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JFlash

29 karma · joined December 2, 2015

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JFlash··on How to Fall 35,000 Feet And Survive (2010)
Sorry, fixed.
JFlash··on How to Fall 35,000 Feet And Survive (2010)
Would being drunk help? In drunk driving crashes the drunk driver survives more often than the others directly involved in the collision, but I've never gotten a definitive reason why...

EDIT: survive more often than others directly involved in the collision who were in a comparable vehicle or in the same vehicle as the driver.

JFlash··on Hashing to estimate the size of a stream
> So if we assume the data in the stream consists of uniformly random integers between zero and N

This needs to be in the problem statement.

JFlash··on Invalid Object Is an Anti-Pattern
The validity of an object depends on the observer. If you require all Customers to have a billing address but a person is in the middle of a multi-page checkout, should their Customer record be invalid if they've only filled in their email so far? What if they want to come back to the form later?

Rails tries to fix this with the `:on` option for validations (http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveModel/Validations/C...), which goes woefully unused in Rails apps.

Now you can do:

  customer.save(context: :checking_out)
  # which is different than
  customer.save
JFlash··on Why hipsters all look alike (2014)
My grievance with this article was glossed over in one paragraph:

"In real life, there are a million ways to be nonconformist. You can be goth; you can be preppy; you can be grunge... "The brain is more complex than the model I looked at, and of course hipsters are more complex," he said."

Yes, there are a lot of ways to not be a thing. That's kind of important to note when you're making sweeping generalizations about a group of people who aren't like you. The title of this article is completely bogus.

JFlash··on The Ivy League, Mental Illness, and the Meaning of Life (2014)
Yeah, I don't really know what I'm going to do if/when I'm a parent. Academia is calibrated around kids doing this "hoop-jumping" as early as possible, so do I push my theoretical children into this race or do I let them eat into precious time to figure things out?
JFlash··on The best icon is a text label
Great comment. This reasoning is probably intuitive to anyone who's familiar with a logographic writing system.

I feel like you can also draw a parallel with programming languages. Consider:

  def sum1(array)
    sum = 0
    array.each { |e| sum += e }
    sum
  end

  def sum2(array)
    array.reduce(:+)
  end
sum2 isn't just a different way to write the same thing. It's a construct that expresses a specific pattern of evaluation and aggregation. It doesn't describe what it's doing like sum1 does. It's more expressive than that. It's "clearer" once you learn it.

Similarly (at least in the US) green means proceed/go/forward/continue and red means cancel/go back/stop/error. This is something that was learned, not something that was known by instinct.

JFlash··on Engineers can’t gauge their own interview performance
Can you elaborate?
JFlash··on Engineers can’t gauge their own interview performance
Right. You'd only know someone was "hard to impress" with that information.
JFlash··on Engineers can’t gauge their own interview performance
Being easy to work with is certainly something interviewers should look for, but software doesn't care how nice you are. Your technical competency should ideally be measured outside of any subjectivity. Of course that's not possible but companies try their best.
JFlash··on Engineers can’t gauge their own interview performance
Beat me to it. When I interviewed at Google there were multiple interviewers and then there were multiple committees and people who look at their feedback.

Comparing interviewers to other interviewers makes a "He did above average" from a person who's hard to impress as good as a "She did really great!" from someone else.

JFlash··on Everyone’s been rejected – these are our stories
Being charming, likable or whatever you want to call it is important. Technical competency should be the biggest factor but there are plenty of people who have that and are personable too.
JFlash··on Killing SEO by Using Angular
All he did was provide a counter-example to "Search engines do not render JS".
JFlash··on Killing SEO by Using Angular
Google's search definitely renders JS. The question is how much does it impact your page's rank to have it download and execute that JS?

I'm not sure, so I'd rather not think about it and just render my JS server side. React does with minimal effort https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/top-level-api.html#rea.... This also has the added benefit of making you think what the UX is like for people browsing without JS enabled.