erik_seaberg

I don't start working on something hard just before leaving home, like I don't start before a meeting. It's the surprises that really tear up the workday.

It's all guesswork until we start measuring the impact of interruptions in open plan offices vs. homes (which is going to vary with families).

I don't try to add any pressure, but going on call will require some resilience from each team member.

They tried remote body shops, which was a disaster (we had "tested deliverables" that didn't compile). This time there seems to be more emphasis on opening your own remote office and hiring the strong candidates there.

They expect you to compete with nearby employers. If not, you should hire from less active markets and probably go more remote.

> when work is done, I leave, and it's done.

To quote Dilbert:

> Now let me get this straight. The time I spend in the shower actually thinking about solving problems is not "work." The time I spend at the office attending meaningless meetings is "work."

I thought inetd let you conserve memory because rarely-used daemons don't need to run continually.

Transit sacrifices speed for efficiency--long headways, meandering routes, sometimes cumbersome crowds, nothing for the last mile. To be fast, a system needs to arrive on demand and go point to point, which implies a lot of vehicles that don't need to be huge.

GPUs live in desktops and phones, but apps live in remote datacenters, so the future seems to be sending rendering commands to Javascript frontends on end users' browsers.

I'm still peeved about the bot that scolded us for the word "Mastercard," which was not only a household name but also an enum value on the wire that payment processing absolutely had to support.

FPS death has also been the least !!fun!! way to lose a game of Dwarf Fortress, even before it had a GUI.

https://docs.ambar.cloud/ says the author's org is polling PostgreSQL (or MySQL) tables and producing records for JSON/HTTP consumers. As for me, I think a Kafka broker quorum is hard to beat for a fast and durable distributed ringbuffer.

tl,dr: an interpreter for MS-DOS and CP/M from the 1980s, no longer sold.

I once drove a shuttle that ran on compressed natural gas from the airport, but liquefied sounds more demanding to handle.

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41723600

USPTO has broadened "obvious" recently, partly because of a court ruling that held "A person of ordinary skill is also a person of ordinary creativity, not an automaton" (meaning that the total prior art doesn't need to connect every dot).

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/02/27/2024-03...

> come to the table with your internal and external research done, with a clear list of requirements, an executive sponsor with actual decision-making power

Putting an executive on the phone is not going to happen that early. A lot of vendors don't seem to accommodate research starting with a demo set up by one engineer on a small team in the org who might have a corporate credit card for the search.

I agree that their "availability zone" story isn't solving the problem, so a quorum should span regions rather than just us-east-1a through 1e.

With serious users, I would feel compelled to warn about the outage risks I were taking.

Sorry, https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/cobol-zos/6.2?topic=statement-ex... seems to be demonstrating a language that is not memory-safe (maybe it used to be, but how?)

  COMPUTE SIZE-NEEDED = LENGTH OF OBJ + LENGTH OF VARTAB * NUM-ELEMENTS
  ALLOCATE SIZE-NEEDED CHARACTERS INITIALIZED RETURNING VPTR
  SET ADDRESS OF VARGRP TO VPTR
  MOVE NUM-ELEMENTS TO OBJ
  MOVE BUFFER(1:SIZE-NEEDED) TO VARGRP
  SET VPTR TO ADDRESS OF BUFFER
  FREE VPTR

C is much older than Unicode, so it's not that surprising that some systems are still using https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_646 and replacing some reserved punctuation (e.g., curly braces) with their country's accented letters.

There isn't power a few blocks down the street from an apartment. Deploying millions of ruggedized outdoor chargers would be a big job that I haven't seen starting.

"Used in anger" means for a serious goal. It's an analogy for firing a gun in combat rather than just for training or testing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidentia..., though the winner's policy will start after January 20.

Any garbage collected language avoids a lot of disastrous undefined behavior.

Besides removing distractions, having more money raises the limits on what you can build before it needs to become self-sustaining. Retirement should be a consolation prize but not the entire goal.

When you have reason to expect litigation you have to start excluding relevant docs from your normal retention policy.

> When a party reasonably anticipates litigation, they have a duty to preserve documents and electronically stored information (ESI). This duty is codified in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) 37(e).

I don't like this (it punishes private record keeping) but it's enforced, I believe also by state courts. Big tech companies set impractically short retention policies in general but also put some records on "litigation hold", because they know they can't refuse to comply.

> Having to page someone on vacation is a very very broken organization.

I agree, I'd like to see enough written down that no outage ever has a bus number of one. But I haven't been seeing that anywhere. I've resorted to this one time ever, and the super senior founding teammate was very engaged and assured me that it was the right call.

> pay for follow-the-sun

This seems likely to create a huge team of devs who are seen as interchangeable, no longer paid amazingly well, and don't have enough to do every day.

Seems pretty normal from two Bay Area startups and two FAANG-sized orgs. Primary should respond, secondary shouldn't be disturbed unless primary seems incapacitated (no pager ack) or is at wits' end.

Edit: I should add that the secondary gets paged more often while the primary is new to the team and doesn't know how to fix everything. In return, you go on call 1/n less often in the future.

If I need to sleep in after a bad night, it's always been fine.