rxhernandez

A lot (I would be surprised if it's not the majority of EEs/CpEs) of electrical/computer engineers are taught how to program with C/C++; using that to understand what age someone is, is an error.

You probably will if you need to RMA anything in the US. Just had to RMA to Lenovo and Amazon recently and both required me to print out a shipping label.

Is null even a type though? If not, then it would seem it's not a static type system that's solving it; it's something else entirely solving it (whether or not that something is contained in that specific type system).

Which is absolutely bizarre to me because most of my experience with Python has been with people who are effectively scientists who don't give a rats-ass about good coding practices and yet I rarely had issues with receiving the wrong type.

Don't get me wrong though, I spent the first 10 years of programming with C and Java so I understand the comfort that a statically typed language provides. I just haven't found it to be a big enough issue over the past 7-8 years of programming in Python to really complain about it.

Frankly, if you were to ask me what the top 3 sources of my headaches in Python are, number 1, 2, and 3 would be, receiving a None value when I expected something else; but that's an issue with most languages.

I've worked in California all my life and have worked in the following industries: medical devices, scientific devices, blockchain, and plasma physics research. I am the only person I've seen use emacs. Almost every developer I've worked with either used VS Code, Visual Studio, or uVision. Everyone else used Sublime Text, Eclipse or a JetBrains IDE.

I haven't even used emacs in years so I don't even know anyone that uses it; I stick almost exclusively to Vim (and for 8 months this was my only "IDE"), PyCharm, and WebStorm.

After having my bloodwork show that I had low vitamin D levels a few years ago, I was told by my physician that under no circumstances should I be getting vitamin D from the sun (as risking cancer was not worth it) and to wear sunblock everytime I go outside.

Frankly, I don't have the time to do an extensive literature search to find primary sources but I have seen from plenty of tertiary sources that it is a poor idea to get vitamin D from the sun. Moreover, there are plenty of foods from which you can get vitamin D.

"There are some people (who are typically not dermatologists or experts in the biology of skin cancer) who have advocated for tanning to get vitamin D. But we know that UVB light causes skin cancer and that protecting yourself against it makes sense. As a doctor who treats patients who have melanomas, I want the general public to be advised that under no circumstances can use of a tanning bed or tanning in general be justified on the basis of vitamin D. Take a supplement instead."

https://www.yalemedicine.org/stories/vitamin-d-myths-debunke...

> if he is really rigging elections, would he really go for such unrealistic numbers

He would if he wanted his quiet dissidents to feel isolated and his loud ones to be that much easier to find.

It's not that much different than other leaders declaring there are no gay people in their country.

In general, it's not a good idea to talk poorly about your employer in public if you want to keep your job; I've heard of at least a couple cases where someone was fired for "mouthing-off" to their spouse in a public place like a grocery store.

I think you need to consider your age and zip code as well. I have a family member who is an insurance broker and she had to factor in age and zip code to give me quotes on insurance.

I mean, Tesla was as ubiquitous (if not more) in my EE degree as Bose and Poincare were in my Physics degree. I don't think I heard Hawking mentioned once during my Physics degree but I also didn't care to take any astronomy coursework.

The idea that the perceived value of something is equal to its actual value is far from reality.

I have met plenty of people that went to top 20 schools that just gave up once they got there yet, still managed to graduate and go to graduate school. I have met plenty of people from my undergrad (definitely not a top 20 school) who were absolutely relentless in their studies and managed to have far more lucrative careers than those slackers who went to top 20 schools.

I mean, I have nearly 3 degrees in EE, CS and Physics.

Physics is usually one of the hardest majors at any university and my homework assignments/tests weren't much different than MIT's homework assignments/tests; sometimes they were a lot easier and sometimes they were on par with their graduate classes. For my lectures where MIT had their OCW version online, they were near identical; the lectures where there wasn't a corresponding OCW lecture, the quality was around the same. Moreover, CS and EE weren't much easier than physics so I can't imagine top 20 universities had much higher quality there either.

(My university also deflated grades to the point where the average GPA was a 2.7 which made it that much more cut-throat (since a 3.0 was the cutoff for many engineering jobs))

(Also, from what I recall, UCSB was much harder to get into than my school yet, they were blacklisted at many engineering companies for having the earned reputation of being a party school; while, at my school, we had those companies consistently come to our career fairs)

If idiots manage to graduate top 20 schools and yet idiots of similar caliber can't graduate from schools that are far below the top 20, their grade inflation is completely unwarranted.

I mean I've definitely been contacted by FAANG companies out of no where and got interviews through that.

> I really have no clue why people love this language so much.

You get used to it somehow. I did C and Java for about 10 years before Python. My first exposure to Python was a Computational Physics class and it was maddening not knowing what types went where. Eventually you realize it doesn't really matter as long as you're disciplined and rely on others who are disciplined enough to document their code well. I haven't had the chance to use mypy in the 7 years I've been using Python (across 3 industries; medical devices, scientific devices, and web) but I would be surprised if it significantly reduced the number of bugs I've seen in practice.

It looks like it was added to the Oxford English Dictionary 2 years ago:

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-45763136

> An American programmer might not be too concerned if a body temperature measurement returns 45 degrees Celcius.

I'm baffled by this statement... I worked in the medical device industry for years at a company of 10k people and you would be hard pressed to find a sw engineer that didn't default to Celsius. Almost all sw engineers there either had EE, CpE or Biomedical Engineering degrees; Celsius is not remotely foreign to these types of engineers. I would be incredibly surprised if it was different at any medical device company.

This past year, on my Thinkpad P50, I've switched between Ubuntu, Fedora, and Arch; Arch has by far been the least buggy. With Ubuntu, things would go haywire when docking/undocking. With Fedora, putting it to sleep was always a risk because after putting it to sleep I would sometimes I would open up my laptop to a black screen that I couldn't recover from. I was fine with that and just wouldn't put my laptop to sleep but eventually I started using Zoom and Fedora would crash within an hour and a half of using it. This pushed me over the edge to wipe my laptop and install Arch; I'm really glad I did.

I still have an issue where the system is not detecting when my laptop lid closing but at least it's not crashing every day or two.

I have a P50 and on:

- Ubuntu 18.04, I couldn't get the screen back after docking

- Fedora 31, it would crash at least every other time I brought it up from sleep. Also crashed after being on Zoom for more than an hour.

Just switched to Arch last night and so far so good (well after disabling hybrid graphics that is).

No, not equally argued. We didn't put asteroids into motion that can destroy the earth's ability to sustain human life. I'm sure you could infinitely fill a list of things we have no control over that could make humans extinct.

As a millennial who spent most of the past decade behind a computer screen (and probably the previous decade before that inside of books), I mourn the time I lost that could have been spent interacting with the world.

Moreover, maybe both sides are right? Maybe you need heavy "screen interaction" to be successful in this world and maybe too much time is being consumed by screens rather than physically interacting with the world. Maybe there is a balance that isn't close to being struck by most.

Maybe I would like my future children (if I have them) to interpret the world largely through their own eyes rather than a clickbait interpretation manufactured to get more money.

I wonder if recognizing your cognitive decline is a cultural issue or something else; it couldn't be more clear that I am unable traverse many layers of abstraction when I havent slept enough; it was also apparent to everyone in my physics undergrad that they couldn't handle statistical mechanics with sleep deprivation.

I honestly wish I could have come up with those substitutes. I have a great deal of trouble in independently finding language that sounds like that since no one I listen to/read talks/writes like that. I'll have to jump down the rabbit hole of finding people that use that kind of language for more substitutes.

"Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

It looks like I'm in a place where it is appreciated. It's worth considering that your reply wouldn't fit in with this community's guidelines.

It's worth considering that those words shouldn't have existed in the first place. How would you handle "lame" being substituted with something overtly racist?

I agree with you. It's a bit frustrating though, when moving towards language that doesn't harm any other groups of people, I lose so much of the color and succinctness of the language I was previously using; I find that I'm limited to saying minor variations of, "I feel negatively about that because of reasons (that cannot be succinctly said and make me sound like I care more about hearing myself talk than my audience's ability to listen)."

Maybe heroes are needed just as much as people that do good designs. Maybe it's more akin to a dichotomy of people that build good houses that hardly catch fire and firefighters who put out fires; even in the extreme case that you build nothing but houses that hardly catch fire, it won't mean that you don't need firefighters; in the nominal case of an economically feasible amount (I doubt many MVPs could take on the cost to make them near fireproof) of almost fireproof houses, it might approximate to needing both equally as much.

Frankly, I've been on both sides of the aisle when it comes to projects that allowed for great design and projects that resulted in doing an endless marathon for 3 weeks straight to put out a fire because of poor design; I can tell you without a doubt that doing great design doesn't take anywhere near as much of a toll on your body and mind as doing an endless marathon; I've severely damaged interpersonal relationships (that I can't undamage) through these marathons.

I had a ROKR. I also had several windows mobile phones. I'd find it hard to believe that Jobs thought the ROKR was what he had to compete with; from a usability perspective, the iPhone didn't come close to windows mobile; it lacked even basic MMS functionality for quite a while.

I agree with this strategy but I don't agree with the whole idea of "if you don't agree with something you should suggest an alternative solution." Telling everyone they're about to fly over the side of a cliff is a great contribution and dissuading people from making that contribution despite not having an immediate solution is really problematic. I have unfortunately seen too many cases where people aren't willing to step back and reconsider their situation because they are too committed to the first solution they came up with and moving full speed ahead is the only thing they see as an option unless there is an immediately available alternative.

Maybe. Knowing something is possible is sufficient for enough people to give things a try.

I know I've been successful in doing so; I've never built a simulator of this magnitude but I've successfully solved difficult problems with novel solutions simply from hearing it was possible to solve them in a given manner.

I can't tell you precisely how it was done but I worked at a company with many different types of hardware that contained many complex configurations of FPGAs, lasers, optics, and microcontrollers, coupled to a computer and they managed to simulate it quite well for what seems like a decade. One of the scientists there was one of the few geniuses I've ever met and they managed to simulate all those devices and a sufficient amount of their variations. So I can confirm it's possible, maybe it just requires an overworked genius?