HN user

probablybroken

227 karma
Posts0
Comments81
View on HN
No posts found.

Personally, I find browsing amazon impossible simply due to the widespread mis-categorisation of products. It seems that suppliers just chuck everything into inappropriate categories in the hope that it gets them more views. This renders the platform useless for product discovery, and suggests that you might as well be searching for the product elsewhere. It also gives me the feeling of rummaging through a bargain basement shop, rather than the higher value store that I think Amazon used to be perceived as ( vs e.g, ebay ).

It's worth mentioning that the housings of many products are frequently sold to multiple manufacturers as components ( though in this case I suspect it's probably the same product ). I've also seen suppliers change the contents of batches of products once an order has been placed ( I'm talking palette loads of products that land with changes to the electronics - even as a single importer specialising in a given product it can be impossible to guarantee continuity of supply from the east ). This makes any attempt to police this kind of re-branding highly impractical since you need to disassemble any given product to verify it's contents, even within the same order.

That's really strange... I always found Excel to perform dreadfully on data sets with even just hundreds of thousands of rows - it was always easier to just load the data into a database, or manipulate it with a script.

The cubic earth made me laugh; I'm currently making a planetary terrain generator which uses a normalised cube to generate spherical terrain, so this was particularly close to home :)

This exact theory made me utterly sick of math at a very early age. The response of the school was to assign increasingly more time to math bookwork, which I had completely stalled on. The more I was forced to do it, the more it made me sick, and the slower I progressed. For me at least, having a real application for knowledge is key.

It's true that good developers can learn new things, but it can take years to learn the frameworks and ecosystems. I've seen projects fail due to a lack of skilled developers & having to either recruit contractors, or developers without the relevant background. Being a developer on one of these teams can be a real nightmare.

It's also sometimes possible to get some small contract work with the employer you are leaving, so long as you don't burn any bridges. ( At least in software dev. There are frequently systems no one else knows how to maintain etc. ) It might not be a very appealing idea, but a few weeks work of this type a year can go a long way to offset loss of savings.

You probably are rejecting potentially good candidates, but I would personally suggest that of the developers that I want to hire, most of them are members of the set of developers who know what the modulo operator is for. And since hiring is a numbers game, it seems like a reasonable filter. Besides, you are allowed to ask other questions in the interview.

I find I tend to write bugs after around 7 hour's work, and during the first four, I can throw myself at a new task in a way that at the end of the day I'd be utterly incapable. I think shorter office days would benefit most mature developers. ( I say mature here because I've worked with people who only manage to get things done through many hours extended foot dragging and procrastination. If you can focus, short days can be beneficial. )

This was my feeling too.. I suspect there's enough overlap between those people who are interested in completing IQ tests, and those on the spectrum to create the same effect mentioned by the author. I found their comment about small talk particularly reflects this; My experience is that I can't engage in it with strangers as it feels like forced dumb chat, with the end result that a lot of people I casually interact with end up treating me like I'm mentally retarded.

P++ idea: FAQ 7 years ago

The PHP base is huge, I've known many good PHP developers who prefer stricter implementations, but work with PHP because they get paid to, and because they know the language and libraries end up using it for new projects. This proposal provides a gradual migration path for those users, and makes adoption a lot more likely.

This story also raises an interesting point for development managers; When you transfer a dev to a new project, it's a lot like getting a new job - you ( probably ) won't have the domain knowledge, knowledge of the tools in use, will have to prove yourself to the other developers on that project before anyone takes anything you say seriously - etc; with one key difference - when you get a new job, you would usually expect a pay rise. I think this is a massive problem in larger orgs where developers may be seen as an interchangeable resource, and can be a major contributor to staff turnover, and loss of critical knowledge. Soon all your developers will be 0.1x.

But then you need to either replace your existing team with erlang developers, or retrain them ( and then have to suffer years of criticism and staff losses from those who disagree with the move. ) Probably easier, and potentially more appealing to current managers to recruit more sysadmins / tech ops and have a larger organisational pyramid under them. ( I say this as an erlang developer who works in a primarily java oriented organisation.. Perspectives may vary ;) )

Wouldn't he also have to learn a lot of advanced mathematics? I'd imagine the bunch of graduates in this case would be math majors. Obviously I don't know the specific requirements of your organisation, but this re-skilling might take up to five years ( if the requirements were R&D focused... Maybe the situation is different if it's more about applying pre-existing sofware. )

I'm much the same, but I'd say that regular contact with people does have a levelling effect - it's harder for stress to take hold long term, and it provides a distraction from whatever negative internal dialogue you may suffer. Also, the longer you spend not interacting with others, the less practised and potentially more problematic it may become.

I wonder if a system like this were used in the real world, it might simply end up behaving as a hashing algorithm, always assigning the same category of bug to the same developer - who would become skilled in handling this type of bug and provide confirmation that the system was functioning correctly. ( Obviously I appreciate that this isn't how the system is trained initially ).