Olumde

Steve Balmer on IBMs obsession with KLOCS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHI7RTKhlz0

I expected the thread to end thusly:

Aliens: "FOR ALL THIS YOU MUST DIE."

Humans: "Fair enough"

I put a car on EBay. Got loads of bids and comments while the auction lasted. As soon as the auction was over the emails stopped the winning bidder would not pay. Meanwhile I had paid EBay the listing price. I feel as though I've been scammed by Ebay bots. I no longer trust EBay.

True, but someone has got to be willing to pay for what you do.

Hey Facebook. Fix the auto scrolling desktop bug first. I've pretty much stopped using Facebook because of this.

Happy birthday Valgrind. Next year you'll be able to drink in the US!

Being a UK PhD holder, a sentence stood out out to me was a commentary/comparison between UK and US PhDs: "This was a three year UK PhD, rather than a brutal six-or-more year US PhD."

My cousin has a US PhD and judging from what he tells me. It is a lot more rigorous than UK PhDs.

Amazon's customer support "call me now" feature used to be the 8th wonder of the world. IMO.

The first time I used it I was amazed to get a call instantly on December 23, one of the busiest shopping day of the year. No fuss. No jumping though hoops no waiting, no one asking for my mother's maiden name.

Now, in an obvious cost cutting measure, the service the service has now been moved to India and there are now wait times, now they want to know my mother's maiden name. Its slowly becoming like all the other customer support centers. But they still have a "call me now" feature.

Declaration: I have never worked for Amazon.

Hopefully this initiative will pass away with Boris Johnson's government.

All OSs and architectures and will soon have VS. All except Linux.

Finally! It seems every time Wolf Blitzer comes on everything is Breaking News

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/02/22/the-troub...

He's a genius. A researchers best hope is that he doesn't stumble on their research subtopic.

Three jobs back I worked for a startup. Everything I did was greenfield. I developed lots of very cool tech. Its the most fun I've had since.

Russia does not want to be encircled by foreign forces aka. NATO. I get that. The US wouldn't want that either. But Russia has not done much to assure its neighbours. Russia has invaded pretty much every one of its neighbours in the last hundred or so years; and so they have reason to seek the protection of NATO.

The US has lost a good deal of moral authority by its reckless invasion of Iraq for example. Now it asks Russia not to do the same thing.

Seriously worth repeating. HR is NOT your friend. I learnt this the hard way.

HR's core function is to protect the company from litigation by employees. The HR management is highly unlikely to side with you against upper management no matter how much you are in the right.

I used to live in the seaside town of Bournemouth and every summer thousands of teenage kids from all over Europe would come to study at the many language schools which are now suffering and tanking local economies thanks To Brexit.

https://www.ft.com/content/64346956-4ae4-4751-8b81-db7f1d578...

The Au Pair system too is languishing.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/nov/18/familie...

Too often I write comments that I believe to be clear and descriptive only to find out much later on (when revisiting the code) they are not as clear and descriptive as I thought they were.

Therefore my top advise would be to review comments a few times after writing them to see if they are indeed the breadcrumbs that I hoped they are, or even have someone not involved in the development review the comments for clarity.

Apple seems overvalued. It took 42 years to reach a valuation of $1 trillion, and just over 2 years to reach $3 trillion. Que???

I don't really know. Perhaps old habits die hard. Or they want to deal with two versions. Online journals should consider remove this pointless limit and instead advise authors not to make papers longer than necessary.

IMO there are (almost) never too many scientists. Yes there will be junk science. In fact most findings are false or offer nothing new. The few that are true form the basis of the progress that mankind has made.

That aside, I think two more reason for the reproducibility crisis are

(1) the restriction on papers lengths by journals. I remember having to cut so much stuff out of my fist papers just to get it down to the 12 or so pages that I was limited to. When I finally finished I thought to myself "I pity the fool that tries to implement this technique based on such paltry information"

(2) Some researchers will not share all material and methods because they wish to stay ahead of the competition. I know this from experience.

I think the "science" is dubious. Do the authors realize that there are parts of the world (e.g. West Africa) where Palm oil is the only type of oil that has been used in cooking for ever??

Could this be because the existing vaccines were developed to generate immunity against the original strain of Covid? In other words would a new vaccine based on delta produce better results?

I think its because we are busier.

Let's see. I am a dad to two kids, a husband, with a day job as a software engineer, but working on my side project when the wife and kids have gone to bed. (yes I'm on HN now but I'm going to fire up gedit soon -- trust me.) I don't even know what free time means any more.

Back when I was a seven years old I had not a care in the world, was often bored. Time passed slooowly. I was sure my eighth birthday would never arrive. I turned 50 in June.

_sigh_ ... Still no C++ API :-(

Bravo! Well done!!!

IMO every company should give something to OSS projects no matter how little, even if its a few hundred dollars or a small commit. Everyone benefits from OSS and how it does not occur to companies to give back is beyond me. I think us developers fail to educate management on how simple and vital to support OSS projects. I dream of the day when it becomes normal for job candidates to ask potential employers "how do you support OSS?"

10x is often used to suggest that one only seeds a single 10x developer. This makes as much sense as the army being okay with squad made up of one 10x solider.

Yes there are 10x solders but their impact is measured by their impact on the unit. IMO this is the only sensible meaning of 10x in large scale software development.

This is precisely why SPJ leaving at this time is all the more surprising.

HN seems to get more this sort of code fast posts of late, and it's a straw man argument. A mature developer can write good code by default mostly by keeping an eye open for code smells, no bloated classes or functions (I've seen 5000 line functions in established production code), no inconsistent abstractions etc. Just like you can keep your body clean and tidy by good daily hygiene it is possible to grow and mature a codebase by doing the right thing everyday.

Okay once in a while you can take on a bit of technical debt but a mature developer will pay it back quickly.

This is why some people think software engineers are not real engineers. No one will ever ask a structural engineer to build "it" quickly and cover 95% of the failure cases.

Okay, apples and oranges. It's actually okay for a team to crank out a prototype held together by duct tape, but you should move away from this mentality as soon as you prove the business idea otherwise the technical debt will sink you quick.

A contract that does not allow a person to practice their craft after their work hours does not seem to me to be legal.

Oh gosh I hate this about wondery business wars[0]. Very informative but also very annoying when they conjure up complete/narrated conversations between people e.g. a tech CEO and an investor or customer. This happens a LOT in the show.

I'm like, "you weren't there man!!!"

PS: I'm not the only one who thinks wondery shows are "overproduced" https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueCrimePodcasts/comments/byk8ix/d...

[0] https://wondery.com/shows/business-wars/