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This is the WARN notice for the _previous_ layoff in October. Presumably they'll file another one for the next wave this week.

Beej's guide to network programming is an all-time classic, and I suspect this is the same (even before I've read it thoroughly).

this is a book for people who think the wizard on the cover of SICP is an actual wizard and get scared

Yes, it seems intuitively obvious, which is why mathematicians spent a long time trying to prove that the conjecture was true. It turns out The conjecture is false in a non-obvious way. The result described in the blog post is a specific counterexample: the conjecture fails, just barely, for a specific graph with several thousand nodes and edges. It's not the kind of counterexample you would intuit in your head or even on a whiteboard.

In the US at least they're a state monopoly

they have a whole complex of particle accelerators; many of the old ones are feeders into LHC

https://home.web.cern.ch/science/accelerators/accelerator-co...

It's floor(_) - as in, floor(1.999) = 0, but floor(2.001) = 2. If you look carefully the upper flange of the [] square brackets is missing, which makes it a floor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floor_and_ceiling_functions

I dunno, man. At least with guitar amps the solid state ones _try_, but even expensive ones kinda suck compared to a tube amp

Maybe Amazon should also ensure employer safety while commuting/walking to the office.

I've never looked into it myself, but they do advertise a service like this around the Seattle offices

It would be nice if that area was something more interesting than a corporate dormitory. Of course this change is ... not the way

That's a lovely photo

You have to eat something, but you don't have to drink. I've seen it described as: Imagine telling alcoholics to keep it under control, while still making them have 2-3 drinks a day!

That's what Blizzard's always done - they didn't invent RTS games, or MMOs, or collectible card games, or roguelikes, they just refined and productized them. I think it's fair to call Overwatch a huge success if you're counting e.g. Diablo and World of Warcraft in there.

Most people don't go to college, but if you did, you're likely to have a mostly college-educated bubble

1. Trial by fire; learning on the job

2. CS stuff is widely available for self-study if you've got good discipline. "The Algorithm Design Manual" by Skiena is my favorite textbook on algorithm fundamentals. CLRS is a bigger book with more mathy crunch, if you're into that.

There's a lot more to computer science and software engineering than just algorithms, but it's what you'll get grilled on the most in junior level interviews. By the same token, the skills you need as you get more senior in this industry aren't really taught in school.

Ah, man, I get being anxious in interviews but it never occurred to me that newbies would be stressed out by their (lack of) Leetcode score. It's totally unnecessary of course - the people who've racked 1500 problems are probably as unemployed as you are :p

I wish the article had more photos - from the one it looks like it could be an awesome rock climbing area

I'm curious what useful applications we have for black holes of any size

It's a meme, like "_____ Considered Harmful". That one started with "GOTO Considered Harmful". This one started with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness...

This is, in fact, an existing product category: the one I'm most familiar with is https://www.beeminder.com/, but it's got a few competitors.

I've never found it particularly useful, but then I'm also too chicken to put up serious cash. I figure I put a high price on having to be disciplined :)

IF you enjoy this kind of thing, (and you aren't already an acoup fan), he wrote an entire article about the biker-gear-leather-fetish trope in Game of Thrones: https://acoup.blog/2020/12/04/collections-that-dothraki-hord...

...which makes it a classic exercise for teaching memoization!

There's an explanation here: https://beepb00p.xyz/unnecessary-db.html (the link behind "Against unnecessary databases")

Cheers! Responding between dumbbell sets - I hope I may never stop being an animal ;)

I mean, you can also just let the data go. "nothing, chaos" is pretty simple. I don't believe being able to search my chatlogs from 2005 would make my life simpler, or better.

Some people are natural archivists and love that second-brain stuff though, and this is a pretty sweet example :). One area I strongly relate to Karlicoss is how bad it is getting data out of my bank; as a regular non-institutional customer I don't get API access, so I have to download a PDF manually every month and run it through some script to parse out the line items.

What's wrong with it? I'd totally believe it's a mess, but I'm curious what kind of mess. Specifically I'm wondering if it's "bad Go code" or the underlying AWS APIs (or both!)

This is a fascinating article that winds through a whole raft of problems that feel super relevant in the software world today: end-to-end encryption, distributed messaging, what we would today call "containerization" (in 1984!), many other things besides. I often dislike this kind of abstract general nonsense but I think there's a really interesting through-line here I hadn't noticed before.

One thing that struck home with me was this line:

Some of these source files were corrupted by byte exchanges, and their owners were forced to the ultimate end-to-end error check: manual comparison with and correction from old listings.

At work I sometimes joke that us SWEs are the last line of retry-and-checksum defense, but it's not a joke! This paper argues correctly that engineering extreme reliability into lower level common components is uneconomical, but on the other hand pushing reliability all the way up the stack doesn't work either. If you surface the jank all the way up to your customers you just have a buggy, crappy product and your business will fail. One level down, if you rely on talented engineers to fight operational fires all the time you have to pay a lot of expensive engineers to not make progress delivering features.