otabdeveloper2

What's a little thing like telemetry data compared with a stunning achievement for humanity like a photo of an American flag on the Moon, amirite?

Not true. A person can manage maybe 10 other people max. Beyond that, you start delegating.

So really there's no practical difference between a company of 11 people and a company of 11000 people from a management perspective.

The technological/practical concerns you'll be dealing with are totally different, of course, but as far as 'people management' stuff goes, there's little difference.

ITT: a massive roll-call for sour grapes.

P.S. Life would be easier if you just bit the bullet and finally learned those algorithms. It ain't that hard.

You miss my point. Ad networks and ad tech companies aren't aiding and abetting fraud. For them it is a cost center. Advertisers are the ones aiding and abetting fraud.

Not really. Not having fraud would be a huge competitive advantage, so of course ad companies are investing huge resources into fraud prevention.

That said, the assumption is that advertisers are the victims here. However, in reality ad spending is driven by huge multinational, bureaucratic and dysfunctional companies. For many of these companies the goal is simply to spend the allocated budgets, and forget about sanity and KPI-driven processes. In that sense advertisers and fraudsters are willing accomplices.

> Don't do drugs, kids. Drugs are bad, mmmmkay?

You're describing how to make it even more of a toy and even less of a tool.

> maybe, just maybe, we won't see "new"s or "delete"s in most future codebases?

I haven't seen 'new' or 'delete' in the wild for a decade now. (Well, except for various legacy libraries or student code on Github.)

I've worked in advertising for 15 years, in different parts of the industry and in different roles.

The thing is: ad tech doesn't want your personal data. Ad tech doesn't even want 'individually-targeted' ads. Advertising is applied sociology and works with statistics and its laws of large numbers.

What ad tech really wants is to assign you to broad classes of sociological groups. ('Gamer', 'parent', 'hobbyist', 'instagram user', etc.)

The insane spree of personal data collection by Google and Facebook isn't driven by advertising needs. It's a deeper and more insidious strategy for things in the future that aren't advertising-related. (I think the strategy bosses in these FAANG companies imagine a future with something like China's social credit system, except on steroids. But this is just my hunch.)

GDPR was never about your privacy or user rights.

It was always a transparent ploy to make it more expensive for small-time ad network operators and give Google and Facebook yet another monopoly advantage.

And ironically, it is Google and Facebook who are the huge privacy violators, not the small ad tech companies; GDPR only serves to erode your privacy in the end.

Prolog isn't really about pure logic constructs.

Prolog is really a database query language. Similar to SQL or GraphQL. Prolog failed because it never got integrated into a serious enterprise data storage engine. (Most Prolog implementations are just text files and in-memory hash tables.)

> The Universal Parser

> Doesn't actually parse, it's a lexer.

Good lord!

> Where did they go?

On welfare.

Sounds like this guy was overqualified for the position. (Probably asked too much money, too.)

The fact that the candidate went on to a non-programming position confirms.

In any case, it was the strings you pulled that let the guy get promoted.

The point is that the idea of drawing diagrams instead of writing code (and/or integrating documentation text right into the source code) is a really old idea.

The idea is older than structured programming, older than the C programming language, older than the idea of object-orientation. It's probably even older than McCarthy's LISP.

Safe to say that if it hadn't caught on during this time, then it never will.

It's the same in every country on Earth.

> Drug company offered 'bribes' to doctors to boost sales

Oh wow, such news.

In other shocking developments: water falls from the sky when it rains, and cigarettes are addictive.

No, you don't want this. Every new generation of new programmers since the 1960's talks about this, but nobody to date has actually written any useful program using pictures and prose.

Sorry. Code is code, that's what your job entails and you can't make programming into something it isn't.

Of course it can.

The question is the time period you're looking at.

Real estate is one of those things that don't spoil with time, so it's conceivable to have a return on investment in 500 years.

Nix hashes your development environment along with the sources to generate a version hash of the build process result.

Is the Chinese "superblock" the same thing as a Soviet "microdistrict?

If so, the article is off the mark, the whole idea of the concept is a less car-centric life. You're supposed to commute to work by public transport and walk inside your "superblock" during leisure time.

Parental control is basically the only technically valid and ethical use-case for MDM.

> IT Admin has certain escalated privileges, which is different to a parental control app.

So a random employer is allowed to control employee devices, but a parent isn't allowed to control their children's devices?

Really?

This is flat-out evil on Apple's part.

> You say "chat app" like that means it's easy.

You're right, it takes a mind-boggling amount of wasted effort and negligence to turn a simple thing like corporate chat into something as bloated and broken as Slack.

Making something simple and easy is harder than just letting entropy destroy your product.

> This is clearly a useless skill as a software engineers except in getting a job at companies that do whiteboard interviews.

Have you ever actually been on the interviewer end of the process?

Literally over half of the candidates literally don't know how to program! They can sort of string together a Markov-chain something if you sit them down in front of an IDE and let them copy-paste stuff until syntactic errors go away, but put them at a whiteboard and they don't know where the parentheses go in a function call.

(They'll write crap like "()f" or "f()a" when they want to call a function, stuff like that.)

> neural nets can approximate any continuous function

So-called "neural nets" are just logistic regression with a fancy name. Seems "deep learning" is just a wavelet transform with a sigmoid basis. (So, boring math stuff we already knew forever, plus marketing mumbo-jumbo.)

Disagreement about how to name methods is not an 'anti-pattern'. It's a literal non-issue that affects nothing at all whatsoever.

Junior programmers pick on whitespace formatting and variable names because that's the only kind of criticism their skill level allows.

> Cloud computing (i.e. datacenter software) requires zillions of concurrent "fibers" on a much smaller number of OS threads.

As a guy who actually wrote "datacenter software" for over a decade: you don't speak from experience and what you said is false.

Basically, OS threads are the smallest and lightest form of concurrency currently in existence. Any userspace 'fiber' will be heavier and slower than actually spawning a pthread.

The problem is when you couple pthreads with interpreter runtimes. (Python, Lua, Ruby, etc.) These runtimes (and especially the GC engines they use!) don't play nice with OS threads, so you're forced to invent various rube-goldberg fiber-like contraptions on async primities.

The end result is slower, heavier and more brittle than any pthread-only solution, but interpreter runtimes necessarily impose overhead, you learn to deal with it.

"A glorified data center manager" is exactly what AWS and Azure are.

I don't have enough eyes to roll at the cluelessness of your comment.

> FOCUS ON PLANT-BASED FOODS

A great idea if you want to save the planet by having people die out from exploding (pun intended) obesity.