It's worth it, if you have to type the boilerplate code hundreds of times. Consider the time wasted in debugging errors due to typos etc. It's even more worth if that shell script (or, in my case an emacs yasnippet) is parameterized.
I've often found that one is better served by saying "please take this in the helping way" outright as opposed to relying on over-cliche phrases like "I don't mean to be X."
Being earnest and dare I say somewhat unique in your discussions can often produce better results than crutching on over-used phrases. This is a reason I stick to phrases like "I apologize for" over "I'm sorry for", or "I appreciate that" over "Thank you for." When words/phrases you intend to convey become noise or just another figure of speech, why bother saying them at all?
All EV certificates provide that feature, not just the ones sold by Verisign. Are you a paid shill of Verisign?
In general, no one should ever do business with Verisign, due to their practice of domain slamming, their Site Finder misfeature, and other shady practices.
"VeriSign was sued in 2002 for their actions in sending ambiguous emails informing people, often incorrectly, that their domain was about to expire and inviting them to click on a link to renew it. Renewing the domain resulted in the registration company being transferred to VeriSign from the previous registrar."
Ok, I didn't know that. What I should investigate is whether the same people that authorized those shady tactics are still in charge there (or whether that culture persists).
Mostly, they are the same. There are some "addons" that are possible with SSL certificats. For example wildcard certificats which are valid on all subdomains, included support, encryption strength, browser support and others.
I adblock YouTube comments, personally. I suppose this is a cute modification of that same idea, but I'd rather not have to get another extension when ones I have already suit that purpose.
Are both fundamentally not the same thing? I understand that company A may have made you a bit uncomfortable, but perhaps their intent was the same as company B's? That is, to see how you logic out a problem. You did say that you got the job in the end, so clearly the point wasn't to see if you knew some APIs by memory as a make-or-break situation.
There's also some benefits that can be gained by company A's method ostensibly over company B's. You get to see their response to the discomfort of not remembering an API. You get to understand their problem solving abilities, not in terms of code, but in terms of interpersonal relationships. In a recent article I read, someone had suggested offering a code prompt and then challenging the applicant to find the bug on completion (even if there wasn't one), simply to see how they respond when faced with that challenge.
Naturally it may not be perfect, it's just hard to really quantify which one is "better" if they're arriving at the same end -- a presumably competent engineer being hired. Are companies not interested in hiring people with both interpersonal skills and technical ability, after all?
Fair point. :) However, I would argue that in company A's scenario, the discomfort I got from not remembering the APIs would never happen in real world situations where API documentation and Google/StackOverflow are readily available.
Ideally, if one does really well in whiteboard situations then great. But similar to how some engineers give terrible public talks, we can't discount the ones that do get nervous in those situations.
It would be interesting to see if you could use a system like this to automagically derive background colors for image display, picking muted complimentary colors to make the dominant color in an image "pop", so to speak.
You can do this by representing the colors into HSV and then modifying the hue by 180%, desaturating them and then adjusting the brightness (v). Most color libraries will let you deal in RGB(A) or HSV so this is pretty straightforward to DIY.
There's a joke in there somewhere...