Scubabear68

Around here the most horrific accidents are with big rig trucks. These are the last vehicles that need to get confused by a construction zone and jump a lane or suddenly brake.

Apple TV doesn’t have ads.

$60k/year savings for a junior dev? Maybe FAANG, but not anywhere else.

I must be out of touch, I didn't know it was an established phrase to mean that. Thanks.

This thing is just amazingly cool and clever. I am curious if this was a critical piece of capsule instrumentation or more of an onboard backup? I have no idea how Russian space missions are run so it’s not clear to me how much is done at their equivalent of ground control vs. what is done on board.

In particular I am wondering about that landing mode.

I honestly found the article rather confusing. Maybe it’s the terminology used? When I hear the term “indie hacking”, I don’t think of product building (although author’s link has that as a definition). Going into the post I thought I’d read about some person’s five year journey into some wonderfully whacky personal hacking projects. The post seemed to start that way.

But then half way through, the tone changes to talk about product and business and learning all that commercial stuff.

The story ends talking about the projects only generating minimal revenue, and disappointment stemming from that.

I am far from an expert in this, but what seems to be lacking is clear cut goals from the start on the business side. If the goal is to hack, then the code itself is the reward. If the goal is to start a business, then you need targets (users, revenue, profitability, growth, etc) and plans (product vision, marketing strategy, market research, etc).

In another comment I was also poking some holes into the “structured” comments, what you say above was in my head but I couldn’t quite articulate it. Well said.

I think checklist interviews miss the mark as you say. You may not have a perfect rubric, but I’m not grading students on a history exam; I am evaluating them for a role in a given position. In the limited time we have to speak, I want to use my intuition and experience as an interviewer and engineer to rapidly get to where the candidate is strong, and where they may have issues.

While this seemed to start strong, I don’t buy into the “structured” portion of this blog post. The referenced research does not seem relevant to hiring engineers. In fact, the opener for the first reference says they researched “ 19 male applicants for life insurance sales”positions”. This is a “mountain” of evidence in hiring engineers?

My own interviews have a list of topics I want to cover (non functional requirements, data experience, app design, infrastructure, etc), so I guess there is some structure. But I mostly run the interview based on their own experiences and projects they have worked on. So we will focus on applications and systems they have worked with in the past. And then I see how deep down those rabbit holes of their own system they can go.

Why on Earth are they shrink wrapped? In a Barnes and Noble store in the US it is not unheard of for people to pick a book off a shelf in the store, sit in a comfy chair or in the cafe, read for awhile, and then put it back when they are done. I did this quite a bit when I was dead broke many years ago.

NJ public schools don’t generally teach it. Many private schools do, which makes for a fun time when a kid transitions from public to private school..

TIL…all that.

Wow. I had no idea CVS owns Aetna!

TBH the proliferation of “motorized things on wheels” seemed to happen over night and I have no idea what the classifications are.

So asking for stats on e-bike injury rates is wrong?

I get that. But those are cars generally driving at highway speeds, and there is a lot of safety built it.

These e bikes and scooters are going quite fast in urban environments with more or less zero protection for the cyclist/scooterist, and who are closer to pedestrians.

Just today I saw a crazy e-bike kid cruise down a major highway, going back and forth between the north and south lanes on the shoulder at intersections, narrowly missing several tractor trailers. And when I am in major cities I am regularly almost run down by scooter people.

What are the stats on injury rates on these things?

In my own experience interviewing people about systems they have worked on (as opposed to hypothetical on-the-spot design), we have been highly successful in routing out charlatans, as you put it. They very rapidly get hand-wavy and are only able to give the most shallow of answers. In a few cases they will go in-depth, but reveal truly bizarre decisions or lack of understanding of the platform.

Good senior engineers can usually go fairly deep, they are honest about where they don't have as much knowledge, and are usually candid about what was good and maybe what in retrospect was a hack or a bad decision in retrospect.

It is frustrating and hilarious that saying my son's name triggers Siri every time, and it really not very close to "Hey Siri".

This article is fairly basic, and may elicit a "well, duh!" response, but I see the issues mentioned in the article coming up over and over again with people new to event driven architectures.

I can think of two recent platforms I've looked at that implements very complex micro services and event messaging schemes that could (and should) all be replaced with simple in-process pipelines that can achieve the same outcomes. Every generation of developer seems to need to learn anew that in-process communications are orders of magnitude faster than (and more reliable) than inter-process communications, and that your chatty OOP design will not fair so well as a chatty distributed networking application.

Misleading headline. This affects many apps and is much broader.

In fact, this line from the article is far more serious: “Apple, for instance, will also need to contend with a reported requirement to allow side-loading of apps outside of its App Store, something it's spent years fighting internationally”.

Yep, most of Western and Southern NJ is rural.

Counter example, n=1. We are in one of the smallest school districts in NJ, "out in the sticks" as it were. The teacher's union is extremely powerful here. Everybody - and I mean everybody - knows who the bad teachers are. Nothing at all can be done get them to improve or to exit.

When parents come in talking about issues, the teachers all put up a wall of educational verbiage and jargon that is impenetrable, but the jargon is designed to make the administration look the other way. Use the magic code words in a meeting and you're OK.

These tests are not looking (much) at advanced courses like Calculus.

This is more “what percentage 9th graders can read at a basic 9th grade level”, “what percentage of 3rd graders can multiply and do basic 3rd grade math”.

These numbers should be in the 80-90% range. But they are not. And note: the majority who are performing well below grade level are not failing. They are probably getting C’s and getting promoted to the next grade. Meaning every year they fall farther and farther behind.

Well said and exactly right. The private school not only had higher expectations? But also realistic feedback in the form of real grades and consequences.

I understand where this narrative comes from, but I think it is false.

The reason I think that is Covid. With kids learning remote and going all digital, the facade was lifted from teaching. Parents can and did directly experience what our kids were going through.

Our kids’ lowest standardized State scores were with teachers who were terrible. A science teacher who hated kids in general (really). A general teacher near retirement phoning it in. A math teacher who said “read section 5.6 in your book and do the homework” - and that was class.

Our kids did well where the teachers were creative. Where they interacted with students. Where they gave direct feedback and corrections. Where they gave learning reinforcement extra credit to help them focus in areas they had trouble.

In good public schools and many private schools, these bad teachers are not tolerated. In poor ones, the bad teachers flourish, and the kids suffer.

I disagree. There are known “good” and “bad” school districts. The known good school districts have better teachers and teaching methods.

This is not about the bell curve, it’s about a lot of US schools not actually teaching students successfully.

In our rural public school in NJ, both our kids were routinely socially promoted with B’a and C’s even though they were very below average on State testing.

We tried fighting this but the inertia of “do nothing and pass anyway” was too great.

When we moved them to private school last year (5th and 9th grade), they had a brutal adjustment period of catching up from being so far behind, and for learning studying habits from scratch.

Public schools in the US have problems due to the unions giving too much protection to lousy teachers, and school boards throwing away money like water on things like laptops and athletic fields while not focusing on attracting and paying really good teachers with a track record of success.

It really is a travesty.

This is more or less what I was getting at. They’re some very nice jobs at the Editor level, but damn few of them. Many people seem to have to settle for peripheral jobs (my wife was in the physical book manufacturing and shipping end) that pays about as well as Burger King.

I know my wife majored in English in the 90’s, when she graduated the job prospects were very weak. She got a job in book publishing that was barely above minimum wage.

She hated it so much that she went back to school to become a physical therapist, and she had been happily doing that for decades.

So it begs the question - can you live on an English degree, and be happy in the real world?

I have seen Delphi in some very established industries where there was never a concern about it for a very long time (and now there is a lot of nervousness about what to do about it).

Amazingly Embarcadero still sells and markets it!

I had no idea Mercury was tide locked to the sun. What a bizarre surface it must have with one half permanently pointed at the sun and the other perpetually dark.

Edit: Google says it’s not.