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tehwalrus

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Senior Software Engineer at picotech.

I have a Physics PhD, am a Linux user (formerly a Mac user), I used Python and C/C++/Cython extensions to do lots of data analysis for a PhD at Imperial College London from Jan 2011-Dec 2014, working with complex systems (mathematical graphs, 3D graphics incl OpenGL, computational geometry, and physics/stat mech). As of Feb 2014, I am also a published author in Linux Format magazine (issues 180 and 182.)

I have previously worked for what3words, a software services company in north London, and a networking hardware company in Cambridge. I stood for Parliament for the Lib Dems in the UK general elections in 2015 and 2017.

https://github.com/joe-jordan

http://stackoverflow.com/users/393816/tehwalrus

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In the UK, high rises are cheap social housing, and rarely have any of these features.

(it's possible a few nice ones were built here at there, but those are the exception - people here value houses and gardens, and nobody builds high rises with large floorspace.)

C.f. the fallout from the Grenfell Tower fire. Most of our tower blocks are like that, and all the flats are currently impossible to sell because they all have the wrong, dangerously flammable cladding on.

John Conway 6 years ago

They may not become famous in their fields, but they're not going to be worrying about that stuff anyway, so will probably be happier. Which, it turned out for me, was a better goal all along.

The independent wealth was what allowed them to do science in the first place, nobody else had time or equipment (at least, that's the normal rationalisation).

I think I agree more with the parent than with you, particularly in engineering.

Lying in engineering means saying anything that's not true with any certainty. I wouldn't hold it against someone, but I would ask them to think carefully before speaking, to make sure what they said is true, as it can lead meetings to decide the wrong actions if nobody present happens to be able to contradict it.

Outside of engineering, all the same outcomes can occur, but proving the truth is much more difficult. And thus, while it may still technically be lying, it is impossible to tell and unfair to call someone on it.

When I visited the USA for a conference, I looked up a nice coffee place that was just across the street from the academic campus where I was staying. I went to the nearest crossing point, waited for several cycles of the traffic lights, and still couldn't deduce when it was safe to cross.

The road markings were black and white stripes, which mean "cars must always stop for pedestrians crossing here" where I live (UK). The description above chimes with my experience. Who does have priority when the light is red but cars are still turning right?

In the end, I went back and had the nasty coffee in the university. It seemed to dangerous to try to cross.

Edit: this is different in different states? It was in North Carolina for reference.

I learned 4e first (modulo a one-shot 3rd ed game a long time before). I think it has excellent potential as a system that allows you to tell stories, even if the actual game mechanics are a bit too simple for most AD&D-heads. Check out the Critical Hit podcast by Major Spoilers, to see where a very effective DM can turn even 4e into a compelling story.

(I now play 5e whenever I run a game, because I can get people to actually play it with me.)

Pico Technology | C++/C# Software Engineer, and other roles | ONSITE | St Neots, Cambridgeshire, UK | £30k - £50k | http://jobs.picotech.com

Established in 1991 Pico soon became a leader in the field of PC Oscilloscopes and data loggers. Based out of our head office in St Neots, UK, our software development teams work in an agile environment creating innovative software using C#, solving problems such as visualising large data sets.

Due to continuous growth plans Pico Technology are looking to recruit C# Software Engineers with proven C# development skills who are passionate about the code they develop. Additional skills in the following areas would be of interest:

C++, JIRA, Microsoft Visual Studio, DVCS, MVVM, WPF, Cocoa and / or Gtk#, Intel IPP / OpenCV, Azure / AWS

Equal to the technical skills our developers possess, we also value excellent organisational, communication and interpersonal skills.

Our Software Engineers benefit from a working environment that encourages them to produce excellent code with a customisable workstation, multiple monitors and an open plan office. Development Engineers can use Wednesday afternoons to work on inspirational projects either as part of a team of individually.

Away from the desk our Development Engineers can be found competing in our annual pool tournament, playing arcade games in the kitchen, gathered round the table football or simply enjoying our picnic benches in the garden. The flexible working hours suit many different lifestyles, with core hours from 10 till 3, Monday to Friday as well as an annual profit related bonus. A full list of the benefits can be found on our careers website.

If this sounds like the environment you would thrive in and are interested to find out more apply now for immediate consideration. Please mention Hacker News in the "where did you hear about us" box!

Check out our latest recruitment video, @tehwalrus features! https://youtu.be/CKJWzBJuZ5E

Pico Technology | C#/C++ Software Engineer, Software Test Engineer | ONSITE | St Neots, Cambridgeshire, UK | £30k - £50k | http://jobs.picotech.com

Established in 1991 Pico soon became a leader in the field of PC Oscilloscopes and data loggers. Based out of our head office in St Neots, UK, our software development teams work in an agile environment creating innovative software using C#, solving problems such as visualising large data sets.

Due to continuous growth plans Pico Technology are looking to recruit C# Software Engineers with proven C# development skills who are passionate about the code they develop. Additional skills in the following areas would be of interest:

C++, JIRA, Microsoft Visual Studio, DVCS, MVVM, WPF, Cocoa and / or Gtk#, Intel IPP / OpenCV, Azure / AWS

Equal to the technical skills our developers possess, we also value excellent organisational, communication and interpersonal skills.

Our Software Engineers benefit from a working environment that encourages them to produce excellent code with a customisable workstation, multiple monitors and an open plan office. Development Engineers can use Wednesday afternoons to work on inspirational projects either as part of a team of individually.

Away from the desk our Development Engineers can be found competing in our annual pool tournament, playing arcade games in the kitchen, gathered round the table football or simply enjoying our picnic benches in the garden. The flexible working hours suit many different lifestyles, with core hours from 10 till 3, Monday to Friday as well as an annual profit related bonus. A full list of the benefits can be found on our careers website.

If this sounds like the environment you would thrive in and are interested to find out more apply now for immediate consideration. Please mention Hacker News in the "where did you hear about us" box!

Check out our latest recruitment video, @tehwalrus features! https://youtu.be/CKJWzBJuZ5E

Pico Technology | C# Software Engineer, Testers who code, and other roles | ONSITE | St Neots, Cambridgeshire, UK | £30k - £50k | http://jobs.picotech.com

Established in 1991 Pico soon became a leader in the field of PC Oscilloscopes and data loggers. Based out of our head office in St Neots, UK, our software development teams work in an agile environment creating innovative software using C#, solving problems such as visualising large data sets.

Due to continuous growth plans Pico Technology are looking to recruit C# Software Engineers with proven C# development skills who are passionate about the code they develop. Additional skills in the following areas would be of interest:

C++, JIRA, Microsoft Visual Studio, DVCS, MVVM, WPF, Cocoa and / or Gtk#, Intel IPP / OpenCV, Azure / AWS

Equal to the technical skills our developers possess, we also value excellent organisational, communication and interpersonal skills.

Our Software Engineers benefit from a working environment that encourages them to produce excellent code with a customisable workstation, multiple monitors and an open plan office. Development Engineers can use Wednesday afternoons to work on inspirational projects either as part of a team of individually.

Away from the desk our Development Engineers can be found competing in our annual pool tournament, playing arcade games in the kitchen, gathered round the table football or simply enjoying our picnic benches in the garden. The flexible working hours suit many different lifestyles, with core hours from 10 till 3, Monday to Friday as well as an annual profit related bonus. A full list of the benefits can be found on our careers website.

If this sounds like the environment you would thrive in and are interested to find out more apply now for immediate consideration. Please mention Hacker News in the "where did you hear about us" box!

Check out our latest recruitment video, @tehwalrus features! https://youtu.be/CKJWzBJuZ5E

Find us at PyCon UK this year (in a week and a half) in Cardiff. @tehwalrus will be going, and is especially interested in speaking to other Pythonistas who can test (i.e. Who are at home ordering -99 beers).

Pico Technology | C# Software Engineer, Software Testers (who code a bit), Product Owner | ONSITE | St Neots, Cambridgeshire, UK | £30k - £50k | http://jobs.picotech.com

Established in 1991 Pico soon became a leader in the field of PC Oscilloscopes and data loggers. Based out of our head office in St Neots, UK, our software development teams work in an agile environment creating innovative software using C#, solving problems such as visualising large data sets.

Due to continuous growth plans Pico Technology are looking to recruit C# Software Engineers with proven C# development skills who are passionate about the code they develop. Additional skills in the following areas would be of interest:

C++, JIRA, Microsoft Visual Studio, DVCS, MVVM, WPF, Cocoa and / or Gtk#, Intel IPP / OpenCV, Azure / AWS

Equal to the technical skills our developers possess, we also value excellent organisational, communication and interpersonal skills.

Our Software Engineers benefit from a working environment that encourages them to produce excellent code with a customisable workstation, multiple monitors and an open plan office. Development Engineers can use Wednesday afternoons to work on inspirational projects either as part of a team of individually.

Away from the desk our Development Engineers can be found competing in our annual pool tournament, playing arcade games in the kitchen, gathered round the table football or simply enjoying our picnic benches in the garden. The flexible working hours suit many different lifestyles, with core hours from 10 till 3, Monday to Friday as well as an annual profit related bonus. A full list of the benefits can be found on our careers website.

If this sounds like the environment you would thrive in and are interested to find out more apply now for immediate consideration. Please mention Hacker News in the "where did you hear about us" box!

Check out our latest recruitment video, @tehwalrus features! https://youtu.be/CKJWzBJuZ5E

Pico Technology | C# Software Engineer, and other roles | ONSITE | St Neots, Cambridgeshire, UK | £30k - £50k | http://jobs.picotech.com

Established in 1991 Pico soon became a leader in the field of PC Oscilloscopes and data loggers. Based out of our head office in St Neots, UK, our software development teams work in an agile environment creating innovative software using C#, solving problems such as visualising large data sets.

Due to continuous growth plans Pico Technology are looking to recruit C# Software Engineers with proven C# development skills who are passionate about the code they develop. Additional skills in the following areas would be of interest:

C++, JIRA, Microsoft Visual Studio, DVCS, MVVM, WPF, Cocoa and / or Gtk#, Intel IPP / OpenCV, Azure / AWS

Equal to the technical skills our developers possess, we also value excellent organisational, communication and interpersonal skills.

Our Software Engineers benefit from a working environment that encourages them to produce excellent code with a customisable workstation, multiple monitors and an open plan office. Development Engineers can use Wednesday afternoons to work on inspirational projects either as part of a team of individually.

Away from the desk our Development Engineers can be found competing in our annual pool tournament, playing arcade games in the kitchen, gathered round the table football or simply enjoying our picnic benches in the garden. The flexible working hours suit many different lifestyles, with core hours from 10 till 3, Monday to Friday as well as an annual profit related bonus. A full list of the benefits can be found on our careers website.

If this sounds like the environment you would thrive in and are interested to find out more apply now for immediate consideration. Please mention Hacker News in the "where did you hear about us" box!

Check out our latest recruitment video, @tehwalrus features! https://youtu.be/CKJWzBJuZ5E

Interesting, but almost certainly a systematic error. We have a lot of experiments over the last few decades detecting neutrinos, and only 2 detecting "sterile" ones (i.e. slightly too many) seems like the outlier.

(These experiments are usually buried underground or similarly crazy in their location, so if they got something wrong about the setup/geology, e.g. If the rocks are slightly radioactive, that could skew the results like this in exactly this way.)

C# Software Engineer | ONSITE | St Neots, Cambridgeshire, UK | £30k - £50k | jobs.picotech.com

Established in 1991 Pico soon became a leader in the field of PC Oscilloscopes and data loggers. Based out of our head office in St Neots, UK, our software development teams work in an agile environment creating innovative software using C#, solving problems such as visualising large data sets.

Due to continuous growth plans Pico Technology are looking to recruit C# Software Engineers with proven C# development skills who are passionate about the code they develop. Additional skills in the following areas would be of interest:

C++, JIRA, Microsoft Visual Studio, DVCS, MVVM, WPF, Cocoa and / or Gtk#, Intel IPP / OpenCV, Azure / AWS

Equal to the technical skills our developers possess, we also value excellent organisational, communication and interpersonal skills.

Our Software Engineers benefit from a working environment that encourages them to produce excellent code with a customisable workstation, multiple monitors and an open plan office. Development Engineers can use Wednesday afternoons to work on inspirational projects either as part of a team of individually.

Away from the desk our Development Engineers can be found competing in our annual pool tournament, playing arcade games in the kitchen, gathered round the table football or simply enjoying our picnic benches in the garden. The flexible working hours suit many different lifestyles, with core hours from 10 till 3, Monday to Friday as well as an annual profit related bonus. A full list of the benefits can be found on our careers website.

If this sounds like the environment you would thrive in and are interested to find out more apply now for immediate consideration. Please mention Hacker News in the "where did you hear about us" box!

Check out the recruitment video, @tehwalrus features! https://youtu.be/CKJWzBJuZ5E

C# Software Engineer | ONSITE | St Neots, Cambridgeshire, UK | £30k - £50k | jobs.picotech.com

Established in 1991 Pico soon became a leader in the field of PC Oscilloscopes and data loggers. Based out of our head office in St Neots, UK, our software development teams work in an agile environment creating innovative software using C#, solving problems such as visualising large data sets.

Due to continuous growth plans Pico Technology are looking to recruit C# Software Engineers with proven C# development skills who are passionate about the code they develop. Additional skills in the following areas would be of interest:

C++, JIRA, Microsoft Visual Studio, DVCS, MVVM, WPF, Cocoa and / or Gtk#, Intel IPP / OpenCV, Azure / AWS

Equal to the technical skills our developers possess, we also value excellent organisational, communication and interpersonal skills.

Our Software Engineers benefit from a working environment that encourages them to produce excellent code with a customisable workstation, multiple monitors and an open plan office. Development Engineers can use Wednesday afternoons to work on inspirational projects either as part of a team of individually.

Away from the desk our Development Engineers can be found competing in our annual pool tournament, playing arcade games in the kitchen, gathered round the table football or simply enjoying our picnic benches in the garden. The flexible working hours suit many different lifestyles, with core hours from 10 till 3, Monday to Friday as well as an annual profit related bonus. A full list of the benefits can be found on our careers website.

If this sounds like the environment you would thrive in and are interested to find out more apply now for immediate consideration. Please mention Hacker News in the "where did you hear about us" box!

Check out our latest recruitment video, @tehwalrus features! https://youtu.be/CKJWzBJuZ5E

Or, whenever you get an unexpected email, go retrieve your credentials from your password manager, log in via the main page, and check you can see the message/problem it's referring to.

(Some of us use the dots to trick some sites into using a nonstandard email, rather like the username+netflix@gmail trick, so you can see who sold your email to the viagra trolls. Some sites reject + in emails, making the dots v handy.)

Not right now, I've just done it enough times. It's often when I want to do a search with 6+ words and all of them are important. But because some of them are e.g. "C++ default constructor" google just gives me C++ 101 answers and disregards the rest of my query.

The searches had to do with real things as well as programming.

So, you write down the formal requirements you have of an operating system (with aggressive auto-updates enabled, or disabled, as the customer chooses) once, on a piece of paper, and hope that they don't change?

Your method seems impractical in the extreme in a commercial team environment.

Sorry, I proposed unit testing as a real-world formalisation of requirements in an earlier post, and you didn't contradict me. What automated system would you use for this instead?

There is a big debate about open plan, isn't there? I personally like working in a collaborative environment, at least within the scrum team all focussed on the same goals.

I think Pico's layout is quite good in that hardware and software engineers share the same space, but it's separated from tech support (who are on the phone a lot) and marketing and the warehouse. Sometimes it gets noisy, but no more than any other open plan I've been in.

If you come in for an interview, you'll get a tour of the building and can see whether our style is right for you :)

C# Software Engineer | ONSITE | St Neots, Cambridgeshire, UK | £30k - £50k | jobs.picotech.com

Established in 1991 Pico soon became a leader in the field of PC Oscilloscopes and data loggers. Based out of our head office in St Neots, UK, our software development teams work in an agile environment creating innovative software using C#, solving problems such as visualising large data sets.

Due to continuous growth plans Pico Technology are looking to recruit C# Software Engineers with proven C# development skills who are passionate about the code they develop. Additional skills in the following areas would be of interest:

C++, JIRA, Microsoft Visual Studio, DVCS, MVVM, WPF, Cocoa and / or Gtk#, Intel IPP / OpenCV, Azure / AWS

Equal to the technical skills our developers possess, we also value excellent organisational, communication and interpersonal skills.

Our Software Engineers benefit from a working environment that encourages them to produce excellent code with a customisable workstation, multiple monitors and an open plan office. Development Engineers can use Wednesday afternoons to work on inspirational projects either as part of a team of individually.

Away from the desk our Development Engineers can be found competing in our annual pool tournament, playing arcade games in the kitchen, gathered round the table football or simply enjoying our picnic benches in the garden. The flexible working hours suit many different lifestyles, with core hours from 10 till 3, Monday to Friday as well as an annual profit related bonus. A full list of the benefits can be found on our careers website.

If this sounds like the environment you would thrive in and are interested to find out more apply now for immediate consideration. Please mention Hacker News in the "where did you hear about us" box!

Check out our latest recruitment video, @tehwalrus features! https://youtu.be/CKJWzBJuZ5E

I've found unit tests for system libraries like this before. The idea is that you run them each time you upgrade your framework, but in practise you run them every time (slowing down your debug loop) and managers use them to inflate the effectiveness of your actual tests, which is obviously measured in "number of unit tests" rather than %coverage (or, better still, %possible input values to each line)

I've never yet had the luxury of working in a language that admitted formal proofs of correctness. Do you mean informal "proofs" like unit tests?

When a bug occurs (perhaps because your tests did not anticipate every edge case) how do you determine where the problem code is located without a stack trace?

I know that it doesn't usually point to the line of code that is problematic, but it usually gives you a starting point for your deductions...

Hogwash. Stack traces in multi-threaded applications are much much more useful than just an exception name, or even just the site of the exception.