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prodigal_erik

5,385 karma · joined May 28, 2009

Bay area smug lisp weenie, paying the bills with soft realtime java.
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prodigal_erik··on UCBerkeley Will Delete Online Content
Surely the greater good would be dubbing in Mandarin, rather than English subtitles.
prodigal_erik··on UCBerkeley Will Delete Online Content
An unfunded mandate is entirely punitive. If we as a society valued it, we'd be paying for it.
prodigal_erik··on Snap Tumbles Below IPO Opening Price as Analysts Say Sell
This company isn't offering voting rights nor planning dividends. What's the benefit of owning shares, other than trying to choose the right moment to sell them to other speculators?
prodigal_erik··on Gravity: a new programming language and VM written in C
It's a kind of tragedy of the commons. If two languages are basically equivalent yet incompatible, neither of the authors did something wrong, but it's a shame about the missed opportunities and problems that didn't need to happen.
prodigal_erik··on Go 2016 Survey Results
Reading and writing CPP macros is awful, but it's still not as bad as reading and writing the mind-numbing boilerplate that they replace.
prodigal_erik··on Go 2016 Survey Results
If you can't build and deploy your own system without a piece of code, you should not be relying on the goodwill of any third party to keep it available for you with no SLA. A good build system is a deterministic function of its input (a commit from your repo) and can run offline.
prodigal_erik··on I spent three months working full time to get a job
Why do that? If your screening test says they're both qualified, interview them both. Hire them both if you possibly can.
prodigal_erik··on I spent three months working full time to get a job
What happens when your production system blows up at 3 AM? Does your team have a list of who can and can't be expected to assist?
prodigal_erik··on I spent three months working full time to get a job
Lots of good vendors offer free trials or guarantees without it harming their reputation. In fact most customers object to shouldering all the risk.
prodigal_erik··on I spent three months working full time to get a job
I wouldn't hire a frontend-only guy instead of a qualified developer, for the same reason I wouldn't hire a guy who can only mount wall outlets instead of a qualified electrician. Everything he didn't care enough to learn is a risk.
prodigal_erik··on I spent three months working full time to get a job
> if you already have open sourced a bunch of code

How do I know you wrote it and didn't merely paste your name over some project I've never heard of?

prodigal_erik··on How we secretly introduced Haskell and got away with it
> It hardly seems worth even having a bug system if the frequency of from-scratch rewrites always outstrips the pace of bug fixing. Why not be honest and resign yourself to the fact that version 0.8 is followed by version 0.8, which is then followed by version 0.8?
prodigal_erik··on The myth of using Scala as a better Java
Java was adopted very rapidly (as soon as it ran acceptably on commodity hardware) because the industry desperately needed a safe subset of C++. The pain point addressed by Go is mostly deployment and packaging, which is why mostly devops (who have rejected OS packaging for some reason) are excited about it.
prodigal_erik··on Uber is designed so that for one employee to get ahead, another must fail
The only way to get team cohesion is positive-sum priorities. If I spend more time helping you improve long-term and less time delivering on my own responsibilities, that needs to improve my next evaluation, otherwise I'm pretty much compelled to stop doing it.
prodigal_erik··on Data on the uselessness of LinkedIn endorsements
I distinctly remember "Homicide", which is actually a specialty intended for attorneys working in criminal law.
prodigal_erik··on CloudPets teddy bears leaked and ransomed, exposing kids' voice messages
I'd be surprised if the script kiddies attacking world-writable MongoDB instances know or care who owns them. Destroying the data and then lying is a lot less effort than actually copying and examining it.
prodigal_erik··on Solving for the Last Mile of Transportation
A 20 minute mile doesn't include waiting for walk signals at pretty much every intersection on the route, and the Manhattan distance between the Caltrain station and his office might be larger.
prodigal_erik··on The Future of Not Working
Whitewashing his reputation for posterity by spending money that has never been rightfully his.
prodigal_erik··on The power of role models
Our phone screen takes anyone who isn't blatantly clueless; another candidate doing better never hurts you. We'd rather interview too much than triage the top N and then start bouncing viable candidates, because we aren't going to stop wanting to hire anytime soon.
prodigal_erik··on The power of role models
This must be a generational thing. I hadn't heard of any of them until years after I started and I think most of them are younger than I.
prodigal_erik··on The power of role models
> many candidates who are equally "qualified" within our margin of error

Too many acceptable candidates? Nobody I've ever worked for had this problem. If you meet the bar, you're getting an offer, even if Chuck Norris and Jeff Dean carpooled to the next session.

prodigal_erik··on ReStructuredText vs. Markdown for technical documentation
This. Markdown is good for non-technical people who struggle with a real markup language, but reStructuredText is so fiddly that I can't figure out who's better off using it over DocBook, or HTML, or LaTeX, or even nroff.

  This is `a footnote`_? Seriously?
  .. _a footnote: http://example.com/
prodigal_erik··on A textbook case in workplace discrimination
As a fat guy it's really common to miss out on swag that we didn't get in my size.

None of it was like a badge of office, though.

prodigal_erik··on My Interview at Uber
I think the quote you're looking for is

> The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads ... that sucks.

prodigal_erik··on Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber
Alcohol definitely blunts fast reflexes. If it also hinders coding, it's not for the same reason. If I had to guess, a little could fix anxiety and perfectionism, while a lot will leave you too incoherent to make something work at all.
prodigal_erik··on Go Is Not Good – A list of articles complaining that go isn't good enough
> I don't think its worthwhile to compare Go to dynamic languages.

I do think we should be making this comparison, because there's a trend in devops of moving from Python and Ruby (each of which have system-provided dependencies) to Go (which statically links a copy of everything).

I see this as unfortunate because devops should be promoting taking full advantage of the system's well-understood and -tested libraries and services rather than avoiding them with approaches like container isolation. If you have a reason to avoid your distro's python, fix that.

prodigal_erik··on Go Is Not Good – A list of articles complaining that go isn't good enough
That wouldn't go on my list, no. One wonders whether hammers and drills would have mascots if they were invented today.
prodigal_erik··on Cafe overwhelmed with customers after it is accidentally awarded a Michelin star
Sounds like lobster meat. Servants used to insist they wouldn't have to eat it more than twice per week, and prisoners complained about it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobster#History

prodigal_erik··on Mark Zuckerberg's manifesto for Facebook offers a social dystopia
More than one would be good, but it's probably hard to explain to layman how to choose a phrase for which they can create an accurate model that's so cheap it can run continuously.
prodigal_erik··on Apple Says Right to Repair iPhones Will Turn Nebraska Into a ‘Mecca’ for Hackers
I'm always surprised people see this as a recent trend. If a machine has no expansion ports and the case is sealed with the weirdest screws they could find, it was meant to be an appliance for consumers rather than a tool for people.
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