>assembler-to-Java project Where's my gif of that guy who looks skeptically at that thing he's looking at? You know that one.
Humor isn't allowed on Hacker News, you should know better.
The IRS’s Effort to Convert Its Assembly Codebase to Java
161–170 of 224 posts
Re: The IRS’s Effort to Convert Its Assembly Codebase to Java
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
$103k-$134k sounds very market rate to me... Maybe not for the San Francisco Bay Area but for areas outside of that it seems fine.
The IRS is based in D.C., which also has a high COL. Additionally, that's for the GS-15 paygrade, which requires a PhD and is the highest possible level -- so you can't be paid more than that. The corresponding paygrade for someone with a masters, or with a few years of experience, is $43-$56k[0]. It's definitely below market IMO. [0] https://www.federalpay.org/gs/2017/GS-9
Who says the place of performance has to be DC?
Re: The IRS’s Effort to Convert Its Assembly Codebase to Java
#163> Wang was working under streamlined critical pay authority the agency has had since its landmark 1998 restructuring. It gave the IRS 40 slots under which it could pay temporary, full-time employees higher than GS rates. Former Commissioner John Koskinen pointed out Congress did not re-up this authority in 2013, despite his entreaties to former Congressman Jason Chaffetz’s Committee on Oversight and Government Reform…
$103k-$134k sounds very market rate to me... Maybe not for the San Francisco Bay Area but for areas outside of that it seems fine.
GS-15 is the top of the pay scale though, there's no such thing as a GS-16 just step increases that come with years of employment.
Plus, would you really want to endure the months of their hiring process (which intentionally filters out people not wanting a long term job) just to join an agency that has no promotion potential for you over the long term?
Re: The IRS’s Effort to Convert Its Assembly Codebase to Java
#164Re: The IRS’s Effort to Convert Its Assembly Codebase to Java
#165> Assembler is like Shakespearean English. It’s dated. A shrinking number of people can deal with it. But it’s also elegant and highly functional. What is considered elegant and functional about assembly?
The more I study functional programming the more I see a mapping between structures (reduce/fold,...) and assembly. Assembly requires you to be very very careful, but if you're used to that you can encode these patterns in short ways. But it's a lost art nowadays.
That's opposed to the view often put forward by FP advocates. Tell us more.
Re: The IRS’s Effort to Convert Its Assembly Codebase to Java
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
This suggestion is pretty innocent of practical knowledge of the problem. Simply extracting the control structure of the assembly via automation is a huge win. This type of assembly is incredibly dense - it was written for machines with at most, 100's of K of memory. It relies on highly non-local side effects which are very dependent on the data. Things like a reference to a status register bit that was possibly set…
you could also just dust off the original specification. code up whatever it's supposed to do, then special case all of the junk that doesn't match.
There rarely is an original specification, and even if one exists, what was actually written has a high probably of not actually matching the specification exactly because of undocumented feature requests or additions.
Re: The IRS’s Effort to Convert Its Assembly Codebase to Java
#167> in theory, there’s no way to translate assembler code. They way it runs is not how it reads Wat?
I'll just leave this here: https://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html
Re: The IRS’s Effort to Convert Its Assembly Codebase to Java
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
Small contracts are an entirely different matter. Try bagging something >> $1M or defense related. I've worked for the government on small jobs here in the EU a couple of times, as long as you stay below a certain amount you can bypass a ton of requirements. But once you go above that threshold the number of players drops very rapidly and there is no escaping the formal process. If you are capable of selling large co…
Here is one of the two young entrepreneurs (19 and 23 years old) that secured ~$300M DoD contract. So obviously, it is not as bad. ;) In 2005, Packouz (23 years old at the time) joined Efraim Diveroli (19 years old at the time) in Diveroli's arms company AEY Inc. By the end of 2006, the company had won 149 contracts worth around $10.5 million.[1] In early 2007, AEY secured a nearly $300 million U.S. government contra…
Pity they had to do it fraudulently. This is not exactly a bespoke product though. 4 years in jail/7 months house arrest is not a great thing to have on your record either but I guess the payday made it worth it for them.
Re: The IRS’s Effort to Convert Its Assembly Codebase to Java
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are only guaranteed until some elected official decides to give you a haircut on your deferred paychecks (Which is what a pension is), right as you're about to retire. (Or shortly after you do.) I'd hedge, and prefer splitting my money between both.
Attempting such a cut would result in a protracted legal battle with some of the most powerful organizations in the country.
Unions? Government employees? They aren't even on the top ten of 'most powerful organizations in the country.' Not for the past four decades - Ronald Reagan fixed that glitch.
What's going to happen is that paid shills will start publishing op-eds citing a handfull of executives and upper managers who gamed the pension payments system with overtime, resulting in massive payouts for themselves, drum up public outrage about lazy government workers, and pass an across-the-board haircut. It will, as always, be turned into a red vs blue issue - and half the time, red's in charge.
Re: The IRS’s Effort to Convert Its Assembly Codebase to Java
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you saying this is how contracts are awarded on FedBiz Ops? I know a handful of small players, myself included who have won IT contracts with the gov't and it is not at all like you stated.
I just registered on SAM and submitted a bid (something unrelated to this), but no idea what I was doing, I mean I put together a plan, had meaningful past performance, but overall I'm just hoping for the best. Would you happen to have any resources you followed? Or, suggestions that you believe led you to submitting a successful bid?
There are Procurement Technical Assistance centers in every region of the country. They are staffed by former procurement officers, and help companies learn how to sell to government and prime contractors.