vmlinuz

There are 4 official retailers in Japan listed here: https://www.farnell.com/raspberrypi-consumer/approved-retail...

Haven't read all of these yet, but a couple stood out as matching recent experiences...

"Future thinking is future trashing": we had a good engineer with a bad tendency to write complex generic code when simpler specific code would work. In one case, he took a data structure and wrote a graph implementation on top of it - it was only ever used once, by him, and I recently rewrote it in about 15 lines of structure-specific code. In another case, he wrote a query builder to make it easy to join data from a new service with our legacy DB, which makes the high-level code simple, but the full implementation much more complicated, and means incoming engineers can't obviously see what implementation to use. His last week at the company was... last week.

"Understand and stay way of cargo cult": Today, I was reviewing someone's code, when I saw a language construct I didn't recognize, and which made no sense to me. I asked him what it was meant to do, and if he could give me a link to somewhere which described the construct - he said no, he'd mostly just copied it from someone else's code. I asked 'someone else', and he pretty much said it was useless, he's worked in so many languages that he gets confused about language idiom/construct sometimes, he writes his code like he'd write a letter to a friend, and it wasn't like anyone was reviewing his code at the time anyway. I said I wasn't going to take his stuff out of the existing codebase, but I wouldn't let anyone copy his useless code in future, and linked him to https://blog.codinghorror.com/coding-for-violent-psychopaths...

Just to be clear, the people cannot vote for the CE - from a limited pool, or otherwise. That was the proposed change in 2014, breaking the previous promise of universal suffrage, but the changes were shelved as a result of the protests, leaving the previous system in place - nominations and selection are still both made by the 1200-member 'election committee' which is widely considered to be a Beijing rubber-stamp group.

One interesting - and HN-relevant! - point is that the current member of HK's parliament representing 'Information Technology' is one of the leaders of the pro-democracy camp, and there was a semi-viral video this week of him confronting police inside the parliament building. He is one of the few pro-democracy members among the functional constituencies, and as a Hong Kong permanent resident and IT professional, I want to make sure I get the papers sorted to vote for him in the next elections...

Just to be clear, this is a story of a person who has been traumatised by a combination of the worse parts of US and Chinese poverty. It's not a nice story, at all...

Also, the two websites she runs, as linked at the bottom of the page - one of them is a blog/content site about living frugally, one is about making money any way you can. They're part of the same problem that the article (probably inadvertently?) illustrates.

Technically, there was at least one device updated to Honeycomb - the HTC Flyer was originally released with Gingerbread and was later upgraded. I know, because I've still got mine, as handed out by Google at workshops where they tried to persuade everyone to use Fragments for everything. I think they've largely stopped trying by now...

Also relevant, that Honeycomb wasn't released into AOSP until ICS, which meant there were no third-party builds or even support from off-name brands.

Interesting contention - who are they mouthpieces for?

I've been into these shops a couple of times when traveling in Japan, and while I mostly didn't end up buying much, they're definitely a lot of fun to browse.

I like Muji, I like Daiso (branded as Living Plaza here, and which I always describe to people as "what if Muji did a pound shop?") and I'm looking forward to the first Don Quijote store opening in Hong Kong later this year!

This seems an odd comment to make, given that Slackware is still active :)

Since my main use for a VPN is to access things in the UK from the UK, I use a Raspberry Pi which I left hidden behind the TV in my parents' living room, running things including OpenVPN. Their upload bandwidth isn't great, so I try to avoid loading it during the day - one useful effect of being in a very different timezone!

I also setup OpenVPN access on my mum's laptop, so she can access things in the UK when she's traveling...

Bandwidth costs and blocking of known IP blocks makes a VPS-based solution not so attractive to me. I do have a couple of 'lifetime' accounts with random VPN providers as a backup. I also have the OpenVPN client running in a docker container on my PC with a SOCKS server in front of it, for flexibility.

Ah, you can live like a king in Asia for $20 a day!

Which is very much not true in Hong Kong (where I live), or Singapore (where I have friends), or a bunch of other places in 'Asia'...

I don't have an answer, but I appear to be accidentally (and for now, hopefully only partially) making that transition right now...

I am an 'older' engineer (in my 40s) who just came off a decade-long stint doing solo freelancing, mostly for one rather laid-back client - so it's pretty much been a career progression break. Started a 'real job' about 6 months ago, as an IC, in a local (long way from US) startup with approximately 60 people in tech department. Did a simple project to familiarise myself with the code base and tools - then started working on a larger, multi-team project...

Then was person-in-charge for the project within my team...

With one, then two (and now three) of my teammates working on the project 'under me'...

Then was committer/deployer-to-prod of project for my team...

Then another teammate decided (AFAIK it was his choice) to move teams, and I agreed to take his deputy-team-lead and code-owner responsibilities - in February when his move is done...

Then a bunch of other teams got involved in the project, many of them committing to my team's repo - so now I'm mostly reviewing, commenting, advising, coordinating...

Then team lead goes on New Year holiday, now I'm running stand-ups, approving early leave for Christmas/New Year's Eve...

I am now (while TL is on holiday) apparently reporting directly to VP of Engineering, who is Austrian and a bit of a hierarchy guy, and who has barely spoken to me before this week...

In the course of about 3 months I've got from engineer to at least temporary team lead and code/project owner. Although things have gone a little Mythical Man Month with me as the bottleneck, I'm winging it for now. I'm trying to be fairly strict with code quality - although that's weakened as deadlines approach and pass - but I'm probably a little soft on people management, which I instinctively don't really want to do, so it's easier to say yes.

It's more, and different, stress from what I've been used to in the past, and it's not necessarily bad, just new. I am expecting to speak to someone fairly soon about increased compensation for increased responsibility, which is noticeably something that has not come up at any point so far.

Fun fact: This is not supported by historical evidence, and was likely simply anti-Semitic fake news which got out of hand... https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/the-rothschi...

Been using a Logitech M705 for a good few years now and I'm pretty happy with it - has a couple of unnecessary buttons, but on the other hand, not only has it lasted more than a year, but it typically lasts at least a couple of years on a set of batteries. They've rebranded it as the Marathon Mouse for a reason...

One big screen. Proper full-sized good quality keyboard. Fairly chunky wireless mouse.

If you spend most of your time working at a desk, why are you hobbling yourself with inferior kit which exists to be portable, not productive?

Yes, I'm relatively old... Get off of my lawn!

See headline... Think "hmm, I knew a guy in London ages ago who had famously served on a sub in the Norwegian Navy"... Check blog.

Yup, same guy. Guess there aren't that many former Norwegian submariners in the tech world!

Not the greatest example, to be honest, since:

a) the very article you linked states "...no publicised cases of blasphemy have been brought before the courts since the law was introduced in 2009 and a source said it was "highly unlikely" that a prosecution against Fry would take place." - and indeed, the case was dropped after an investigation found, effectively, that not enough people were offended to be worth proceeding...

and b) earlier this week "voters overwhelming[ly] supported a referendum to remove [blasphemy] as an offence in Irish law." [0]

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-46010077

The official line here in Hong Kong is that the mains water is clean and drinkable, but the plumbing between the mains and your tap may not be clean. The Water Supplies Department maintains a list[0] of residential and commercial buildings whose 'last-mile' water supply is regularly tested and found to be safe and clean.

Of course everyone still boils their water...

[0] https://www.wsd.gov.hk/en/core-businesses/water-quality/buil...

I once wrote a Logo interpreter in BASIC... For my Computer Studies GCSE (UK national exams at 16) final project. It never actually worked, but it was a heroic effort!

We used Ingres on HP-UX for our database class when I was at university in the late 90's - and now the vast majority of my current colleagues are quite a lot younger than I am, and they don't know why I keep doing double-takes when they're talking about k8s/nginx ingress...

Common question here - standard Economist policy is never to name their writers and correspondents, except very very rarely. Their content is published under the name of the newspaper, not the individual author.

Came here to say this... had various family members using it, clients, etc.

Backblaze's "we don't support Linux desktops because they'll abuse it" policy is pretty annoying, in context.

Maybe I am just too old, but I'm quite surprised to see no mention here of the Burns Omni-net from the Simpsons episode The Old Man and the Lisa[1] - "It sweeps the sea clean"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_Man_and_the_Lisa

Unless you are in academia/research, your job is not to produce software - it is to solve customer problems, add customer value, and help your team-mates and wider colleagues. You should be able to trust your colleagues on the marketing and product side of things, and while you should be honest with them about tech limitations/requirements, you need to be able to work with them to deliver product.

This could have been made clear in a few simple sentences:

We have created a new software license which we are calling the 'Redis Labs License' (RLL), by adding the Commons Clause terms as extra restrictions on top of the Apache 2.0 License. We recognise this will no longer be a true Open Source license, but we consider it a fair trade-off between our business needs and our responsibility and commitment to the Redis community.

From now and in the future, work on the following Redis Labs modules will be published under the RLL: Module A, Module B and Module C.

There will be no change to the licensing of Redis core, and we remain committed to supporting ongoing development under the existing BSD license.

I did this, back in the depths of history... Changed job involuntarily in early 2000, had verbally accepted an offer from one company, another company came along and said they couldn't offer me any more 'salary', but they could include a car/allowance - which meant quite a lot more cash since I already had a car.

Presumably this is Project Fi (fi.google.com) rather than Google Fiber...

There's a couple of interesting things here...

Firstly, Naomi is a person with a certain style - in both a personal and physical sense. She is not one to back down from a fight, but she clearly lost this one and still feels the loss pretty strongly.

Secondly, it's interesting because, when you strip it down a bit, it does appear to be a case of an Asian-American woman coming to the defence of an American company and white male writer/editor, unsolicited, in a dispute with a Chinese woman. It doesn't seem to mesh all that well with the other narrative of Sarah as an anti-white racist...

I have direct personal experience of Hong Kong's points-based scheme, the Quality Migrant Admission Scheme - which, it should be noted, is a very niche scheme, largely unknown even amongst expats. The vast majority of skilled immigration comes on a simple sponsored work visa...

QMAS gives you a few extra points (5) if you are applying alongside a degree-level-educated spouse, and a few more if you're bringing children (5 or 10 for 1 or 2 children). Given that the 'pass mark' is 80 - which doesn't guarantee a visa, just allows you to apply - it's neither a trivial amount nor a particularly significant one.

I've heard that a lot of financial companies require staff to take at least 1 block of leave per year, during which they are forcibly offline and their work is covered by a colleague. If someone is hiding something in their numbers, having someone else take over for a week or two is a really good way to uncover it...