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FLUX-YOU

2,705 karma · joined June 23, 2013

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FLUX-YOU··on My life with 12 programmers, 2 rooms and one 21st-century dream (2016)
The weather in Atlanta, Houston, Austin, and Phoenix is brutally hot and/or humid and shows no sign of getting a cooler average.

It's difficult to do stuff outside when it's that hot, especially as you get older.

FLUX-YOU··on My life with 12 programmers, 2 rooms and one 21st-century dream (2016)
You can totally do that with a small house and a nice piece of land. Doubly so if you have a significant other to help even with a low income.
FLUX-YOU··on Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System
Maybe all of the contractual obligations for existing products were not a good idea
FLUX-YOU··on Nobody Trusts Facebook, Twitter Is a Hot Mess, What Is Snapchat Doing?
Will probably need a high profile case before anything gets moving (since there's a LOT of money to fight back against ethical laws). We need a governing ethics body to determine ethical guidelines, otherwise people are just going to invent their own ethics hosted on Github and that's bad if you follow it and have to go to court.
FLUX-YOU··on Introducing the Cultural Leadership Fund
>Maybe you could count someone like Neil deGrasse Tyson

No you can't because NDT doesn't represent business opportunity and consumer behav-- er, I mean "in other words, culture".

FLUX-YOU··on Being the editor of a newspaper in Eve Online
It doesn't make much business sense these days to develop another MMO like early EVE. There's so many good games out there that it's hard to keep someone's attention. People will quit when they see it takes months-years to get access to shiny things to improve their character. Especially if people prioritize playing with their friends in any game versus playing one specific game.

Plus I think the newer generation of gamers are less patient and the older generations have less time to spend on games.

FLUX-YOU··on Reddit Experiencing Elevated Error Rates
Traffic light model means using red/yellow/green.

The problem I see with a lot of sites is that there is plainly a problem, but the status is still green. I was checking reddit's status page and Aug 20th was green throughout the entire downtime and still is. The amount of times I've seen it be inaccurate makes me think it is not a good model.

I would much rather have a graph of requests served and other metrics (which reddit has). You can very clearly see a dive on the graphs and know something is wrong.

This is what I'm referring to: https://i.imgur.com/UAtFnfI.jpg

FLUX-YOU··on Reddit Experiencing Elevated Error Rates
I don't mean to rag on reddit specifically, but it seems like another example of traffic light statuses being useless. Github had similar examples. I don't get why anyone uses them.
FLUX-YOU··on Facebook addiction linked to staking your self-worth on social acceptance
I know that some people do have real emotion behind their posts, but I also know some people who read emotion from text when there isn't any at all.

e.g. "Javascript is fucking stupid" could equally be a screaming rant or just a casual comment with a group of cursing sailors.

Pretending you know what emotions someone's expressing from plaintext is basically the opposite problem of what you're talking about and is equally flawed.

I wasn't there though, so if they were leveling personal attacks because of your dissenting opinion, you were likely correct about the emotional part.

FLUX-YOU··on How to Hire
It's the shitty PHP projects they don't tell you about in the interview that people have a problem with that they then shovel on your plate.

But that really goes for any language.

The true extent of technical debt is almost never realized in an interview, but you can't really do much about it if you accept the job and they tell you to work on it.

FLUX-YOU··on Georgia Tech Creates Cybersecurity Master’s Degree Online for Less Than $10k
>Also, I think studying data science is underrated for cybersec.

Can you elaborate? I know a lot of security teams will have large amounts of machine data thrown into ELK or Splunk, but that seems like qualitative data and so there's not a lot of number-crunching to do.

FLUX-YOU··on Show HN: A side project in medical devices
If they don't have a solution already, anything that schedules custom pharmacy mixes based on physician orders in a medical records system is worth millions. I wouldn't go so far as to connect it to an actual drug mixing system though -- let the pharmacists take care of that.

These are short-lived mixes that can't be stored for a long time, so must be prepared on-site.

Bonus if you can plug into an inventory system and get alerts for drug shortages. These can happen pretty regularly, on the order of six or seven times per year.

You'll write a lot of custom code to connect to that medical system API, and often there are surprise and sparsely documented features. That's mostly why you set a high price for it.

We did one of these and quickly saved the hospital millions because we had before and after photos of pharmacy waste generated. They weren't wasting drug mixes for cancelled orders any more when a doctor forgot to call/fax the pharmacy or the patient had been checked out/moved.

Before-hand, they were collecting this information manually with some cobbled together reports. It was nuts.

This isn't turnkey though. You will work for the money trying to sell to hospitals with bloated change management processes.

FLUX-YOU··on A Type of Simulation Which Some Experimental Evidence Suggests We Don't Live In [pdf]
>The properties of the simulating universe, including foundational things like rules of logic and mathematics, could be literally unimaginable (by design or accident) within the simulation.

This could be the quadrillionth iteration by which point they'd be pretty confident though.

FLUX-YOU··on Engineering whiteboard interviews: yay or nay?
I really wish we had multiple formats that the candidate could choose from:

1) Whiteboard

2) Review and technical discussion of existing code or projects

3) Paid take-home project

4) Pair programming on live code

5) Technical discussion only for rare cases for those Top Secret/NDA candidates that really can't discuss their past projects but are also time constrained

Some people do actually like to whiteboard. Keeping it around is kind of like legacy support for people who practiced hard to excel in those interviews.

This is pretty much the union of technical interviews that are well-known. If you switch out a technical interview format and can't get meaningful insights into a candidate, you're testing for the wrong things.

FLUX-YOU··on Wanted: ‘Lost Einsteins.’ Please Apply
This is a chicken-egg scenario:

1) I'd be less apprehensive about giving away 8% to any (!) company I found if I knew the network/guidance/community were proven.

2) You need track records of success before the network/guidance/community is seen as worth it. Right now, it's a gamble since you're new.

So you need a population of people willing to take a lower amount of money with a gamble on community quality.

Given that, it seems better off to wait.

FLUX-YOU··on Baltimore police will pay consultant $176k to maintain Lotus Notes system
>A developer making shitty modern react apps can make 180k a year with a bit of effort.

Living in an area with million dollar homes and 3k rents, sure.

FLUX-YOU··on Seaweed could be scrubbing more carbon from the atmosphere than expected (2017)
It'd be a lot easier to convince society if we could convince a relatively few major business leaders of the world to change their company processes. Especially since industrial processes are a major contributing factor to climate change.
FLUX-YOU··on West Virginia to introduce mobile phone voting for midterm elections
This is looking awful:

Boxes look unpatched/out of date. No CISO personnel: https://twitter.com/GossiTheDog/status/1026603800365330432

Good news is it doesn't seem to actually be blockchain: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2018/06/05/the-west-vir...

FLUX-YOU··on YouTube, Apple and Facebook Ban InfoWars, Which Decries 'Mega Purge'
>if these companies are going to revoke his 1st Amendment protections

The first amendment has nothing to do with getting moderated on a private company platform.

FLUX-YOU··on YouTube, Apple and Facebook Ban InfoWars, Which Decries 'Mega Purge'
https://www.youtube.com/yt/about/policies/#community-guideli... - Hateful Content

http://itunespartner.apple.com/en/podcasts/faq ("Why was my podcast rejected or removed?") - Content depicting hate themes

https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards/hate_speech

FLUX-YOU··on YouTube, Apple and Facebook Ban InfoWars, Which Decries 'Mega Purge'
>My concern is what appears to be a coordinated take-down of his channels on the dominant social media/communications platforms with very few precise details explaining why.

Alex Jones could easily show the emails from these companies where he was warned multiple times.

FLUX-YOU··on Wells Fargo says hundreds of customers lost homes after computer glitch
>but I've also known programmers who just don't care about striving toward perfect, bug-free code

This target moves too much in business to be able to efficiently target it.

I surely wouldn't take the time to make something perfect if I knew the business was going to turn around and add another feature that forces me to re-evaluate the thing entirely.

While 400 homes lost is certainly significant, don't forget the millions of homes it accurately kept track of. Imagine the amount of work and resources that would have had to be used to keep track manually and by paper.

Please don't worry about 2 steps back after you've taken several billion steps forward.

FLUX-YOU··on Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
Sounds like a dream job or a nice side gig if you just want a job. Login, run script, log out, bill for thousands, then go back to doing your own thing.

Intentionally withholding stuff without offering an upfront option is shady though.

FLUX-YOU··on Developments in tech in Toronto over the past seven years
"God, why can't companies train more senior engineers so I won't have to train them?!"
FLUX-YOU··on China is laying the groundwork for a post-American world order
>My whole point was this “burning bridges” and general miasma around Trump’s foreign policy is the result of ideology and hysteria instead of hard nosed observation of facts.

Part of the "stature" involves how he publicly treats officials from other countries and how he presents himself to the world.

This is what led Angela Merkel (and other world leaders) to repeatedly denounce Trump. Theresa May almost laughed when Trump suggested that she sue the EU and it's by far not the most stupid thing he's said.

No president does 100% bad things, but the problem is that with every success that he does have, he can't articulate it well because 30% of his vocabulary solely consists of the word 'very'. His reading and speaking level are barely above middle school. The only reason he's resorted to doing unpredictable, mad dog politics is that he isn't capable of doing anything else -- not because it's a good method of politics these days.

Does that get you things like trade deals because no one knows how you'll react? Sure, at the cost of reputation down the line.

FLUX-YOU··on China is laying the groundwork for a post-American world order
Things are way too early to call on North Korea. I saw this today: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-sp...
FLUX-YOU··on China is laying the groundwork for a post-American world order
Not sure I agree 9/11 was when it started. We were still cooperating with allies and other countries and still maintaining non-war stuff.

Trump is when the bridge burning started and when America really lost its stature on the world stage. If it was declining since 9/11, trump took that gradual trend and sent it straight down.

FLUX-YOU··on Almost 80% of US workers live from paycheck to paycheck
Commodities might be cheaper overall, but that's like taking a $10,000 paycut for a $1,000 annual perk when you look at all the other crap going on in the US.
FLUX-YOU··on Bay Area cities are cracking down on free food at tech companies
>Cool, so start-ups lose a potential hiring perk to the incumbents.

They could just do something similar to what colleges do:

- increase salaries just a bit

- but the increased salary goes to a food card

- employees can't easily turn this into cash

- you swipe it and "pay"

- the company is essentially paying for the employee's food

Money changes hands, but no one is at a net loss than what a free food perk would cost.

FLUX-YOU··on Removing jQuery from GitHub.com frontend
Angular is a nightmare for complex UI interactions for components that are spread out.

I'm sure experienced people know how to do that properly, but it's really difficult starting out.

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