solresol

So should I cover the idea of pair programming, then? Or do you just mean "pair" as in "I want someone like that on my team, and the value that they get is not primarily in the programming, but in understanding their industry vertical."

I can probably come up with some way of doing a pair programming exercise (the course is fully remote because of lockdowns).

The final assignment is going to be (essentially) "choose a program you want to write, and write it" -- so they will have shown a certain amount of initiative and problem solving.

Is that the sort of thing you would want to see?

Taking the history of a spreadsheet file, seeing what has been added to it over time, and where, and automatically generating a web application from that.

Often some spreadsheet has grown organically to solve some problem, with or without code.

Oh dear... I've been triggered by that reference to the HP-UX boxes at Queensland police in the early 2000s... yes, it was as bad as can be imagined... no, actually, it was worse.

A large number of them were out-of-date and at their end-of-life. HP was charging a super premium for keeping them in support beyond their normal end-of-life period... some reseller pointed this out as a justification for why it would be cheaper to replace them than to keep them in support. It back-fired: QLD police just took them out of support without replacing the hardware. State-level critical infrastructure running on obsolete equipment with no vendor support....

I pictured Go = G.

If you want C# and G (a nasty tritone) together, then you need something else. Adding in a Bb will give a nice diminished chord.

It's a high school (IB) essay.

Given that the student probably started learning about economics less than 18 months ago, I think it's pretty amazing.

... and yet, Ada95 managed to include (as part of the standard for the language) the ability to bind to C, C++, Fortran and Cobol. All of which have absurdly different calling conventions and assumptions about memory.

Working on a ServiceGuard cluster of HP-UX boxes for a major retailer, I put the IP address onto the wrong computer, and stopped all warehousing operations (for the country) the day before a long weekend. Might have been a million dollars worth of losses incurred...

My brother short-circuited $25k worth of test equiment (at a time when salaries were around $30k/yr) on his first day at work at one job.

Anecdatum:

In 2018 I was running a consulting business helping customers with backup to tape, but even back then most customers were doing backup to a dedupe (magnetic disk) library like the HP StoreOnce, but then often copying that spooled-to-disk data to tape one per week or once per month.

Now (2021) the flavour-of-the-month is backing up to cloud storage (s3 or Azure blobstore), sometimes directly, sometimes as a copy from deduplication storage. This morning's email summary tells me that one of my customers has just recently stopped using their on-site tape library; I have a quote out for some work with another customer to decommission theirs and replace it with writing to a cloud-hosted provider.

So tape is still getting used (assuming that's what Deep Glacier actually is), but it isn't owned by the customer. But if you are backing up to Google's blob storage, then no, it isn't tape, it's just magnetic storage again, just in low-speed access sections of disk.

The product I was working (DataProtector) has gone through a bit of churn as it changed hands from HP to Microfocus, so this could cloud the numbers a bit.

It matches my experience.

I can update pages about some topics (e.g. backup, tape drives, backup products) and nothing gets deleted or changed. But there are others where everything I update gets reverted with a comment like "reverted good faith edit from ____"

I haven't been in enterprise IT for a while, but the enterprise features that you could have closed-source that would encourage big corps to buy (and pay a premium) which hobbyist buyers couldn't care less about:

- SNMP support (it's on the network, it should report what it is) - Raise SNMP trap (or other alert into $proprietary_monitoring system) when the screen looks like a BIOS screen - timestamped video storage of any activity that happened (auditors will love this) - integrated authentication with LDAP / ActiveDirectory so that you can set up a group which has access to all TinyPilots

The Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV might suit you. It's a 4WD SUV. You get 50km of battery range before the petrol motor kicks in, so it has a lot of the advantages of electric without paying all that much more for it.

The regions outside urbanized ones will deploy solar faster than in the cities, so they will end up with very cheap power in the middle of the day.

You can charge a car from an ordinary domestic power plug -- particularly in a low density area where you can park the car close to the house -- so you don't need specialised charging infrastructure.

I stayed in a hotel in Canberra that was set up like that (charging cables hanging from the ceiling). It was just normal domestic extension cables, so not obviously dangerous. Fortunately I was tall enough to reach up to connect my car's charger to it to charge it overnight; I don't quite know how they would have expected someone my wife's height to grab them.

Don't apartment blocks in the USA have parking inside the complex? i.e. you buy an apartment and a numbered parking space or two? (I don't know -- I've never lived in one, so genuinely asking.)

Then the answer to your question is: through a normal 110V power point in their parking space. Which might involve a visit from an electrician to wire it up, and (possibly) installing a submeter for the consumption -- but nothing complex beyond that.

You don't need some special charger. I charged from a normal wall plug for ages until I paid an electrician to upgrade it (and even then it was only an upgrade to a 15 amp circuit). You'll recharge fully overnight without any trouble.

What you'll end up doing is just buying one of those outdoor-rated extension leads that you can find in a gardening store and running it under the garage door out to where you park the car.

It was fun for the first few days and then you get kind of used to it.

But what never gets dull is laughing at people paying to fill their cars with liquid explosives.

Back in my day we used to use kibitz (from the expect package)...

https://linux.die.net/man/1/kibitz

https://opensource.apple.com/source/tcl/tcl-20/tcl_ext/expec...

Not bad for 415 lines of code.

I'm somewhat introverted (my children say "dad doesn't talk much"), but I can walk into a room full of strangers and be still there three hours later still connecting with new people.

I think it's practice and/or motivation, and it's orthogonal to being introverted/extroverted.

There's nothing wrong with what you, by the way. You are forging your own path and you will find some obscure niche that no-one cares about which turns out to be lucrative enough to keep you occupied. It will all work out in the end.

Yours is the sort of background where getting an MBA (or equivalent) might be helpful, and would be a nice combination with tech skills + understanding of business in general. If nothing else. you would quickly find yourself above the "thermocline of effort" where you get paid a lot for not doing all that much work, which might fit your goals. A gentle first step to see if this might work for you would be reading "The Personal MBA" by Josh Kaufman.

I think the name for what you are offering is called "Business Intelligence".

Now you need to be able to handle objections.

What does this offer (me the CEO/CTO) that isn't done with Tableau or PowerBI?

Those tools get me custom insights about the business without using any developer time; the work is generally done by entry-level data analysts or accountants.

(This is not to say your idea is bad, but this is an objection you will need to have a response too, like "this tool is cheaper". If that response seems to get traction you might change your pitch to "it gives you 80% of Tableau, but at 20% of the price".)

Yes, this happened to me when I joined google. I think there was a mixup with someone hired at the same time with the same name. So I was told I was being hired at L5 but was in the system as L3. I raised it as a problem and tried to resolve it.

Management response: I was asked to resign (in the most clear terms possible).

> Since all debt that matters is denominated in USD,

Actually, most major economies borrow in either their own currency or in Euros (if they are in Europe).

It's called the year of jubilee. It's not insane, and it has been applied to developing nation debt. A lot of thinking has gone into what wide-scale debt forgiveness might look like.

This being HN... where are the poets writing about Silicon Valley, about rationalism meetups, about starting one day too late for the IPO, about the feeling of finally debugging something that's been a recurring problem since before you started with the company... ?

Both China and the USA think that any invasion into their territories will inevitably fail because of the strength of their armies and because of the long supply chains that their enemy would need to maintain to hold a position.

Both sides also believe that the other side will inevitably fail because the other side's political system and ideology is so broken.

But because of the first point they both feel confident that the collapse of the other is going to be containable and controllable.

The technological developments (even if morally wrong) are autonomous fighting vehicles that rain mayhem and destruction; and engineered viruses. A failed state can still cause the other side to lose a war, leaving no winners.

Maybe I'm missing something, but revenue per employee doesn't seem to be rising, which is what I would expect to see out of a successful startup that has found product market fit and is beginning to gain economies of scale. All I see is a capital raise 2x the previous raise each year, with no sign of profit and only a proportional increase in revenue.

I can build a business like that: sell Hadoop consulting services at a loss, below the market price. Win lots of business by being really cheap; grow as fast as your cashflow allows, which will require annual investment rounds of ever increasing size.

When I look at Google Trends, Hadoop's long-term trajectory looks like "dead by 2024". Do we expect that Databricks will be able to justify a $8B capital raising if Hadoop doesn't really exist? If not, what's the path to profitability?

(Not trying to say anything bad about Databricks or their management, I'm just genuinely wondering what's going on.)

> module Main where

> input = "aaaabbbcca"

> r :: String -> (Char,Int) -> [(String, Int)]

> r [] (c,n) = [([c],n)]

> r (x:xs) (c,n)

> | c == x = r xs (c,n+1)

> | otherwise = (([c],n): r xs (x,1))

> main = putStrLn (show (r (tail input) (head input, 1) ))

4 minutes 42 seconds.

And no, I don't write code like this normally, but I guess this is me when I'm under time pressure... anyway, I could refactor it nicely afterwards in the 25 minutes allocated.

The way it works where I live is that if the tax office has to refund you some money (or the government wants to give you stimulus money, or whatever) is that by default it gets deposited to the bank account that was last used to pay any tax that was owed. There are always going to be oddities (e.g. a refund needs to be given to a person who has never paid tax, or you have changed bank accounts since then), but the vast majority of the time this will be the right account to send it to, and it's OK to have manual intervention to handle the rest.

I'm not sure I understand why the USA can't do this, to solve the first problem listed (paying people directly). I'm not sure it requires government intervention to solve the other problems (instant payments from one person to another are common outside the USA, for example). What other advantages does SSN-as-bank-account have?

I can't offer a citation, but I can observe that electricity prices in wholesale markets regularly go negative during times when renewables are operating at peak output. Since people overprovision solar to have enough power at non-peak times, during peak generation times, there's too much energy.

This doesn't happen with fossil fuels, since the plant operator will of course reduce output as far as possible by reducing fuel consumption.

So it seems entirely reasonable that the bulk of bitcoin mining in the future is going to be done at times when the electricity price is exceptionally low (or negative), and mostly be powered by renewables. It's an economically rational thing to do and as a bonus it will provide some grid stability.