flukus

They also won't give a second glance to those who would like to move down the stack, even in markets where these sorts of skills are practically non-existent.

In practice for this particular question they're asking if you've memorized sort algorithms. I have not (or I've forgotten since) and I doubt even the brightest minds of the industry that did invent them did so within an hour long job interview.

Personally I like to rsync the logs locally so I can have the context of the errors and also historical data, the later can be useful for blame avoidance. I also prefer awk's pattern matching for the filtering, counting, etc. Especially on legacy code where some errors aren't really errors, or errors that aren't for me, etc.

The hardest/funnest bug I ever fixed was from grepping several years worth of log files and noticing that an error occasionally happened within 5 seconds of each other. From that realization I just had to search the code base for "sleep(5000)" to find the problem.

If you have a lot of environments, servers or apps I highly recommend recutils over a hosts file too.

In the case the file was only intended to be there for a temporary step, I wanted that working before involving the database, which I believe also won't work because you can't do system calls at comptime.

Ultimately if you go down that path, whatever would be supplying the file could just as easily (or perhaps easier) be supplying zig code and you're still reliant on some sort of per-processor.

I did some experimenting recently and was disappointed by how limited it is. It's a great solution for generics but things like file access don't work in const expressions and the errors are horribly opaque with no hint that it's not allowed.

I was hoping to be able to do things like generate type safe classes from a database schema but the current limitations mean you have to fall back to shell scripts, which zig-build also appears to not support.

Even in this thread everyone is code golfing fizzbuzz instead of something more practical.

When something has been around for a while but never caught on we're usually quite dismissive by default, usually on the assumption that it never caught on for a reason. Think of your own reaction the last time 3D TV's were hot.

Things will usually fail for the same reason again and agian unless there's been a fundamental change to make it more feasible, like battery tech making the latest round of electric vehicles successful.

The author must have smarter friends than me because I've definitely witnessed mine fall for this fallacy. I've even had them ague that's it's a good strategy away from the casino where there are no sunk costs.

> They key difference here is between people rationally knowing that those odds are independent, and them being able to bridge that to their irrational belief that they're special, or lucky, or that they're "owed" luck.

I think in part it's just greed as well, they think they can have that money that all those unlucky people have lost. This greed then gets rationalized as luck/skill/smarts in a way that's not dissimilar to how people rationalize joining pyramid schemes.

> When the demand for houses rises, Flatland metropolitan areas, which don't really have traditional downtowns, just sprawl some more.

And this is the driving force behind those cities going bankrupt, they're easy to build but not sustainable in the long term: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI

Assuming you live somewhere that's somewhat affordable and self driving is a couple of decades off then 95k/year to follow the FIRE model.

It might be a bit circular, but I'd go a step further and say that the lack of self driving in long haul trucking is evidence that general self driving is at least a decade away.

> ls, grep, find, ps, htop will always be what they are.

SystemD screwed with a few that I'm still discovering one by one. "cron", "shutdown" is no longer in the default debian path, I think ulimit was another one.

But at least I don't wake up one morning with the whole interface rearranged.

> So basically the new GTK is iOS but without the professional designers behind it.

Professional designers seem to be the ones creating these problems. Back when it was just programmers you could tell a button was a button, a tab was a tab and we didn't hide basic functionality behind a swipe gesture or long press that users were supposed to just know.

Now everything is pretty but harder to use.

IMHO the two biggest problems I find with existing tools are that they assume the documentation is the source of truth and that the tangling will leave artifacts in code. Both of these make them poorly suited to the sort of projects that most of us work on, I'm not Knuth writing a dead tree tome but I would like some better ways to add documentation to existing projects and have to integrate with others.

I wrote a PoC of a tangling tool that worked through "virtual" files and had a syntax aware handler, there's enough information that it could possible work with language servers too, but sadly I haven't had time to take things further: https://gitlab.com/lusher/tanglemd

> Or they believe the costs are worth it.

The costs are more than likely paid by others, which is why they're oblivious.

Far easier than convincing them would be to stop subsidizing them, sprawling car dependent suburbs are a giant money sink that the people living in them rarely pay for.

It also is/was free on audible if you've got a subscription.

In practice it stopped working well long before windows 11 because so few apps were win32 based and/or because developers would explicitly override the theme. I gave it a go on Windows 7 and even apps like outlook and office wouldn't look right.

Gnome/KDE still offer proper themeing that works with proper native apps but even there you've got web browsers and electron apps that ignore it.

> CLIs (that read input from stdin and spit out results to stdout/stderr) are useful in an automation/data processing pipeline.

TUI's and GUI's can both be used in the middle of a pipe when things require some manual fiddling, Git commit would be an example of this, opening vim to edit the commit message. Here's an example (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8371877/ncurses-and-linu...) of how you could create an ncurses TUI but still output to stdout.

Dmenu (https://tools.suckless.org/dmenu/) is a good example of a gui program that fits comfortably in a pipeline.

With a middle ground like a micro ORM those transparent queries are barely visible anyway, literally a line or two lines of embededed sql strings. Especially micro ORMs that can handle dynamic filters. They're generally write once and only get looked at again when modifications are necessary, so they're not worth "optimizing" by adding the complexity of an ORM.

A common pattern seems to be over engineering these simple scenarios though. Someone decides that embedded sql is evil and needs to be extracted out of normal code, often to stored procs. Then these simple queries have enough friction that an ORM starts to look good, then you end up with an ORM generating simple queries dynamically in the same place that used to have a simple embedded string.

How universal is it? It had made it's way to Australia by at least the early 90's.

And they had much higher humidity. From Australia I normally LOL at a northern hemisphere "heatwave", but that recent heat dome was crazy.

It's bad enough Netflix algorithms try to shove things in my face whether I like them or not, I don't want the food equivalent doing it literally.

> You need a way to filter what's good from what's great.

Existing algorithms already struggle with being contextual. On youtube/netflix I often want short funny videos, but other times are better to sit and watch that four hour long history of the parthian empire but the algorithms have no context for this and give me the same suggestions at both times. Food would be even worse, different meals for breakfast lunch and dinner, a desire for variety and some deeply subjective preferences would make it all but impossible.

Another issue is that cooking and taste co-evolve together. You could get the worlds best chef to make a meal but it will never be as good as me making the same meal that I've refined over the years and that my taste buds have got accustomed too. For me some of those recipes split off from my Mothers and may have diverged from what everyone else considers normal.

I think this is just part of the human experience we need to keep part of the human experience and just let the robots do the cleaning up.

More and more I'm seeing "unit testing" becoming the generic term for what we used to just call plain old testing. A lot of companies had never had anything remotely close to unit testing but called all their automated tests unit tests, at least in part out of ignorance of the difference. My current company has gone a step further and calls their extremely manual and poorly defined QA test plans unit testing.

As for my 2 cents, I find single assert principle helpful as it helps narrow down the unit of behavior your actually testing. I don't care if a test covers a single function or half the code base, as long as it's clear why it is specifically testing for and what has gone wrong if it fails.

How long do the batteries in those things last? If it makes it to 2 years then they're doing much better than any of my wired ear buds where the wire's or contacts usually break and are probably responsible for less waste.

Plain text database: https://www.gnu.org/software/recutils/

Replaced a lot of awk for me, along with places I might have been tempted to use sqlite. Unfortunately never had much luck with the bash or c integrations.

I'd call it a forum more than social media, the focus is on a topic rather than individuals. But when it comes to outages nothing beats Twitter. I'm not really a Twitter user, but when I click a link from elsewhere there's a >50% chance I'll get "we're having trouble loading this tweet".

> why is it only appearing now?

Maybe the clouds have to be just the right height/composition to see the effect. If the clouds were higher it might be too small and diffuse to see, maybe the lower clouds are partially blocking some other light sources making it much more pronounced or something along those lines.

Why did no one break out a high powered laser pointer or range finder?

> Companies don't pay you for being a "developer" or "labor", they pay for specific skills and the ability to apply them effectively and competently.

Companies tend to be way too specific about the skills required and any learning curve is not permitted. I've used just about every desktop UI framework under the sun and a whole bunch of web ones, but companies that need react developers won't look at me for instance. There might be some highly specialized skills that can command a premium but those are mostly rare exceptions.

Along with companies not training there's also been a shift away from specialized roles and requiring all devs be experts in every tech the company uses past, present and future. When they hire someone that knows x "just in case" they're shrinking the talent pool available.

> Michael Phelps was not slightly better at swimming.

If you look at individual records he literally was just ~1% better than the previous record holder. His 200m freestyle record was 102.96, the previous record was 104.06. The whole field is people making slight improvements on previous generations.

> Elon Musk is not a modestly more enthusiastic car company CEO

Many attempts at electric cars were there, his happened to be at the time when battery tech had become good enough. A few decades earlier we'd look at him they same way we look at Clive Sinclair after his electric car effort, despite a previous notable contribution in the computer market.

> Yeah, the ethics would be tough

What sort of ethical issues are you thinking? I would have thought higher grade meals than you'd find in a standard prison would entice all the volunteers you could want. There's probably other groups were some good quality meals would be just as enticing, like college students.

A bigger practical issue in prisons would be things like the high prevalence of hepatitis and drug use along with all the confounding factors (like poverty) that lead them to end up in prison.

> Will fancy new offices with that perks that SV workers have long had convince you to return to the office?

If "fancy" means open plan and "perks" means sitting next to a foosball table that will further entrench my WFH preference. Things like free drinks and food might make a difference to whether to work for company A or company B, but there's nothing I care about enough to give up the extra time I have each day.