spfzero

When you do something successfully, how do you feel about it? Do you feel like doubling down on the harder stuff?

Being fluent in tools is one thing, but the creative rewards are the most important, if you can feel them. If not so much, hey, you're just not cut out for it. Tons of people aren't and it doesn't mean they're not smart or hard-working. It's just not their thing. There are plenty of other great things to do! Like someone mentioned, project management, scrum master, product management all can make use of your education so its not a waste at all.

So, if that's you, I don't think advice like "oh don't use that tool use this other one" are going to help you. Don't waste more time on something you're just not that into. Programming and engineering in general involve lifetime learning, and you need motivation to do that. Without the creative "juice" that's going to get old fast.

The article did not say how the bad data was introduced. There is plenty of room for contractor malfeasance or incompetence to be a factor. Working around the safety measures in place, for example. Using an import tool improperly. Directly modifying a database through console, or, custom application software written without customer knowledge. Abusing privileged accounts in non-authorized ways. I'm sure there are many more.

The engineering precautions in system design always involve trade-offs. There is no perfect system that could be created for acceptable costs. Ultimately it is always going to come down to humans following the rules, hopefully as few of those very-trustworthy humans as possible, though that's where the FAA may have been lax.

Canada and the UK illustrate the downside of single provider, but the US has embraced all of the bad about single provider, but with multiple providers. Anyone can get into the game, but no one tries to make the product better. The patient is not the customer in either the US or Canada or the UK. They are the same in that respect and that is what matters.

If you're in the category of paying more than your fair share of taxes you probably can afford to buy instead of rent. But if you want to keep renting, find a non-scumbag landlord. They exist, I've rented from them.

IIRC the NS prefix was in use long before there were any dealings with Sun. There was software development going on at NeXT before they had the name for the OS ("NeXTStep"). So, NX for NeXT, NS for NeXTStep.

Why? As long as it is not competition to your employer, your off time is your time. How would it be different from a hobby? And as mentioned, the intent is not to make enough money that you leave your current job. You're still a loyal employee doing an honest full-time job there.

I wonder whether this particular unit was representative of the production target build. Maybe it was an early prototype? Certainly after 250K revenue (if you believe that number) there was funding for a design rev.

I wanted to say the same thing. Start a small business on the side. Something you enjoy; there's a million ideas. A friend of mine buys and sells classic motorcycles. Someone builds new replacement parts for unsupported industrial equipment. Car accessories, anything.

It should not have the potential of losing a lot of money, because you don't want to worry about it and you have a full-time job already. So that rules out big capital investments, machinery, etc. You will need to sacrifice margin (so you'll learn what that means for sure). You will need to choose your market carefully and learn a lot about it.

You don't need to make a big profit, huge revenues; you're in it for the experience. Go low overhead: work out of your home, store things in your garage, don't mess with business stationary until you need to, etc. After a year, you'll be learning about financial statements (but you should still study those of other companies as others here have said.

Make sure to keep the business finances separate, too.

There seem to be quite a few parallel messages between Stoicism and teachings of the Buddha (separate from the Buddhist religion, which seems vastly different).

But I would say, continuous refactoring is maintenance. You would not need to do it unless there was technical debt that had not been addressed in a timely manner. And when you are forced to do development because your underlying platform, i.e. javascript, changes, that's maintenance. You're not adding anything, you're just adapting. Though I concede that to the extent that the JS changes allow new capabilities and you engineer them in, that's a gray area.

I would just say that when the effort of fixing bugs, refactoring, re-platforming, updating docs, and tweaking features, is greater than the effort invested in major changes, you're in maintenance.

Most software applications get there. Take your favorite IDE. It's in maintenance. Vim and Emacs are in maintenance. Your bank's web app is in maintenance. Chrome is in maintenance.

I admit this is somewhat arbitrary, but there are things that you do less of, and things you do more of on a lot (most) of production applications with users. Sometimes the needed functionality target was missed the first time. Maybe the second time. Maybe users massively changed their minds. So you might not get into maintenance for a long time, but that might be more due to a poor understanding of what the market wanted, rather than there being no such thing as maintenance.

Both, but I find myself having to learn a new ORM practically every time I switch languages and platforms, or just every 5 years or so because new "better" ones come out. Also, I often do not feel I've every really "learned" the ORM. It doesn't act like my understanding of it, all of the time. Either my laziness, poor documentation, etc.

So I keep coming back to SQL, even if it means rewriting code I've already written. At least with SQL I know exactly what's going on, probably because I have a lot of experience with it. With SQL I can try code out against the database in parallel if needed. It always works exactly as expected. I get the paradigm so I don't have trouble writing it correctly. I don't have confusing bugs related to saving state vs. leaving it in memory. YMMV.

You might look into "joint ownership". You and the client(s) both can do whatever you want with it. In the contract, you might want to agree that the clients do not go into the business of selling the software to others, since that would compete with you. You need a contract, and a lawyer.

If you've finished the software and are not heavily customizing it for a client, then I believe that is more of a licensing plan. Just sell it. Again, lawyer.

I would not mess with a partnership. I don't have a good reason for this, but it seems to involve tighter coupling than I'd want.

Note: I'm not a lawyer (but I have sold semi-custom software to companies, without a lawyer; I would do it differently now but it worked out fine).

One idea might be to incorporate and consult under your company's name. You might even do a sole proprietorship. In that case, customers will not necessarily do a background check on you yourself (some still will), because you are not necessarily contracting on a particular individual doing the work.

This might involve a few hundred dollars, but if you indeed have skills worth $125/hr, it would be worth working at a car wash etc. until you save that up.

You might look at something like the median life expectancy of a 65-year-old. That skips over a lot of early deaths that really bias the "average life expectancy".

For instance, you might find that in 1980 the median life expectancy at 65 was 25 years, and today that number might be higher. You'd still be getting a lot of lifestyle disease deaths though. Obesity and diabetes really grew after 1980.

https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-statisti...

It might be even better to look at median life expectancy at 70 or 75, if your idea is to gauge whether modern medicine is keeping people alive longer. Start with the group of people that at least made it that far. 70 or 75 is still probably too early for "died of old age" to happen, and those people are past most of the "died of something else" deaths.

Here's another way of looking at it: Many mutations are going to happen in the wild, but only a few will make the virus more viable in some host or hosts. Most of the mutations will be dead ends, or jump to another species and then mutate away. Only rarely could one emerge and jump all the way to humans, spread across the globe and cause a pandemic. Ebola couldn't, and SARS1 as well due to speed of mutation. (The only original SARS1 around any more is in laboratories, except when it has escaped.)

In GOF you speed that process up by orders of magnitude. You arrive at the viable mutation sooner, possibly infinitely sooner if random mutation would never have arrived. If you engineered part of it, there's a good chance it would never have emerged naturally. It might have come into the world in a few decades or centuries, or it might never have. But you have it now, and have to guard it perfectly as long as it remains in your lab.

Bottom line, it probably won't escape, but it probably never would have emerged naturally either. IMO, to make GoF a beneficial trade-off, it should be focused on viral species that are close to emerging naturally and do not need their genomes to be artificially manipulated in order to become dangerous.

That precision is fascinating. Other measurements of that age I'd guess were a lot less precise, such as time and distance. It seems like anything you used sqrt(2) for calculating, would be swamped with less-accurate factors and you'd get a much less accurate answer.

That's like saying if we want the benefits of markets, be ready for theft. Society was ready for theft, and so created laws to make it illegal. That way we can have the benefit of a market with a low probability of being robbed on the way home. Seems to work out.

As the sibling to yours said, it is closest to forgery or counterfeiting, rather than theft. I don't think that changes it much re. maximally benefiting corporate interests. It might benefit them a little less maximally, but not by much.

They are considered "experts" by the media, for one thing. So if you read an article on nutrition and some "expert" or other is quoted, and you act on its advice, then you might be in that fraction.

The incentives for the reviewers are different. On-line reviewers (often) get caught up in review-counting and status-seeking. They want to be a "Top Reviewer".

In a store the person has to go out of their way every time they recommend the same book. It's one-to-one vs. one-to-many. There's more of a chance they really do think highly of the book, maybe even years after reading it. That's valuable.

Manufacturers in the "old days" weren't necessarily more virtuous, but they were more constrained; by material and process choices. There weren't the options for a part that would reliably work... for three years and then fail. You had to choose from a hand-full of materials that either worked or did not, and if they worked, they likely would work for a long time. If they didn't, you couldn't even sell the thing.

Today there are myriad types of plastics, metal fab processes, treatments, etc. that can be used to build "things". So there are many variables to trade off, and (some) makers will trade off durability and reliability at the drop of a hat for a 0.1% short-term profit advantage. If they even considered those qualities in the initial design.

Any molecule that can fool your tastebuds, can also fool some of the other receptors in your body that will then respond similarly than they would when encountering sucrose/fructose. Probably not all, but probably some. The insulin response seems like a good candidate and studies have shown people gain weight on diet sodas kind of the same as they do on sugared-sodas, so it is not out of the question that artificial sweeteners are not benign.

We can never know how many people Covid killed in America, because the rubric in the US is to count as a Covid "death" any death where the deceased tested positive for covid. In that group might be someone who would have not died had they not had Covid, but it also includes many people who would have died regardless of Covid positivity.

It is also to count as a Covid hospitalization, anyone hospitalized who tests positive for Covid in the hospital.

In both cases, all we can say is that somewhere between none and all of them are actually in that condition because of Covid.

When you travel to a foreign country you are agreeing to operate under their laws. If you go there without respecting their laws, I can't see having a lot of sympathy.

The idea that this notorious arms dealer is going to be completely rehabilitated because he has lost a few years of networking, in the network which he built by himself in the first place and certainly would be able to easily do again, is wishful thinking at its worst.

Yes someone published a story in the Wall Street Journal, but this thread is talking about Twitter. Twitter is not exonerated because some other outlet did something differently.

The point here is that they were specifically responding to government requests to censor information. That is truly government overreach, but in the opposite direction to what you claim.

For people with recent experience building hash tables. What sticks over the years is how you work with them and where they are a good solution to a problem. The more experience you have in using them, the less likely you are to remember how to build them, because that information was never used and got pushed out of memory by all of the other things an experienced developer needs to remember.

Whenever I read "misinformation" I always wonder whether this is the old "misinformation" that turned out to be actually the correct information mislabeled, or is it some of the old information that is still wrong, or is it some new information that some people are saying is wrong.

Karaoke is the best activity I do with my parents in-law when I visit. They love it. It's kind of fun, actually. The equipment they have is old and they have special CDs with the songs and lyrics, really low quality. Apple Sing through AppleTV, with voice search, would be a huge improvement.

They're adding it to Apple Music for no extra cost this time though.