chojeen

I'm looking forward to having the same experience as COBOL engineers did after retirement: companies backing up the brinks truck to anyone with the skills to keep the lights on.

A better analogy would be "remotely swing a hammer as a service". You can't build something like that and act shocked when a significant fraction of your users use it to harm people instead of driving nails, and you certainly shoulder a large fraction of the responsibility.

I really don't get a lot of this criticism. For example, who is using iceberg with hundreds of concurrent committers, especially at the scale mentioned in the article (10k rows per second)? Using iceberg or any table format over object storage would be insane in that case. But for your typical spark application, you have one main writer (the spark driver) appending or merging a large number of records in > 1 minute microbatches and maybe a handful of maintenance jobs for compaction and retention; Iceberg's concurrency system works fine there.

If you have any use case like one the author describes, maybe use an in-memory cloud database with tiered storage or a plain RDBMS. Iceberg (and similar formats) work great for the use cases for which they're designed.

> Riot and Blizzard both have large flagship franchises that they practically decorate their offices around, statues and all. When I was talking to recruiters in the past, Riot stood out as one of those "don't bother applying if you aren't absolutely shitting passion for our games out of every hole" as culture fit.

I interviewed at Riot when I was trying to move back to Saint Louis. I could not muster up very much enthusiasm for League, and you could just feel the room shift into "just get through this interview ASAP" mode.

Can't help but feel I dodged a bullet.

Do people have any pride? Why would you subject yourself to this?

It's hard to know how to feel about this complex situation. On one hand:

- The Chinese government clearly has its tendrils in TikTok and uses it to push its oppressive censorship policies around the world

- The security implications of giving China a backdoor into a large percentage of American phones is too concerning to ignore

On the other hand:

- Explicitly targeting specific companies feels wrong. If security and censorship are real concerns here, Congress should be passing laws that apply to all companies, not just TikTok

- Even though there are sound reasons to restrict TikTok, this is still a transparently protectionist policy by the Trump admin and fits right into his nationalistic, totalitarian, xenophobic playbook. A broken clock is still right twice a day, I suppose

- Requiring a sale to an American company is the mirror image of China's forced technology transfers for foreign companies. Two wrongs don't make a right

I think the best scenario is for Congress to preempt Trump with laws that protect American security and free speech interests without executive action. That's easier said than done, though.

At a startup, there's a good chance Fred's time would be better spent knocking out feature work (you only have so much runway, after all). But at a mature tech company, assuming he's good at his job, Fred is likely providing a ton of value by

- Keeping his coworkers sane (barely functional codebases that are difficult to work with have a way of killing morale) - Having an intimate knowledge of the code base that can inform future feature work - Paying down tech debt that's generally uninteresting to more feature-oriented coworkers

Having a whole team of Freds is probably not a good idea, but having one in a senior engineer or tech lead role is really useful.

I can't imagine forced remote for all employees would ever become the norm. It feels like likely that companies would move from dedicated offices to leasing co-working spaces for those that want it.

Do they still have to label irradiated food in the EU? IIRC many people avoid it because radiation is scary sounding. I have to imagine that chemically treated meat would be an even tougher sell, regardless of how benign it might actually be.

For a couple of years, the only thing that worked for me was mega-huge doses of PPI's. After several pH studies, endoscopies, and other tests confirmed that I don't have abnormal reflux, food allergies, gluten sensitivity, or anything else, my doctor(s) and I found after years of trial-and-error that a combination of H2 blockers and a low-dose of antidepressants mostly controls my symptoms, which are probably caused by an overly-sensitive gastric nervous system.

FWIW, one of my GI doctors recommended trying alternatives to PPI's, while the other was highly skeptical of these data mining studies and recommended staying the course unless a causal link is established.

Some people (like myself) suffer from functional dyspepsia, in which GERD-like symptoms are observed with no apparent cause. There's really no standard treatment: some people find relief from PPI's, H2 blockers, small doses of SSRI antidepressants, or changes in diet. Every doctor I've talked to (including one of the top gastric neurologists in the country) agrees that, given a choice between taking PPI's long-term or suffering from functional dyspepsia, they'd take the former every time.

References:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28271513 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4070655/

> Depends how pedantic you're being, but ripping DVDs for personal use doesn't count as "piracy" in my book.

Exactly this. I got tired of lugging around my gigantic DVD collection and having them scratch or break with time. I've since ripped all of them, and Kodi makes for a fantastic frontend for my HTPC.

As I get older (I am currently thirty), this is something that terrifies me, mainly because it is something that I have experienced from both sides. I got a B.S. from a major CS university, then started on a Ph.D. in Astronomy. Due to my dissatisfaction with that program, the fact that programming is my passion, and various life events, I decided to leave after obtaining a M.S. and began to look for work.

I attended my university's CS job fair, only to find that I had become almost completely unemployable to tech companies (granted, I only had a 3.3 GPA in CS; damn you, WoW!). I ended up taking a tech support job with a scientific computing software company after I was promised a quick transition into development. However, that too evaporated, ironically due to the stigma of working in tech support.

After about 8 months, I interviewed for a developer position at a Midwest branch of a major tech company, but was again turned down. Luckily, I was instead hired to be a QA contractor on a different team, whereupon I quickly transitioned into a non-contracted developer on the original team that didn't hire me about a month before the company's new CEO announced that we would not take anyone with lower than a 3.5 GPA. I took the opportunity to mention this fact at every opportunity to one of my co-workers who had originally voted not to hire me.

After about a year, I started interviewing new candidates at this company. You would think that, given my prior experiences, I would be more forgiving than my peers in looking at past experience. While I didn't make any judgments based on school or GPA (in fact, those were filtered out before the resumes ever made it into my hands), I did turn down several candidates who were "too enterprisey", i.e. did not have experience or interest in whatever tech was trendy at the time. Granted, these candidates also had trouble understanding and debugging simple perl scripts I showed them, so I was already not on board, but when those candidates were borderline hires/no-hires, that was something that swayed me in the "no-hire" direction.

Now, as a married thirty-year-old with two kids and several non-coding hobbies, I have neither the time nor inclination to use my free time to learn today's trendy languages and frameworks. My work keeps me relevant for now, but if that ever changes and I need to look for work, I'm terrified that my experience and ability to learn quickly will be irrelevant to prospective employers, who will just want to see the right technologies appear on my resume.

I worked at Yahoo before and during this period, first as a QA contractor and then as a full-time developer.

Before the switch, our team (advertising pipeline on Hadoop) used the waterfall method with these gigantic, monolithic releases; we probably released a handful of times a year. Almost without exception, QA was done manually and was painfully slow. I started to automate a lot of the testing after I arrived, but believe you me when I say that it was a tall order.

Soon after I moved into development, QA engineers without coding chops were let go, while the others were integrated into the development teams. The team switched over to agile, and a lot of effort was made to automate testing wherever possible. Despite some initial setbacks, we got down to a bi-weekly release cycle with better quality control than before.

Around the time I left, the company was mandating continuous delivery for all teams, as well as moving from internal tools to industry-standard ones like Chef. I left before it was completed, but at least as far as the data pipeline teams were concerned, the whole endeavor made the job a lot more fun, increased release quality, and weeded out a lot of the "that's not my job" types that made life hell for everyone else.

As an ex-doctoral student in astrophysics, I can confirm that there are a lot of crackpots out there. The most common claim was that heliocentricity was correct, if you can believe it.

> Getting a response so nasty it's easier to get them into trouble later on. :)

I know the comment was tongue-in-cheek, but it bears mentioning: when dealing with the police, your objective should be to escape the situation unscathed, not to provoke them. Remember that criminal charges, severe injury, or even death are possible consequences of any encounter with law enforcement.

If you don't need open-source, but instead just want to migrate away from advertising-supported email, I find that FastMail works pretty great and is cheap to boot.

My dad owns a mid-size landscaping company in a medium-sized city in the Midwest. Until the Great Recession hit, he'd hire around a hundred of laborers from Mexico and Latin America on H2-A visas every year. He could only do so after proving that they could not hire enough Americans at a reasonable wage (obviously, the meaning of "reasonable" is hotly debated, but at the time, it meant slightly higher than minimum wage). I've never understood why similar restrictions aren't put on H1-B visas.

My method to survive an 80+ hour work week:

1) Actually "work" a 40 hour week 2) Spend the other 40 looking for a new job

I love that the desire for developer talent is so great that many employers will bend over backwards to accommodate your desire for work-life balance.

Maybe this is a dumb question, but is json (de)serialization really a bottleneck for python web apps in the real world?

Why would anyone ever take a job like this when there are tons of interesting jobs that actually do have work-life balance and pay a hell of a lot better? Hell, you could still work long 6-day weeks if you wanted to, but at least that way you would have the option of taking a break.

There are days when I love what I'm working on and I don't want to go home. But I still force myself to leave, because that work will still be there tomorrow, and I'll go in the next morning with renewed passion.

And it's not like these people are useless. I knew a guy like this in college, and he eventually settled into a decent job. Not everybody needs to be passionate about their work.

Also, some Yahoo employees might have transferred over after the acquisition.

Because women suffer the most of the consequences of an unintended pregnancy, I'd think most women would want to take control of the situation.

That being said, I'll be meeting Citizen Snips right after child #2 is born, whenever that happens.

Was it the awkward breakfast after sleeping with yourself?

Same here. It seems like a really solid IDE, but I like a more lightweight development environment, and there's always that one vim command that vim emulator plugins miss. However, I've recommended PyCharm to several of my coworkers who use IntelliJ for Java development, and they love it.

I find that this typically isn't a problem when you instruct git to ignore those files.

Brilliant way of describing the IDE metadata files, BTW. I got a nice chuckle from that.