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RandomOpinionon Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

>When that happens, Google is going to have to start rewarding operational efficiency gains at least as strongly as they currently reward popular science project type gains. And then it will be very interesting to see how they change and if the era of "but Google offers its employees ..." will be over.

One has only to look at Microsoft to see an example of what might happen. Things were very carefree there as well back in the '90s during their heyday when growth seemed limitless.

It's also interesting to contrast Google / MS with Amazon, where Bezos has kept a tight rein on operational efficiency all along. They probably won't suffer as much when they reach their growth ceiling.

RandomOpinionon 'Clean your desk': My Amazon interview experience

>"I found this website called Stack Overflow that has so many answers to problems I run in to. Sometimes I'll just copy the code directly from the site, without typing it out again myself!

Sometimes I even just walk up to colleagues and straight up ask them for help with a problem. They just tell me things I can use in my job, out loud, in a busy office, and we still haven't been caught!"

I've lost count of the number of (thankfully former) co-workers whose only technical skills were searching Stack Overflow and asking their colleagues for help with a problem. The measure of a programmer is what they are able to do when there _is_ no answer to be had from SO or their colleagues.

RandomOpinionon 'Clean your desk': My Amazon interview experience

You might be a bit out of date here. Textbooks are absurdly expensive these days relative to computers; Stewart's "Calculus" is $289[0], for example. That's about the right range for a new low end laptop or a used mid-range laptop.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Calculus-James-Stewart/dp/1285740629/

RandomOpinionon Kent Beck: “I get paid for code that works, not for tests” (2013)

>What I did said "x failed" if a test failed, no details.

Yuck. Imagine if you got a bug report that just said "X failed" with no details.

RandomOpinionon Kent Beck: “I get paid for code that works, not for tests” (2013)

>...device drivers...

I hope you're joking but I suspect you're not. Device drivers have the highest level of privileged access in many operating systems and code quality for drivers is so uniformly lousy (certain large vendors whose names begin with "N", "A", and particularly "Q", I'm looking at you) that attempting to break the drivers would be among the first things I'd consider if I were trying to root a device.

RandomOpinionon ARM-Based Windows 10 Portable PCs? Hell Yes

Interesting. I must say that I'm surprised that MS didn't give up on Continuum after Intel hosed them by cancelling their Broxton smartphone x86 chip. MS might just be throwing good money after bad.

The two keys will be performance and compatibility for the x86 emulation. If they can get it to the point where it's effectively as fast as Intel's low power Atoms while still keeping broad Win32 app compatibility, then Microsoft's Continuum concept is back on track to become a game changer.

RandomOpinionon Liberouter Combo Cards – FPGA boards focused on network data processing

The early computers (for the most part) were von Neumann architecture machines just like modern computers, with an instruction pointer, registers, branching, and so forth that most people associate with conventional software development.

FPGAs are a undifferentiated sea of configurable logic gates with configurable connections between them[0]; it's not quite wiring together bare transistors but it's not that far removed either. None of the elements of a von Neumann architecture are there; if a engineer wants any of those things in their design, they would have to assemble it themselves from the available gates[1]. So, no, building a design for a FPGA has little to do with programming in the sense that most people mean it.

[0] With various special function blocks interspersed at regular intervals depending on the manufacturer and model of the FPGA

[1] or buy a pre-made soft-IP core

RandomOpinionon It Takes 6 Days to Change 1 Line of Code (2015)

Agile emphasizes value for the customer but who the customer is has a very broad definition. The end-user is first and foremost, of course, but the operations group who has to keep the service running and the development team who has to maintain it (i.e. you) and so forth are also considered to be customers. If your PM doesn't understand that, it's a failure on his/her part, not an issue with agile itself.

RandomOpinionon It Takes 6 Days to Change 1 Line of Code (2015)

>...it's amazing how happy we are to optimize for developer satisfaction over all other metrics (I'm looking at you, Agile).

Developer comfort is not a goal of agile; the goal of agile is always having the project in a known good state.

Any developer comfort is a side effect of the prerequisites for having the project always be in a known good state.

RandomOpinionon With rifle and bibliography: General Mattis on professional reading

Worth a read. Though some may be disinclined to hear him out for what he is[0], his words ring true and are applicable to any profession, including ours.

[0] Foolishly, in my opinion.

RandomOpinionon Ask HN: What is the best sci-fi you read this year?

I read Seveneves this year as well but came away disappointed. Some of the science was good (orbital mechanics, genetic engineering) but the rest of the science and engineering was fairly poor[0]. Couple that with the questionable decisions routinely made by many characters and it's a very weak novel overall.

[0] In particular, they did not (and physically could not) have launched a broad enough manufacturing capability for the remnants of humanity to have had a realistic chance of long-term survival. The practicality of the Seveneves themselves did was also at best dubious from a biological and other standpoints.

RandomOpinionon ReMarkable Paper Tablet

>For those feeling the impulse to empty their wallets, I urge caution. I just got done being burned by the kickstarter for the goodreader equivalent.

What's the "burned" part about? I'm reviewing their updates and everything seems normal.

RandomOpinionon ReMarkable Paper Tablet

I have to concur with the others. Sync to the cloud is pretty much the last feature I would want; that would make this device forbidden by default without IT approval in pretty much any business or other professional environment I can think of. Imagine if a doctor bought one and took notes on your device. Is your cloud storage solution HIPAA compliant?

Save the notes to local storage and let me transfer them to a computer locally.

RandomOpinionon Amazon States Language – A JSON-based language to describe state machines

Already exists, it's called SCXML and is a W3C standard.

https://www.w3.org/TR/scxml/

RandomOpinionon Ask HN: What “missing” technical solution(s) do you wish existed?

What you want is nearly possible: Intel's current generation of Compute Sticks (CS325 and CS525) are the size of a USB stick but have 2 cores, 4GB of RAM, and 64 GB of disk space. Granted, you can't use it on the go but it is ultra portable.

RandomOpinionon Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware

The press release says:

"This AMI includes a set of developer tools that you can use in the AWS Cloud at no charge. You write your FPGA code using VHDL or Verilog and then compile, simulate, and verify it using tools from the Xilinx Vivado Design Suite (you can also use third-party simulators, higher-level language compilers, graphical programming tools, and FPGA IP libraries)."

So basically, buying a copy of Vivado is the minimum. There aren't any open source tools that directly output Xilinx FPGA bitstreams that I know of.

RandomOpinionon It’s not the methods that are Agile, it’s the people

Re: #1, that kind of depends. Are the B- and C-players at that level because they are incapable or because they've never been shown how to be A-players? If the latter, a well-bonded team can motivate and teach them how to become an A-player as well.

RandomOpinionon Learning to Read X86 Assembly Language

68k Macs are easy enough to find on eBay. Grab one of the old Powerbook 1xx series laptops and you have a self-contained development station that's less expensive than many modern microcontroller dev kits.

RandomOpinionon Learning to Read X86 Assembly Language

While I like Petzold's "Code", it's really aimed at nontechnical audiences. Jon Stokes' "Inside the Machine" or Nisan and Schocken's textbook "The Elements of Computing Systems" are far better if you have a technical background.

RandomOpinionon Intel preferentially offers two customers Skylake Xeon CPUs

Looking at the article date (Nov 17) and the dates for Supercomputing '16 (ended Nov 18), if Intel had actually announced preferential release to specific customers, it would have been confirmed already. Combing through Google News, there doesn't appear to be any article covering Intel's announcements at SC16 that mentions such a preferential release. So, it's probably just a false rumor.

RandomOpinionon How Satya Nadella is taking on Apple and Amazon

>A Windows Phone with the ability to run ("native") Windows software would be an incredibly interesting play.

Intel killed its smartphone x86 chip project in April[0] so that's unlikely to happen anytime soon. There are reports of MS planning to attempt to do x86 emulation on ARM but that strikes me as a long shot. Getting good compatibility and decent performance would be challenging to say the least.

[0] http://www.anandtech.com/show/10288/intel-broxton-sofia-smar....

[1] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/x86-em...

RandomOpinionon How Satya Nadella is taking on Apple and Amazon

I've got a S7 Edge and if there were a model of Windows Phone with current hardware, I'd dump the S7 Edge and get one without bothering to think twice. Android's UI is miles behind Windows Phone, particularly the live tiles and the mail UI.

RandomOpinionon Electron considered harmful

>Yes - electron apps are slower and eat more ram - but someone else is paying for that.

Not that there aren't a lot of posts here defending Electron that basically say the same thing but don't you feel embarrassed in the slightest for saying that?

Yes, there's a lot of things we, as coders, can do to make our lives more convenient by treating bandwidth, RAM, and CPU wastage as an externality that can be shoved off onto the end-user to pay for. That doesn't mean we should.

RandomOpinionon Electron considered harmful

>If electron apps had a smarter way to manage chrome core as a dependency, the file size would be peanuts. Every apps is download on the same bundled core. Once this happens you won't have 100mb sizes. An intelligent installer could check core, if not installed download and install otherwise use what's on the system.

Oooh, we could give this core a snazzy name like "Flash" or "Silverlight" or something too.

Once again, history repeats itself.

RandomOpinionon Jellyfish Proteins Improve the Polariton Laser

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_field_theory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Unified_Theory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_theory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_everything

Yes, quite a number of people have considered the possibility and have been looking for such a thing for decades.

RandomOpinionon Microsoft and Linux and Patents and Tweets

While downvoted for its lack of substance, the parent post does really capture the heart of the matter. Microsoft (or any other for-profit company, really) as an organization does not think in terms of being a friend or enemy of open source; that's a fiction projected upon it by people fixated on the idea of open source as a ideology (e.g. RMS) instead of a tool (e.g. Linus Torvalds). To paraphrase the famous quote by de Gaulle: "Corporations have no friends, only interests."[0]. Microsoft thinks in terms of "In this specific situation, do we make more revenue by cooperating with open source or by competing with open source?" and that decision is made on a team-by-team and product-by-product basis. On this basis, it's easy to see why they continue to work to get revenue from their patent portfolio while still doing things favorable to open source elsewhere.

[0] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Charles_de_Gaulle#Most_famous

RandomOpinionon Programmers confess unethical, illegal tasks asked of them

Yes, but the blocking factor is the precursor to the PE exam, namely the Fundamentals of Engineering exam. Even the generic FE exam contains topics that most CS majors are not likely to have encountered. See http://ncees.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/FE-Other-CBT-spe... for a summary.

The other major blocker is that the Professional Engineer licensure process requires "four years of progressive engineering experience under a PE" (see https://www.nspe.org/resources/licensure/what-pe). There being few, if any, software PEs, there is something of a chicken-and-egg problem.

RandomOpinionon Humans 'will bully robot cars', Mercedes chief warns

I would think that an integrated dash camera and the ability for the driver to automatically upload video for reporting to law enforcement would prevent this from ever becoming an issue.

This has parallels to the situation in Russia where dashcams are more or less considered a necessity for every vehicle. See https://www.wired.com/2013/02/russian-dash-cams/

RandomOpinionon What Test Engineers Do at Google: Building Test Infrastructure

"Let he who is without sin^H^H^Hbugs cast the first stone."

Developers ought to be appreciative that there are people willing to do QA and test infrastructure for them.

RandomOpinionon Microsoft Replaces Command Prompt with PowerShell in Latest Windows 10 Build

I've used various shells on UNIXes and powershell and they're both about the same to me. Powershell has clunkier syntax but has more features.

What exactly about bash would you say makes it superior?