ecopoesis

I applied to ITA in 2008ish and was require to complete one of these, something very similar to instant search. Needless to say I failed because the question isn't about your ability to program, it is just if you know what a suffix-tree is.

These are fun puzzles but terrible interview questions.

Providing reasonable accommodation, which is required by US law, is not unfair or arbitrary.

~12% of American women will get breast cancer, which is about 6% of Americans. And during October there is just as much pink as there are rainbows in June.

Are kosher kitchens not a thing in San Francisco? They aren't common in Boston but I think most places allow them.

The point is to enrich Intuit and other tax preparers that lobbied for this.

The “pleasing heft” the article mentions is a sign that you have soda-lime glass instead of borosilicate. A few years ago after having a 2-cup soda-lime Pyrex measuring cup explode I order the equivalent from Arcuisine in borosilicate and I was amazed at how much lighter it was.

SRECs are generated and auctioned quarterly. After an initial lag I get a check for SREC sales every 3 months.

There are schemes where you can get fixed price SRECs by signing them over to a 3rd-party. The third-party then give you a fixed amount monthly or quarterly or whatever but it's a significant discount on the auction price.

There are also companies that will give you a lump sum for your 10-years of SRECs up front but like all 'need cash now' schemes there is a significant discount.

CadQuery is awesome. OpenScad’s language is quite limited: being able to use any Python you want makes CadQuery so much more powerful. Plus CadQuery can generate STEP files so you’re not limited to hobby 3D printers: you can send your project out to a CNC shop. I designed and manufactured a keyboard using CadQuery and would highly recommend it.

This is just shorthand for the blog post: if you read the linked code on GitHub you can see that the three variables are assigned to actual, static random numbers.

Or maybe it was always sick and is getting better? There’s no war in Europe. No war in the Western Hemisphere. Violent crime in the US is at a multi-decade low. There has been a human in space for the entirety of the 21st century. Most of the world carries a supercomputer with instant access to the sum total of human knowledge in their pocket.

We live in an age of marvels.

If society is indeed sick then the cure probably isn’t worth it.

I think Java is simple because it’s small. There are only 50 keywords and ~40 operators (many of which are variations). As a comparison C# has 102 [1] keywords. Java code is generally easy to understand assuming some familiarity with other languages. There aren’t many weird symbols or constructs. There are very few exceptions to the basic rules of Java. It just does what you’d expect most of the time. Java feels like a lowest common denominator language— a kind of average of everything else.

This “simpleness” is part of what makes Java not easy. It is not very expressive. Java (outside of memory management) does not give the programmer a lot of help. You have to explain things to it in excruciating detail, being very specific and never leaving anything out or the compiler will complain.

The lack of expressiveness makes some things really hard. Just look at the number of dependency injection frameworks that exist for Java. Or logging frameworks.

At a certain point of project complexity everyone ends up fighting their language. It feels that with Java that point comes early then most others. But cleverly I think it comes after a level of complexity that most people end up hitting in enterprisy CRUD apps and that’s a big part of why Java is so popular.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/a/4980785/858463

Java won for a bunch of reason:

1) It’s fast. Like almost C/C++ fast. Yes like any language you can write crappy slow code in Java but it is fast by default.

2) While certainly not an easy language it is a simple language. The number of footguns in Java is pretty small.

There’s only a little of magic that languages like Ruby and Python have. Which of course means the programmer has to be more specific and add lots of boilerplate. And if you get it wrong the compiler yells loudly. And there’s none of the memory management ceremony from C/C++ that everyone gets wrong constantly.

GC can lead to hard to explain madness but your basic enterprise CRUD app is never going to see that.

3) The standard library is awesome. Things like Java collections and concurrency just work: no fuss. And when you need to reach into the back of the tool cabinet the defacto STL provided by Apache is incredible. Need something super specialized like an ordered bidi map in a tree? Apache’s got one and I have faith it’s well tested, decently performant and has good documentation

A decade ago Java could be terrible. There were a lot of people pushing giant XML confine. But even then you could always use code and smart folks did. Today the XML stuff is kept for comparability but the world has moved on. Modern frameworks end up looking and acting a lot like Rails.

Why? There are ~76,000[1] coal worker in the US out of 151 million people in the workforce[2]. Why does this minuscule industry deserve more protections then say Toys 'R' Us' 31,000 employees?[3] Just because they all vote GOP?

Coal is a terrible industry that is destroying the world. It can't go away quick enough.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/03/31/8-sur...

[2] https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12000000

[3] http://money.cnn.com/2018/03/16/news/companies/toys-r-us-emp...

Salsify the PXM company comes from salsify the root vegetable and is pronounced the same way. Our logo is a stylized salsify flower.

Modern software engineering has a much to do with software engineering as putting decals on you car has to to do with engine fabrication.

If you want to engineer software you should start by making transistors ands putting them together into AND gates and work your way up. It will likely take you a lifetime to master the skills unless you can find a programmer to train with (and not a JavaScript hacker).

Let’s not “no true Scotsman” these folks or anyone for that matter. Everyone starts not knowing everything. Everyone ends not knowing anything.

These people are making cool watches where none existed before. Therefore they are watchmakers. The aesthetic design is an equally important part of the package: who cares if that’s were they decided to focus their first efforts. I imagine a large number of us so-called software professionals started the same way: changing an HTML tags color, hacking a new sprite into a favorite game or changing the color of our DOS prompt.

I really like Apache’s explanation linked from that page of the Apache license as a “universal donor” and GPL as a “universal recipient”. It’s the cleanest analogy about open-source licenses I’ve seen.

I had an Alpha Multia back in ‘98. I remember having to scour eBay for the appropriate SCSI adapters since DEC used something proprietary. And even with the adapter, I never got the Linuxes of the time to recognize the HDs.

The key to running NT4 for Alpha was DEC’s FX!32. It crosscompiled x86 code to AXP. Thanks to Alpha’s better design this made my 233mhz 21066 a lot faster running x86 code the my Pentium MMX 233.

I think (hope) North Carolina's history with the 'Bathroom Law' and the general lack of democracy at the state level makes Raleigh a hard sell.

Boston and Cambridge, MA have passed truck side rail laws. "Trucks over x height prohibited" and "Trucks over x weight prohibited" are common.

States and cities can do a lot, and in fact can do a lot more then the federal government because they don't have a 10th amendment restricting them.

https://www.volpe.dot.gov/our-work/truck-side-guards-resourc...

Domestic adoption costs a lot too. Source: I adopted a baby from Virginia and it cost over $50,000. It is a very broken system.

Adoptions in the US cost ~$40k, a lot more then the 10-15k for pregnancy.

And if they aren't the miners will just fork Bitcoin to a version without the coin limit. The real question is what future do the miner's choose? I see three options:

1) The new Bitcoin supply is tightly managed and the miners maintain the current deflationary pressure, ensuring a continued rise in Bitcoin's value.

2) The new Bitcoin is tightly managed, but with the aim of some modest amount of inflation akin to what most central banks aim for. In this model, transaction fees dominate mining profits since Bitcoin's value will stabilize or drop.

3) The new Bitcoin goes into hyper-inflation Weimar Republic-style, eventually becoming worthless.

I think it will be number 3. There is too much money to be made by attempting to time the inflationary spiral, and miners essentially acting as Bitcoin's central bank are in a perfect place to take advantage of it.

There are hashes that represent the content of photos, the Microsoft’s PhotoDNA and Cloudinary’s pHash. I’m pretty sure Facebook’s engineers are smart enough to that they can’t just run photos through MD5 and have everything work.

Infrastructure can change quickly. In Boston it looks like it took us about 40 years to move from a streetcar dominated system to an auto dominated one. And that was with two intervening world wars.

Because it costs a lot of money to to move, and poor people (service employees) don’t have that money.

That's because Tesla has the room to properly cool the battery. Phones use batteries as heat sinks for their processors, and heat kills lithium batteries.

Vermont cleaned up its street names as part of the E911 rollout while I was growing up. The dirt road we lived on got a name for the first time.

The towns also deduped street names, so if one town had a Green St, Green Ave and Green Rd, only on kept its name.

It's an artifact of ad blocking.

> (I am very smart)

Citation needed.

In the late nineties when I was in college working at the helpdesk we had a problem during freshmen orientation where all of NE2000 clones in the desktops from HP or Packard Bell (definitely had Packard in the name) had the same MAC set. It was a lot of fun reinstalling everyone's drivers via sneakernet.