throwaway9870

That is part of the reason why people buy Deere. They have superb logistics and the best dealer network in farm equipment.

I think the natural evolution of programmers is to become more capable of building complex systems until you reach the realization that just because you can build it, doesn't mean you should. You then think hard about how to build as simple system as possible. The front-end space hasn't historically struck me as filled with a lot of grizzled systems programmers that have learned this lesson, so we get what we have today. Eventually they will learn and thinks will start becoming more minimal.

"Writing Solid Code" pushes this type of checking and I have been using it for at least 20 years with similar effectiveness as you. I don't understand why such a simple and pragmatic method is so overlooked.

I am not a security person, but I can't help but wonder where the advice of not writing things down comes from? I think my wife's password book on her desk is a lot more safe than most computer experts.

In my experience, mercenaries are never satisfied with their pay, they always want more. While I care about pay, I have also cared about a few other things: who do I work with and what can I learn from them, what type of work is it, location, company goals, etc. It is ironic, but I think if you optimize money by just focusing on money, you will fall short of what is achievable.

> Mostly, the negativity just writes off ambitious people. Though it might make sense given your org, like others, might just have the same reward problems.

Or the person has unreasonable expectations. On top of that, they are bad at selecting a job that will make them happy. In any case, I would not hire then either. Maybe if I just had some boring app that needed some maintenance I would hire them, but that is not what I do.

It is not that it is hard to understand the syntax or even write them, it is hard to read and change them. Here is an example I just grabbed off a random webpage:

^(?=.\d)(?=.[a-z])(?=.[A-Z])(?=.[!@#$^&()_-]).{8,18}$

That is hard to quickly* read and understand what it is. Sure a comment would help, but if someone said it isn't working, I have to work all that out and then fix it.

There is a reason Perl lost to Python. It just seems like we can do better.

Beginners don't care about deleting a line, you can press DEL 80 times and get it done. They care about quickly typing something in or changing a config, saving and quitting. Easy to instruct with Nano without having to introduce the concept of mode editing, which is totally foreign to most beginners.

The glass is half-full or half-empty. We have websites and can do things I never dreamed of as a child. When I had to do product research when I was younger it meant going to a book store and pursuing a rack of magazines. Google was a startup, Amazon was a startup. I would not call them unprofitable. Back when I was young you had companies like SUN, SGI, MIPS as startups, where are they now? Our president tweets? Direct communication to people without it being filtered by N layers? I bet every president has said hate speech behinds the scene at some point. Now the curtain is being lifted. I consider that good, actually, incredible. If you think sitting in your house alone during COVID would have been better without having the internet, then just turn it off. But I don't know anybody who came to that conclusion.

In the modern world people seem to criticize things that are not perfect. That is fine to notice those things, but to let them sway your entire outlook is unhealthy and, in many cases, wrong.

Can we do better? Yes, I think so. But I don't think we are doing nearly as bad as the picture you paint.

I think the biggest problem is that the Internet accelerated change to a speed that people are not accustomed to. It might take a couple generations to adapt.

I have worked in "lower tech"" fields and have worked extensively with trucking companies, so I can somewhat relate to what you are saying and agree it is a bigger obstacle than people in tech give it credit for. However, it is also a nice business opportunity for a software team to build a really important product. Somebody should be able to get VC funding for this. BTW, in my experience, once someone wins this business and a trucking company is using your software, if you don't screw it up badly, you are locked in for a LONG time.

Great suggestions here, but one thing I would like to point out to the original poster is that, while I have read a lot of books, people have had a far greater impact on my thinking than any books. So I don't discount books, but it you want to be a better thinking look around for successful people and pay attention to how they work.

Giving a non-functional person a house would be a great way to destroy it.

Are you saying a young liberal owning a house would not be upset to see the price of it go down?

In a small organization, people usually succeed by being motivated by dream of success. In large organizations, people seem to succeed by fearing and avoid failure.

That yields a very different organization.

Attempting to identify truth is called the scientific method.

Yes, I would agree with that.

"A fundamental problem with Galactica is that it is not able to distinguish truth from falsehood,"

In true science, it is exceptionally hard to distinguish truth from falsehood for many of the interesting subjects. It can take decades of work to reach consensus on what is "truth." Physics in the early 20th century is a great example of this debate.

I think you are conflating hardware watchdogs and software timers. The hardware watchdog should be to catch cases where the system is no longer running your software (or the kernel or the watchdog daemon). Timeouts for software catch things like slow procedures, etc.

Exactly. Every Intel machine has a hardware watchdog built into the ICH chipset. Make sure it is turned on.

Yes, and I even clicked through to the energy.gov article. The article does not define what "100% clean energy" is. It doesn't even use the term 100% clean energy except in the subtitles of a couple of graphs. It uses the term "100% clean power", which again, is very sloppy. Do you understand the US uses a lot of energy besides electric? Is that going to be clean or not? If not, what does the term "100% clean energy" mean?

I have a real problem with statements like "100% clean energy by 2035". What does that even mean? You will have electric aircraft by 2035? Completely electric ag? Electric trains and trucks? No, not a chance.

The article used the term "power" and when you click through to the energy.gov site, it is clear that it is referring to the electric grid. But you said energy and when people make that mistake I often wonder if they even know the difference.

Regulation can help detect fraud, it might discourage fraud, but it can't prevent it. MF Global, Enron, Maddoff, etc. How long did Maddoff run his little scheme before being caught?

I still don't get it. You need to put an if statement in that function to raise the exception. So I still don't see where 50% comes from.

> Aside: At this point, my laptop was bordering on unusable, even on battery power.

How would grounding an outlet affect a laptop running on battery?

You are making two functions calls in the second loop, vs one in the first. If the result of read() could be checked for eof, then you would remove one call. Also, since the branch is so easily predicted, I would be surprised if there is much of a performance hit once the second call is removed.

If you see a 50% speed-up in the above code, I question what read is doing and the implementation of eof(). I would expect read() to dominate the if statement unless eof is extremely expensive. I have written dozens of read()/eof() functions over the years and read() always dominates because the read involves copying memory and/or making OS calls, etc., while eof() is a simple comparison. So if read() dominates runtime, example 1 and 2 above should not be anywhere close to 50% different.

I worked with IBM in the early 2000s porting some IP to their processes and what was so difficult was that everything was proprietary to IBM. From the nomenclature, to the tools, to the models, etc. That was great when they were on top, but the world passed them by and there was no hope of converting them over. I never worked with Intel the same way, but some close friends did and it sounds exactly the same. They are proprietary and very inefficient. A block that would normally be laid out in two days, Intel would spend two weeks on. Their process design rules were super restrictive and their tooling just isn't efficient compared to the what the rest of the industry now uses. Unique, strict and obnoxious design rules might be OK when you are designing a high-volume processor like Intel, but that is not the kind of process you want for a foundry.

I fear it is not in Intel's DNA to make this switch.

The police are only part of the problem, the criminals still needs to be charged and convicted. There was a reason SF recalled their DA. Also, many of these people are mentally ill, and the arrest can turn physical. In the current environment, police have very little room to make mistakes and even if they do everything according to their training, public opinion can really go against them (see Nicholas Reardon). Nobody wants to be public enemy #1 for doing their job.

Imagine reading an honest job description for being a police officer:

  * Good benefits, poor hours

  * Willing to risk life to save others even if they hate you.

  * Must make split second life and death decisions and if you are wrong, you can go to jail for lifetime.

  * You will be recorded and every important decision will be second guessed by people who have never done the job

  * Even if you follow training perfectly, public opinion might go against you which could lead to criminal charges.

Can you image taking a sys admin job like that? Hackernews would laugh non-stop at that posting. But we expect less educated people to do that job for less money. Good luck with that plan.

Just like we have done to teachers in our schools, I think we have made the job almost impossible. In a more gentle society, I can see the plan working, but in our current cities, I think our expectations are complete fiction.

You are just digging yourself in a bigger hole :) Modern farmers are not anywhere close to uneducated peasants.

What do you you think the default behavior of an assert is? If you are turning them off, then you get what you describe, which is not what I am advocating.

Compiling out assertions in production is like taking your seat belt off when you leave the driveway. Seriously, in my experience, all the interesting stuff happens in production. We deploy two builds, app.debug and app.release. We run generally run app.debug unless there are performance issues, but even in that case, we sometimes run it just to make sure nothing shows up.