Hacker News Reader

rilindoon Bird lays off hundreds via Zoom call

> Now there’s no reason to look for another job, if your rent is guaranteed and the government checks come in every month for four months on top of unemployment.

That is actually an ideal outcome, because that would slow down the disease transmission significantly.

rilindoon CDC coronavirus testing decision likely to haunt nation for months to come

Months? This is going to haunt the US for decades.

rilindoon India announces nationwide lockdown to stop spread of coronavirus

Given the huge reliance on outsourced IT labor in India, I would curious to see how it would affect operations in the West. The pandemic is already affecting school's and testing centers that rely on online proctoring based in India - most of them not available at least until the end of the week (this is before the announcement).

rilindoon Where America's climate migrants will go as sea level rises

I find it hilarious that even in a worse scenario with the climate crisis, Chicago somehow did not get any migrants .

rilindoon IBM's Lost Decade

Rebranding won't help, unless IBM actually put in the CapEx behind their cloud:

https://www.platformonomics.com/2018/05/follow-the-capex-sep...

rilindoon The Logic of Political Survival (2002) [pdf]

These are the same authors who then wrote the Dictator's handbook:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dictator%27s_Handbook

CPG Grey has a summary of the book:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs

rilindoon Mark Shuttleworth is not selling Canonical or Ubuntu – yet

It would be odd if they do. They seem to pushing all their Linux efforts on Amazon Linux 2, which is a clone of Red Hat Enterprise 7.

rilindoon Justice Anthony Kennedy to Retire from Supreme Court

That would Scalia and he didn't retire - he died.

rilindoon No-Cost RHEL Developer Subscription Now Available

You would choose CentOS if you need to run enterprise-level software (example, Oracle), but you can't pony up the operational money to buy Red Hat Enterprise Linux licenses on your server fleet.

rilindoon DOS Ain't Done Til Lotus Won't Run? (2005)

I been around IT long enough to know that this statement:

"DOS ain't done till Lotus won't run"

Was never a common saying. It is actually:

"DOS ain't done till Lotus runs"

I am not sure how it devolved to the current usage. I suspect it is probably started after the Microsoft-DOJ trials.

rilindoon Sepp Blatter to quit as president amid corruption scandal

I guess John Oliver will be drinking Budlight Lime live.

rilindoon I will not hack on your codebase for free in an interview

The developer does came across as a prick. The thing is, does the company allow anybody to access the code? Probably not, because that code is very likely proprietary company information that only certain people are allow to view and modify.

So from that standpoint, validating the skill set using opensource tools would be the way to go. Having an outsider view and modify internal company code demonstrates poor judgement on the part of the interview, as that code is not her/his to just expose to anybody. I would be wary of even considering that role if interviewer is willing to expose their code without considering the legal and ethical consequences of that action.

rilindoon The last moments of Lac-Mégantic

The cost inflicted by oil is measured in centuries. A year or two saved may not make a difference in terms of total lives lost:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/globalwarming/1...

Moving oil through the pipeline is bad, but it is less bad than moving by rail in light of the probabilities of human loss (though the spillage is likely to be bigger when there is an accident). At least there is an potential up of rail being freed up to move something else safer - like people.

rilindoon Don't Leak Interview Questions

Related by possibility off-topic: How about signing a NDA?

I am not advocating it (in fact, I probably would have significant reservations about any company that will pull that on me), but if you are that concerned about the questions leaking out, do something to legally oblige the candidate not to disclose the process.

Otherwise, put up with it. Or try a different way to vet out candidates.

rilindoon Technical Interviews Make Me Cry

Yes and I appreciate it.

https://gist.github.com/rilindo/6576017

New toy to play with. :)

rilindoon Technical Interviews Make Me Cry

Here is a first go at it:

https://gist.github.com/rilindo/6575580

Essentially, I just checked to see if the characters in the first string exists in other string and exits out of the code. It probably won't cover every use case (in other words, probably very buggy), but it is a start.

However, I have the luxury of relaxing while looking up the functions online, writing the code by my lonesome and then verifying it by running it directly. Last I checked, not any of these things are likely not present or available in a white board interview.

EDIT: I should at least put it in a function. :D

rilindoon OS X Mountain Lion available on the Mac App Store

FWIW, when I upgraded to ML, my boot time was cut down from 20 seconds to 5. Awesome.

rilindoon Why Generation Y Is Causing The Great Migration Of The 21st Century

Much of decrease is due to the sharp decline in Southside Chicago as well as the growth of the suburbs outside of Cook county.

http://igpa.uillinois.edu/content/census-reveals-population-...

Thanks to the economy, however, the trend is somewhat reversed:

http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20120406/BLOGS02/1204...

rilindoon AT&T Throttling Unlimited Plans after 2GB Data Use

That would be very difficult to do:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/judicial/2011-04-27-...

rilindoon 2013 is the year of NoOps for the Cloud (infographic)

Sysadmin here, 11+ years now, grokker of Perl/Python/Ruby/Shell/PHP, manager of physical and virtual servers.

I think the whole point is the developer no longer have to be concerned about the day to day management of the server (e.g. tuning disk I/O, manually deploying applications and services, setting affinity on processes, managing logs), as that will be shifted completely to the infrastructure managers. And that is fine. Infrastructure should be devolved completely back to the administrators and developers should just write code that runs automatically with no modification in the cloud.*

I am not sure what the last question supposed to be, but I assumed it implies that systems administration will be obsolete. It is possible that it will change,but consider this: in the past, most sysadmins worth their salt should at some point be able to write code. It is only recently (it seems around the late 90s) that there was a generation of admins that didn't have the technical chops to write code or even simple scripts. With the advent of cloud and the management tools that comes with it that requires a significant programming background to manage (e.g. writing Puppet or Chef code), this is a welcome return to the past.

*In theory. :)

rilindoon Debian is now the most popular Linux distribution on web servers

Expect this to be brief. For a while, there was uncertainty because CentOS updates were way behind Red Hat (the upstream vendor). As of January, CentOS is effectively in sync with RHEL.

rilindoon Driving has lost its cool for young Americans

That's not unique to CTA. That is the nature of public transportation - you will always deal with those characters.

Its no big deal. The usual response is to ignore them and generally they will go away (unless you are up very late at night). Nothing too different from ignoring the beggars coming up to you during a traffic stop. I am not sure why the OTP is making an issue out of it.

rilindoon Driving has lost its cool for young Americans

I disagree about Atlanta. Atlanta does not have a well-developed rail. I should know - I live there. :)

rilindoon Driving has lost its cool for young Americans

And notably, in the last 15 years, they got a fairly effective rail back up up and running (the MTA rails) as well as Metrolink.

I am surprised that Atlanta is on the list. In terms of public transit, it is not only abysmal, it seems that the current GA legislature is going out of their way to kill it.

rilindoon Driving has lost its cool for young Americans

The growth of the suburbs in the middle of the last century and the subsequent flight from the inner city. These two factors contributed to the death of railway transit systems in all but a few of the large and medium-sized cities. From that point one, most of the transportation investment is in expanding highways from the suburbs to the city and maybe bus services as well.

It is only in the last 10-15 years that serious efforts are being made to rebuild the inner system rail ways system. In the face of public apathy (and sometimes outright opposition) as well as interests depended heavily in highway transportation, it is been slow going.

rilindoon Why are you still deploying overnight?

"Why are you still deploying overnight?"

Because you don't hire a system admin to do that job for you. :}

rilindoon Blunt and necessary review of programming language books.

Masterzora,

Correct. Programming Perl is not meant to be a tutorial. That role is filed by the most excellent O'Reily Book "Learning Perl."*

* My first scripts were done using Learning Perl as my tutorial. It is still one of my favorite programming books.

rilindoon CEOs vouch for Waiter Rule: Watch how people treat staff

That is why when you are interviewing at a company, you treat everybody you meet politely and cordially - even the cranky secretary. :)

rilindoon Working Best at Coffee Shops

I'm surprised. 81 comments in and nobody commented on the real reason why you work best in the coffee shop: that's where all the hot people are.

You don't go there to work. You go there to look busy while you people watch and maybe- just maybe, get somebody's attention. As a result, you get a lot of work done, because you can only surf idly for so long alone.

Its like the gym, except more fattening.

rilindoon Cluster SSH (OSX)

This like these always makes me uneasy. Yes, you can do stuff on X number of machines all at the same time. That also means you can break things all at the same time.