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eckesicleon The year I didn't survive

To your first question, I don’t know. We do celebrate her birthday, light a candle whenever we walk past a church / go into a temple etc. If I’m brutally honest I think it’s more for my own sake than his.

To retain the connection, we look at photos together every week and I tell him stories about her, and their relationship.

I spoke to him just now, and he says that he misses her but is unable to articulate how. Perhaps these ceremonies will grow more important over time, and as he grows older perhaps he will appreciate that we took the time to celebrate her.

I have an adult friend, who lost his mother at a young age too. He tells me that he only really started to miss her once he got older, around 12, and as an adult. He doesn’t remember who she was or why, but he misses the idea of having had family dinners at home every day etc. The dynamic in a household is very different when there is one adult and one child at home, versus two adults to a child.

eckesicleon The year I didn't survive

My wife died suddenly when my son was two years old. He’s almost seven now.

So far, he’s completely fine without her. He claims he has memories of her, but I think he just remembers photos and videos that we’ve watched together. I don’t think he knows what he’s missing.

eckesicleon Supreme Court rules to uphold TikTok ban, setting stage for shutdown

Both those entities are within regulatory reach of the US administration.

eckesicleon Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban, but Trump might offer lifeline

Because it’s used to influence elections worldwide. Most recently the first round of the Romanian elections were won by an unheard of pro-Russian candidate who ran a disinformation campaign on TikTok, allegedly organised by the Kreml.

https://www.politico.eu/article/investigation-ties-romanian-...

https://www.politico.eu/article/calin-georgescu-romania-elec...

eckesicleon Remembering Matilda, the last survivor of the transatlantic slave trade

Yes, but unlike other bad stuff, like homicides, this issue isn’t homogeneously distributed over the world. It’s disproportionately concentrated to a small number of countries and regions, that for various reasons and to various degrees tacitly condone it.

eckesicleon Remembering Matilda, the last survivor of the transatlantic slave trade

Yes, exactly. We can do both. Recognise a historical figure and raise awareness of current issues.

eckesicleon Remembering Matilda, the last survivor of the transatlantic slave trade

For context, there are around 40 million people living in some form of slavery today, around four times the number of people who were sold in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, so it is by no means a solved problem.

Most people in slavery today live in Asia and the Middle East, but there are pockets in Africa where it is common too.

Modern slaves are sold for as little as $10-$100 and are therefore often considered disposable by their perpetrators. Approx 70% are women and 25% children.

Slavery is illegal everywhere in the world but enforcement is lax or non-existent in some countries, notably Libya and Yemen.

eckesicleon AI companies cause most of traffic on forums

Anecdatally, by default, we now block all Chinese and Russian IPs across our servers.

After doing so, all of our logs, like ssh auth etc, are almost completely free and empty of malicious traffic. It’s actually shocking how well a blanket ban worked for us.

eckesicleon Does Your Code Pass the Turkey Test? (2008)

There’s another fun thing we can call the Britain test.

The short form for September is Sept in en-GB, the only month abbreviated with four letters. It’s Sep in en-US and other en- locales. All other parsing is identical.

For example, if you’re parsing abbreviated date formats on AWS, this parsing fails only on eu-west-1 and -2 servers, and only in September.

eckesicleon US Government wants to make it easier for you to click the 'unsubscribe' button

Swedish legislation has it right here. You can unsubscribe by any means you prefer. Mail, email, phone call, a notice in your local newspaper, carrier pigeon. The choice is completely with the party who wishes to terminate the agreement.

It incentivises companies to make it as simple as possible, because if they don’t the cost of manually handling requests coming in through all kinds of different channels quickly becomes excessive.

eckesicleon US Government wants to make it easier for you to click the 'unsubscribe' button

Yes that’s right. You can unsubscribe by any which way you want. Mail, phone call, pigeon. Any message sent to any employee or office in anyway is deemed acceptable for giving notice for any service or contract.

eckesicleon Plastic bag bans work

https://i.imgur.com/GKMjP7p.jpg

Maybe I’m an outlier but I have another 3-4 of these bags of bags at home with reusable bags. Most people I talk to have the same.

I do refill my car with them occasionally, but I either forget to bring them or do grocery shopping at unanticipated times and don’t have a bag with me.

eckesicleon Your last name contains invalid characters (2010)

Hi. I wrote part of this flow for SAS on the original mobile app years ago. I am so sorry.

We had to do it because the underlying backend is Spanish and the APIs are insane. Behind our JSON-wrapper is an adapter to translates it into teletype friendly format … spaces, new lines and tabs makes it look like a ticket you’d get from a travel agency in the 1970s.

This format is also the reason why your name is truncated on your ticket (or so I was told). IT in the airline industry is insane and many systems are many decades old at this point.

A bit surprised you have trouble with APIS though.

eckesicleon Test Smarter, Not Harder: Focus on Outcomes, Not Outputs

Of course context matters but _generally_, end to end tests should be mostly avoided:

- the execution time of end to end tests are orders of magnitude larger than unit tests. In a medium ish application your end to end tests will take several seconds to spin up, for example by spinning up fresh databases (even with rollback in gets slow) and other detachable services. A unit test is usually a malloc away and thousands can be run in parallel on your local box in a second. End to end tests easily take hours of compute time time to run in the real world. Good luck running the suite on your laptop. Nothing kills productivity quicker than a test suite that runs slowly

- unit tests are also independent of other code so it’s easy to get some confidence that your code does the right thing by only testing the touched files in your diff before running the entire suite on CI.

- unit tests encourage good code quality since it’s easier to test injectable code. E2E instead incentivises copy pasted test suites that are thousands of lines of code long.

- in the general case end to end tests are asynchronous and require orders of magnitude more effort to run. Asynchronous tests are flaky. Flaky builds slow down your velocity.

- E2E tests rot really fast. One change leads to thousands of broken E2E tests.

- E2E is not a replacement for monitoring your application. The class of bugs you will catch in your E2E suite is a strict subset of the class of bugs you will catch with monitoring and metrics. Build the latter instead and roll out your code incrementally to your users.

- E2E tests are complicated to set up and maintain in ops. Unit tests not so much. Somewhat unexpectedly your development velocity scales pretty much linearly with stack complexity.

In summary (and again context matters and there aren’t any absolutes, but …):

- Don’t do automated E2E tests.

- Do unit tests

- Do metrics and monitoring

You have a limited budget, spend it where you get a good bang for your buck.

eckesicleon Swedish Tesla strike goes international as Norwegian and Danish unions join in

> Postal workers even decided not to deliver mail to the electric automaker, including license plates – an action that Musk called "insane". The local court has since put a stop to that action.

This is no longer true. A higher court overturned that decision and the license plates are again blocked from reaching Tesla.

eckesicleon The dead children we must see

It’s a reference to a series of articles by The Onion.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_to_Prevent_This,%2....

eckesicleon The dead children we must see

Proponents of firearms always seem to fall back on the same argument against a ban: “Take the guns away and the bad guys will be the only people armed”.

This isn’t true though. Guns are used to shoot people because they are available, not because they are legal.

In the UK it is still possible to acquire guns illegally, but they are rare and difficult to come by. There were only 28 homicides from shootings last year.

If you just make it a lot more difficult to acquire a weapon the shootings disappear.

eckesicleon Use Timestamps

It’s the default on many non-AWS providers.

eckesicleon Use Timestamps

There’s some unexpected behaviour with MMM as a formatter, which is that it’s not always 3 characters long and differ subtle by locale.

Notably on the JVM if your locale is en-GB every month is 3 chars: Jan, Feb, Mar, etc. until you get to September which is Sept.

In en-US it’s just Sep.

Of course, if you don’t specify the locale in code, it will choose the system default leading to lovely region specific exceptions for your servers in Ireland and England.

eckesicleon What happens to all the stuff we return?

That’s why you also by your car online or over the phone (applies to EU/UK). Have the dealership mail/email the paperwork. They will ask you to come in because they know this is the case, but just stand your ground.

Then you have the right to return if you find any defects within 14/30 days.

eckesicleon Why Britain doesn’t build

It's 74% of eligible adults, not 74% of the population.

https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/culture-a...

eckesicleon Why Britain doesn’t build

Make America Great Britain Again!

eckesicleon My friends who cheated in interviews are getting promoted (2022)

Yes. Interviewees were free to pick any language to attack their problem. We found that interviewees who picked certain languages performed consistently worse during their interviews, and also received worse feedback in their 360-review after working for a year (if they passed).

The bottom languages were: Java C++ Php

They also made up the bulk of interviews. I suspect that Java and c++ together accounted for about 75% of all interviews.

Languages like ruby, python and golang increased your chances of passing the interview as well as getting good peer feedback one year on.

More niche languages (rust, erlang etc) didn’t have enough data points to be analysed separately, but if you grouped them they were the choice of the strongest candidates.

eckesicleon My friends who cheated in interviews are getting promoted (2022)

Sadly not. We ran the study on internal company data, so it was never published. The purpose of the study was to improve and inform on our hiring practices

eckesicleon My friends who cheated in interviews are getting promoted (2022)

I ran a largish statistical analysis where I was working on all interviews and employee ratings for the following year (16000 data points).

My conclusion was that:

* some interview problems carried zero signal

* some interviewers are really good at identifying strong candidates, and others correlate negatively! On average interviewers rating is a weak signal (<0.25. Correlation)

* geographic location is a medium signal (0.2)

* a relevant degree is a strong signal (0.4)

* choice of programming language is the strongest signal (>0.8 correlation (or anti-) for some languages, and some.

There is some selection bias though since candidates who were rejected did not get a chance at the job so we didn’t have a rating for them.

eckesicleon The elite British college for the world’s best nannies

You pay the agency a one off fee for the recruitment (I think it was GBP6000), and the nanny is your employee, so they keep their entire wages.

The nanny also pays a yearly membership fee to them, but I don’t think it’s very large.

eckesicleon The elite British college for the world’s best nannies

I had a Norland nanny look after my three-year old son for a few months after my wife died.

It was an interesting experience, and very different from anything else since.

The contract that the Norland Agency (you can only get these nannies through the college's own agency) issue to the clients, and also the ethical conduct they sign regulate in detail, how Norlanders interact with their clients (and it's very much one sided in favour of the client).

In terms of the day to day, they develop, with the parents, a strict schedule for meals, education and social events that they stick to religiously. When I woke up in the mornings, fifteen minutes before my nanny was supposed to start (she did not live with us) to have my coffee, she was invariably always parked outside in her car waiting for the clock to strike 7:00am, before walking in exactly on time each morning. Snack-time, dinner, and bed time similarly occurred pretty much on the minute every day too.

My son had a meal schedule that was planned and approved by me a week in advance. Every day she planned a fun/educational activity. She tailored a teaching programme for my son, based on his performance from an evaluation she did, that she also followed each day.

Before going home every day, she wrote a journal of everything that had happened during the day, and what the goals and the targets were for the next day.

I've tried to retain and adapt what she put in place, and I strongly believe it is the framework and the structure to their approach that make them so special. My son also thrived under her care.

I couldn't recommend them more.

eckesicleon Career advice no one gave me: Give a lot of notice when you quit

The context of the grandparent comment implies that they date their letter of resignation as being submitted in the future.

eckesicleon Two types of C programmers

… and those who mistake it for trinary.

eckesicleon Career advice no one gave me: Give a lot of notice when you quit

No it’s not valid in Sweden (or anywhere else). The date at which your resignation starts to count is the date that your employer learns of your intent to leave. You are however free to agree on an arbitrary date with them as your last day.

It’s not the date you put in the letterhead. That would be insane.