fridek

CRUD apps are 90% brainless. The only challenge not solved by phpMyAdmin or others alike is UI and nice connections between the data. There were already attempts at generating this 90% just to decorate with UI and additional logic, but I feel it will take some time to do it well. People got burned by GWT and other backend + frontend solutions.

Also "CRUD apps put food on the table for you guys. Be grateful!" is a really broken way of thinking. Salary after a certain point doesn't increase happiness that much [1] so there is no good reason to work on CRUD apps if one doesn't like that and can cover their needs otherwise.

[1] http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2019628...

A helpful Googler once told me to always think as if you had just one server - with a hierarchy of computation, access and storage costs and different characteristics of failure.

This is just a tip of the iceberg. Junior questions on stack overflow and general attitude towards learning people how to work with the vocabulary and the basic concepts are sort of addressed by many great tutorials (codecombat.com <3), podcasts and in general helpful people that are out there. But try to even formulate an advanced question, like "how should I fit this idea into my existing 200+ classes system". Even if you describe your problem in less than one page of text, there is no place to ask how to design stuff. I suspect most people just make enough mistakes to become this senior architect person who gets to say "oh yes, we did try that in the 70s, it won't work because X".

</rant>

I'm from Eastern Europe and I've heard from native speakers that we use perfect tenses more often than a native speak would.

It is interesting to see how much easier it is to communicate with other non-natives in English than with natives. I always struggled with UK accent and considered the US version simpler. However it seems British have developed more tolerance for varying accents over time, while Americans have often trouble understanding anything I said. For them, there was only one version of any given word and I was not using it.

Does it feature more recent knots like the Eldredge or Trinity? I wonder how a formal description of the "tricks" they use would look like.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1113076301/unique-make-... is a smart strap like you describe. Unfortunately it seems to be rather thick. I doubt it can look and feel as good as a thicker watch.

I've never seen a management role as something related to individual performance. I think it's rather clear that a one person team won't work better with additional manager. On average though you won't get uniform team nor a team that gets along well. And even if you do, it has its own dangers. Manager is there to make sure things happen even when people disagree on them, and to make sure the best option wins any argument, not just the loudest. It's really often like juggling with dogs and cats. That are on fire.

I was lucky to see the stellator construction in progress in 2011. It is easily the most amazing piece of tech I've witnessed with my own eyes. Not only it's huge, but it is also built with a stunning precision (to shape the magnetic field exactly like designed). I took couple of more raw pictures, feel free to take a look: https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B41yKtv8jj2RdzdKbmxH...

Replacing "140 trillion times the total water on Earth" with "enough to supply an entire planet's worth of water for every person on earth, 20,000 times over." wasn't a particularly good idea.

Sure you can. And as I said, I'm not a big angular lover. In fact we used Backbone for REST in it, because of shortcomings of the $resource at the time.

And flux is great and React-first, but it's not technically a part of React. And it is also great, having a choice is usually a good thing.

Still I'm skeptical when people are happy just because they moved from angular to react. Or from any X to Y really. Usually the gain comes more just from rewriting things with better understanding of the project and from more established team. No one does A/B studies on it, right?

"I’m not joking: we were perfectly able to get by in one of the Angular projects developed internally — consisting of around 200 Javascript files and a total of around 10,000 lines of code — using only factories."

Funny, I could agree this is true for providers or services. Factories however can't be used for singletons, so I'd rather not know how they implemented shared state and utils.

Because React solves only the directive part of Angular? I'm not saying it's great BTW, but comparing React to Angular is silly. That's like saying you chose lodash.js over Angular.

Ah, so it's one of those moments when there are contradicting studies and without getting a PhD on the subject one can't have a meaningful opinion. I just wish there was a good way of settling such situations.

It is interesting to read that burning coal actually produces more radioactive waste than a nuclear plant [1], only because there are loads and loads of it, and there are usually very few regulations involved.

Some say that coal is not the only alternative and it can be processed in a safer manner, but this is wishful thinking. Renewable sources involve a costly manufacturing process that is not necessarily green [2] and there is still no good, scalable solution for a cloudy, not-windy day. And don't get me started on hydro power and how we have at best no idea about the long-term environment impact of it. Then add to it the way politics works and that dirty coal works just fine for your common Joe, as long as it's burned elsewhere.

Nuclear power scale well, can be safe when done properly, and if nothing literally explodes is the cleanest option out there. Compare the victims of coal mining accidents alone with those of nuclear disasters [3] - and those do not include the air pollution victims.

[1] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-r...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse-gas_emis...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_disaster...

We have learnt to not put reactors on top of the water tanks, and to not shutdown all safety systems to see if the plant explodes.

I'm not an expert, but the Fukushima's core problem was an older design based on active cooling, that requires continuous water input and thus electricity to run the water pumps. Current work is concentrated mostly on making nuclear plant as passive as possible, resulting in graceful shutdown in the event of supporting equipment failure. This involves finding a coolant that behaves predictably and nicely when various subsystems go down (water does not).

Additional reading: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/423307/newer-nuclear-re... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_nuclear_safety

It's hard to make an argument that loyal customers are lost. Don't they by definition renew the license every year anyway? If not, still no one is lost - existing licenses don't magically expire. This change affects only potential new customers who are not renewing every year for some reason.

The same could have been (and was) said for Angular. Weapon choice is part of a duel.

At the same time, I worked in a couple places that used better, but less fancy languages/frameworks. I won't name them to not attract a horde of "but Erlang/Racket/Ember is the best thing". There was a repeating pattern of having a hard time with both recruitment and with actual development. People didn't know our tech, or they did but not as well as they claimed they did. Then there was all the trouble with finding libraries, examples and general help of any kind with less popular tech. I suppose the cost of using a wrong but popular tool (be it React or anything else) may actually not overweight the cost of using the right tool which in general is harder to utilize.

You see, your idea about how the water consumption works is invalid. Water is not vitamin C, there is such thing as drinking too much and it leads to lower sodium levels in blood. It is actually advised to not drink too much water immediately after exercise, when your electrolytes levels are already low and further dilution may affect your brain functions. Probably not in a fatal way, but still. The article is actually right that insisting on drinking more water is bullshit, and a dangerous one. You should drink when you are thirsty, it is really very simple. The only people advising otherwise are either selling bottled water or have drank enough kool-aid already.

It's funny how people saying ads should be replaced with a subscription model in different threads are going completely bananas about paywalled articles.

Couple of web newspapers in my country switched recently to 10 articles a month for free and then asking for a subscription. It's awful, it makes me read less and I would prefer to see some ads I'm used to ignoring anyway. Usually I don't know if I like the content before I'm half-way through it. I also don't want to have 20 subscriptions pending every month just to have access to a reasonable portion of the internet.

The web has already killed most of review and proofreading process in press. Lets not kill content quality by taking even more money out of it.

It looks like an amount of space hard to fill with meaningful data. I wonder if they would prevent people from filling it with random junk just for fun.

Not that it matters and it was already said elsewhere, but peer bonus can be awarded only once for one thing. And it makes sense in a 50k+ company, where some social interaction happens and a single person can become peer-bonus-celebrity easily. It's not a good thing to incentivize :) Also if I were a manager sifting through some kind of peer bonus app I'd too be tempted to mark all as rejected after a while.

There was a book recently, Work rules! by Laszlo Bock who happens to be a head of people operations. He describes exactly those inequality patterns. It's nothing unusual, some of it is accepted (some people earn more for their higher value) and some not (woman not asking for a raise so easily). Seriously, just go and read a book, not some stream of contextless tweets gathered together.

You speak as if the money was yours to spend and it was misused somehow. As far as billionaires eccentricity goes, this is a great use of money.

From what I've heard Microsoft Edge looks like such attempt. When a site requires some kind of compatibility mode, the not-so-good-but-indeed-old IE is spawned to serve it. Great approach and I hope they set the bar high to make the common use case faster.

My ideal browser would support only something like "use strong" from [1] and spawn Netscape 4.0 for all pages that abuse JS.

[1] https://developers.google.com/v8/experiments

It's absolutely normal to feel bored with a project around a second year of it. Consider finding an environment where you can switch projects while staying within the company. Most large corporations would allow you to do that, at a cost of being probably less flexible with toolchain and decision making process.

You can view them as huge tragedies or local aberrations, depending on where you live I guess. But if you consider what the modern world is capable of in terms of armed conflict (probably few orders of magnitude more of what WW1/2 was) I think it's reasonably peaceful at the moment.

That would be $20 billion, making it one of the top 1000 companies by revenue globally. I'll leave it to you to decide if it looks like a true information.

Oh I absolutely agree, the algorithms and math are described very well. It's complex but clear, and the course I mentioned explains those concepts very well (and is fun, bonus points for that).

I of course meant the or-tools API docs. Overall I think it's nicely done and structured, but could be better.

Basically it solves NP-complete problems that are solvable because of small set size and some clever constant optimizations. There are industries where it's a useful thing for scheduling, for example. Or you may want to solve travelling salesman when planning a trip.

Coursera has a great course on discrete optimization [1] where I have learned and used or-tools. They are rather nice, but the documentation is half done (basically code is the best documentation) and some interfaces are not compatible with others. I ended up forking or-tools for my own use and tweaking many unexposed internals. I guess it's extremely difficult to implement generic optimization solver, so I won't complain, but be prepared it's not out-of-the-box thing (I doubt there is any).

[1] https://www.coursera.org/course/optimization