loudouncodes

I don't expect amazon to have my best interests at heart. To the contrary, this entire post is about how their actions dont have their best interests at heart. When I pause a purchase because of this crap, I might not ever return to pick it up.

I never expect a faceless company to care about me. I do expect that when I willingly align my interests with theirs, things should get easier.

I spent 11 years working as a contractor for the U.S. State Department. During this time I:

- In 1996 built and deployed a system to keep track of the removal of landmines in Bosnia. In 2015 I met someone who knew my work as a child in Sarajevo, producing the maps they’d give out to schoolchildren.

- I managed a project with over 30 team members to build a system to help former Soviet Union countries manage their import/export control policies.

- I helped create a system for generating some annual reports for Poland that was a requirememnt for them to join NATO.

I realized I should clarify “I could find”. I’m in the Washington D.C. Metro area, but I spoke _at least_ once a week everywhere from Richmond to Philadelphia, and occasionally as far as Ohio.

Networking and Marketing.

For 10 years I spoke at every conference, user group, etc. that I could find. I sustained a 9 person consulting company finding gigs through the network of other speakers and attendees that would come up and ask me questions. Every question can be rephrased as “I have a problem you can help me solve”, but you also have to qualify to make sure there is a company with a budget for solving that problem. That takes a little business development.

For conference attendees, you have to have some free giveaway to keep a connection… like a free 2 hour code review of your existing project, or “I’m willing to do this presentation for an in-house user group as a lunchtime thing if you’re interested”. Those little giveaways get you closer to the management and the confidence you know what you’re talking about.

This is ridiculous.

1. Pseudocode should be typeable in an email.

2. You should be able to write pseudocode on a whiteboard without worrying about syntax.

3. Pseudocode should be loose enough that it suggests a domain-specific language that it might inspire.

4. If your pseudocode requires a mechanism for comments, you’ve lost the plot. In their example, they comment ‘v1’ as ‘variable holding candidate 1’s tally’. Then name it that! ‘tally_can1’ would be much better.

I use and love pinboard.in

I absolutely have an inner voice. I’m ‘hearing’ it right now as I plan out what i’m saying to you.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2014/aug/21/science...

Let me get my pdf highlights into readwise and let me orgazize my notes as a zettelkasten in obsidian and i’ll get in lline to pay you.

I started watching it, but the whole thing turned me off because they took two fantastic women involved at NASA - Margaret Hamilton and Poppy Northcut, and combined them into one character that in the several episodes I saw was trending towards being a love interest.

For a show that should have accuracy at the start, this was unforgivable given the need for strong women role models in tech.

This alsp pissed me off. He is totally ignoring Benoit Mandel brot’s work in the 1950’s and John Conways work in the 1970’s. He sounds like a petulent child who takes himself too seriously and expects others do the same. It distracts from an otherwise interesting classification paradigm.

I do not see much difference between his 4th paradigm and a breadth-first search through an np (nondeterministic polynomial) problem. I’d love to know what other mathemeticians that work on dynamical systems (Dr Krieger, anyone?) think of his work…

Beautiful, but why this design trend of breaking the semantics of scrolling?

Um, he starts in 1976, then says ‘21 years later’ and he’s talking about today? He’s 20 years off in his opening premise...

Wow! A webring! Haven’t seen one of those in a zillion years.

Fully functional?

I have expectations...

How can this article, as well as the hundreds of comments here, not acknowledge that all they are doing is solving the Drake Equation for new values they are estimating?

Training on a common ‘software engineering body of knowledge’. The state of the art is so different across organizations it’s like having medical tricorders at one place and leeches at another.

Washington Apple Pi in the mid 80’s. Had no idea that would be thought of as a ‘heyday’. I was in high school and used it mostly as a group of people to get software from...shareware and... otherwise.

There were also some fun bbs games like TradeWars 2000, of which nothing like that exists today. I remember racing home from school to see if there were still colonists left on Earth to take to my planets.

Every time I see Godzilla he’s ensnared in and tearing down power lines. This was bound to happen sooner or later.

This but for retrocomputer kits

Audible, I’m a regular user and a big fan, but if you want to make me happy and increase my book purchasing volume:

1) get rid of the subscription service, I have avoided purchases altogether because the book was cheaper than my credit was costing me, but couldn’t bring myself to give you more money when I have a bunch of credits there. 2) include the kindle book. Just make it so I’m buying the rights to the content and I’ll willingly let you lock me in to both the kindle and audible.

3) improve the UI of the apps. I have 50 or so booos now, and it seems inconsistent how they are ordered, where they are downloaded, which devices recognize I’ve listened to them, etc. give me a way to organize my books, give me adjustable playback speed on my echo.

I can’t believe I’m going to be ‘that guy’ for this post, but the word ‘co-conspirators’ hurts my eyes. Can you conspire alone? No, a conspiracy naturally involves several people. The word ‘conspirator’ is enough to identify someone in a conspiracy.

Co-conspirator is re-redundant.

Thank you for tolerating my inner pedant.

There is an important point lost here. People are saying 'people who couldn't use the road before now have the option to', but they are ignoring that the restricted hours were increased by 90 minutes in the morning and evening. I used to have an option to get to work super-early, or work till 7pm then head home on a road that was no busier than the rest of the regions traffic. Those options are now off the table. What was legal, fair, free, and without congestion is now blocked by a toll that is pushing early morning traffic onto roads not built for commuter traffic.

Getting this up and running on the PiDP/11 would be a thing of beauty: https://hackaday.io/project/8069-pidp-11

I recently hired several graduates from General Assembly and several from CodingDojo in Washington DC to be junior engineers on a team including intermediate and senior engineers. I would hire them again in a heartbeat.

Many years ago I was consulting when HungryAcademy graduated 24 engineers into the ranks of a large Washington DC based company. And they were all excellent as well. That program was run by Jeff casimir, who has also started several other programs, not at Turing School in Colorado.

I'd recommend any of those programs based on first hand experience hiring their graduates.

That is one of my favorite movies. And while the computer in the movie is named Colossus, it has nothing to do with this story. In fact, the real Colossus was still classified at the time this movie was made; use of the name is sheer coincidence.

If you liked the movie 'Trancendance' from a few years ago, check this out... you'll see some awesome parallel storytelling.

I live in Loudoun County, va, and we've always had the option of using paper with an electronic scanner. There have been touch screen voting machines in the last couple of elections, but I didn't use them,

Are you actively driving? That limits what you can learn technically, because technical requires at least visual learning, if not actually hands on.

Stick with audiobooks about technical _concepts_ or managerial topics. I'd suggest start with either The Phoenix Project or The Ideal Team Player. From there, follow audible recommendations.

I ran across this idea a couple of weeks ago in the book 'Machine, Platform, Crowd". I'm drawing out idea for presentations to my com Sci high school students.

Kindles are horrible for tech books. I buy books directly the the pragprog website and they automatically appear in my Dropbox as PDF (there is a choice of format). My books auto-update with typo fixes, etc. automatically.

I teach several competitive programming high school teams. On one hand, I hate it, for exactly some of the reasons on this thread. On the other hand, high school bands compete for trophys too... who ever thought to have competitive orchestras?

people are competitive, and competitions motivate. They aren't for everybody, but for some, they find it valuable. The competition and the coding ability are two separate life skills, forced together in the crucible of the high school education system.

I cannot criticize the motivation, or the fact that my students in high school can solve problems many professionals I know cannot. I can criticize that the competitive spirit marginalizes some of the groups we need to Encourage more.