jerzyt

I'm on a Dell Precision M6400 - it's 12 years old. When it came out it was a $3,000 laptop. I bought mine for about half of that on a fire sale a year later. Still love it, although I do have a 10 year younger ThinkPad, I prefer the much older Dell.

Yup. The author made a poll of fellow FB employees. As if that is even remotely representative of the overall market of the 25 to 44 year olds. Just consider the average salary of the polled population vs the general population.

As interesting as it is, I'm really curious how this list was compiled. Was it just a manual process, or was it done with some FFT?

As a side note, I'm glad Madonna didn't make the list.

One of the funniest cases I know of is actually a reverse case. A French/Russian caricaturist, Emmanuel Poiré, published his work under the name Caran d'Ache, which is a french transliteration of the word карандаш which means pencil in Russian. The Swiss company Caran d'Ache "borrowed" his name six years after he died in 1909, and became on of the most renowned companies in this business. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caran_d%27Ache https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caran_d%27Ache_(company)

My pants don't have big enough pockets to carry enough change given the parking rates in California.

I would've loved to be a fly on the wall in that meeting.

There's no greener grass on the other side. I've been in the big consulting business, and sometimes you can't get a client to schedule a meeting for months, so you're flying blind, with absolutely no feedback. And then we go into the typical cycle of "Lessons Learned" etc, because what you've developed is irrelevant to the client.

This is a great write-up. This is real life. And then you get a corporate dude berate everyone and ask: what are you doing to make sure that it never happens again? And I always want to respond that "I can guarantee that the same thing won't happen again, but something very similar will happen, if you won't assign sufficient resources to fix the real problem, instead of putting on a band-aid. And you won't even know the difference."

I think the OP covers this case very well.

I don't think there's anything 'gotcha' about the question. If you understand that git uses SHA1 for the objects it stores, the answer is pretty obvious. If you don't, you really don't know git.

That is so true. A lot of people use git as write only repository. Still better than nothing, or copying directories. Maybe at some point they'll figure out how to retrieve a previous version.

I couldn't agree more. The fundamental design it's absolutely brilliant. The UI does take some getting used to.

I frequently use Git as an interview question, but only when the candidate lists Git among the skill set. Specifically, I ask how does Git figure out when you've renamed a file. If you don't grok it, don't list it.

You are so right about Atlassian tools. I cannot stand Jira. Very often, it's easier and faster to fix a bug, then to update the status in Jira. It's clutterware.

I really like that. I've seen code so full of trivial unit tests, yet no integration or regression testing.

A good unit test should be written with the mindset of a hacker - how can I break it - rather than just a few assertions. It's not easy to do, and that's why there's so much bad stuff.

Another vote for Ian Stewart's book, or any other of his books. I discovered them at the end of high school and devoured them during the summer before college. Did I just admit I was a nerd? Tough. I'm proud of it.

I haven't used SQLite until a few weeks ago because I've always had an Oracle or Postgres running and it was an easy choice. Recently, I needed a self contained solution for a Python project, and I wanted the SQL support with minimum installation and system dependencies. I tried SQLite - I'm absolutely amazed how well it worked for the task.

I don't know how SQLite scales for large data sets, but for a small tasks it's fantastic, and can be trivially ported to something like Postgres.

Sort of a brilliant engineering solution to a non-existent problem. Or a very niche problem to say the least.

Mall or airport security certainly fits the niche, but difficult to scale beyond these examples.

Innumeracy on display.

Exactly. And each one of these companies had built the business around a key idea. I interview a lot of candidates for data scientists, and one of my favorite questions is what makes one of these companies what they are.

Compressed air is definitely cheaper than any other gas you could use, but you can't liquefy air at room temperature, at least not reasonably. As result, a can of compressed air would have very low capacity compared to a gas which can be liquefied at room temp.

A gas like propane for your BBQ liquefies at room temp, and once it's liquid you can put a lot of it into a cylinder without increasing the pressure.

That's why compressed air is not used in the spray cans.

If the terms master/slave are so offensive is the actual slavery also offensive to you? If it is, what are you doing to stop the slave trade in Libya?

If nothing, then all you're doing is empty virtue signaling.

Pretty much any book by W. Richard Stevens, but in particular Unix Network Programming, which made a cameo appearance in Wayne's World.

Intro to Statistical Learning by Hastie, Tibshirani, James and Witten: https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Statistical-Learning-App...

Thank you sooo much!!!

You beat me to it!

What should I do now with my Masters degree?

I've been using vim for 20+ years and have never been into extensive customizations. That was part of the attraction, because I had to deal with a lot of remote servers, often off-shore. With out-of-the box vi/vim I could get the most done with the least number of keystrokes. Someone made a comment above about IDE editors with vim emulation. Wish every IDE would do that. RStudio for example is not exactly vim, but I find it close enough. If only Spyder and Jupyter would that.

Production logging with accurate and precise timestamp is an absolute time saver. That means like 1ms timestamp and NNTP synchronized servers.

I agree. After criticizing print statements, more than half of the article discusses logging, which is a little more organized print. And I'm not disagreeing - it's invaluable in production systems.

I wish there was more to how to actually debug in Jupyter or Spyder, and I'm relatively new to both, and was hoping for some tips on that.

I highly recommend the MIT Missing Semester Course. https://missing.csail.mit.edu/

It's a glue which is not covered anywhere specifically, but it'll make your life a lot easier.

Git is art. All programming is a solution to a problem. Some of the problems are very pedestrian and the solution is very boring. There have been many version control systems before Git. I remember using SCCS, RCS, CVS, ClearCase and finally Git came along, and just redefined the whole concept. Sure, the CLI may be clunky at times, but the fundamental problem of version control is solved. I suspect, that historically, Git may be considered as a bigger accomplishment for Linus Torvalds than Linux. After all, Linux is a clean room implementation of Unix, whereas Git is completely original.

In the late 90's, I had Solaris running on my Toshiba laptop. I loved it. It was a great OS and development platform. At some point it became too difficult to keep up with software upgrades, otherwise, I'd still be using it.