SimonPStevens

No op, but I think I understand what they are getting at.

With a quicksort you take one item and compare it one at a time to every other item by just asking this question "does this come before or after". Then you repeat that process with each side.

But with insertion sort you take each new item and ask the question "where does it go in this already ordered list".

Although these are logically essential the same thing, and certainly have the same result, it's the way the question is framed that makes the quicksort approach often the easier question to answer when trying to decide on a priority order.

Both require a little cunning because you have to get the other person to "forget" that they are essentially prioritising a large list and focus on the easier question of the individual step in the sort algorithm. That's easier with quicksort because the question is very small and isolated, but with insertion sort you are constantly looking at the larger list in order to find the insertion point.

This still seems no different from giving the employee a payday loan (admittedly at zero percent interest).

It's not going to solve anything because they are just taking money early that they will need next month.

It might seem attractive initially, but within a few months the status quo will have reset and those employees who were living paycheck to paycheck will still be living paycheck to paycheck, just now it will be day by day waiting for their accrued amount to increase.

I suspect as a company you could do well, but you aren't solving any problems for the employee. And you may find that as business pressure increases you'll end up exploiting them in some way because they are vulnerable and have little protection. It won't be long before someone on your board says something like "hey, we could make a bit more money if we start charging x% interest to get early access pay they won't accrue until next month. That's fair because we're taking the risk they might not accrue it all." And before you know it you are just as bad as every other payday lender out there.

This unexpected expenses thing sounds like poor justification to me.

And charging the company Vs the employee is no different. If you didn't charge the company they could instead increase the wages of their staff by the equivalent amount. You are just taking money out of the potential pot that goes to the staff. Staff costs is just a single line on our summary p&l which includes salaries and benefits.

> demographics is working against asset values in the next twenty years or so.

As someone who is about half way towards retirement, how is it best to work with this?

My future retirement income seems to be mostly dependant on having the right selection of investments for my pension account to grow in time for when I stop working. It's currently split between a few low cost, broad indexes. But if we expect asset values to go down as older generations sell off, am I going to see this pension pot fail to meet what I need it to in order to cover my retirement.

My pension advisor just seems to blindly follow the script of 'passive beats active', and expects 5% annual return. Which I just go along with, mostly because I have no idea what else to do. Am I being too pessimistic when I really can't see 5% return being likely.

How do I go about making sure my retirement is provided for. It kind of annoys me I have to seemingly be constantly figuring out the market situation to make decisions on what's best. Why do I need to be a stock market expert to manage my pension. What I'd much rather do is pay for a future pension more like an insurance plan. I pay monthly now, and some experts who know what they are doing worry about the investment strategy, and I just get a fixed pension payment.

Short video by Tom Scott on the subject for those interested.

https://youtu.be/HfHgUu_8KgA

tldw; Older homes in the UK had a water storage tank in the roof space that fed the water heating tank. This couldn't be classified as drinking water so wasn't allowed to be combined with the safe mains water that fed the cold tap. These days modern houses mostly use combi-boilers with no storage tank, so mostly both hot and cold are drinkable and it's not an issue. But preferences still lean towards the separate taps.

It's every 15 seconds for Ethereum blocks.

https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/blocks/

Because they are picky and hard to get in to.

To a VC who has very few other ways to asses you, having something in you past that singles you out as someone who has already cleared a highly selective process means you are more likely to be the kind of person who succeeds.

Nothing to do with Google's own products. Any other club similar difficult to get into will convey the same signal.

It's a crude signal, but it's a signal.

This is a good comment, but It's easy to generalise one specific experience that works successful and mistakenly think it applies universally.

You may be right within your company, but I can offer an alternative anecdote.

I work at a company that makes energy trading risk management software. It's complicated and niche, and the customers are varied and have very different mindset to develops and testers. We have traders, hedge funds, energy generators and retail suppliers all with different use cases.

We absolutely need a product manager who has the time to dedicate to understanding the customers needs, understanding the changing landscape of the market and understanding the competition. This is not something we can just expect a developer or tech lead to do through ownership.

I'm certain your way works for many though.

The real trick is balancing the two.

Help enough to build that reputation for being a team player. When you can't fully help, don't just say no, give them some starting pointers and offer to review, or assist more if they get stuck, so even then you are still being supportive.

Help people to help themselves. Don't just do something for them, guide them in how to do it themselves so next time they don't even have to disturb you.

Listen out for opportunities to use your skills to help people when they don't even realise they need help. I've lost count of the number off little scripts, tools or reports that I've knocked out in a couple of hours just because someone absent mindly moaned about something they found annoying. These things build your reputation far more than just plain helping, and if you're observant they are often simple and quick to do.

But also, make time to progress your big goals too, which does mean you have to say no sometimes.

Get help in return from those you have helped to move your goals forward faster than you can on your own.

What are some good alternatives that don't do this?

While I mostly agree, it is a touch more subtle than this metaphor.

Shouting fire in a crowded theatre doesn't typically cause the fire to get worse.

A major newspaper breaking news of an impending bank run, does have the likelihood of actually being the thing that triggers the bank run, or maybe making it much worse.

We'll have to just agree to disagree on this.

I don't believe that having bitcoin that was in the past involved in criminal use will cause you any problems at all. I'd be interested to see any evidence you have to the contrary.

Something I think people confuse is the concept of 'a bitcoin'. There is no thing that is transferred around like a physical coin or note. A bitcoin 'transfer' is just a change in the balance of two accounts, not an actual transfer of anything physical or digital. There is no change of ownership of anything.

Cash is only private if you never put it in a bank.

But if the reason for taking the payment is legitimate you're going to have no more problems with Bitcoin than you will with cash in this regard.

If your reason for taking the payment is illegal then I agree, Bitcoin puts you at some greater risk. But if that's you're point then perhaps you should be clearer. Bitcoin can be dangerous to use for criminals because it's more traceable. If your use is legal, it's no more or less dangerous than cash.

I'm not sure of the point here, this seems a bit nonsensical. Do you avoid using cash too because criminals use it?

Using or accepting Bitcoin is not dangerous because of this. And you have no more chance of unintentionally recieving funds linked to this than you have of unintentionally recieving cash used for criminal purposes.

(Not intending to start an argument for or against Bitcoin, and there are other pros and cons of it I'm sure, but this particular one is not really valid)

There are some that do address this type of issue.

Timescale DB have a license [0] that is basically open source with the one added restriction that you can't use their open source to offer a hosted SAAS version of their product. Basically to allow them to open source the software for those that want to host it for their own use, but preventing the big cloud providers from taking all their business. It's not really 'copyleft' though because it takes away a users freedom (albeit a very small and limited one).

The GNU Affero GPL [1], adds the requirement that using the open source software in a server environment you must also provide the ability for your users to download the source code. It doesn't address the problems through royalties because that's kind of against the GNU philosophy, but it does stop the cloud providers from just taking the software and modifying it and using for cloud infrastructure without providing the modifications back to the community.

I'm sure there are other examples of this kind of this.

[0] - https://blog.timescale.com/blog/building-open-source-busines...

[1] - https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.html

No, they aren't the same. But they will all change regularly and invalidate their corresponding extractor just as quickly.

Or easily swappable battery packs.

There was a promo/concept video a few years back, from Tesla I think, showing cars pulling up into a battery swap station and a door slid open in the floor beneath the car and a contraption automatically swapped out the battery for a fully charged one without the driver leaving the car. Not sure whatever came of that concept.

Not GP, but I understand what they are getting at. They were shortening to be concise. What was actually meant was...

"You will not be able to use it for anything because YouTube and every other video sharing website supported by youtube-dl will have changed a million times.

To not include Microsoft when you say 'big tech' is blinkered.

They are currently the 2nd biggest company in the world by market cap. Around double the size of Facebook.

They might not be cool or trendy in tech circles anymore, but they are without a doubt a big tech company.

Their OS runs over 70% of desktops [1] and their office suite has over 80% of the market share [2]. And that's just the sectors they completely dominate in before we even talk about other sectors that they are involved in with major competitive products. Xbox, Surface, Azure, SQL server, Power BI, Windows Server, .net, Visual Studio, BizTalk, are all huge popular widely used tech products. And I'm sure there's more that I don't know.

And then add GitHub and LinkedIn if you want to count recent acquisitions that still seem to operate mostly independently at the moment.

1 - https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide

2 - https://www.ciodive.com/news/Google-Microsoft-Office-collabo...

The eye tracking looks great, just as a regular additional way of using the mouse for things like focusing windows or tapping dialogs. I'm very tempted to get one of those.

Does anyone with experience of them know what the multi-monitor support is like? I have 3 screens side be side and one below, so quite a large range to cover that requires some head movement to go across all of them. Will it work with viewing over that wide of a space where I'm not always directly facing the primary screen?

> we might see another Fall of Rome in our lifetimes.

The Western Roman empire took around 80 years to fall. From 395 to 476.

The Eastern Roman empire lasted for several hundred years more.

It's sometimes thought of as a quick obvious event, but it wasn't, it lasted a lifetime. We may already be in the period of time that future historians will refer to as 'the fall'. It may not be obvious from within what stage we are at, or when thee start was.

Thanks. I'll definitely take a look to see if you've done anything differently to me.

I have a ergodox, and while I love it for writing prose in English, I struggle with it a bit for coding. It feels like it needs an extra column or two on the right hand side to have enough space for the symbols and special keys (arrows, home/end/pgup/pgdown, etc). I've tried all kinds of different placements or multi layer layouts to try and make everything comfortable to reach but whatever I try I can't quite get it right.

I'm going to try a separate numpad next I think so I can map some things on to that and have it just to the right to gain the extra key space.

Surely the real problem here is not when face retouching filters are on or off by default for your own photos. It's when other people use them and you don't know if they have them on or off. That's what quietly sets the new beauty standed because everyone sees these retouched photos and assumes they are representative of reality. What I'd like to see is something in the image metadata that stores what filters were used so apps could display that info. I can't see that happening though.

This title is overly misleading. There is no evidence presented in the article to even suggest they paid the ransom. And Garmin declined to comment.

It's possible they paid, but it's also possible they are just restoring backups.

gp is probably thinking of system.text.json which was only added to .net core in version 3, which less than a year old. But it's not been high priority to add because of a very well established open source project called JSON.net that has been around for ages.

However the full framework has had a different JSON serialiser (DataContractJsonSerialiser) since v3.5 in 2007.

DataContractJsonSerialiser has been around since .net 3.5 which is 2007, so 13 years. And I think the open source JSON.net has been around for longer, but I can't find a version history right now.

I don't understand how this works.

If your order to doordash cost $5000, why did they pay the restaurant $20,000? That would suggest their prices are 4 times cheaper to the customer. But I thought everyone complained they were more expensive.

Surely DD are still keeping their commission from your order?

What have I misunderstood?

I spent quite as few years as a contractor and I quickly discovered the best way to be effective was to learn how to be effective with everything in the default settings. At every new place I went I could just jump right in. No need for any time spent fiddling with settings or tweaking and installing pluggins.

Although a slight counterpoint is that I also used to have my git settings file stored in a github gist so I could just grab my latest one and every new environment would have the same set of aliases I was used to.

Their main revenue is from two things. Firstly from their job boards which will be significantly reduced as few companies are hiring. Then secondly from advertising which will also be reduced during times of recession.

The product you think of as stack overflow that will probably is really just a way for them to drive the right kind of traffic to those revenue sources.

Well in code we're using C#'s decimal type (128 bit. 96 bits are used for an integer and the rest used for the sign and scaling factor) [0]. It's essentially just floating point applied to a base 10 integer rather than a binary one.

In the SQL server database the column types are usually decimal(18,5) or decimal(25,12) [1]

[0] - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.decimal?v...

[1] - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-sql/data-types/decima...