danek

  Doing so *nullifies*

pun intended?

Counterpoint: I wouldn’t think of starting a startup in the US but I would seriously consider it in Sweden. Healthcare is one of the issues for me.

Maybe it’s not right to say it’s the reason for Sweden’s success but it could be an enabling factor.

Fwiw the books are included if you buy a ticket, and the books are the medium of much of his work so it would make sense for him to extensively reference them

I believe I've experienced this combination before. I don't know exactly what it was, but my experience matches the description. I thought it was some sort of seizure, but exploding head is a better match. (so thanks!)

I think it was caused by a medication I was taking at the time. It started a few weeks after I increased the dosage, and stopped when I quit.

This didn't happen a lot, maybe 5 times over 2 months, but it was terrifying. I'd feel a strange sensation throughout my body as I was falling asleep, then hear a pulsating noise that sounded "glitchy", like an old CD that was skipping. I couldn't move my body but my eyes could look around the room, and I'd "see" weird shapes and lights. I could kinda make the experience stop and wake up by moving my eyes a certain way, which I guess snapped me out of it.

I used to get sleep paralysis somewhat regularly, now just a few times a year. But it never included the symptoms of exploding head syndrome. Usually it's just the sensation of some malevolent entity standing in the room while I'm laying in bed, unable to move.

It's one of those things that sounds so simple and great on paper but has a huge impedance mismatch with reality.

Anything involving people is political. I'm not sure it can be avoided. And even if it's somehow not political today it's not future-proof. For example, a recipe could call for an ingredient that's considered unethical.

Yes, testing along with strict linter settings goes a long way.

I'm thankful that physics prevents many nightmare scenarios like goose-sized scorpions

Yeah, I find that pure functions (or pure functions living in immutable objects) makes my code immensely more composable and easier to work with (i.e. more adaptable and less expensive to own). If some business requirement changes I can recompose and tweak existing code without reading every line of code to figure out what side effects may unintentionally get triggered.

True, keeping your enemies in the dark about your true capabilities is a useful strategy (unless it is a doomsday device, then you should tell the world). Strategic leaks of misinformation is one way to go about it.

Also low-quality exploits could be made on purpose to be intentionally found. The victim finds it and then thinks they are in the clear, while the a more sophisticated real exploit is lurking undetected.

Thank you

Or waiting for us to compute 42

This is true but a study is useless if it can't measure the thing you want. Things in programming are notoriously difficult to quantify, compared to say, stuff in physics. Perhaps it's why there are so many holy wars.

I'm also curious how this would work without breaking reflection

Pretty close. End of July, 8 years ago. It was definitely more than one an hour, but not like what Is imagine a shower to be like. Maybe more like one every 15 minutes

Fair enough (I don't know much about beer)

I read the studies he cited and I'm not sure we can conclude anything from them. As far as I can tell, "bug density by language" is not a thing you can measure in a meaningful way. It depends on the specific programmers at a specific point in their career, their skill level, domain knowledge for the project, scope of project, who the project manager is, their culture of testing, etc. For example a great JavaScript programmer will make a less buggy program than a mediocre c++ programmer.

There is no silver bullet, though the article tries to pass off TDD as one. Also he does concede that static types can power tooling that might "feel like they make us more productive".

Disclaimer: I prefer having types but I also think JavaScript is great and don't shy away from using it.

Imagine receiving a box of live scorpions by accident.

I am trying to imagaine what the customs agent thinks "live beer" is, since apparently it is something you can import as long as you pay the tax.

Yeah lots of rural areas in the US have very dark skies. I saw lots of shooting stars one night driving acros Utah, it was pretty incredible.

My company has some apps that we need to install on our customers servers. A linker would have been amazing for us 7 years ago as we could have targeted the (as of then new) 4.0 runtime and redistributed or binary. But as it was, we could only expect the 2.0 runtime to be installed so we can't really leverage a lot of stuff that's been out since then and had to write our own hacky versions of lots of common things.

Nowadays with dotnet core you can bundle the entire runtime with you binary. The linker is cool, in that it will create a strictly smaller binary, as in "hello world" might be 12mb instead of 50mb. That's cool, but it makes me wonder if .NET would be in a strategically better place today if the linker were present 10 years ago. How many companies didn't choose to write their app in c# simply because a customer might not have the runtime installed?

In any case I'm really impressed with everything Microsoft is doing with dotnet core and hope that I get to use more of it.

Also none of my cards are signed because when I do sign them, the ink rubs off after a few days! So I assume the whole signature system is purely ceremonial at this point. Or at the least it's a way to say a human was present with a physical card.

Let's say this talk was never approved by PR and the employees went rogue. Firing someone in public right after they give a talk is still terrible optics. Even if salesforce is in the right, this executive looks totally incompetent, which in turn reflects poorly on the company. Unless it was an extended salesforce trash talk, that is.

It's a joyful surprise for me when the logo actually links to the right thing. Also it's not just blogs--any subsite, like documentation sites, forums, company wikis, etc.

That's the point, that it's better to focus on long term but the game puts a lot of pressure on you to optimize for short term

Yes I agree. To clarify, I was away on vacation at the time and we only spoke briefly. We discussed that the lack of details about the severance was weird but we had 10+ reports of others who had received 1-2 months of severance, and they had worked there only a year or two, whereas he had been there 4 years. So we though it was reasonable he would get at least a month of severance, based on precedence of "lesser" employees.

He was told that hr had a standard formula for calculating the severance but was not told that the main factor was his manager's discretion.

Also for him at this time, any money was better than no money, and he was interested in moving on with his life rather than writing a shitty Glassdoor review (he's actually doing much, much better for himself than he was at the prior company, I'm just pissed about the way he was treated). So yes, this was bad advice and I learned an important lesson. But I'm also thankful it worked out in his favor in the end.

It sounds super shady but it's what this company does. It's basically a payoff: "Don't ruin our recruiting pipeline or tarnish the opinion of any existing employees and we'll make your firing a bit less painful with X months salary, just sign here. Also we will let you know what 'X' is next week, after you've signed".

X ended up being 1 week of salary. Though for other people it was 1 or 2 months. Very shitty.

Excellent point. I'm pretty sure this is a thing, I vaguely remember reading something about how getting promoted gives you some "invisible leverage" (my words) because now the company has decided you are valuable and special and they don't wanna look like they made a mistake. Thanks, this actually helped me understand an instance of where several not very good managers got further promoted and it made no sense to me.

Yeah I've noticed that usually you need at least 4 people to quit before anything happens to the boss. Even if they know he sucks they're gonna try and keep him on. No idea why, but it has the appearance of "he's part of the mgmt club and you aren't"

Excellent point. And now I suppose that every legal question is really two questions ;)