The amount of information available on candidates to hiring managers is extremely limited. Evidence of outside creativity is a pretty good sign that someone is not a bozo.
I enjoyed the book _Leprechauns of Software Engineering_ which did track down all the chains of citations to find where the original work was misunderstood or even nonexistent. I would bet that it covers most or even all of these citations, but I’m not taking the time to pull it out and cross reference. https://leanpub.com/leprechauns
Lots of bugs in production code never get triggered or never get fixed and lots of production code eventually gets deleted. There is a real problem with confirmation bias here, as the bugs that cost weeks to fix in production are extremely memorable, and the bugs you might have thought would be a big deal but never actually had to deal with are nearly invisible.
There could be, but I can’t think of anyone I know who grew up with transit who talks about how much they love car centric suburbia. I do know people who like that their kids are in greener spaces, which is related.
This is a good list. It’s interesting to me that it emphasizes historic papers that were quite novel when they were published. These papers were impactful, and are thus good on some absolute scale. But they were not written to be introductions to their topic, and they do not reflect more modern thinking on the topic.
Reflections on Trusting Trust is seminal. In the age of networked computing and open source (and decades of apparently no one mounting a meaningful exploit along these lines) one is asking the reader to do a lot of work to generalize from the concepts in the paper to ideas of security and trust that align with their experience. I could imagine (and did) reading this paper in a class with a moderated discussion. But without the discussion I suspect it would fall flat for many readers.
In the comments people suggest the original Paxos paper. It is cute, but incredibly difficult to understand IMO. For people already aware of network programming primitives, Lamport doesn’t use any of them instead inventing his own metaphors. I tend to think Raft was so successful when it came out because it was described more clearly, not that it was a better algorithm.
It would be interesting to find better more accessible ways of learning the same material. Or maybe the best would be an edited volume, like a textbook, interleaving these classic papers with modern analysis, reflection, and commentary.
It’s more common if the specialty shop has expanded to a chain. Because the same skills and tactics it takes to make a chain business also make a salable / maintainable business.
Finance is like the engineering department in Star Trek. They provide critical resources, and are limited in what they can do by the laws of physics, but they still have to respond to constant demands from executives to somehow make it work anyway. That means they aren’t steering the ship, but they are going to interpret guidance from the captain about priorities in ways that make sense to them.
One person businesses often require a unique collection of skills to operate and don’t make enough money to hire a team of professional operators. This is also true of traditional small businesses like restaurants and car mechanics. The phenomenon is discussed extensively in the “E-myth” series of books. The TLDR is if you ever want to get someone else to run your business, you have to be careful to systematize and document how it works.
I would tend to flip the value of reflective novices and prescriptive masters. Or rather, I’m often successful with advice from reflective people who have minimal mastery. Like, I’ll take reflective advice from an entrepreneur who has only ever sold one company over prescriptive advice from a banker who has sold dozens. In particular, the prescriptive advisor often not only makes flawed assumptions about your situation, but also about your goals. Someone who is good at reflective advice can be good at it even in unfamiliar situations.
I try to be a reflective advisor, and it’s interesting how often people coming to me for advice want prescriptive and push in that direction. In fact this article just made me realize i mad that mistake just last week, giving prescriptive advice without really understanding the situation, because they leaned on areas where I identify as having deep expertise.
They are lobbying to maintain the status quo. I think their big fear is some politician deciding to sell off the amateur spectrum to Verizon or getting convinced by Cisco that ham radio is bad for wifi and needs to be more tightly regulated.
That said, I cannot speak to whether they are efficient at their lobbying or not.
This is kind of what the ARRL does. Amateur radio is supposed to be self-policing. They want to minimize FCC headaches from any kind of hobbyist radio, in order to maintain flexibility and tolerance.
I’m 41, and know all those things, and my father’s company ran for most of my life on AS/400. But they replaced those systems over a decade ago. My whole professional career IBM has been trying to commit corporate suicide in a stumbling awkward way. It’s a testament to how long you can keep spending down brand credibility. I struggle to call them important today. Maybe historically interesting. But not important.
My biggest image format question, which I haven’t seen a clear answer to, is as an iPhone camera user should I be keeping the JPEG or the HEIC as my archival format? I theorized the HEIC had more information, but I don’t really know. Unfortunately keeping both is a usability nightmare in all the tools I’ve seen. Anyone have an informed opinion or good link?
Redundant implementations only help with uncorrelated problems. With complex software, problems are often quite correlated across multiple implementations. Add to that the additional complexity of managing those multiple implementations and the potential for problems may be net worse. The consensus among safety experts is that multiple implementations are a bad approach to safety or reliability.
The banks are just responding to government policy. To quote the article, the single family homeowners who think of rising property values as a birthright are the problem, along with politicians and regulators who cater to them. The banks are just an instrument.
I thought it was pretty clear that the FSF has accomplished little and is prepared to accomplish less going forward. An advocacy organization without a legislative agenda, whose messaging remains ineffective and unchanged for decades, isn’t very good at advocacy.
RMS never harassed women? Have you spent any time around MIT or other RMS haunts? Dude was well established as a serial harasser. When I was a grad student in 2002 it was common knowledge that he was afraid of spider plants and many women at LCS had spider plants in their offices to keep him away.
Scaling the payment with the importance of the software is already how enterprise software largely works. Often times customers actively want to pay more for software so they can secure more attention from the vendor, if the software is critical to their business.
I imagine getting the trackpad right is either a giant pile of heuristic rules, or a nice tagged data set for ML, or both, maybe with a side of online learning from usage. A trackpad that automatically does the right thing for me coding, my 12 year old gaming, and my 8 year old with sloppy fine motor control does seem like rocket science to me.
Microservices architectures are like the Navy using nuclear reactors to power aircraft carriers. It’s really compelling in certain circumstances. But it comes with staggering and hard to understand costs that only make sense at certain scales.
The capitalist colonization of North America, complete with genocide and chattel slavery, deserves at least honorable mention. Also the East India Company, and the Irish famines orchestrated by British landowners, and many more.
Just because the companies doing the murder are more numerous and regularly go out of business, doesn’t mean that capitalism’s hands are free of blood.
Falling life expectancy is a statistical fiction due to changing demographics. And health/medical outcomes are still better, most of the problem is systems that encourage people to die because they can’t afford care.
Responsibility doesn’t sum to 100%. If I fly on a crappy airline and get in a plane crash, it was partly my fault, and also the fault of pilots, maintenance people, regulators, executives, and many more. If someone makes a box with a hole in it labeled “free prize inside” which chops off your fingers, it’s mostly their fault. If everyone knows that opiates are addictive, and a pharmaceutical company says they figured out how to make non-addictive ones, and gets regulator approval, and convinces doctors to prescribe their new drug, and to tell patients it is not addictive, then I think lack of personal responsibility is only one small part of the problem.
If you are making your vaccine from artificial peptides that are a hundred times shorter than a live virus, this seems unlikely. There was no way for live virus to be introduced into this process.
Generally being able to interactively adjust the granularity of the data, drill down, and also to interactively filter the data and see it properly re-aggregated.