HCIdivision17

I've been surprised by my attitude over this. Either I want a honking 10 pound brick of capability or my Surface Pro 4 with dock. I really appreciate the convenience of being able to just grab the computer and go (nowithstanding the idle==shutdown-without-saving bug), but there are times I'd like to go heavy on the horsepower and battery.

What is the sort of mayhem we can expect to see on the IT side of this transistion? It seems like there is already a ton of infrastructure in place for them to deal with the dynamic nature of their current calendar, so how do they move to the Gregorian without tripping overthemselves? (Never mind the cultural hurt that will follow, though I'm not sure why they're losing holidays - wouldn't those just follow under different Gregorian days, like Easter does?)

I really like the term "friendly pita". When people complain about tech support being unhelpful, I've often found the opposite. Be genuinely friendly and relentless and I've found even incompentent people will fix things. Which I also genuinely appreciate.

Sincerity helps, both as a shield and as a way to diffuse the inevitable frustration that comes from troubleshooting tech.

Of course, I've got a strong force of will, too, so I tend to mix poorly with charlatains like the grandfather's post. I really feel for the souls who have to work under that jerk.

My friend would always talk about old war stories. And he'd repeat too :) But his son said jokingly over lunch with him, "Always suffer an old geek." And I've never regretted it.

Keep trying to share what you know. He couldn't figure how to teach what he knows either, but really I think mentorship is more about showing and sharing. You'll find someone who appreciates the skill, and you'll be that guy who sets them on track for their career.

Also kudos on the name memory; I have been well instructed by every good engineer that clearly mirroring people's name back. I don't, but I see how much that helps (just wish I could memorize labels).

Elsewhere in the threads here someone noted that a lot of young teams don't have upper managers. And frankly, I'd believe many simply don't have any proper management.

Where "proper" is critical. I've had a lot of managers, but few effective ones. And almost none who led the department. I found my mentors in other departments. It's a real shame, since a great manager will do more for learning and quality of life than anything else, I think.

  Old age and treachery will beat youth and skill every time.

I love that line. It's featured in a neat writeup by ridiculousfish:

http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/old-age-and-treachery.h...

It's a weird experience if you're a clever youngster. I liken it to speed vs torque. I have to rely on being fast and being able to scan a problem as fast as I can to understand it. But an older engineer will just know the lay of the land. I had this happen a lot with an older electrical engineer. He seemed slow and I looked to run circles around everyone, but he could point to things as a root cause before I even understood the problem. I would have to spend time to decompress his observations to backtrack how he figured it out, and you start to realize that his shortcuts and heuristics are just so much better than mine. I wish all young engineers to have the opportunity to be whooped by the tortoise.

Sometimes I would spot something he didn't, but it was frequently because I was approaching from a position of ignorance. It worried me that someday I'll lose that edge, but I guess it's why a good team will be diverse and balanced.

Right? It really violates the Law of Least Astonishment. I think part of the idea is that the phone serves as a close hub to get push notifications from, since it doesn't retrieve my mail without the phone. Which honestly I'm starting to think I preferred (you really start to notice how much nonsense heads your way when the notifier is on your wrist).

Nope, I just live under a rock apparently. The S3 nails the sweet spot of functionality and form for me, but from the looks of it I apparently could have gone all-in much sooner.

I'm gonna shill here and say check the S3 (or S2 classic). The spinning bevel is really slick, and the OS feels really natural. Partly because it seems to understand there's approximately enough space on a watch to put like 4 icons ever. The voice works great, and I've had conversations with my arm at my side (but really, get a bluetooth headset - airports are too crowded to use a speakerphone).

And some of the watch faces are clever. The default chronograph one actually fakes the light reflecting around the face as your wrist moves. Complete BS, but passes the illusion nicely.

To be sure. I really don't like the style, but I can't deny that they boomed the market for smartwatches. You could by a cell phone watch decades ago, but it wasn't particularly awesome. But now, with the amount of tech that can be crammed in the same space, combined with the fantastic power management and battery densities, we're seeing real functional stuff.

And you bet Apple will have some sort of untethered watch. I bet it's expensive though. Not as a joke, but to make sure it doesn't compete with their flagship. Or maybe not; if Samsung's method works and people bundle the 4G watch with a phone just as much, maybe we just get that much more connected.

Regardless, I think it's pretty premature to be whinging about the market for smartwatches failing like the article.

No, that's the cool bit: it's like a cell phone on your wrist!

The 4g connection is pretty good, and I think the call quality is pretty decent. Battery can only handle maybe an hour and a half of call per day (between charges), but I'm not too chatty, so it works great for me.

I can't buy into this analysis. I just got a Gear S3 Frontier. It's a literal cell phone, but it looks like a watch. It's fairly comfortable (after the absurdly bad band is replaced), and its interface feels natural.

It's the watch I wanted when I was a little kid with the cereal box Tetris watch. [0] I had a whole bunch of Casio databanks, from the 32 number to 150 number [1] to the neato 'touch screen' version I saved up for a year to buy [2]. I remember dreaming of getting that computer watch off SkyMall's catalog (can't find a link just now), and dreamed of having something like it. Now I have a gizmo more powerful that Roger Smith's in BigO.

Again, it is an actual cell phone. My inner child is gleeful about it. But here's the gripe: the software to talk to it is only available on a mobile device. ONLY. Any my phone is more than 4 years old, so it turns out my bluetooth can't talk to it.

Still an awesome watch, and I can't wait to upgrade my phone and load my usual apps on it. Would I have gotten it if it were smaller, less capable? Probably. I tried to get an S2, but my phone store wouldn't sell it while the S3 was on the way.

EDIT: This is one of the first watches I've seen that is capable of standing on its own (somewhat) if untethered from a phone. There have been cell phone watches, but not at this price point, and not with the same slick interface.

[0] You know the one: https://stevecochrane.com/v3/2006/09/15/tetris-should-be-eve... [1] http://archive.casio.com/products/archive/watches/databank/d... [2] https://www.flickr.com/photos/timepieceslove/6362901777/

I've been out of the field for a while, so I don't really know the state of the art anymore. But I had the pleasure of visiting what was then called the Texas Microfactory. It's basically a sort of microvoxel printer, capable of moving components around on a small stage.

Here's a link to a paper on the machine, I think: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00417722/document

And a thesis on the gizmo: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.599...

I haven't read it, but it does have some cool pictures around page 40.

As you might imagine, control is the hard part. Damn thing was wobbly like all get out, to the point that it building anything at all was the impressive part. And it did - it wasn't practical for mass production, but it certainly could do cool things.

Robustness really depends on the computer these days, I think. Flash drives already route around bad sectors, and most computer chips are capable of gracefully degrading performance as sections fail (one of the ways chip yields go up: over build the chip so failures can be routed and sold as a cheaper variant).

To your first line, the micromachine-for-micromachines idea often reminds of Feynman's talk "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" [0], which is great at least in how long ago it was made. Turns out it's a really hard problem. There have been some functional versions of the micro arm-onna-arm designs, but they're just stupendously hard to control. I'd love to see some progress on that front, though, because it really is cool when it works.

[0] http://www.pa.msu.edu/~yang/RFeynman_plentySpace.pdf

There's definitely an effect, but from my intuition I'd guess it'd have to be fairly strong. But maybe if they're cheap enough to produce and easy enough to mass up, you don't have to even be that effective.

Here's where my intuition is anchored, and you can figure if it's applicable (because I worked in a very different field). In magnetron sputtering, you ionize a gas as it passes through a strong magnetic field (harddrive magnet strength). Once the molecule ionizes (since it's moving at sonic speeds in the vacuum), it whips around and slams into some target, blasting molecules back from the target like a shotgun to a pile of dirt. These sputtered molecules/bits of material may be slightly charged, and when they hit the substrate will carry that charge and deposit it onto the substrate. Over time an insulating substrate (like glass) will charge up a bit, and this will begin to repulse incomming splattered charged bits. It'd be called something like 'biasing' and slows down the deposition rate, since the incomming material may slow too much to properly embed itself on the substrate. The magnets behind the target also trap electrons (in what is often called a racetrack), which helps amplifies ionizing the gases (since a strong field may not ionize the incoming gas molecules, but plonking an extra electron onto it will).

It tends to be a game of small effects in big numbers. Any individual interaction can vary wildly from one interaction to another, but over many trillions of trillions of events it averages out like you'd expect scales similar to Avagadro's number to. So if we could fabricate stupefying amouts of these gizmos, you wouldn't need it to be completely effective; just enough biasing or field strength to tilt the odds a bit in your favor and a lot of the little chips could survive. And if you have enough, you win! Sure the solor wind may clobber a few chips, but if you have billions enough of them, perhaps enough survive to keep effective.

This is part of the approach to some MEMS gizmos, where you play the odds and make huge numbers of the gizmos with a cheap fast process and filter out the working ones. Ideally you'd be smart and just have a really good process, but if your fabrication process is messy or too hard to control and the gizmo valuable enough you can take the losses. (I mean, you don't do that - you engineer good processes! But... well, that can be expensive. And sometimes waste is cheaper.)

EDIT: I'm thinking of the spherical cow equivalent of a gizmo here, too. You prolly wouldn't make billions of little computers and hork them at another star system unless you could essentially replicate them chemically. But not with a photolithographic process typical to chip designs. You can get millions, not trillions of trillions. Have something that self-assembles in a beaker and then perhaps it becomes an option. But that's sort of like hurling a viral infection at another star system, and... well, kinda gunks the idea too.

I think the main problem is of scale. The Earth's field isn't too strong, but it is huge in expanse. That's a lot of distance to deflect and decelerate. Going from a million meter diameter to a billionth likely requires a honking big*large field strength to deflect as hard.

Also while space has a very low temperature, it's an impressively terrible conductor of heat and thus a garbage cold sink. To keep things cool you either have to wait for the heat to radiate out or to off gas your coolant. You could generate radiative fins for the chips, but I don't know how effective that is in space; I would assume they would be so gossamer it would be hard to keep them from corroding in the solar wind.

But maybe that's just an engineering problem.

It does, doesn't it? I used to use Ventrillo, but then they screwed our small group out of our server connection. And we happily used Dolby Axon for a while. We tried Google Hangouts... for a while; until it just really didn't work well (it just disconnected and crapped out a lot). We tried using the Steam client's chat, but while ok for screensharing, it wasn't so great for chat.

But at some point we heard of Discord, which posed itself as a chat/vent replacement, started using it, and it just works. Which is huge, since the other stuff generally didn't (Axon was actually good).

They're targetting the Twitch model a bit with customizable bits for a charge. Basically allowing some chat branding for guilds and the like.

It seems Reddit admins don't have that ability, if I read the thread correctly. Rather, Spez helped build the system and just knew how to manage the prank. It wasn't even really a backdoor thing, he just had the know-how to do it (like being able to log into the database and update a row).

That's the confusing bit about the outrage to me: I think people expected it to be secure and tight, and ... well... I'm not sure what led to that conclusion. I can easily imaging that until Spez pulled that stunt, they just figured it was too hard to screw with and that the databases were sufficiently secure. After all, the techs have full access to the machines*. It's like being surprised that your ActiveDirectory admin can change your password at will.

But you can bet your booties they'll try to lock it down a bit better now. Wouldn't expect it to be the TarSnap of forums, though. Reddit's not exactly a bastion of authenticity :P

EDIT: What I mean here is that someone has physical access to the machines, right? Or at least some amount of root? Or can log in? I guess to me it's like being outraged that the guy who targets the Hubble telescope abuses his position and points it at Earth or something as a joke; huge amount of time and money on the line and it would be a dumb thing, but it's also pretty harmless. Might still get fired for it, though.

I'll see if I can find it, but there was a comment in an AMA on the topic where someone asked if they have a test server and they said no. Not because they're goofy noobs at the business, either, but apparently it's just too impractical. A lot of the testing really needs the load to be properly exercised, and simulating that is sufficiently hard to probably not be worth the effort.

So this update? Updating on Production, baby!

Edit: I bet they do have test servers, but nothing full scale. Which really may emphasize your point more: I would love to know how they tested it and merged it in when there's only so much they can do offline!

To be sure, and you've done a masterful job encouraging it! I usually see you there to prop up the cool stuff, and I certainly appreciate it.

And in full fairness, when I made that comment, a whole bunch of stories were non-tech related, but interesting, so I probably should retract my comment =/. (One was about bread!)

And not even all tech! I've actually started spending more time on Reddit because it's more interesting in general. When a post percolates up here about motorcycles or manufacturing or some cool analytics on an obscure topic, I have a great time. But they're not common, and there's always some StackOverflow-style "this doesn't belong on HackerNews". (But they also seem to pull people out of the woodwork like gangbusters - HN loves the occasional off-topic interesting post! But not constantly :)

Which is fine, I guess. That's why we have things like Reddit! Perhaps it's a variant of the Unix Way: have sites that provide a specific style of service, either in content management or filtering or whatnot. And appreciate them for that!

The post where they describe what they're doing sure makes it look like that. From what was described, this is a massive refactoring and recalculation effort to pay down years of accumulated technical debt. Occam's Razor is probably good enough: they had tons of complicated rules in the system that goobered up their calculations, and they needed to get the large amount of ineffectual cruft out at some point.

There's even a clear note that the /top stuff should go back to normal after the recalc is finished and it's back up to speed.

Frankly, I was a bit shocked by the scope of it. Seems like a huge and terrifying update.

As you'll find is often the case, many simply can't avoid it. I can't. The systems I work on are backed by the JVM and run Java, but with Python on top. (Jython - Python 2.5 implemented in Java - if you're looking for the implementation.) As is almsot always the case, it's utter crap except for how useful and great it is. You get to do a ton of scripting in Python, and it has near-transparent access to the Java modules, too. So you can do things like

  from com.companyName.module.class import myFunction

and it just works. And it's terrible because you're doing crazy things like mixing Java paradigms with Python's style and it gets a bit nuts.

But you're making money, solving problems, and in the end, it's all about the trade-offs. For my work, Jython nails that sweet spot. I would run screaming if I saw it stand alone, but I won't spite it given my alternative is VBA. (Which I also won't shit on - VBA has saved my bacon more than a few times!)

Aww. That's not terribly interesting at all. I mean, I get it, and I don't doubt it's validity. It's just so... mundane.

I would have thought there'd be utility in having a very small last-resort utility like ed by default. But then I don't use Vi much (or ed, normally I'm just touching up a file from the command line, so I use nano), so perhaps I'm out of touch.

I'll be honest, I didn't read the full feature list. I looked at some of the quick queries and was really happy to see some of them.

Yeah, the amount of intellectual violence I'll be able to perpetrate against my data is just staggering. Regex in Excel has always be a bit of a slog, but to do it in SQL in Excel? Gosh. That's almost worth the price of adminssion right there.

(Ever try to conditionally refactor a screwy OPC itempath based on an arbitrary spec and bad naming conventions in a cobbled together dump from an overworked customer engineer? Swiss army chainsaws are the only elegant solution there.)

> Well, unless you’re using Arch Linux.

I would love to know if you're using Arch Linux? There's got to be a good story about why it's not there, if not. Might be fun to hunt down if so (I like historical stories about that sort of decision making).

With the coupon code in this thread, I was willing to go in on it, because it's comparable to what I pay for SSMS Tools. It's really really handy to be able to query an Excel table; a raw query window in SSMS is just about my favorite tool, but you can't beat being able to just get your hands right on the data like in Excel.

Ideally though? I would really like to have a one-time purchase option. I buy this for myself, though I work in a company, because this is a tool I particularly find useful. In a year it's going to just stop working, and I won't remember why, because I won't remember paying a license for it. Then I'll have to look up the email and do all the nonsense to figure out what my login is and buy it again. And that just sucks. I've dropped a lot of services because I just don't need them enough for that. But I'm hoping this works into my flow well enough.

I can't help but interpret that as saying what humanity came from. And by golly dammit, we haven't gotten too far from that, have we :)