You don’t need product adverts for ‘ethical’ functions 1 and 2. Honest aggregators and reviewers which the buyer can seek out when they need something would fulfil that. I think that would also be much more convenient for the buyer (though obviously not for the seller, who wants to invent needs in people who otherwise wouldn’t think of buying anything).
But does it really help communications, or does it just make people less anxious? When two communication styles conflict, this ‘blunt’ writer says to a less blunt coworker: “I told her I wouldn’t want her to change her communication style to match mine, and that I valued learning from her softer approach.” Is anyone really going to respond “actually, boss, yes, I would prefer you to stop waffling on. You need to change how you talk to me.” I would predict that this doesn’t change anyone’s behaviour, it just gives people less guilt/anxiety about acting as they already act.
And the female octopus. So intelligent, but after they reproduce they stop eating and die. (Apparently they sometimes eat their mate beforehand, which I didn’t know until now). It seems like such a waste. I count myself lucky that humans don’t follow this pattern!
And if the calorie count upthread is right, that’s 4550 calories per day purely from potato, not counting any added butter, milk, beans, meat etc! I know people did more manual labour back then, but something seems wrong with that figure.
Yes, good point, that’s true. Personally, I know it’s not the ‘right’ ethos, but I see the mock test failure as a bit of a bonus. My change intended to stop calling ReadOne and start calling ReadMultiple. Having to change the test sure tells me I accomplished that! But you’re right that if I’m intending to only test behaviour, the fake lets me do that better. Interesting post, thank you :)
Mocks are essentially just “calling this function on the mock object during this test returns this result”, though, right? At least, the ones I write are. No state, no logic, no real ‘behaviour’. As soon as you introduce a fake that really has an underlying state and maybe some kind of validation logic (assuming that you want tests to make sure you can’t insert nonsense/retrieve non-existent stuff), you’ve introduced a ton of new and completely meaningless failure points.
The fatal flaw is that you’re really introducing a new class which may have its own behaviour problems. Now your test is implicitly testing the test class. I also prefer to see explicit mocking than just trust that the fake does what it says it will. How do I know without looking whether the fake store method REALLY stores the doc, or whether someone set it up to just return OK? And how do you test error handling - make another fake for every error scenario?
Speaking of UK/Europe, the cookie notice on this site (one of those “if you continue to use this site...” ones) should be changed. Because it’s annoying and a dodge, but also because “This does not represent valid consent, even if the mechanism also includes an ‘OK’ or ‘Accept’ button.”
I think these accounts are ridiculous and counterproductive. However, they’re obviously different from the type of content that the woman in this article posted. The conflation of the two is part of the problem; this woman cannot show her face in a funny video without being related to ‘sexy instagram posers’. Finding Instagram accounts of men flexing in their underwear while typing some HTML would be just as ludicrous but nobody would be saying “this is why we can’t take men seriously, they don’t focus on technical aspects”.
I don’t mind this behaviour. It can be difficult to coordinate when you don’t know whether the other person is done yet or not. Back in the old days we used to, as the end of the article says, send lots of little bits of text to deal with this (to older/less internet-savvy people’s great annoyance, as they treated chat just like email, and would be furious when their wall of text was responded to with half a sentence!) but it made the chat very disjointed and you’d end up having to deal with multiple simultaneous stands of conversation. Anyway, the real problem is people who ask “what were you typing?” when you delete your message or take a long time. You don’t want to know!
I’ve never used a ‘live’ chat like he describes but I really like the idea. Is there anything modern that provides that?
Yeah, mine will show an entire section for Scottish romance novels (huh??) but won’t have the classic title I’m searching for. Internet Archive almost always has at least one copy of what I’m looking for, so I don’t bother with Libby much (although I’m aware using IA is more controversial)
Your figures are obviously wrong... tax is not 40% over your entire earnings and VAT is not taken from your salary. So this “omg, government take 75% of my earnings!” thing is alarmist.
e: in fact if you earn 80k and spend ALL your takehome on 20% VAT goods, you still end up with the majority share.
As the page says, this would affect 4% of people in the country. Seems like an issue HN will assign disproportionate importance to but would not really have been a decisive issue for the country.
But also the biggest party membership in a long time, the Tories quietly ‘adopting’ some of their policies post-election, the derided free internet idea seeming weirdly prescient when Covid hit, the number of people who voted Tory to ‘get Brexit done’... it’s more complicated than “they lost because people hate socialism”.
e: according to the downvotes, no, it is because people hate socialism. It must be nice to live in a world with such simple answers eh :)
Try Cornwall to Newcastle by train, more like 9-10 hours :) If I still have to pick remote jobs by which ones are close to my physical location, or pick my living area based on where jobs are, I don’t feel like the promise of remote work is really being fulfilled.
I’m in the UK which is objectively tiny, but going from the south to the north wouldn’t be a day trip. And if you basically spend 1 day travelling up, 1 day doing whatever team guff the company wants you to do, and 1 day going back (i.e. ~24 hours), you’ve wasted MORE time than you would have commuting an hour each workday for the whole month!
These “remote but actually not” jobs are my pet hate. They clog up remote job listings and can never offer an actual reason why the employee must appear in person every week/month/quarter. It’s the worst of all possible worlds! No close connection with your coworkers or regular office benefits, no ability to work from anywhere, plus regular expensive/gruelling travel.
Thanks for posting this. It’s interesting and goes some way towards explaining why everyone I’ve met who extols the benefits of meditation is just as prone to mistakes, ineptitude, emotional reactions, pissing people off, etc as everyone else but (unlike those who don’t meditate) seem to have no awareness of it and never apologise!
The conflation of administration and leadership is a really good way to put it. I’m frequently amazed that people who seem to be doing the work of a secretary are actually highly-paid “managers”.
I see your point, but I personally hate the time wasted on phatic meandering like “... unless anyone disagrees”, “hmm, what if...” etc. I’d much rather people concisely said things they were quite sure of. Plus, it’s hard to disagree with people in person. I don’t have all the facts to hand, and I can’t double-check my phrasing. Text solves all of that for me.
I wish people would just use text more instead. I agree that video conferencing calls are hard and people overlap a lot - but the bigger issue is that most of what people say in meetings is pointless! Maybe it’s just me, but I find it impossible to think in conversation, and most of what I end up saying is “um - what about - oh, never mind, won’t work.” Especially with tech problems, I need time and silence to figure it out. I wish people would propose the thing to be solved on a chat thread, tag the people involved, and trust them to engage without being forced to do it real-time.
Isn’t the clue in the name? :) I feel like it’s almost a mind trick. Ask anyone off the street what the difference is between a queue of people and a stack of plates, and they’d get the right answer pretty quick - but ask a tech person in an interview and they’ll panic! (Which probably proves it’s not a very good example to judge applicants by on its own)
Out of poverty, but probably not into the incredible wealth that American software work can generate. For example, see the commenter saying their house is paid off and they can live off passive income. I’m not in a third world country so I don’t know for sure what salaries are there, but I find it hard to even imagine having so much money!
Sorry for the harsh feedback. As a new starter, I’d expect you to be making it clear how you’re useful to me - not the other way around! It seems fairly clear that your motives are self-directed (how can I connect to talented people? What can I learn? What should I be doing? I want context.) and that you believe you deserve other people’s time. Following up on people who don’t answer your cold emails is really quite pushy in that regard. Yes, you ask how you can help, but you’re still putting much of the burden of figuring out what you can do on the other person rather than figuring it out yourself.
I want to work with people on a project, not help people with their grand mission of self-improvement. One of the points in How to Win Friends is to truly consider and appeal to the other person’s interest. Do you think everyone you email is interested in you and wants to spend their time answering questions about how you should conduct your learning and career, essentially having an interview with you? (You might also want to consider how some people will feel if they know you’ve only selected “awesome” people to interrogate, and they weren’t on the list...)
I don’t think you have to stop doing this if it works for you, but I’d suggest at least letting people off the hook if they don’t reply!
You joined as an engineer, not a manager. Why are you asking people how you can help with their challenges when it’s very unlikely you have the power to do so? I’d find this entire email process very bizarre, demanding and power-seeking (you want me to tell you who the bigshots are so you can meet them and what you should do to get promoted, and you’re pretending it’s for my benefit? Who are you trying to kid?). I’d certainly end up with a very negative view of you. Just so you know.