Singletoned

Ah, okay. I'm in London, UK. I suspect this 8 hour interview might just be an American thing.

I've been in the industry for 10 years now and I've never seen this at all. I know a couple of people that applied to Google, and they reported that it was a fairly gruelling process, but apart that, I haven't even heard from friends about people going through anything approaching 8 hour interviews.

Out of interest, what about male prostitution? Is it possible for a man to be paid for sex "and to have a whole human being at the end of it"?

With all that software, I don't suppose you've come up with a good solution for installing and configuring it all automatically on a new machine?

Last time I tried to automate it I used homebrew cask, but it definitely wasn't a satisfying solution.

> Machine learning does not have less bias than human researchers.

You are right that machine learning gains bias from the humans that created it, but unless they managed to transfer 100% of their biases to it, it will always have less bias.

I don't disagree necessarily, but I'm definitely more cautious in criticising someone else's pay when I can't do their job.

I certainly know that a lot of people who know nothing about computers think that I'm overpaid as a software developer. Why should I earn several times their salary when I just sit at a computer all day, whilst they do hard work?

I was going to quote the same line, but because my brain found it particularly hard to parse. I assumed the clause beginning 'with' should refer to the last item in the list.

> Finding natural patterns of associations in data is a totally reasonable starting point for finding a causation _when a causation exists_.

So if a causation turns out not to exist then finding natural patterns was an unreasonable starting point? What would have been a reasonable starting point in that circumstance?

> Any differentiating scheme simple enough will be insufficient to be the basis of any important decision, and any sophisticated enough won't be neat enough for us to be talking about it like this.

That seems to be an argument against anyone but experts ever discussing anything.

Simple models are useful, particularly as they can be understood by the less expert of us.

> There we called the matrix A “a web matrix,” noted it was column stochastic (as it is here), and appealed to a special case of the Perron-Frobenius theorem to show that there is a unique maximal eigenvalue equal to one (with a dimension one eigenspace) whose eigenvector we used as a sort of “stationary distribution” and the final ranking of web pages.

Thank god this explantion doesn't have any of that bullshit in it.

Do you mean that it is better for society that Texans get shot, or that we should all be shooting muggers?

> Then he started throwing away his material every year and creating new material.

This is actually standard practice in the UK comedy scene. A lot of people are focused on creating a new show for the Edinburgh Festival every year, and spend 9 months a year workshopping their new material in standup clubs aiming towards having a polished hour every August.

> converting our main app, gitlab-ce and gitlab-ee, to another framework and language would makes us unable to ship new features for at least a year

This would be quite a good argument for not tying oneself so deeply to a particular framework.

> He knows a lot about his domain, sure, but he's no god and there are a lot of areas he knows diddley-squat about.... user interface design for one!

And Einstein knew nothing about biology.

I'm sure he knows "diddley-squat" about most areas, but as long as he knows a lot about his domain then he's an expert.

And he is good at user interface design, and git is a good example of that; it's just not aimed at beginners. It was designed by and for expert users, and the interface fits that very well.

> Git is basically Linus in a nutshell: abrasive, unforgiving, and behaving like an absolute asshole to any non-expert struggling user.

You forgot "brilliant".

I've always found the fork bomb page on Wikipedia to be a good example of different languages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_bomb

The Python is example is both short and obvious, whereas the other examples tend to be either cryptic or complicated.

Pretty much the same for me. At an early job I had at a very large software company (that did banking and hospital software), I was given developer access to a very old intranet application that they had (with the idea that I would tweak it if the need arose). All credentials were stored unencrypted in an Access database, and a little random testing showed that most people used the same password for the intranet as for their main computer account.

I've given up trying to change the culture at these places, and just make sure that I'm not part of the problem, and that my objection has been noted (for "I told you so" purposes, later on).

My rule of thumb for writing things like job descriptions is that it doesn't mean anything unless someone else might write the opposite.

So "Software Engineers who want to write great code" is meaningless, as is "committed to building the best products".

But I disagree with some of his other examples:

> solve problems from beginning to end: everything from product conceptualizations to engineering implementations.

This tends to put me off a bit. Just like "full-stack developer". I agree everyone should be able to do beginning to end when needed, but I much prefer to be able to specialize. And I really don't want to be involved with "product conceptualizations".

> solve the toughest problems fast--the first time

This is also a bit off-putting. It suggests that they aren't very tolerant of failure. I may just be a bad developer, but I generally assume the first solution we build won't be the correct one.

Or even just a search and replace...

> Once you go dict, you won't go back. This style of development is too easy, since dictionaries are baked into Python, and there are many facilities for working effectively with them.

How is this an argument against using dictionaries?

After 10 years of Python development, I do find myself using dictionaries rather than objects, in just the way that the author proscribes, but I'm finding it to be a genuine pleasure.

I'm tempted to have a play with this, and see how many legitmate, non-offensive uses of "retard" I can get into my repos.

EG The french for "I'm late" is "Je suis en retard".

Chrome is made by people who want that information. Mozilla is heavily funded by people who want that information. Safari is made by people who want to keep things as 'simple' as possible. Internet Explorer is made by idiots.

Yes the reference to "the shooting at Columbine High last spring" confused me, then I noticed the date.

I came here to see whether there was an explanation of why it was being reposted. Maybe there are some predictions in it that have come true?

The problem is going to be that you have (almost definitely) built up quite a bit of technical debt. If you start testing now, you will start to expose the technical debt and take a productivity hit. Selling your boss on "TDD increases developer speed" is going to back fire.

I would try to sell them on more automated QA testing. That's a much easier sell, and the benefits should become obvious sooner (particularly when they can start firing QA testers and use that money to hire more automators).

Then you can start TDDing the QA testing. Map out the automated QA test for the feature in advance. Then developers can develop to the QA test, and will know when they have finished.

It's a long process, but turning around the short-termist mentality takes a long time.

To be fair, the poorest in society are a LOT better off now than they were 50 years ago.

He probably lives in Europe and wants all the UK companies to flee there.

They're a bit like sugar, in that the first taste can be really appealling, but after a lot you end up feeling sick and regretful.

You may have already seen it, but the 4 sections you describe are very similar to this: https://www.politicalcompass.org/

The basic idea is that there are two axises, not one (social and financial).

> under the project name "Hardening.io". The authors have recently had to rename this hardening framework to "Dev-Sec.io"

I can't imagine why...

The gist of the post is that make is preferable to modern build systems. The author has used self-depracating humour to defend himself against attacks, but clearly it was too dry.

If we stopped attacking the authors of articles, then it would be easier for them to write openly and less defensively, but unfortunately if you write anything on the internet, people will call you an idiot.