various gunboats).

All good though.

The original comment says:

> Like on a college application, they expect you to answer it.

I don't know if that changes your interpretation, but if the other replies are any indication, yours is not the default.

The comment I was responding to was saying that the question was about your non-working life, and that it’s normal to do so.

You’re trying to argue something else. I’m only saying that interviews questions about your personal life are out of scope.

It is 100% not standard to ask questions about someone’s personal life.

It's a chance for you to meet the actual CEO (or VP or whatever in a larger company), and also for them to get to meet you in advance, instead of effectively getting "blindsided" by a new person (to exaggerate a bit).

Usually, by the time you've gotten to that point, the decision to hire you has well and truly been made. I don't know what then would need to happen for the actually rather secondary function of giving the CEO the opportunity to veto to become relevant. I'd be curious hearing about anyone who's ever experienced it (on whatever side). I guess it can be a safeguard against vastly unaligned values, but I suspect it's very rare.

But primarily, and effectively, it's usually just a meet-and-greet. And it's hard for me to blame a CEO (or VP etc.) for at least getting to anyone who's going to enter a mutual contract to effectively become part of their company.

That was not the case in this scenario. I was told I would be offered the role if I came out favorable with the CEO (did he like me or not? did I jump when the said "jump"?). To me this meant that the CEO doesn't trust the people he hires. He clearly didn't trust the hiring manager's jugement and/or respected their position. The CEO delegated a task and responsibility but then felt to have to authority to override that, which maybe he does. However, that's not a culture in which I want to operate. If I was wrong, so be it, but I saw a red flag and I made a choice.

I remember from my friends who worked at Google at the time, that everyone’s always been told that “every new hire’s contract lands on Larry Page’s desk, he has to sign off on it”, and you can probably bet your bottom dollar that Larry Page didn’t spend a lot of time on each hiring package, if any.

If you can't trust the people you have hired to hire people then you shouldn't have hired them.

Yes, it usually is. But in this case the problem was that the CEO could unilaterally override the decision made by everyone else, so it wasn't just a meet-and-greet.

Generally the chat with the VIP means: "You have the job, but I (VIP) want to just double check that my underling hiring managers are not totally useless."

No, you don't have the offer at all. If you did, you would already have the offer letter in hand and the meeting with the VIP would just be a casual meet-and-greet. When it is part of the interview process, it is very deliberately because the VIP has veto power, and thus the decision to hire has not been finalized.

Your job when talking to the VIP person at the end is to "sound like a likable, competent person, who VIP would be cool with saying 'yea I hired this person'."

As you point out, the VIP is the one making the hiring decision. Everyone before the VIP was just a filter before the actual decision-maker.

(Outside of tech) the only time it's normal for a VIP to be involved in the interview process is when they're interview for executive or other management level positions, or for a role that would be working directly with management on a regular basis. But tech likes to do things backward, and insist that a VIP wasting their time on a lower-level hire is somehow normal. It's not normal in any other industry.

(And of course the CEO can override any hiring decision anyway. The question is if they will.)

That's a huge red flag for any workplace. The only time you should ever consider taking a job at a company like that is if you're unemployed and you need the job and have no other prospects.

I'm always a bit puzzled that this needs to be pointed out? I don't have sleep apnea per se, at least not chronically, but I've definitely had bouts of it due to allergy, sickness, stuff like that. The symptoms are the same because the mechanism is the same: I didn't get enough oxygen in the night.

It's always glaringly obvious to me the next day. I feel way more tired and exhausted than I normally would given the amount of sleep. I sometimes had instances of waking up gasping for air.

I really don't need to be told in those instances that there was an issue during the night. My sleep didn't sleep, of course there's something wrong and needs to be looked at?

Like, one time's a fluke, but if it happens a lot...

One, not all sleep apnea patients snore. 20% do not snore

Second, I am not sure what your experience has to do with people that DO have sleep apnea? If you are correct and you do NOT have chronic sleep apnea, then it makes sense you would notice clearly on the nights you did. For someone who has suffered from it for years (or even their whole life), they aren't going to have anything to compare it to. They don't 'feel way more tired and exhausted' then normal because THIS IS THEIR NORMAL. If everything feels the same as it always feels, why would they assume it was sleep apnea?

Just because you experience something a particular way doesn't mean everyone does

You noticed it because it’s happened to you occasionally. What about people who’ve been experiencing it most of their lives? To them, they are just tired all the time and don’t know why. It could be any number of things.

To someone who’s never experienced it, how could they understand?

My wife has bad sleep apnea and has to use a CPAP - neither of us noticed or understood the issue until she did a sleep study to deal with her bad snoring. We knew she was tired all the time, but attributed it to factors like work stress or maybe diet.

The average person’s understanding of sleep apnea is probably around the level of “it exists and they have to wear a device at night” and not much more.

Maybe it was always that much obvious to me that what should have been a good night of sleep had no, or maybe even a negative, effect on my wellbeing, and therefore something must be wrong during the sleep.

But if the effects are a bit more muted and accumulate more gradually, and you've never heard much about sleep apnea, you might not directly attribute it to the sleep itself.

I remember one person who thought waking up tired is just part of being an adult?

The original comment said "multiple folds higher chances to be depressed, unemployed", for me that's a bit like saying that being on fire has a very high chance to make you depressed and unemployed.

Yeah, of course that's true, but the effect on performance and well-being after a sleep apnea night is so obvious to me, I don't have to look for the proximate cause...

EDIT: Through the other answer came to me that maybe in other cases, it's not so directly obvious just after waking up.

>

> I'm always a bit puzzled that this needs to be pointed out?

You're puzzled that most people don't know the symptoms of sleep apnea? Maybe there are big campaigns where you are, but I've never seen any public information about its symptoms.

This is surprising to me. I'd have guessed it decreases quadratically (i.e. due to the inverse square law), not exponentially.

The paragraph below seems to contain an explanation, but I don't really understand it (namely because I don't know what that percentage "Coverage" column actually means, or what we mean with "the total distance at each QAM step").

Each data rate in the standard uses a different encoding technique. "Faster" encoding techniques cram more data into a given transmission interval but require a higher signal to noise ratio to be received without error. Since SNR declines with distance you can have a rough idea at what distance from a transmitter you will be able to receive at what data rate.

However, people and vendors focus far too much on maximum throughput. I've seen data showing that even in the best conditions, clients spend about 1% of their time transmitting or receiving at the highest data rates. Because they are dynamically adjusting the data rate based on the perceived SNR.

Individual clients' peak throughput also works against _aggregate_ throughput when talking about wireless networks with multiple users. If you have 100 clients, do you want one to be able to dominate the others or everyone get a more or less equal share? These peak speeds assume configurations that I would never deploy in practice, because they favour individual users and cripple aggregate throughput - things like 160 MHz wide channels.

But the sticker speed is what sells..

Correlated, but obviously bad code can really fuck with neighbors. And each client has an incentive to be greedy so users of that client get a better experience. So you fall back again to QOS for what you care about..

Basically this. They way we usually put it is that we want clients to "get on and off the channel as quickly as possible". That requires all clients in range of each other to be behaving (respecting the rules) and using fast enough data rates to minimise their consumption of precious air-time.

Under the hood though, it's a very granular frame-by-frame, almost nanosecond-by-nanosecond thing that leads to the overall throughput at a human timescale. To give you a sense, let me try to summarise the factors affecting throughput this way:

- Data Rate: the transmitting client can adjust the data rate of each frame up or down per frame if they want. For example, a single TCP session on a 2.4GHz channel could in theory see data rates everywhere between 1Mbps and 450Mbps. But in practice most drivers I've seen adjust up or down incrementally. And in a healthy network, they usually hover around the top 25% of the mutually supported data rates (but they also spend very little time at the highest data rate, typically less than 1%). Also the AP could be using different data rate to the client, and usually is. The rx and tx directions are effectively separate streams and data rate is always chosen solely by the transmitter.

- Block Size: Similar to TCP windowing. Data can be sent in multi-frame 'bursts' before an acknowledgement is required by the transmitter for it send more. In the original Wi-Fi, every frame had to be acknowledged. Later standards introduced this idea of block acknowledgements.

- Re-transmits: Whenever acknowledgements are not received, the data has to be resent. Block size will be reduced, possibly to 1, so it will also take longer. Note that re-transmits are expected and very routine in Wi-Fi, whereas in TCP they are usually considered more of an exception (except on the internet). I've observed re-transmit rates of 20% in networks where no user is perceiving any sort of issue at all. So Wi-Fi is very robust to frame loss, up to a point, but even so, re-transmits do end up having a large impact on the aggregate throughput.

- Clear channel wait time: It's no exaggeration to say that transmitters spend most of their _waiting_ to transmit. And a big chunk of that wait time is just waiting for the medium to be clear - the clear channel assessment. If the client thinks there is a transmission going on, it just has to kill time.

- Other wait times: Even when the channel seems clear, there are various requirements to do nothing before and after transmitting. For example, the inter-frame spacing interval and the random back-off interval. These are just the rules of play. In fact, congestion avoidance on Wi-Fi could be said to be entirely a matter of timing.

Note that these are a simplification and clearly I can't mention everything or cover all the nuances. But, in the way I've framed it here, the clear-channel wait time and the re-transmit rate do basically encapsulate the impact of intangibles I didn't mention, like congestion and noise/interference.

TLDR; Wi-Fi transmissions are extremely lumpy at their native timescale, but many seem a lot smoother than many TCP transmissions at human timescales.

> Correlated, but obviously bad code can really fuck with neighbors.

Also true. Bad code is usually exemplified in Wi-Fi by bad drivers (looking at you Broadcom). These will cause clients to "stick" to bad APs when they should roam, or pick the wrong channel/AP/band in the first place. Intel is generally very good.

> And each client has an incentive to be greedy so users of that client get a better experience.

Greed is good in the sense that clients want to transmit their data as soon and as fast as possible and we want them too! But they have to respect the rules. Of course there's only a handful of chipset vendors so they mostly do. But within that, there's still plenty of room for clients and APs to do things that are _sub-optimal_ even if they are Wi-Fi legal, as per the sticky client example I mentioned.

> So you fall back again to QOS for what you care about..

Wi-Fi does indeed have its own implementation of QoS which is of course a timing dance! But I think you're referring to QoS in higher layers like IP. So it's worth mentioning that this WiFi stuff is all happening at layers 1 & 2. All the congestion detection and re-transmissions and so on that may be happening in higher-layer protocols like TCP are happening _in addition_ to what is going on at the WiFi layers.

If you have a good connection and are successfully able to transmit packets to your AP at 600Mbps, and your neighbour has a poor connection and is transmitting at 6Mbps to his AP at that moment, you literally have to wait ~100 times as long for a free medium before you can attempt to transmit. And that's for every single frame. Then you have to hope his client is well-behaved enough not to transmit while you are transmitting. Otherwise you end up having to wait again and retransmit anyway.

You might not notice this with only 2 clients. It might be the difference between a 80MBps and a 50MBps download for example. But it decays exponentially with the number of clients.

This is also why it's often better if everyone uses lower transmit power (while still retaining coverage), as networks farther away will see less interfering networks.

But then again, the sentence uses the term "signal strength", not "throughput", so that would suggest quadratically. But I guess "signal strength" could be meant colloquially and mean more than just the raw signal power received by the antenna, here.

It's all very fuzzy to me, as it stands.

Where is it pretty common? I have never heard that (outside of being a mistake)

Because the variable is the base, not exponent.