pedasmith

Well, most of the people who created the internet have never worked for a FAANG company, so ... no?

R&D includes both "creating new battery recycling capabilities from scratch" and "redesigning the the rear brake lights to be a deeper shade of red to match the recent coloring trends".

Only one of these has long term impacts but they are both "R&D"

I think that the most important goal of our profession is to find and implement high-level concepts so that our users don't need to worry about tiny details.

As an example: when I buy a back-up hard drive from a typical brick store like Costco, the "back up hard drive" is abstracted away: I don't need to study the USB timing diagrams, or worry about the details of how the magnetic domains are imprinted on the spinning disks, or really any of the chemical details of the surface coating.

This abstracting away of details is AWESOME. I can buy a $150 disk drive after spending less than a minute considering the purchase.

Git, on the other hand...

Let me give a real-life example of where real-life git and real-life published work flows don't work: you can go into GitHub.com, and make a project. And you can write code in Visual Studio, and save it up to your new git project.

Unless, of course, when GitHub.com recommended that you add a license. The instant you add a license, the project isn't "empty", and once the project isn't "empty", you can't trivially push your new Visual Studio project up.

The fix for this is to delete your GitHub.com repo.

I bet you'll reply and say, "that's just real-world problem! I only want to hear about theoretical problems!" -- which, IMHO, is one of the problems my profession faces. Real-world problems are ignored in favor of theoretical ones.

I hate the Hole Hawg story with a passion. Firstly, because it's wrong: the story say things like "it's a cube of metal" and "the handle is not ergonomic".

But look at pictures from the maker. It's not a cube, and the handle is in fact ergonomic. Indeed, I would hope that a drill used by expert for hours every day would be 100% designed to make their jobs easier, and that includes not given them crippling injuries. And it's 100% purchasable from Home Depot. And, looking on Amazon, it's half the price of a truly expensive drill.

But there's another level at which the story is bad. The story feels like a story about gatekeeping: either you're one of the special people, or you're a useless homeowner. Either you have big problems, or you shouldn't be here. Either you've dedicated your life to drilling holes, or you're not welcome.

So, I read the story, and it sounds like both an exciting story of a newbie learning that some profession has unexpected depth. At the same time, it's also a story of a person who wants to be part of the special exclusive club.

There was a version created for the S60 (Nokia) platform!

From the Judge: releasing the logs may help clarify whether fraudulent activity interfered with the comment period, as well as whether the agency’s decision-making process is “vulnerable to corruption."

My take: I was one of the flesh-and-blood people who commented. when I did that, I also looked up every comment made by a person with my name. Result: every comment by someone with my name was obvious cut-n-paste.

From my POV, it's clear: the FCC site was swamped with fake comments. Their unwillingness to publicly say so is an abomination in a democracy.

Why would the tax people care at all? They are more likely to take your salary from the two jobs, add them up, and charge taxes on the results.

Where I work, a side job is legit (with the obvious caveats, of course!)

We have anecdotal evidence that one hiring manager says that they care about honesty. The same person hasn't said that they have actually had this situation happen, so it's still hypothetical. OTOH, there's also tons of vague anecdotal evidence that some hiring managers are actually kind of self-righteous jerks.

So we're not actually any farther ahead. Personally, the advice I'd probably give a person in this situation: ask a lawyer from the area. Compared to a FAANG salary, it's a cheap investment. I might also recommend paying cash, and not giving a real name.

You can read the PDF directly from the CDC:

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvss/vsrg/vsrg03-508.pdf?ref=p...

AFAICT, most of them allow split tunnels for work VPN -- most work VPNs are set up to allow access to corporate resources, not block normal usage. Some places have very high security requirements.

Hey, I get to tell m y own two 1990's era threads story.

First: in Windows 3.1, you got exactly one thread. My former company (BBN Software Products, home of the RS/1 statistical program) managed to get a version of RS/1 on Windows by splitting it into two pieces, each of which ran a single thread. On piece (RS/Client) was the UI; it talked to the "server" using TCP/IP (or a shared memory channel if the client and server were on the same machine)

Second: I also got to help port a networking program over to an SGI box. At the time, the SGI GCC-based compiler could either supports threads, or support exceptions, but not both. (And my "unsupported" I mean, "generated code that would crash even if no exception was ever actually generated"). I couldn't convince the company to keep the threads and dump the exceptions, so instead I had to convert the program to spawn new processes with shared memory (!) to emulate the threads.

TL/DR: actually programming with threads at the time was decidedly unsupported.

No, but I know the team and will happily forward the feedback to them.

For a similar take on the problems, but with some different solutions, take a look at the UWP [StreamSocket](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/uwp/api/windows.networking....) (etc) classes.

Specifically, StreamSocket will happily go through proxies for you, will handle TLS / SSL (either at start up or after the connection is established), does IPv4 and IPv6 transparently. We also do service discovery using DNS-SD, although that's technically in a different class, as is the other network information. The SteamSocket class is designed to be very similar to the other socket-style classes like StreamWebSocket, so your code will (mostly) move from one to the other.

I've found from my own experience that the real key to a smooth network experience is the magic technology called "caring". It's easy to test if your code handles network disconnects; just run your code and yank the ethernet cable (or switch off Wi-Fi).

Source: am PM for the Network Developer Experience team at Microsoft and helped design the socket APIs.

Good to know your threshold for major fuck-ups is 20%. Would you accept a grocery store that overcharges you 20% of the time? Would you accept a car that doesn't start 20% of the time?

A reasonable process would do a spot-check, discover that they are horrifically off, and then implement a second-level check.

Did they really? My recollection is that they had a slow and inefficient pipeline that would never be able to handle the speed that Amazon fills order at.

How about proof of citizenship for the right to a free press? Should we require a passport to get into church? Do only citizens get to walk into a post office? Do I need to show someone an ID before I send a letter to my representative?

Let me put it into computer terms: when your program isn't fast enough and you've got a nice profile trace, do you start your analysis with the functions using up a lot of time? Or do you start among the functions that aren't using lots of time?

Why approach vote fraud any other way? The majority of vote fraud (the 'r' is deliberately dropped, BTW) is by the incumbent party systematically preventing votes and voters from being counted.

Jimmy Carter tells the story, for example, of a town in Georgia where the voters were recorded as having voted in alphabetical order. That's real vote fraud, and something that no amount of pretend voter ids will help.

I just read the executive order. For a programmer, I think I'm pretty good at reading government-ese, but wow! given the words in the order, I'm not quite sure how that translates into Adobe not being able to offer their cloud.

Can anyone with more experience translate the order?

The VCs that were funding the startup I worked for got spooked and demanded an immediate reduction in force; I was one of the programmers that got hit.

The market the company was in didn't shrink, and they kept on making money, so the VCs were definitely not the all-seeing oracles that day :-)

Personally: the Seattle-area housing market shrank (and has since recovered), which didn't affect me because I already had a house. And I found a new job pretty quick.

Essentially, all your numbers are subtly wrong and all of their wrongness is making the final number look much larger. You have to adjust for inflation, including 'weird' inflation. You have to account to suddenly becoming disabled after 20 years. Including the employer contribution is arguably misleading.

Social security is security: no matter how I get screwed, I'm only poor when I'm old, not poverty stricken and dead.

Yes, and note that the tax is .5% -- that's more of a pittance than a serious boundary.

IMHO, it's red-state spite.

Missing from the story: Virginia was one of the "red" states that didn't expand Medicaid to the lower to middle class. This has two follow-on effects: a bunch of people didn't have insurance, and the federal government stopped shoveling cash to hospitals that provided treatment to people without insurance.

Weirdly, when I pop the data into a linear regression program, it pretty clearly shows an upward trend. Additionally, the article preferred (strongly) to point to non-peer reviewed articles and not actual data.

Unless my math is wrong, that's about 70 people. They all probably already know each other.

Weirdly, the article didn't notice the very strong correlation between "states that didn't accept the Medicaid expansion" and "places with under-payed rural hospitals".

This seems like an absolutely elementary analysis to do -- places with the Medicaid expansion are more likely to have people with health insurance; places without are less likely.

Take a look at https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3397 for one way to get this set up. Your DHCP server can give you a list of host suffixes to try whenever you have a short name.

Cite, please. America went through a painful contraction in tax revenues during the giant recession but have bounced back since then. Taxes have not notably increased.

Yes, I program in my own variant in a calculator app ("Best Calculator, IOT edition") that I wrote. The calculator is programmable in BASIC; this is a surprisingly powerful combination.

Writing small programs to automate a calculation is something that should be accessible to everyone; when I created the BASIC editor and overall system the goal was to have as few steps between a user thinking "hey I want to automate this calculation" and having the program be written.

BASIC has a great sweet spot: simple commands, but still a real language. My version, of course, doesn't require line number and has real functions.

The real question is: what training would you drop in order that the pilots get this alternate training? You can't just say, "train train train"; eventually the pilots have to actually fly.

Indeed -- Tesla lived for free for years in a New York hotel. The hotel owners felt that his mere presence made the entire building a nicer place.