nice2meetu

There is a quirk (almost a bug?) in FreeBSD's qsort where it will switch to insertsort for the whole array under certain conditions, which we hit in production given how our data was arranged.

(I think this was the check) https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/blob/main/lib/libc/st...

Now that they are at school, there is always an emphasis on us as parents taking an active role in reading with them and encouraging them at home.

I can see now how this was taken given the way I wrote it.. I believe the intention was more "Don't pressure your kids and stress yourself trying to get them to read before even starting school". An example of kids being confused was being taught the upper-case alphabet, whereas the school starts in lower-case. But I don't think the advice was meant to be anti-intellectual.

Reading back what I wrote, yes, we never took this as a warning not to let them learn at all! I think the intention was more that there is less incentive to actively push or pressure kids in to reading before school, and that actively trying to teach them one methodology might even conflict with the method they end up being taught in school. That parents try to "get their kids ready for school" by getting them to read before starting, and that doing so is unnecessary. That is how we took it.

That time my daughter proudly announced “look Daddy, I can read this book with my eyes closed”

We were told it was better to let the teachers teach otherwise kids learn bad habits or don’t engage.

That being said our eldest went to school at 4 1/2 in Australia and they had to learn 100 words in their first year (phonics), and we were a little worried that it seemed so intense, though she ended up learning 200 or so and went on to become a voracious reader. But then we moved to the US and our youngest started school at 5 1/2 and had to learn 20 words in her first year and is now 7 and can barely read. In hindsight it does seem so late, and I agree there is so much of the world and learning and curiosity they miss out on by not being able to read.

I feel there was a missed chance to make it “by A, W and K”

Maybe Ascii art simplified things :-). I think what tends to trip people up are things like - Where do the pedals actually live in relation to the rest of the frame? How/where does the seat attach? The front wheel? Most people know there is kind of an angled bar on the frame, but where does it go exactly?

I like to think of the bike problem. Sit down and draw a picture of a bike from memory in as much detail as you can in 2 minutes. Easy right? But it is surprisingly hard.

I think it comes more from the thought that human text readable format is usually more verbose than binary representations.

So not like my take when I see a pack of Tim Tams with a half-star health rating.. "Hey these things are a little healthy, looks like you need to eat a lot to get any benefit though"

I joined a big tech co and dove in to a huge unwieldy code base that had gone through the process you described above. I did a lot of reading of the code, and soon became the only one that understood it and could make big architectural changes.

But.. that is a dead-end job. There is no career path being the maintainer of a large legacy code-base. It was pretty good if you wanted to rest-and-vest, I could do whatever I wanted. But there were no great features, no demo's, no selling of the work. Even small changes were painful.

Moved to a different team where everything is new and building from scratch and suddenly opportunities open up.

I knew the name sounded familiar, that was it

Ours has been out for about 5 hours now. Also South Bay. :-(

This was my first thought. I just have a * rule on my domain hosting account to send all email to my gmail, but can’t actually send from any of those addresses. I’ll usually sign up with website@mydomain.com

Deformed corner here too! it was sitting precariously on a pile of papers on top of a set of plastic drawers on top of a standup desk which was half raised (where the printer lives, was silly I know). My daughter came in and bumped the table and my open MacBook fell directly on the corner of the screen. It has a dent there now but no other damage

Ah, I remember it is the non-intuitive one, but then when I use it a while, I keep double-guessing which one is the intuitive one.

Kind of like when my wife tells me I'm doing something wrong and she wants it to be the other way.. I know she thinks this thing is important, but can't work out which way she wants it done.

Very similar to me! Double degree in EE/IT, my first job out of uni was with a small company building gps chips. I actually spent a lot of time writing testing software. A couple of years in it went down the drain and I just naturally transitioned in to a software role (paid a lot better).

There is even a Wikipedia page for going through all of the common misconceptions. It seems to have grown since the last time I visited it years ago.

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

I once had to change my mental model for how fast some of these things were. I was using `seq` as an input for something else, and my thinking was along the lines that it is a small generator program running hot in the cpu and would be super quick. Specifically because it would only be writing things out to memory for the next program to consume, not reading anything in.

But that was way off and `seq` turned out to be ridiculously slow. I dug down a little and made a faster version of `seq`, that kind of got me what I wanted. But then noticed at the end that the point was moot anyway, because just piping it to the next program over the command line was going to be the slow point, so it didn't matter anyway.

https://github.com/tverniquet/hseq

Ditto on the "certain female family member who insists that she remembers things word-for-word". When she recounts her meeting with a friend it is needlessly tedious (I try to be a good listener of course). Complains that my recollections are too vague and she wants to know what really happened and is frustrated I won't give her details.

I think a large part of it is just that you store what is important to you. To me the day-to-day politeness is just filler. I don't care if they had black coffee or a latte. If someone was struggling with something and poured out their heart over multiple conversations, I'm going to remember what arguments and concerns they had and the mental model I built up around that situation. The filler is just unimportant and doesn't stick around.

My wife is the opposite. Signs of weakness are an embarrassment to be forgotten. She lives for the day-to-day.

I did something similar for tanh once, though I found I could get to 1 ulp.

Part of the motivation was that I could get 10x faster than libc. However, I then tried on my FreeBSD and could only get 4x faster. After a lot of head scratching and puzzling it turned out there was a bug in the version of libc on my linux box that slowed things down. It kind of took the wind out of the achievement, but it was still a great learning experience.

My life goals didn’t change much but past 30 there was marriage and kids, which kinda put a dampener on doing anything towards achieving them. I also have to accept the reality that my wife’s goals are pretty opposed to what I hope to achieve so I have a long battle there. Currently I’m probably really choosing the path of least resistance. Maybe when the kids grow up I can get some focus back.

My wife hit this the other day. She entered her info on a website, gave up, and then got a polite email from them, something like: "Hey, we noticed you started filling in our form but didn't complete it, are you sure you don't want to sign up with us". She was furious, and we wrote a reply saying how unethical we thought this was. It was a small business (swim school I think).

There is always another side to the story.

I was friends once with someone who I later found out had schizophrenia. She used to say horrible stuff about what other people had done to her.

Then came the couple of times some raging hot-headed guy would be banging on the front door of our house yelling at us and wanting to have a go because of the all the horrible things we had done to this poor girl..

It is amusing looking back but wasn't at the time, and it was scary how far people are willing to go even off hearsay.

In our case async replication was acceptable, so we had a failover solution available.

We had a replication HA solution, but it was "warm", and customers didn't really want to run another server doing nothing. I think we also charged a lot for it.

The area we were in, customers could tolerate some outage. Restoring from a backup didn't take that long. I believe we were known for good support helping people get back up.

But yeah, what you are saying is all the arguments that kept coming to us. People were used to having a few servers for the database, and different front ends, and layering things like that.

This reminds me of my previous job where we had an optimized single-server solution, whereas the competition scaled horizontally. They couldn't out-scale us at what we did until they got to 20 servers or so, which only the biggest customers needed anyway, and even then they would be really slow. You can achieve some impressive speedups when you really focus on the problem.

Still, it wasn't that helpful from a business perspective, because apparently it is easier to justify mark up on solutions with lots of servers.

CROSS JOIN in sqlite3 is used to force the order of the tables in the join. Note the query has a WHERE condition so is the same as an INNER JOIN

https://www.sqlite.org/optoverview.html#manual_control_of_qu...

We never had much money growing up, but in Australia it was never a problem. Sort of the opposite - with tall poppy syndrome, you sort of looked down on those too well off and out of touch or stuck up. Rather, I had 100% confidence I could grow up, get a good job, retire some day. Focusing on the end meant you missed the journey sort of thing. Pretty care free.

But I later spent some time in rich Asian cities and became aware of the high stress highly competitive environment there, all the way from early schooling. Now I am in the Bay Area and see the same sort of thing here, with there being such a huge difference in potential just by getting in the right schools or doing well on the right exams or interviews. Then things like this health care trap in the US is such a big shock. Even schooling, with such a huge difference between good and bad schools, good and bad neighborhoods. I can see why there is such a desire to better, or even maximize, ones situation.

I had a similar, though certainly not as bad experience. I was sitting with friends at a lookout and I wandered off to take a leak. I jumped over a side fence to give some distance, not realizing that there was nothing on the other side.

I realized what had happened. My thoughts were along the lines of "I'm about to be in a lot of pain, I may as well enjoy it on the way down". I was also horizontal on my back.

It ended up being a 10m drop, so not as big as in this story (I went back and measured it another day). It was soft dirt at the bottom, and there was sort of an indent in the cliff at that point so I missed any jutted-out rocks coming down. When I landed I bit through my tongue and was horribly winded, but otherwise ok.

I am religious but also remember making a firm note on the way down that nothing supernatural appeared to be happening, mostly because prematurely assigning meaning when these things happen tends to annoy me. I don't think I ever thought I was going to die, maybe at 10m I didn't have enough time. I just remember looking intensely at everything thinking I probably wouldn't get the opportunity to fall off a cliff again.