angrybits

What can I say, being an asshole is one of my diversity dimensions. We just had that training at work, it was very helpful.

Also, I hope you aren't a Python dev in your spare time. Guido would be appalled.

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

I know. And I'm sorry, bitterly sorry, but I know that... no apologies I can make can alter the fact that in our thread you have been given a dirty, filthy, smelly piece of technical argument.

Those optimizers you are fighting with have thousands of man hours of research behind them. For every silly choice they make, they make hundreds or thousands of correct ones.

You can have locked cage space leased from a datacenter if you want to be in control of all the things you have any business being in control of.

Except for the fact that you can explicitly contain the potential damage by controlling which accounts can do what. It's not like you have to have one god account with no MFA that has the keys to the city.

Not trying to be snarky, but why on Earth would I mind that my government is trying to prevent a rival government from gaining nuclear capability? World politics are what they are, and they are unavoidable, so my preference is that we do anything necessary to stay in a position of leadership. Would you prefer different if you were us?

edit: clarified last question

That is total bullshit and you know it. This whole culture of self-loathing was cute at the beginning, but it's descended into absolute absurdity. You are patently out of your mind if you actually believe what you wrote. You don't, of course, but what's a little hyperbole when you're posturing for imaginary geek cred points on a website amirite?

This is a good thing even for those outside of San Antonio proper. I was able to upgrade to 1 Gbps on a small-time ISP this weekend, and it's because Google is coming to the large city near me. Competition is a wonderful thing.

No, I value any 1 human over all 30000 remaining lions. How could you not do otherwise?

> I'll be over here riding out the inevitable with my own file sync, git server, chat server, web server, and making my internet how I want it to be

To me, this is exactly why we're not headed for an internet-solely-comprised-of-walled-gardens scenario. There will be plenty for sure, but the pathways will still be open and we netizens can connect whatever we like with them. This is why I am still excited about it, even after 20 years.

> when the last user of it finally gives up and moves to gmail so they can continue to communicate with their contacts or maybe they give up entirely

Between the title and the quoted, I think you have used up your hyperbole quota for one day.

I guess I don't see the issue. The internet is a large piece of infrastructure on which citizens and companies can publish (almost) anything they want. Lamenting that for-profit ventures have tried to wall off their parts is curious, as I am not sure how that impacts me or my decisions. I don't facebook, I don't tweet, and I could not care less that these things exist. (Not entirely true, but my objections to them would be off-topic.) The world is a very large place, and there will always be people who hang out in the more distant corners of the net, you can go be with like-minded people and talk about the good ole days of (insert bygone era here).

Now if you are lamenting this because you want a piece of the action and the big kids are being bullies, then I suppose my answer isn't going to comfort you any. But for just simple usage, I think this is a tempest in a teapot.

> the poor rarely can take advantage of them

I'm pretty sure the solution to that is clean public transportation, no?

Who cares how many lines it takes to do Hello World? Honestly, that isn't a benchmark for any meaningful thing.

There are lots of good sibling comments to this one, but I want to get one more point in before we all move on.

Spending an hour yielding to something larger than yourself is probably good for the soul and definitely good for the ego. You can walk into almost any church, and there you will find a quiet space where you can meditate/pray. You can find a sort of comfort in its 2000 year history, and in the myths/rituals of our past and the people who believe in them. If you are made to feel uncomfortable, then try another one or stop going altogether, there are literally zero negative consequences to it.

The point of this is that you don't have to swear an oath to little baby jesus to get a benefit from a modernized church. You can make of it what you want, they won't mind in the least.

If you join a fundamentalist cult, then yes. Lots of modern churches are non-denominational and quite relaxed. In fact, they are surprisingly similar to the entity being described in the article.

I liked the article, but this is like the cultural equivalent of Not Invented Here. Does it really matter that organized Christianity believes that a guy woke up from the dead? If you want a sense of community and the rituals that go along with it, then you could absolutely join a church of your choosing and just not believe in zombie messiahs.

The wife and I have been talking about this at great length as of late. We are not wired to believe in the supernatural, but I am having a hard time coming up with reasons why that would prevent us from finding a church to go to. It does limit which churches might be accepting of us, as I will not be handling snakes or washing anyone's feet. But as churches get more and more devoid of fundamentalism (a survival maneuver), they become more and more like the thing being talked about in the fine article. Maybe it'll all meet in the middle one day.

We have a POC running where we stream web hit data onto HDFS in near real time (several seconds of latency perhaps). There's no reason to think you couldn't do it with other streams of data as well.

edit: Not sure about Salesforce specifically, sorry if this is too far off topic.

> separately managed relational dbs all over the place

On the BI side, this is overwhelmingly the outcome for large companies. The business units get silo'ed, they build their fiefdoms, a consolidation project gets kicked off and fails, rinse, repeat. Even if the consolidation succeeds, it takes extremely strong leadership to keep it from devolving right back to silos. The tech is not the cause of this problem, so I don't foresee it being the solution to it either.

The enterprise I work for won't touch cloud with a 10 foot pole, and I know this because we literally got told to quit asking about it. :)

So yes, even we are building out a pretty beefy internal Hadoop cluster, so I would never say that it will be all-relational-all-the-time. But my point was more that there will be copious amounts of SSAS cubes and Oracle warehouses for the foreseeable future. They work great for their use cases and they have well known problems with well known solutions. Doing what Twitter's team is doing when you aren't Twitter might not be the best idea for everyone, after all.

In our case, we use Teradata for our work and it's quite capable of handling very large workloads, and thus we currently have no plans to spin it down in favor of the new hotness. (Even though the new Hadoop cluster positively dwarfs our TD appliance.) I'd say we have a mixture of both on the horizon, if only because our DBAs are less than cooperative about Java UDFs, so Hadoop is the easiest way for us to do complex processing against our fairly large data set.

> The one big vertically scaled database at the hub of everything is definitely disappearing.

Maybe in Startupville, CA. But I think you're forgetting that it's a big world out there and there are lots of systems that are built on vertically scaled relational engines that practically print money. The vast majority of companies out there do not have Twitter-scale engineering problems to solve.

Administrations often change their tunes to maintain a populist backing. They could have just said plainly, "Look, he did the crime and we are required by the rule of law to bring him to trial." and left it at that. But they didn't. They subtilely drilled home the "he's a traitor and a coward" ideas, and I am honestly not sure why. They have nothing substantial to gain by it, other than maybe to discourage future acts of subversion. Apparently, whatever the aim, they're willing to use the language of tyrants to achieve it.

The story this tells is so stark, I don't know what else there is left to say on it.

They guy sealed his own fate when he made himself an enemy of the state, and I fear he will never get to set foot on his homeland again. One day, I hope he will be nationally recognized for his service to his people. In the meantime, the drastic divide between the aims of the government and the aims of the governed makes me grow ever more worried that we have dark days ahead of us.

It changes over time, and ranges anywhere from the use of force to achieve an objective all the way to simply humanitarian. Sometimes a mix. (delivery of supplies + security) The world is not in a steady state, so as our needs change over time, so does the mission.

> I have zero respect for someone that was there

Serving isn't for everyone, and I don't expect you to understand it if you haven't. But either way your attitude is as discourteous as it is pretentious, and you have added zero value to the conversation by shooting your mouth off on the subject.

America's fighting forces will continue to carry out their mission, day in and day out, just like they always have. I have a feeling they'll do just fine without the backing of the German nerd contingent.

From TFA (although I realize he's not advocating for this):

“Two of my colleagues will be joining us in a few minutes but I think we can get started. I’d like you to whiteboard an answer to the following prompt: given a string, write a program in any language you want that reverses the string.”

I have not, and will never, do such a thing on an interview. It'd be the shortest interview in history if I were ever asked to.

We have hired plenty of great people just by talking through the relevant technology and asking open ended questions. My thing was usually to talk through HTTP in detail, and I would loosely time how long it would take to get through chunked encoding. Then I'd ask "how would you solve this problem" question, to see how they attack a problem and how they stand up to me poking (sometimes unreasonable) holes in their plan. You don't need panels, committees, quizzes or any of that bs--just ask questions you know the answer to until you're comfortable that they're competent and pleasant to be around.

(I may or may not have gotten Entity Framework tech support for free from an interviewee once in the past, but we don't speak of such things.)

This is why I mentioned Occupy, they had the people in place to make a meaningful impact. They were able to come out in force so quickly because of the free flow of ideas and information. It may have been that quickness that kept them from forming a cohesive strategy for achieving their ends, but that could be a whole 'nother article in itself.

Agreed, I just meant I choose self-sufficiency over dependence when possible/practical. As I get older, it seems to impact my choices more and more--and I'm not (just) talking about basic necessities, it's also guiding my investment decisions and property purchases.

The internet changes a lot of rules. Who will make the most effective use of these new rules remains to be seen, but the game has changed nonetheless.

From the fine article:

> individualism replaced collectivism and solidarity

I find myself wondering if I am part of a remaining few who treasure that. I value self-sufficiency over dependency, moreso as I get older. I have come to realize that there can rarely be an imposed collective benefit that didn't come at the expense of at least one individual. The answer to "is it worth it?" will be dependent on which one you ask. Likely the same for "is it moral?" if I had my guess.

That said, I don't think individualism can last forever. The fast exchange of ideas gives incredible power to well coordinated groups. Will it descend into mob rule? Maybe, maybe not. Time will tell. We see regular examples of internet mobs taking down powerful people and companies. The recent Pao take-down comes to mind here. People have their opinions on whether or not it was justified, and mine is irrelevant here, but to me what is most striking was the sheer effectiveness of it. Eventually "we" will figure out how much power we wield and put it to use on targets of more consequence than the CEO of a cat picture website. Occupy could have really shaken things up with the right leadership in place. They were tactically effective, but lacked a leader to put them to effective use to achieve an end.

I think the time of the collective is fast approaching. As long as it's a volunteer collective, I have no issue. If it's forced at the threat of violence, I think my opinion would differ. I am not convinced that history inspires confidence on this one.

edit: small clarification

We had beer taps at my previous job, and nobody drank during business hours even though they could have. Any work past 5 or so might have been under the influence from time to time, but we really only drank in any quantity after quittin' time.