slackingoff2017

This kind of mapping hit mainstream a few years ago. Look at the ground in most games, it's not actually 3D but does a damn good appoximation.

In some games you'll see real subdivision surfaces which are even more awesome but somewhat expensive.

I remember being super excited when these features were making their way from software rendering to GPU years back. I would guesstimate a very large fraction of the perceived increase in game graphics have come from these techniques in recent years.

I test API's and code I expect to reuse a lot but I agree on CRUD type stuff. If the code is being used in one place and bugs aren't all that consequential its a huge waste of time to test everything.

I've found that unit tests are less important when you have good CI and your codebase isn't shit. On high quality code it takes so little time to fix bugs and redeploy that unit testing is a hard sell.

If war can be waged without loss of life the biggest incentive to avoid war is gone.

We have seen countries start attacking each other on the internet in peace time because it's hard to prove and the costs are abstract. I fear the same will be true for war with robots.

I've always wondered why this isn't a first class language feature. You could make something like JOOQ or LINQ that just hooks the compiler itself at build time to extend the language arbitrarily. And no worries about outdated versions, you hooks could also polyfill newer syntax and features if you can hook at parse time.

This would result in a whole new breed of abominations but perhaps something decent would come of it

If ES6 used hashes to version libraries this might be possible. I still think you'd have too many versions to keep track of.

In other spaces the pendulum is swinging away from shared libraries since storage space and bandwidth are relatively cheap.

Java is often distributed as "fatjars" these days. IOS and Android apps bundle their dependencies the same way as far as I know. The whole serverless movement is a move away from shared code for better or worse.

This is interesting to know, thanks.

I think everything will eventually settle in the middle where Java and C# currently live.

They have an "intermediate code" that they somewhat compile down to. But this is really a more compact version of the source than a binary though. You can see this easily by running a decompiler. Often times the decompiled IL is almost identical to the source. And before the JIT kicks in the IL is typically interpreted.

You get the best of both worlds. Easy to compile, easy to decompile, platform agnostic, compact code, and fast if it needs to be

Do they serve Koolaid at Google by chance?

If he has the power to do such things then does it that is definitely HIS official policy going forward. Apparently company policy doesn't matter when you're the guy at the top, or at least that's what he's trying to tell us. Way to send a terrible message to your employees BTW.

If he doesn't like your site and has a bad day he's going to take you off the internet.

Said everyone trying to reinvent the wheel ever :) . I would replace that with "rarely". Sometimes it's obviously optimal to roll your own thing but in almost every case it wasn't.

My bar is pretty high. Unless you can write an academic paper on the thing you just invented you should try what's out there first.

How do you get promoted so quickly? I've worked my ass off at several companies and been in high positions at early startups but when I ask for a promotion everyone so far has said no"sorry, you only have X years experience". Maybe I'm not working for the right places...

Currently working with a bunch of guys out of the game. Spending about 4 hours of free time a day for over a month was the only way to break into new tech and absolutely vital to my recent job search.

Learned some cool stuff, but also how terribly behind my company was

Nobody ever looks at my repos :(.

Software hiring is stupidly broken. Google has done much research on hiring and a code sample+cognitive ability are the two most important predictors of job performance.

Tell that to anyone that hired me ever.... The first time you'll even talk to another dev is your on-site.

When I was in charge of hiring once we made a huge deal of user repos and probably spent more time looking at them than resumes. Got some damn good engineers from that. But almost nobody does it that way

Ah, good :) . No wheels invented today

Interesting, but you probably didn't need to write your own filter :). Google's Guava library has the best designed and performing Bloom filter I've ever seen. Lockless concurrency, extremely fast hashing function.

This points to using a cheap Linux box at host VPS.

AWS micro instances run Linux basically by default and have about 150-250 megabit connections.

I assume they loaded the documents onto a hacked AWS box running WordPress or similar and downloaded them later from there. Hackers almost always tunnel through at least one compromised machine because they don't trust a VPN alone for anonymity.

In no way does this imply anyone was or was not responsible. This is a common thing to do for any hacking group

They won't until consumers wise up. I've stopped using them completely, not worth the gamble.

Their price advantage has eroded anyways. I don't see any advantage to buying from them relative to straight from the manufacturer most of the time.

Amazon has done a great job squeezing shipping costs and margins. I doubt I pay more than 5% more on anything but I know I'm not getting any fakes

Whenever I see an article titled "should (insert non-engineering position) at an engineering company learn engineering" the answer is yes.

There's studies that show the biggest source of satisfaction with your boss is whether they're good at your job. It's also well known that people like others like themselves, and that smart people are much better at figuring out if the person they're talking to is also smart.

What does this point to? That your very best engineers should be the ones hiring more engineers. In the endless quest to save money many companies have relegated this task to corporate drones.

I have no proof... but I would gamble a large part of the reason that bigger corporations end up with mediocre engineers and management is because they forget how to hire good people.

At the startup stage you're far more likely to see star studded teams, small groups of people that are all absolutely brilliant. My belief is that this is largely to relegating hiring to cheaper labor once the company grows past a certain point.

I know of a lot of unicorns where the founding team has made a point to personally interview every engineer. Some of them until well past 1000 employees. You'll hear people say "I can't believe this billionaire is wasting his time interview janitors". What needs to be understood is that some of us, me included, believe that who you hire is the most important decision your company makes.

The type system is still working properly in that it will produce code that compiles and runs. For the developer such a behaviour can be misleading. This is compounded by IDE's with intellisense which will suggest passing random objects with the correct properties into the function.

My fear going down farther than about ten feet is how long it takes to reach the surface. 30 feet is a long way underwater.

Rescue is related. I doubt anyone could pull somebody out that's passed out at that depth. You're just not going to have enough air. I had to help someone out of a pool once and the only way I was able to manage was by walking along the bottom with them on my shoulders to shallower area. They panicked and tried to climb me, pulling me under if I did anything else

I'm not sure if this is normal but I have voluntary control over my eustachian tubes. Opening them makes a small click that's audible to others if they put their ears up against mine :)

You pretty much act as you do with regular type systems, rarely creating types that are compatible by accident. There is one place however where you use structural typing constantly.

TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript and using "options" objects as method parameters is a common pattern. These options objects are synonymous with anonymous classes and don't have a name, only a shape. Structural typing is one of the strategies TypeScript uses to maintain compatibility with patterns in JavaScript that use these nameless objects.

There are no namespaces. Methods are compatible if they take the same or a subset of the parameters. Objects need to have matching property names and values.

As much as I like the idea of wealth redistribution I have the same doubts it will work. A similar phenomenon happened in South Africa when it was tried. The initial wealth distribution worked okay but it got rid of owners that knew how to run a business and replaced them with corrupt politicians.

As much as many of the 1% don't deserve it... A lot of them have that much money for a reason. The ones I knew, the "new money", were generally extremely intelligent and hard working before they made their millions. A lot of them are on permanent vacation now but if all of us had that much brains, charm, and grit it would be a lot easier to get rich.

Actually our use of fertilizer and irrigation makes CO2 level a significant limiter on plant growth rates. CO2 fixation is so expensive that plants adapted to arid environments have developed a better way of doing it, C4 carbon fixation.

I found the study: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/04/05/study-suggests-increa...

I would hope so since I've been in swimming pools deeper than that. Deepest pool I've been to the bottom of was 32 feet I think.

I don't get how anyone could dive for fun, it's scary down that deep :)

Another crown phenomenon https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krummholz

And something that prevents many trees from being grown indoors https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction_wood

Trees will lead you down a glorious wikipedia black hole.

The increase amount is debated but higher CO2 levels have caused significant gains in farming efficiency.

http://www.climatecentral.org/news/study-finds-plant-growth-...

I had no idea that 12% of the population makes top one percent income for at least a year of their life. What causes so many of these people to fail?

How could there possibly be so many jobs that offer that kind of income. Or maybe it's that most jobs offering high income have short tenure..

I've messed with people a few times when I thought it was really important for them to agree with me. You can trick people into considering a different opinion by planting evidence that supports your point of view.

A very effective way I found was to identify their role models and find one that shares my opinion. For example, I have a friend who salivates to Elon Musk and I've had great success getting him to consider alternate viewpoints by casually mentioning that my opinion aligns with his.

Another more subtle way is to read a bunch of stuff that supports your point of view using their phone or PC. Most big sites these days will show you what they think aligns with your beliefs. You can use the creepy targeting they're already doing to skew the point of view your friend sees.

Definitely jaded. I have been in charge of a couple smaller organizations and worked with some smart people for years to turn them around. In the most memorable case there were simply too many of the "old guard" left when I departed victorious and within a year they had it running just as badly as before. My biggest mistake was not getting rid of all the people that made it bad in the first place. I promoted and shifted them into places where they couldn't screw anything up but they stepped out of the caves the day I left town.

Even years of increasing membership, better benefits, virtually every metric increasing steadily was not enough to convince these people that the changes happening were positive. They wanted to do things "their way".

When I came back a year later I saw our shiny new equipment collecting dust in the corner. A few of the old guard were in the middle of a demonstration on how to pretend that it's still the 17th century. The smart new managers I brought in were gone.

Watching that place boomerang so fast struck a chord in me. The only time I'll agree to run anything now is when I have total control of what happens beneath me. Build little slices of heaven surrounded by towers of corporate bullshit. My long term goal is to build my own company but meager attempts so far haven't worked out.

I couldn't change people's opinions even with years of bulletproof evidence that they were wrong. Maybe a few of them individually, but a very small percentage of the group. They simply went along with things until they had an opportunity to change then back to how they liked them. I now 100% understand why management is gutted when a company changes hands.