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elseweather

54 karma · joined January 15, 2021

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elseweather··on Amazon braces for another major round of layoffs, 14,000 jobs at risk
This is the WARN notice for the _previous_ layoff in October. Presumably they'll file another one for the next wave this week.
elseweather··on Beej's Guide to Learning Computer Science
Beej's guide to network programming is an all-time classic, and I suspect this is the same (even before I've read it thoroughly).
elseweather··on Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK) v4.0 is out [pdf]
this is a book for people who think the wizard on the cover of SICP is an actual wizard and get scared
elseweather··on The bunkbed conjecture is false
Yes, it seems intuitively obvious, which is why mathematicians spent a long time trying to prove that the conjecture was true. It turns out The conjecture is false in a non-obvious way. The result described in the blog post is a specific counterexample: the conjecture fails, just barely, for a specific graph with several thousand nodes and edges. It's not the kind of counterexample you would intuit in your head or even on a whiteboard.
elseweather··on Lottery Simulator (2023)
In the US at least they're a state monopoly
elseweather··on CERN aims to build €20B collider
they have a whole complex of particle accelerators; many of the old ones are feeders into LHC

https://home.web.cern.ch/science/accelerators/accelerator-co...

elseweather··on I liked this simple calculus exercise
It's floor(_) - as in, floor(1.999) = 0, but floor(2.001) = 2. If you look carefully the upper flange of the [] square brackets is missing, which makes it a floor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floor_and_ceiling_functions

elseweather··on One man’s quest to revive the great American vacuum tube
I dunno, man. At least with guitar amps the solid state ones _try_, but even expensive ones kinda suck compared to a tube amp
elseweather··on Amazon Mandating 3 days back in office come May first
> Maybe Amazon should also ensure employer safety while commuting/walking to the office.

I've never looked into it myself, but they do advertise a service like this around the Seattle offices

elseweather··on Amazon will require employees return to the office 3 days a week
It would be nice if that area was something more interesting than a corporate dormitory. Of course this change is ... not the way
elseweather··on I don't like making the best things
That's a lovely photo
elseweather··on People who “drink to cope” can make their symptoms worse: study
You have to eat something, but you don't have to drink. I've seen it described as: Imagine telling alcoholics to keep it under control, while still making them have 2-3 drinks a day!
elseweather··on Activision Blizzard Hires Notorious Union-Busting Firm WilmerHale
That's what Blizzard's always done - they didn't invent RTS games, or MMOs, or collectible card games, or roguelikes, they just refined and productized them. I think it's fair to call Overwatch a huge success if you're counting e.g. Diablo and World of Warcraft in there.
elseweather··on Disintermediating friends: Online dating displaces other ways of meeting (2019) [pdf]
Most people don't go to college, but if you did, you're likely to have a mostly college-educated bubble
elseweather··on Avoiding Leetcode Anxiety
1. Trial by fire; learning on the job

2. CS stuff is widely available for self-study if you've got good discipline. "The Algorithm Design Manual" by Skiena is my favorite textbook on algorithm fundamentals. CLRS is a bigger book with more mathy crunch, if you're into that.

There's a lot more to computer science and software engineering than just algorithms, but it's what you'll get grilled on the most in junior level interviews. By the same token, the skills you need as you get more senior in this industry aren't really taught in school.

elseweather··on Avoiding Leetcode Anxiety
Ah, man, I get being anxious in interviews but it never occurred to me that newbies would be stressed out by their (lack of) Leetcode score. It's totally unnecessary of course - the people who've racked 1500 problems are probably as unemployed as you are :p
elseweather··on Rare chunks of Earth's mantle found exposed in Maryland
I wish the article had more photos - from the one it looks like it could be an awesome rock climbing area
elseweather··on Neutron stars may be bigger than expected, measurement of lead nucleus suggests
I'm curious what useful applications we have for black holes of any size
elseweather··on The unreasonable effectiveness of print debugging
It's a meme, like "_____ Considered Harmful". That one started with "GOTO Considered Harmful". This one started with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness...
elseweather··on Ask HN: Solo developer, what's your recipe to start working?
This is, in fact, an existing product category: the one I'm most familiar with is https://www.beeminder.com/, but it's got a few competitors.

I've never found it particularly useful, but then I'm also too chicken to put up serious cash. I figure I put a high price on having to be disciplined :)

elseweather··on Clothing, How Did They Make It? Part IVa: Dyed in the Wool
IF you enjoy this kind of thing, (and you aren't already an acoup fan), he wrote an entire article about the biker-gear-leather-fetish trope in Game of Thrones: https://acoup.blog/2020/12/04/collections-that-dothraki-hord...
elseweather··on It Can Happen to You
...which makes it a classic exercise for teaching memoization!
elseweather··on Map of my personal data infrastructure
There's an explanation here: https://beepb00p.xyz/unnecessary-db.html (the link behind "Against unnecessary databases")
elseweather··on Map of my personal data infrastructure
Cheers! Responding between dumbbell sets - I hope I may never stop being an animal ;)
elseweather··on Map of my personal data infrastructure
I mean, you can also just let the data go. "nothing, chaos" is pretty simple. I don't believe being able to search my chatlogs from 2005 would make my life simpler, or better.

Some people are natural archivists and love that second-brain stuff though, and this is a pretty sweet example :). One area I strongly relate to Karlicoss is how bad it is getting data out of my bank; as a regular non-institutional customer I don't get API access, so I have to download a PDF manually every month and run it through some script to parse out the line items.

elseweather··on Ask HN: Which are the best Go repositories to read to learn the language?
What's wrong with it? I'd totally believe it's a mess, but I'm curious what kind of mess. Specifically I'm wondering if it's "bad Go code" or the underlying AWS APIs (or both!)
elseweather··on End-to-End Arguments in System Design (1984) [pdf]
This is a fascinating article that winds through a whole raft of problems that feel super relevant in the software world today: end-to-end encryption, distributed messaging, what we would today call "containerization" (in 1984!), many other things besides. I often dislike this kind of abstract general nonsense but I think there's a really interesting through-line here I hadn't noticed before.

One thing that struck home with me was this line:

> Some of these source files were corrupted by byte exchanges, and their owners were forced to the ultimate end-to-end error check: manual comparison with and correction from old listings.

At work I sometimes joke that us SWEs are the last line of retry-and-checksum defense, but it's not a joke! This paper argues correctly that engineering extreme reliability into lower level common components is uneconomical, but on the other hand pushing reliability all the way up the stack doesn't work either. If you surface the jank all the way up to your customers you just have a buggy, crappy product and your business will fail. One level down, if you rely on talented engineers to fight operational fires all the time you have to pay a lot of expensive engineers to not make progress delivering features.