SystemOut

This is what my first PC was my freshman year of college back in 1990. Felt damn good I got the 65MB hard drive instead of the typical 40MB that most machines had back then.

Thank you! I thought the word Alloc was in there but couldn't remember the right combination of Alias/Alloc/etc.

This reminded me of the old days working in Windows 3.1 and my first professional project was to write a SOCKS client that could be loaded up and intercept all calls to Winsock's connect() function. It needed to do this without modifying the other programs and it had to happen at the DLL level and not the VxD layer where our IP stack ran.

Turns out there was an undocumented Windows API function along the lines of "AliasCsToDsRegister" or something like that - I've tried to find a reference to it but I can't find it. It allowed me write into the code segment (the CS was global and read only - as it was shared among all processes) and replace the first few bytes of the connect function call with a jump to my code which would then put it back, make the call to the socks server, do some other magic, put my jump hook back in and the return to the caller. Good times!

Kind of surprised I remember this and more so that it actually worked.

At 30 days they gain rights as a tenant. There was a case years ago of someone with an AirBnB I believe where they stayed longer than 30 days and then refused to leave claiming they had established the place as their residence.

I hated this part of being on-call for government customers. I had to go through some crazy adjudication process all for the privilege of having to change my passwords every 60 days. And even though I used a password manager for them I couldn't paste them in because the VM I was required to use to access the systems didn't allow pasting from the outside.

So I just typed them into notes on the VM and left them there.

You're looking at it from the wrong angle. It's not that an engineer says no but rather, other projects that are growing and have more resources/weight behind them come calling and looking for engineers that want to transfer into their project. A stalled/non-growing project can't block a transfer like that.

If Google really wanted to solve this problem they could by making the promotion criteria different. Their actions say they don't really see it as a problem, though.

This. Spent almost 3 years at Google and my view is that it is an intended side benefit of how they do development.

If something that relies on say, one of their log services, and that log service is getting end-of-lifed then all the dependent services that aren't really critical will also get shutdown. It's a forcing mechanism to keep the amount of cruft down. If that service that relies on the old service is that important they'll put the resources on the project long enough to port it to the new service.

They have a real problem finding developers that will want to work on it. You don't get promoted at Google for maintaining a product that isn't growing.

Was at a very fast growing tech company until a couple of months ago on one of the core teams and while we did put engineering managers through coding and design interviews, they were not held to the same standard as a staff or sr staff level engineer.

The main goal was to understand how they approached problem solving and handled things they may not know since that was a key ability we wanted in our managers. Managers still need to be technical, even if they aren't coding on a day to day.

So while the questions may be the same, the way they are graded/evaluated may not have been the same.

But they haven't said where the jobs are being eliminated and not all are coming out of the Bay ARea. The article mentions they are closing a center in Taipei. They also have a pretty distributed workforce with only part of it being in the Bay Area.

Same thing with Yahoo for me. My last name is too short for gmail, though.

My last name also happens to be shared with the name of a large multi-national manufacturer. For some bizarre reason I get semi-regular emails looking for support help from customers of theirs in Iran. No other countries, just Iran. I also get e-mails from people that work for the company in India with photos of their company picnic. This happens about every other year although it's possible I've missed a few. I don't really use the account anymore.

They at least seem to throw a nice company picnic.

I have something similar. So imagine you have johnsmith.com as a domain name. And then someone with the same name gets johnasmith.com (there's an a in there for a middle initial). And they use john@johnasmith.com but they and probably others keep missing the "A" in the middle since it's easy to miss. I have email for my domain forwarded to me and the amount of email I get is staggering.

I've talked with the guy via e-mail and he is nice and all so I used to forward them to him but he's never gotten many of them fixed after I asked multiple times so I've stopped.

There is another guy with the same name as me with a similar gmail as mine and I've gotten pretty sensitive emails for him from lawyers, bill collectors, etc. I generally let the senders know in those cases but the rest I ignore.

So yeah, many times it's ineptitude.

I'm kind of surprised in this case, though, why so many restaurants send out food without a credit card or some other method to pay in advance. 9 years ago when it started most just took it on faith and sent food out but pretty much everyone requires pre-payment nowadays.

We might work at the same company!

I lead one of our teams and that's pretty much the explicit directions my VP gave us. Actually, the entire leadership team gave those directions. It's made me glad I switched jobs 18 months ago.

Somehow I'm the only one on our team with kids but some of my team has had a difficult time managing the change from an emotional standpoint and I just treat it the same way. I don't expect them to somehow magically "power through it". They're normally very productive and I know this will pass.

As someone who has been in a team lead role and hiring for many years I can't imagine a more toxic viewpoint to team building.

Supposedly this company was profitable in March. From https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/18/here-are-the-85-startups-t...

"Unicorn rents scooters by the week or month and is already profitable"

So what happened?

Landfills do collect and burn methane. Those pipe like structures you see sticking out of a completed landfill are part of the process.

https://archive.epa.gov/climatechange/kids/solutions/technol...

For those of us that are bald and have to put on sunscreen pretty much all the time....this could potentially help prevent some cancer.

Can't recommend this option enough. I got a Steelcase Leap V2 from a used office furniture dealer for $200 or so after negotiating a bit. For another $50 or $75 they would have replaced the fabric as well but it didn't need it as it was in really good condition. They had Aerons and other chairs too but I liked the Leap better.

So I'm not at a fortune 500 (fortune 1000 yeah) but we are expanding into a new city and waiting until our office population is enough to move into a full time space. I can not wait for that since we've completely outgrown their largest private office space and are spilling into random other offices here but it took a while to find the space we wanted and could grow into and do the build out. Flexport did that as well here in the city and moved into their own digs recently.

That's probably utilities, cell phone, tv, after school/nanny/sports/etc for kids activities, Starbucks, food, etc. Not that it isn't a lot but I don't see any other line items for all the stuff and it can add up depending on how you live.

The incentive system at Google for promotion (which is where the dollars get much bigger) rewards launches, not maintenance work. You'll see hundreds of people on new products that are launching and hardly any full time engineers, excluding SREs, on products that literally bring in a billion dollars because they just work.

I've been doing this for the last few months and it really helps. In my case it's a set of OneNote grouped tabs for each story/project/etc that I'm working on. I have tabs for re-creating, background, ways to setup the environment for the task at hand, links to things that are helpful, etc.

I don't understand why Americans love their cars so much.

I grew up in Oklahoma and you pretty much have to have a car. Huge amount of land, not many people. Virtually no public transportation.

I moved to the Bay Area back in 2000 and car-pooled for exactly one year of that time and then took BART the other 16 years before moving to Chicago. Even though I like driving I really hate traffic. Why would I sit in traffic when I can read/sleep/work/etc. It was cheaper as well. I wouldn't even talk about a different job unless they were within reasonable distance to a BART station.

I moved to Chicago recently and now take Metra (commuter train) and then walk 15 minutes. It's a little sucky in winter (today was 16 F, Friday is expected to be -6 F in the morning - dress in layers and have warm boots). Even then, I wouldn't drive. The cost, the time, the potential for accidents just aren't worth it to me.

I get why people drive in rural areas. You pretty much have to. But I don't know why folks don't push for mass transit more in cities. Cars are so expensive and monopolize your entire time getting to/from somewhere. I tried car pooling and really didn't like it since I'm essentially trapped with the same people every day. Mass transit can be crowded but I can still read or listen to audio books if I don't have a seat. But cars are ingrained in so much of the culture here plus I think a lot of people won't admit it but just don't like being around other people.

Our elementary schools have specifically dialed it back to at most 30-40 minutes of homework and that includes the 20 minutes of reading they want them to do.

I say this without it being critical of you but you really need to get your daughter into a different school or district. It's not healthy and research has shown it doesn't help.

Normally I wouldn't expect consider Chicago a "smaller market" but for software it is.

Moved from SF to Chicago about 18 months ago after working in the Bay Area for 17 years. I can't speak for other cities but Chicago is fine from both a network and comp standpoint. The profile of the type of work that's done here is different, sure, but nothing wrong with that. Depending on your point of view, it could be considered refreshing.

On top of that, comp is moving upward here. I'm not sure the trigger but recruiter reach outs started jumping here (like for a couple a week to 10+ a week) about a year ago and I'm seeing a definite upward trend in salary numbers.

Now, this is Chicago, so there is still a lot of dev shops that aren't modernized but there were a lot of shops in the Bay Area I wouldn't touch either for varying reasons. I don't regret moving away from the Bay Area other than the roads suck here due to having real seasons.

You see it mostly with smaller homes in areas that are desirable. The smaller homes, usually built 50-60 years, tend to have low ceilings, small kitchens, no master bedroom, etc. Some have structural issues due to neglect but most are fine structurally just not desired by buyers.

When the owners decide to sell they usually get snapped up basically for the land cost - demolition cost and are torn down for "teardown" houses. In Chicago it's pretty common. Our street is about a 50% mix of 50s homes and < 10 year old teardown homes.

There are other search engines and one can easily just type bing.com into their browser and set it as the default. Even on Chrome.

I'm not sure why you remember MS the way you do. There was a much much larger barrier for consumers to move to a different OS. If you owned a PC you pretty much had to run Windows. And MS made it extremely difficult to use a non-IE browser in the OS.

That doesn't mean I think they're innocent in all things but I don't see how their search market share is a monopoly target.

Uptake has real (paying) customers specifically for their ML based solutions.

Here it's the opposite. Elementary starts earlier than middle school. I actually prefer this because our middle school age kid is fine to get out to the bus on her own. The elementary school twins not as much. I can leave for my train earlier this way.

1) Fox News 2) No one has to ask John Oliver to publish more anti-Trump topics