Is there a public disclosure, list of these locations?

It's not surprising. Google support is non-existent. Many times I've asked for support and even on a Google Workspace paid account I was told to "ask the community".

If they stopped building settlements; stopped dissecting the West Bank for the settler's safety and actually acted like they were interested in a two state solution, that'd be pretty good.

Few sane people are criticising Israel's right and necessity to defend its citizens (although the way they're going about it is certainly fair game) - where it appears most critics (including myself) have a problem is in that subset of Israelis who oppose peace and (especially through the settlements) do everything possible to obstruct it - and have been controlling the government in recent years. Hamas's behaviour is indefensible. But unprovoked it is not, and for the Israeli government to play the innocent in this is just taking the piss.

TL;DR As history proves, violence without a political dimension only begets more violence.

Yes, this is something that people forget in their "logic". If they block ads how can they know if a site is showing obtrusive advertising?

As I replied above, there are different models - CPM (cost per thousand) will pay publishers per ad shown. This is an option for branding. CPC (cost per click) will pay publishers if an action happens (a click in this context).

Saying "I block ads because I won't click on them anyway" hurts the same, because we don't know if the model is CPM or CPC.

Not exactly. There are different models - CPM (cost per thousand) will pay publishers per ad shown. This is an option for branding. CPC (cost per click) will pay publishers if an action happens (a click in this context).

Saying "I block ads because I won't click on them anyway" hurts the same, because we don't know if the model is CPM or CPC.

This is a naive view. Once micropayments or subscriptions kick in people will just go somewhere else.

In our site we offer a subscription service where users can customize their experience around the site... The number of subscribers count around the couple of hundreds out of a user base of hundred thousand.

If you make the offer "in your face" people complain. If you send out an email reminding there's such an option they call it spam. Even at $5 a month people complain.

Their reasoning? "We are the content creators when we comment in the blog posts or forums so we shouldn't have to pay, and we shouldn't have to have advertising".

These users who many times comment how they have benefited from the connections made through the site ignore the costs of running the site - colocation, traffic, software, development, tax, insurance, salaries, etc, etc...

You can indeed. It's on the Privacy tab in Safari preferences on the Mac, and the Privacy section of Safari preferences on iOS.

Personally, I've no objection as long as I'm *asked* to opt-in. If I'm not, the default should be opt-out.

John Battelle's main thrust seems to be that Apple shouldn't be blocking advertisers from tracking users. Further, that he angry that Apple opted him out by default, rather than forcing him to opt-in to privacy.

Regardless of your views on the evil of (Apple|Google|whoever) this seems an odd argument. Unless you're an advertiser, of course.

On the employment law, there's nothing concrete I'm aware of. But there are two reasons we want to avoid the issue anyway - one is that we've had some great people before who don't do a lot outside of work, but are excellent here. And there's the cover-one's-arse thing ofc :-)

I should add, mind, that this only relates to having such work as an entry gate. I'm definitely all in favour of candidates with such things on the side and love nothing more than to hear about them.

I'm a bit confused here, so I'll labour the point as you may be right and our candidates may be also confused, which would indeed defeat the purpose. So I'll try explaining it in a similar manner to how to give it to candidates and if you still see it as a complex task then we may need to do some work on our framing.

Bear in mind this is a similar question to the one we give, not the same. But we use a game board for the chosen game to demonstrate the rules, especially given many of our candidates aren't British.

Given the rules of Battleships, implement fireAt(x: Int, y: Int): Boolean so that, when given board x, the method when called alternately by each player will return true if a hit was made and false if a miss was the result.

Hence a game would go along the lines of:

Player 1 - fireAt(3, 3) = false
Player 2 - fireAt(4, 5) = true
Player 1 - fireAt(2, 3) = false

And so on.

So this problem can really be solved with an array check + update. Plus it's nicely extendable - if people nail it immediately, you could work on a win condition for instance. And it really has nothing whatsoever to do with actually playing the game.

Sorry, I obviously didn't state this clearly enough. We're interested in an impl for the method, not a client. We're not interested in a game-playing algorithm. We're aiming for something so simple it can be implemented using an array.

There are two puzzles we actually use, and we chose them via brainstorming and then getting a few people here to try them themselves. We're very definitely not trying to solve something seen before - rather, we aim for a simple game because we can demonstrate the mechanics on a game board during the interview. As mentioned below, we timebox it and try to remove as much pressure as possible. This isn't a Google style logic puzzle, but array manipulation.

As for filtering prior, we tried it. It didn't really work. Firstly, we had the fraud problem (only caught them once, but that was worrying enough). Secondly, there's the ownership problem - many employers aren't happy with their property being used in future interviews. And finally, if you ask for open-source or private projects theirs an entire kettle of fish with regards to discrimination (i.e. does this discriminate against those with family responsibilities etc.).

Add to this that we're a very small team, with no HR support. It's often a better use of our time to spend 30-60m with someone than to spend time bouncing (often worthless) CVs around, liaising over tasks etc.

Sorry, I perhaps didn't state clearly enough. We're interested in an implementation of the method, not a technique for playing the game. At it's simplest, it's an array storage and lookup problem.

I should also note we timebox it to 40m, and we tell them that we don't mind if they sit and think for 35m before writing anything. We give them the option of ignoring us or using us as a pair. And we offer feedback during the process, e.g. if they look stuck or headed off on a tangent. Of course any problem feels an order of magnitude in an interview, so we try to minimise it.

If you're interested in work in London, you've got a reasonable grasp of Java and you love web development drop me a line ( j s h i e l l at yazino com). We're a small company so we can't currently manage people entirely sans experience, but a couple of years + passion may well do the trick and we're happy to train to fill in the gaps.

And we're desperate for good, passionate web developers.

Not a chance, as I hope some of my interviewees read Slashdot :-)

However, similar problems would be something like the game of Battleships - I'd provide a simple interface for the game logic (e.g. fireAt(x: Int, y: Int): Boolean) and ask them to go about solving it. So no worrying on graphics or such niceties, just simple data structure manipulation. And as previously mentioned, most don't even run - we're much more interested in the approach than a working solution.