webjprgm

If there was a 1% decline, would it work to not adjust pay but record this negative inflation so that next year if it's +2% then the employees only get +1% raises? If the economy continues to go down then this won't work, but it would handle a short bump fairly without actually reducing anyone's pay. Would people still leave?

From knowing nothing to building a simple web app, PHP is faster.

If you already know RoR and have your dev machine and deployment environment all set up, then it's not hard to get a Rails app working. Rails has a significant advantage with the use of gems (and bundler, etc.) for easily adding complex features.

I still use PHP for my home projects most of the time because I haven't bothered to set up Rails on my VPS, so the effort it would take to do so just isn't worth it compared to how easily I can drop a PHP app in place. (I am using a framework in PHP too.)

But then, the author was talking about PaaS not setting up Ruby on a VPS. So in that case it's probably just about how comfortable the developer is with each language. I'm a bit more comfortable with PHP because I don't like debugging Ruby GEMs that use instance_eval black magic for DSLs and/or have to be inserted as Rack middleware. Not unless the project is large enough to make Ruby gems worth it.

(Eg. if I want good unit and integration testing. For home projects I rarely do integration testing. E.g. #2 was rack middle ware for REST API.)

Could you get your pizza or Chinese food delivery via drone?

I would also recommend looking at the code generated by Lex and Yacc as well as hand-written code to parse a Lisp or Scheme. That might give an idea of how to organize a hand-written parser.

Though, without reading Modern Compiler Implementation or something similar the use of shift-reduce tables in generated code might not make sense. Also, my computer science curriculum included a course where we wrote a top-down LL(1) parser which is organized very differently with a function call for parsing each rule which calls other functions for parsing sub-rules etc.

I've hand-written a few mangled char-by-char state machines as well, which served as lexers for various DSLs.

Also remember that most of the time you have two hops on your wifi network: PC -> router -> TV. (Newer wifi cards can skip the router if the software on both sides supports it.)

I don't have vision insurance, but my health insurance will cover the eye exam.

I figure I should stay a year because usually the hiring bonus has to be returned if I don't.

Still doesn't count. You're perceived entirely differently being that young (younger than a typical college grad new recruit). You also don't have the same life goals to deal with, like raising a family which is much more expensive and requires more stability than a young single guy in an apartment who can move at a moment's notice.

And then remove the existence of cookies altogether, I infer. Since only a unique identifier is necessary, with all other session data and preferences being stored on the server.

I notice in a comment further up that Apple has two separate IDs. One for advertising and one for tracking users of a vendor's applications. Should this browser ID system have two separate IDs, one for securely identifying a user and another for advertising? The secure ID would have to be unique per website, otherwise phishing schemes just became ridiculously easy.

On my personal blog I made a button to disable/enable all the social media plugins. I don't know if anybody uses it (my readership is approximately zero, so no point in tracking clicks or A/B testing), but I figured I'd give users the option out of courtesy.

It does use a cookie to track your preference. The default is to enable them (since most users are not tech savvy enough to know they want them off, and those same users wouldn't easily find a button to turn them on).

Yup.

This may be part of the lack of technical background in the article, but how do Facebook widgets on people's sites track whether you are logged in to Facebook if not via cookies? The mechanisms I know, user agent and IP address, don't seem reliable enough to replace a session cookie.

Or you could get motor power for 30 miles and manually bike the remaining 6. The wheel doesn't stop you from manually moving the bike, does it?

A simple example comes from the article itself. Parameter 'strength', the strength of the frognication. What is the range of that? Is it 0 to max int? min int to max int? 1-100?

(A real-life example would be a function that outputs an image in JPEG or PNG and takes a quality parameter. I notice that within the same library often one type of image wants 1-100 where another type wants a different scale, like 0.0 - 1.0. The parameters have the same name.)

This is not something that can be checked by most type systems. Therefore it needs to be in the documentation.

I might point out that some employment contracts specifically say you can't discuss salary with fellow employees. (I know I read it somewhere I applied or worked, probably at my current job too.)

Personally I don't care about being paid for unused vacation days. I just want my vacation. And I don't want to have to use it all for Christmas. (Some employers I've worked for give you a week or two for Christmas automatically, some make you use your allocated days.)

I think it makes sense to pay out for vacation days one could have taken but didn't when they quit or get laid off. I'm not sure it makes sense to pay for vacation not taken in previous years, but maybe.

You can see the person's finger (or the CastAR wand's tip). I imagine the rendering engine will show the same thing in the same place relative to the real world for both users. It doesn't have to, in the case of a game where you each have your own point of view, but it could if the game works well that way.

They have a clip-on to the glasses that convert from AR to VR mode. So you wouldn't need a reflective surface portal as you say. I believe switching between the two headsets would just be a matter of software. I'm wondering if that support exists or is easy to make, or whether there would be difficult challenges to it.

Basically, I'd prefer to buy one system that could be both AR and VR than two separate systems, one for VR and one for AR. So that would make CastAR beat out Oculus Rift unless the Oculus Rift was just so much better or the software was incompatible.

How does this compare to Oculus Rift in terms of cost, quality, and potential to be a "game changer" as everyone calls both? Especially since CastAR can be both AR and VR, could one hook up a CastAR to the games and demos we already have for Oculus Rift?

Someone would have to own each Wikipedia page to approve pull requests. As it is now, anyone can do the edits directly even if there's not a person dedicated to curating a particular page.

Exactly. Google does not have my credit card and I don't want to give it to them. Amazon already has it. Just like I prefer to use PayPal when I can to avoid giving a new online merchant my credit card directly, I could now use Amazon for that purpose.

If I hadn't ever created a PayPal account in the first place then I would have no motivation to make one. With Amazon I already give them the credit card info to make purchases on Amazon. PayPal is just a middle-man so I have no reason to use them already.

Well, except that PayPal lets you receive payments too. Now that I think about it, I believe I created my PayPal account originally to accept payment for a website job. Only later did I add my credit card to make eBay purchases. So I can't completely replace my PayPal account with Amazon services yet.

Apple iBooks lawsuit by the US government is relevant here. Book publishers and Apple made a deal to change pricing to an agency model, where the publishers dictate the price. The US government sued them on the basis of anti-competitive price collusion. This slapped Apple and let Amazon go back to it's race-to-the-bottom pricing. In fact the US government is right that Amazon's methods are the essence of a free market. They are just bad for every other player and lead to Amazon expanding it's market share and thus making Amazon more of a monopoly.

Very interesting twist.

It gets bad for consumers if:

1. Once Amazon has all the market it raises prices.

2. The price pressure on manufacturers, publishers, and other producers of goods causes those businesses to fail and stop making their products, or to produce lower-quality products.

Do people really pigeon-hole themselves into being just back-end engineers? Or just front-end? I can imagine a designer-type person picking up HTML, CSS, and eventually JavaScript and calling him/herself a front-end engineer in a limited way. But as a programmer I work on all of it, both server-side and client-side portions. (So I'm a full-stack engineer I guess.)

It seems to me that a designer who picked up some JavaScript would still not be a programmer. Lots of apps require advanced JavaScript to run a UI client-side. I would not expect anyone who was a full programmer to be just a front-end engineer and be completely unwilling to learn PHP or Ruby to also work on the back-end. If I met a person like that I would think the person a horrible programmer and not hire him/her. (Unable or unwilling to learn, lack of passion for software engineering excellence.) A designer with a few extra skills is one thing, but a restricted programmer is something else entirely.

But what do I know? Hence I ask whether this is common.

Maybe someone has an official answer, but I always thought of front-end as anything in the browser and back-end as anything on the server. Front-facing is user-facing. Back-facing is hidden plumbing.

The article seems to be more about UI vs. non-UI code. Rather than have part of the UI code in the business logic, it can be split out. This was already possible, but with Node.js you can have the server-side half of the UI code be in Javascript so all the UI code is Javascript and the business logic code can be in some other language.

It encourages you to imagine what these things can be good for, therefore get excited about even just this small progress.

Could we have loser-pays-cost only for patent lawsuits?

I worked on a project not long ago that used Rails to serve up purely JSON via a REST API and the front-end was all Ember and Coffeescript. (Coffeescript because an intern started prototyping part of the UI in it, and we all figured it'd be fun to learn. I'm not sold on it though.)

We designed our JSON model differently than Ember Data expected, though, so we basically had to make our own Ruby GEMs and EmberData adapter. But with those in place it's fairly easy to use Ruby as just a back end.

Only if you'd be able to use those 3 minutes productively. You can't sit down at a computer and work for just a minute and a half, you'd have to be able to get to work a minute and a half sooner to capitalize on this. If you have a salaried job then this makes no difference.

I find that at work I get more disheartened when I know there's a fun hobby project waiting for me at home.

Part of OP's problem is that he, like me, started with programming as a hobby and still wishes it was.

Note that in hobby programming there are still boring parts to push through. Additionally I still have to do sys admin work so I have a server for my website. And other such things. But as a hobby I can choose to pause it whenever I want. I can stop and go read a book instead. I can switch to another project just to keep working on something fresh then switch back when I have the energy to push through the boring part.

Also, real work often has policies, paper work (digital version of it), politics, and all kinds of other stuff that gets in the way of just writing code and making nice software.

All through high school and most of college I knew I wanted to be a programmer when I grew up. But when I was about to graduate I suddenly had to decide what kind of thing I wanted to program. I have many interests; too many to study them all. So I know a little about a lot of things but I have been unable to get jobs in those areas. (Graphics, compilers, AND operating system internals to name a few that the OP mentioned.) So basically since I couldn't decide I'm stuck with the "general" stuff. My experience is similar to OPs, basically, but I haven't figured out the solution. I have a vague plan of becoming either important enough at work to pick my projects and help with product strategy or else to become an independent developer.

Complicating this plan, though, is the fact that I put more emphasis on family than on work satisfaction. If I have to put up with a boring job but get to live in a nice house in a nice community and spend time with family, that might be worth it. I'm just not totally satisfied that it is yet. But I can't go risk everything in a San Fransisco start-up attempt.

I think this is a great idea for getting more people to experiment with hardware projects. Then they can move on to learning more things. But for a first try the barrier to entry needs to be as low as possible.