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njonsson

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meet.hn/city/29.7589382,-95.3676974/Houston

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Interests: DevOps, Mentorship, Privacy, Programming, Remote Work

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engineering at Oracle Health, ex-Amazon • nilsjonsson.com • hachyderm.io/@njonsson

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The best high-GI food I have found is Welch's fruit snacks. They are superior to glucose tablets: (1) Can be swallowed whole quickly and easily, or dissolved by saliva. (2) More concentrated, so you can pocket or pack more glucose in less space. (3) Can be compressed in a pocket or backpack without turning to powder that leaks everywhere. A packet of fruit snacks is 17 g of carbohydrate, which is small enough to catch moderate crashes and large enough when doubled to catch major crashes.

In 2020, the Amazon Principal Engineer community added a ninth tenet. Much effort went into crafting the new tenet, as was the case with the others. The new tenet may be my favorite of them all.

LEAD WITH EMPATHY

Principal Engineers shape an inclusive engineering culture where others are heard, feel respected, and are empowered. We are conscious of how our words and demeanor impact others, especially those with less influence; we take responsibility for that impact, intentional or otherwise. Our work builds productive relationships across teams and disciplines, and across a wide range of life experiences.

Hash tables 7 years ago

Nitpick: The talk by Dr Cliff Click is dated February 2007, closer to 13 years ago than six years ago.

Simpler, yes, in the sense that just one instrument (the soloist) would have to play notes they were not prepared to play. But a concerto (typically a long piece for one or more solo instruments accompanied by orchestra) showcases the solo instrument, both by exposing it and by demanding much from the soloist’s technique and interpretive powers. It’s a shorter order for the orchestra to adapt than for the soloist to do so.

It only applies to procedural knowledge, of course, but there’s a similarity here between “teaching it to a toddler” and writing a program that does it. I often find huge gaps in my domain knowledge and understanding, not while I’m composing a readme up front but while I’m writing code.

Unless I’m mistaken, if Alice pays 9% of $117,000 (i.e., $10,530), then Bob pays 11.7% of $234,000 (i.e., $27,400).

An 18% tax rate would apply to earners of $1,170,000 (i.e., $210,600 in tax).

The high end would be a 63% tax rate applicable to earners of $117 billion (i.e., $73.71 billion in tax).

This calls to mind the office scene in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash in which Y.T.’s mother reads a directive from her employer. She self-consciously scrolls through the dull text — aware of her employer’s automated surveillance system as she does so — pausing and returning to an earlier section of the text to create the impression of careful reading.

It strikes me that an hourly rate that increases over the life of a project might be a way for a freelancer to skew his billable hours toward new development and away from maintenance. It also reflects the fact that the freelancer’s knowledge of a particular client becomes more valuable over time. On the other hand, an increasing hourly rate is a tougher sell to potential clients.

I had an elevated Lp(a) level and was able to reduce it dramatically by taking niacin, under the supervision of my cardiologist. YMMV?

  Plus, in the history of the world, he said, is there one
  thing you can think of that has been hand-made, and on such
  a large scale as software, that was as complex?  [I cannot
  not.]
Yes: musical compositions. The largest software projects are more complex, and take longer to complete, than symphonies. But the failure rate is probably comparable.

There are probably plenty of commercial composers who write music mostly because it’s a job they can do, and they derive a modicum of satisfaction from it. But the composers who have made history — just like the programmers who have made history — do it because they must. If they give it up, they cease to do what they were made to do.

All decent suggestions. I quibble with this, though:

  // Don't do this:
  function getData() { }
  // Do this instead:
  var getData = function() { };
The assignment is righteous, but by omitting the function’s name, you make stack traces more difficult to follow. Better this instead:
  var getData = function getData() { };

Making semantic line breaks (such as for bullets) is understandable, but it still feels wrong that we’re otherwise doing the job of `fold`. I started breaking lines in commit messages because it’s convention, but I still believe this is a tooling issue.

This shell script wraps wide commit messages to the width of your console.

    GIT_PAGER="fold -s -w`stty size | awk '{print $2}'` | less" git log $@
Dropbox Easter Egg? 15 years ago

There’s an irreverent wagging tongue in there, too.

   greetings

       to

  AAPL    GOOG

   :)  :P  :)

      MSFT
Was it prophetic of iCloud and Google Drive??
Java's Comb-Over 15 years ago

That’s the most compelling argument I’ve heard for regularly paying down technical debt, and/or for acquiring it with great care. The craftsmanship argument — made by Uncle Bob and others — holds guilty appeal for me as a hacker but strikes me as self-indulgent. What’s compelling about your perspective here is its rational basis in the interest of the product owner. I had not thought of user stories as an abstraction, and therefore a probably leaky abstraction.

Successful economic models cannot be divorced from the cultural context in which they arise. American-style Capitalism was born during the Protestant Reformation. This religious movement provided a theological basis for individual property rights and free enterprise, as well as the understanding that actors in such a system must be restrained by conscience and charity toward their fellows.

We cannot expect to solve the problems of human nature via economics or public policy when the philosophical and religious landscape has shifted.

Why pi? 16 years ago

On a purely superficial note, here are Knuth's recent Google searches, according to the Safari search box dropdown list that flashes by at 2:22:

• google calculator

• wolfram alpha

• williams cutlery

• craig gentry

• "the lost chord"

• acrobat scroll speed

• html bulleted list

• html subscript

• doerr "protocol partition number"