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throwaway35777

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What we don't teach or reward today is the behaviors and engineering process to write high quality code.

A surprising number of inexperienced developers do the following: "once I get any working solution I should immediately open a PR" and let the senior engineers tell them what's wrong with it.

When the big money leaves this field I hope there will be more pressure for people to adopt good engineering practices. I love to work with folks who put good effort into trying to make high quality changes. Personal initiative and ethics are how high quality software gets written.

Stoicism was philosophy marketed to and practiced by the Roman elites, so that Logos reinforced the social hierarchy is not surprising.

That being said, the philosophy has many practical lessons to teach. Meditation and philosophy helped me personally through a long illness.

There also used to be Triplebyte. It filled a niche of talented people who have bad resumes and don't know anybody. Found a great job through them when I was starting out.

Real shame there's nothing to replace it, there's huge arbitrage in the market of good people who don't know people. If I were starting out now I don't know what I would do, how do you even meet people.

I recall feeling like it was mostly a guide on manipulating people, and it didn't make a great impression on me, personally.

Any action will affect other people in some way. What matters is how you choose to utilize that capability.

There is an excellent old book on the subject, How to Win Friends and Influence People. I was lacking in this area and my career improved greatly after reading it.

In general, people are cautious when giving criticism because it carries implications.

Say a manager gives negative feedback to a subordinate. The subordinate now believes the manager doesn't like them. The subordinate follows the standard advice: start looking for another job. Manager now has the larger problem of hiring a replacement.

It's best to reinforce positive behavior. Little trick I learned: compliment people. Find an reason to say "nice work" on every code review. DM people and say "nice presentation", "great design". It works.

I was a grader once. I guarantee if someone gives a good answer they'll get full marks even near the bottom of the stack. For BS answers I'll admit I got less generous as the hours went on.

No one's getting hurt by this system if it's randomized. It's a matter of graders giving out partial credit for wrong answers which is discretionary. Rarely students are granted a small mercy. Seems OK.

I like to be on teams for which, if new to the team, mostly you notice things being done sensibly (in context), and the 3 things you see that you don't understand, you can just ask about them, because everyone on the team just wants to work well together to achieve the genuine goals.

I've observed this kind of culture mostly at startups. Once places start to make a lot of money -- things become political.

So if you want to work at the highest paying jobs, you'll have to deal with politics. Because once they make enough money to afford you, the company also makes enough for savvy gatekeepers to entrench themselves in a core system and carve off a piece of that revenue for themselves.

The biggest single reason why the USA's (and to a lesser extent Canada's) internet is shite...

Speak for yourself, but I live on the west coast and my Internet connection is great.

Edit: downvoters, what are the problems with U.S. internet?

That's true, but you'd still need to find the unauthorized passenger already on board. Without a picture you'd have to flush the plane and reboard.

Given there are thousands of security cameras in an airport, I don't think anyone would mind if one was used to record who got on the plane.

Why did the system securing the plane let the operator override the error and allow an unauthorized passenger on the plane?

Should be easy enough, UI shows the picture of the guy who scanned the first ticket and system tells operator you go and check his ticket. If you can't find him on the plane he's hiding in the bathroom, call security to get him out.

The UX of UUIDs 2 years ago

And there's no "forward secrecy" - if a normal word becomes a swear, then it's often hard to go through and change all uuids.

Which is why the standard has been base16 (or base10) for so long.

The UX of UUIDs 2 years ago

resistant to swear words

No it's not.

Edit: downvoters, a tame example is 0x72b5473d5a567200.

The UX of UUIDs 2 years ago

base58 is case sensitive which hinders readability. When devs work with uuids they typically remember the first few letters ("this is guid abc", "that one is guid 1ac"). Hard to do that in base58.

The coarsest encoding to have this property is Base32 where it remains easy to memorize first few letters without needing to memorize case.