401–410 of 704 posts
In 1993 I was interviewed for an operating job in a power plant for a major airline, assigned to their data center. At my current job, I was working in a high rise office building with sixty-six floors. The operating system computer was a JC8520, which was running a version of MS-DOS. All commands had to be typed in correctly or nothing would happen. While operating the plant, several commands had to be entered every…
an airline owns power plant?
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It's cliche, but I really do feel reading the Art of Unix Programming gave me a very good sense early on for how to walk this line carefully. Unix programs are high quality - but they're also, ideally, small , and written with an eye to compositionality with the rest of the ecosystem. The best architecture is in the middle, and often the best first draft is a simple series of pipes. https://www.catb.org/~esr/writings…
(Honest question) What is the difference between this microservice architecture that gets a lot of hate here?
In practice, a way of splitting work up between teams. Also it makes it easier to figure out who to blame if something breaks. Also a convenient unit for managerial politics
So because manager X "owns" microservice Y, it's going to stay around so that they have something to manage. Over time the architecture mirrors the organization
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No one wants to be a "programmer." They'd rather be called "engineers." With none of the licensure, mandatory education, and so forth. But the world needs programmers and technicians for most of the work we have to do. I do comparably little "engineering" and the little I have done that qualifies for such a statement I recall. Majority of the work is programming and technician work. Nothing wrong with that.
Actually I call myself a developer. I'm not that good of a programmer, but quite resourceful as a developer.
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I'm not so sure. I can imagine trusting someone to set up (and even enforce) eg an alcohol policy, but still be prone to alcohol abuse themselves. Weak wills are a thing. Or people thinking they are smarter than the protocols that apply to the masses.
All I mean is he is the person paid to do this already so it's not extra dangerous. It's like a policeman doing a citizens arrest if they spot a crime on the off hours. It's frowned upon but you know it's the same thing they do in their job.
I don't think the senior sysadmin was paid to hide browsing from the oversight?
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Naive civilian question here -- If the drill sergeant is your boss in basic training, I don't understand why telling him info you think is important got you into trouble. After all, "talk to your boss if you have a concern" is the #1 piece of advice given to anyone who has a job. In healthy work environments, the culture is to assume the best about the intentions of others ... sounds like he wasn't doing that at all.
Basic training isn't supposed to be a healthy work environment. It's about breaking the recruits down and reforming them into perfect, interchangeable cogs that won't interfere with the operation of the machine. Recruits leave with a sense of pride and belonging, and they fit seamlessly wherever they end up, doing their required work with minimal hassle. They address problems at the lowest possible level (e.g., a sup…
Another justification for making parts of basic training hard, is that fighting a war is hard.
So before they send you out into the field, they should make sure they know how you handle sleep deprivation, bad food and confusing orders etc.
I learned to lace my shoes correctly at 40+ thanks to a post on HN. I will search for the post tonight.
I got some remarks when I was young that I am tying shoe laces wrong. Never cared about that, but it turns out a lot of people do that incorrectly and not for the reason I was laughed at.
My shoes don't get untied anymore.
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I had a colleague who was old school and loved optimising, everything he reviewed come back with tiny changes that would save fractions of a ms. His nemesis was a guy who was arguably the best coder I have ever worked with. Things come to a head in one meeting and old school said if we did things his way our code would run quicker and the response was legendary 'If we coded like you it'd run quicker because most of t…
'Optimising' for simplicity would often be a good idea, though. Optimising for speed of execution only matters some times.
In my experience it's rare to correctly identify the bottleneck in code while writing it.
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I mean, playing sports (nowhere near even a semi-pro level) has destroyed my body a hell of a lot more than playing video games has. People just find one source of body destruction more "worthy" than the other, and that's more a societal value judgment thing than an objective danger level thing. It isn't only video games that get hit with this; for example, in my experience ballerinas get a lot more faux concern abou…
I don’t think it’s fair to diminish sports because you personally suffered injuries or long term damage, there are only a handful of sports that carry risks of that severity, where most people will probably get hurt after some time. Sitting down all day wrecks everyones body indiscriminately unless they are undoing the damage every day.
And no, unless you are counting things like chess as a sport (and/or conflating exercise with sports), the vast majority of sports carry incredible risk of both minor and major injury compared to a sedentary lifestyle. Here[0] is a list of the Olympic sports for example; there isn't a single one that doesn't routinely cause injuries.
My point remains that if I get tendinitis or bursitis from playing soccer nobody clutches pearls about the sport but if I get the exact same injury from playing video games it's somehow more concerning - this is a reflection of how society values those things, not of their actual danger levels. Hell, I can get the same injuries from playing the piano but pretty much nobody leads a discussion about piano with "it wrecks your body".
Like many other people who should know better, I tried my hand at day-trading. I bought some course by someone who in hindsight I'm certain made more money off selling courses than they ever did off of day-trading. I got my account setup, had enough funds to allow me to trade short timeframes (I forget what this was called but there is a rule where you need X amount of money before you can do more than Y trades in Z…
Any kind of active trading in public markets is a fool's game for non-professional investors.
Active trading in something obscure enough that the professionals don't bother might be exempt. Eg think trading Magic The Gathering cards in the 1990s.
You might still lose money doing that, but at least you have at least a theoretical chance to make money trading on a risk-adjusted basis.
Of course, the more obscure the market, typically the smaller the scale. So in the end your gains might just look like an hourly wage for your effort, instead of return on capital.
In 1994 my boss asked me how long a set of changes would take in an existing billing application. I took a day to look at the code and I said 6-8 weeks. He said we (me with his guidance) could do it in a week, maybe two. I adamantly disagreed. We proceeded to spend about 3 days writing a detailed document on the logic required. Once he was satisfied, he asked me to take a final look at the code and revise my estimate…