skipkey

I’m honestly not sure. I met a couple of the developers at a convention a few years later, and found out the carnage one was where a stack of tokens from the tokenizer was unexpectedly deleted, but we didn’t talk about the other one. I suspect someone probably owned a Maverick that was buggy tho, or didn’t run.

The old Clipper 5 compiler had some fun error messages. The two that I remember running into were “Ford Maverick Error”, and my personal favorite, “Carnage! Module name crushed in compilation disaster!”. I ran across both abusing its preprocessor.

I don’t recommend the first book. At least in my edition the typesetting is just odd, which makes it harder to read than it should be. The front matter indicates it was typeset in Mathematica, which probably explains it. The later books in the series don’t suffer from this problem.

The videos that it was essentially transcribed from are great tho.

If it exists, you could probably replace most of the first book with just a really good explanation of the Lagrangian, with lots of examples, I think.

My wife and I have definitely used Nordstrom’s return policy by buying two sizes and returning the one that fit worst. But Nordstrom still benefits because we would return the online orders at the store in person, and if we are there we are going to do some shopping.

Arguing something only tangentially related to the debate topic is a decades-old strategy, at a minimum. We called them squirrel plans, or something like that.

When I was in high school in the late eighties, one semester the tournament topic was something like, “Resolved, that the USA should decrease the non-military consumption of fossil fuels”. A fairly straightforward topic.

In one tournament we ran into a team whose affirmative plan was, “ban oil-eating microbes”. Basically they ran with “evidence” from some articles written by crackpots who postulated that these microbes used to clean up oil spills could mutate into something that would essentially eat all life on the earth.

You had to be ready to handle things like this so you would have a number of generic negatives that you would try to tie in. In this case, we ran with our “humans are bad, so killing them off is a net good” negative. We called that one Malthus.

So how do you describe a 400 person team? Mid-level?

That’s definitely selection bias. For big companies, in my experience, if you need a Unix-like development environment you’re going to be on a Mac. Small companies and startups are different of course.

For years, I kept my wifi with the passphrase “This is my passphrase. There are many like it, but this one is mine.” Without the quotes of course. With two spaces after the period.

At this point I am not going to overcome forty years of muscle memory. I assume whatever tool is doing the rendering will make things right according to the current convention.

It was the first thing I learned to program on. My father went to a conference where they gave him one as swag, and he gave it to my older brother and me. I was, I think, seven years old or so.

Writing code that we hand assembled taught me a lot. It’s probably still in a box at my folks place somewhere in the garage.

Honestly the UBI images seem like the best option. They publish those, they have to publish the source for them.

Sure, they can make it more difficult by making them static, but it seems doable.

If you have time, or have pre-made it, using clarified butter results in a better final product. I keep some in the fridge all the time. Ghee would probably work similarly, but I have never tried it.

One of these days I am going to make a shirt with the text “Font Nerd” in comic sans, just to see how many heads explode…

It depends. Admittedly this was 35 years ago or so, but generally a certain percentage would go towards the bar and other staff, but mostly you would keep your own tips.

It’s probably due to a difference in culture. The US was still very anti-socialism at the time. But the culture was definitely that you should keep the rewards of your own labor.

At smaller restaurants there was never any pooling at all.

When doing development for Windows in the early Windows 3 days, if you had a Hercules card and monitor in addition to a VGA one you could run the debugger on the Hercules. This was a much nicer setup than debugging everything on the VGA.

> One thing that I've observed is that the more errors there are, the less likely people will look at them

It can be even worse than that. At one point I worked on an app that generated north of 500 lines in the PHP error logs per minute per server. In the course of implementing a feature I cleaned up a few of the low hanging warnings near the code I was modifying. This resulted in about a 3 percent reduction in the log file velocity.

When we deployed to prod, everyone panicked, because log file velocity staying about the same was one of the primary things they alerted on, as a proxy signal for server health. That was the one and only time in my career I was reprimanded for cleaning up warnings.

I did enjoy reading his blog though, well mostly the comments. And then it just died a few years ago and never came back. I always wondered if the “database server” issue mentioned was just an excuse to stop blogging.

It’s a balancing test. Cooking on electric stoves is a far worse experience than cooking on gas. Induction stovetops are somewhat better than the classical electric tops that generate heat through resistance, but only somewhat.

I am stuck using an electric stovetop, and will replace it with an induction one soon, but I would switch to gas in a heartbeat if it were available.

The enemy of my enemy is my enemy’s enemy. Nothing more, nothing less.

- Howard Tayler, Schlock Mercenary

About 10 years ago I was working for a game company. Most folks came in a few minutes before 10am when the daily standup was. I would come in at 6am, and generally get all the productive work I would get done before anyone else got there.

But after that, I would generally just circulate and see who was having problems, and help them. And honestly, helping the kids and teaching them was something I really enjoyed. So I see both sides of this debate.

But on the other hand, at one point the manager told me he thought our productivity was a direct result of our open office setup, and I asked him who the top 3 developers were. He named them, and I had to point out that all 3 had noise canceling headphones on to block out all the collaboration.

My uncle ran a pirate radio station in rural east Texas in the late 60s with a transmitter he built himself. He broadcast music, and I think some sermons on Sunday from the local Baptist church. It was very low power, probably no more than 15 miles range.

Until my aunt ran a clothes line to the antenna and suddenly it could be picked up in Dallas. Within a few weeks the FCC had tracked him down and made him stop. Luckily they just confiscated the equipment rather than putting a teenager in jail.

There were a number of us that looked into this at the time, talking on Compuserve. I think the columnist Robert X Cringley (Infoworld maybe, it’s fuzzy) hooked me in with Mark.

One of the interesting things about the disassembly was there was a pretty decent sized chunk of valid code that had no entry points, that really looked like a naïve implementation of LZ compression. I always figured that the developer just couldn’t get it working correctly, and they had spent so much money on the ad campaign that they just put no-ops in the handler table and shipped it. It’s even possible that management had no idea it was done.

I haven’t checked, but I suspect the return is less than they would have gotten just sticking the money in an S&P 500 index fund over the same 14 years. Still, the risk is lower.

My 2013 F150 periodically asks me if it should upload a “Vehicle health report”. I have always declined.

The idea of a vehicle repossessing itself does bother me. In the early 2000s I bought a vehicle from Mitsubishi, financed through them. At the time, setting up an automatic payment through them cost a monthly fee, so I set it up through my bank instead.

About 3 years later I got a call from them threatening repossession because I was three months behind on payments. I checked and every payment had been sent.

It turned out that Mitsubishi Motors East had transferred my loan to Mitsubishi Motors West, or something like that, and I had missed that. It was probably in one of the statements I never bothered opening.

So my last name is Key, and my initials are C D, so in the mid-late 90s any time I was prompted to enter a CD Key I would always try “yes”. It worked at least half a dozen times.

Sure it does. It means they have two options. Let you stay remote, or fire you, but not “for cause” so you still can file unemployment. Otherwise you won’t be able to file.

What happens if someone doesn’t pay the fee?

What many people don’t realize is that some large corporations actively manage for mediocrity. Oh, they won’t say that is what they are doing, but it is the outcome of things like micromanagement, constant meetings interrupting flow, high levels of process bureaucracy.

But there is a rational reason for it. It reduces risk and makes output more predictable. If you have a 10x developer who is actually producing 10x, how do you plan for that? What if he leaves? If you reduce him to 2x or so, it’s much more likely he can be replaced.

His blog has been down for a couple of years, I wondered what happened.

“Natural flavors” frequently used to mean, “this product has a small amount of MSG in it, but we don’t want to list that”. At least in the US. I am not sure if the FDA regulations still allow that though.

Seems ridiculously cheap to me. here in Phoenix, there are 2 restaurants near me that do by the slice, both around $5. Most restaurants don’t offer it.

I have only spent a month or so in NYC working a decade back, and at the time every thing was more expensive than home except pizza. I think every region probably has its cheap food for the working class. Here it’s tacos, there it was cheap slices.