jfultz

Very much so. The documentation is the specification, so it's not merely writing the documentation, but writing the specification.

Another interesting tidbit that plays into this...the syntax coloring is programmatically derived from the documentation (yet another consequence of the documentation being the specification). This wasn't mentioned in the meeting because most or all of the participants already knew this, but it's an important part of the subtext of the discussion.

Speaking as an insider who wasn't present at that particular meeting, but has been present in some other live-streamed meetings.

It's like the company used Normal Spinrad's "Bug Jack Barron" and the goofy sci-fi premise invented by its mustache-twirling villain as an operating manual.

Many states in the U.S. require car or booster seats to be placed in the rear seat, as well as seating any child 8 years or under in the back seat. Even where it might not be required, it's considered irresponsible to do otherwise and there's a lot of cultural pressure to conform.

There's lots to criticize re Tramiel's performance at Atari, especially on the console side where he sat on the already-finished 7800 for two years while letting Nintendo redefine the marketplace. But Atari had been failing in many ways up to that point (mostly management failures), and all of those chickens came home to roost in 1983. What Tramiel took over in 84 was a company that had already fallen, and was on the brink of utter collapse.

They drove away many of their best software developers, forming competitive software companies such as Activision and Imagic, and then spent resources trying and failing to sue them out of existence. Also departing were hardware folks like Jay Miner and Joe Decuir, who would be major contributors to the Amiga, an opportunity that Atari would later have in their hands and throw away. They completely muffed the next-gen console release with the Atari 5200, which was basically nothing more than a repackaged Atari home computer (already 3 years old at the time of the 5200's release), crippled by a terrible analog joystick that didn't self-center and was prone to breaking. They rushed VCS games to market assuming they would print money regardless of quality issues. After 9 months of raking in over $300m in profits in 1982, they ineptly handled the warning signs of Christmas 1982, leading to over half a billion in losses in 1983.

There was no way the crash of 1983 wasn't going to hurt Atari, but IMO a company which had been better run could have survived. As it was, without somebody that had Tramiel's level of discipline at the helm, Atari probably would have died in 84 or 85.

I mean that the LinkedList class is defined so that "new LinkedList()" returns not a list of length zero, but a list of length 1 with the first element containing the string "head". The actual list it creates is {"head", "1", "2", "3", "4"}, despite the fact that the output claims the list has 4 elements.

There are various answers which seem a bit sloppy to me. For example, "How do you find the middle element of a singly linked list in one pass?" The answer, without comment, makes a presumption about how to define the "middle" of a list with even length. And it defines a linked list implementation with a magic, invisible head that requires extra code beyond the loop to compensate for. In the "How do you check if two rectangles overlap with each other?" answer, the code will determine that the rectangles which merely coincide at edges or corners are overlapping, without noting that distinction. The vending machine example tries to drive home the point of requirements definition, but the point applies equally to these much simpler examples. I only gleaned maybe 10 examples...maybe I just got "lucky".

Also, the overlapping rectangles example has an error in the explanation. It says "If any of above four conditions is not true then two rectangles are overlapping with each other, as in following diagram first condition is violated, hence rectangle A intersects rectangle B." This somewhat nonsensical statement refers to a diagram that's not there, but furthermore, incorrectly indicates that the rectangles overlap if "any of [the] conditions is not true", when in fact all of them must be false. The code is correct on this point, but the explanation is wrong.

I don't remember how I first heard about HN, but I came here from SlashDot, too. At some point, I realized that /. was too many fluff posts (I can't say now exactly what the "fluff" was, but the perception was very strong for me), too few posts that I was interested in, and that I had just grown tired of trying to dig any gems out of comments that had become increasingly toxic, boring, or irrelevant.

I remember when I first visited HN, after an initial bit of confusion, I realized two important things. First, there was no stream to follow...no need to feel like I had to "catch up". Second, I could scan 30 posts in the same time it took me to scan maybe 6 /. posts. The presentation was just so much more clean and efficient.

After about a week, I noticed a third really important thing. For the first time in ages, I felt like I was actually finding out about tech news as it happened instead of being days-to-weeks behind the leading edge. I was spending the same time/effort on HN that I had on /. (and mostly just staying in the top 60 posts), but getting much more for it.

That having been said, HN ain't perfect. Probably my biggest annoyance is the prevalence of links to paywalled and/or adblocker-hostile sites. But as far as news selection, I dumped /. just days after coming here and I've never looked back.

My big concerns is the author's objectivity. This journalist has now written ten articles (including this one) mentioning Amazon in the headline, and one which strongly implicates Amazon (and has pictures of Amazon boxes), all since February of this year.

https://www.theatlantic.com/author/alana-semuels/

Of these eleven articles, ten of them run against Amazon, its business model, or its affects on society either directly in the headline or in the tagline listed on her author page...the only one I could find that didn't was "Free Shipping Isn't Hurting Amazon" piece.

So, as a person who had written a bunch of articles in the last 7 months criticizing Amazon, did that color her expectations of her Amazon Flex experience? It seems pretty clear she took the job so that she could write the piece, even basically admitting at one point that she was carrying around her reporter's notebook while on at least one of her Flex runs.

I doubt she made any false statements, but along with the objective statements, she included quite a number of subjective ones which clearly supported a thesis of "Amazon ruthlessly exploits the gig economy". And a significant portion of the article was dedicated to her own "tech support" issues...none of which seemed to be supported by quoted observations from the people she interviewed.

I don't doubt that there are valid problems and criticisms of Amazon Flex. I just don't know how much I can trust this article to objectively communicate them.

There doesn't appear to have been an official release of the compiler since 8.57, announced on August 8, 2013.

https://forum.dlang.org/group/c++.announce

I can't find anything about what changed between 8.52 and 8.57. But in 8.52, there wasn't even support for C++03, which the DMC site self-reports:

https://digitalmars.com/ctg/CPP0x-Language-Implementation.ht...

cppreference maintains a compiler support grid for features in the C++11 and later standards, which includes DMC 8.52 and mentions a small number of supported features.

http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/compiler_support

Here's a post on the DMC forum from 2015 which seems to agree that C++11 support is generally not there.

https://forum.dlang.org/thread/dbmsmttdbpfjsuhrhpkd@forum.dl...

My parents bought Basic Programming for the 2600 at my request. We didn't yet have a computer, and affording one was a bit dicey at that time. But I had been learning BASIC on a TRS-80 Model I at school for some months, and the hope was that I could replicate some of that experience at home.

Long story short, this is literally the only console cart I've ever returned (on the 2600 or any later system) due to being dissatisfied with its contents. It was an remarkable achievement on the system, but for a kid who just wanted to be able to do some nontrivial BASIC programming, it was nothing but disappointment.

I've used a lot of C/C++ compilers over the years, and the two compilers marked in my memory as having enough bugs to be noticeable and disturbing were Visual C++ 4.1 (so notably bad that MS essentially apologized for its screwup and conceded that 4.2 was largely about fixing 4.1's problems) and CodeWarrior for Mac (pretty much any version, I think...I never tried the Windows version, but the thought of it makes me shiver).

CW had a pretty nice environment to develop in compared to its contemporary competitors, but it just didn't have a solid compiler.

There seems to be a lot of push-back around here on the basis that nobody asks for it/cares/looks at it. I agree that would be annoying if that's your experience. But, speaking as a hiring manager, I can say that I won't even grant you a phone screen without a code sample. And do not be surprised if I ask questions about it (I don't always, but depending upon the nature of the resume and position, I do probably about half the time). I read every sample and assess it for competence, quality of construction, style and...unfortunately these days...whether it was plagiarized.

I just have to know that you can write decent code. I don't want to waste my time or yours if your code in the language we need is not up to a minimum standard. When I have to train a new candidate on a million line code base, I cannot afford to spend time also training them to be competent in the native language of that code base.

This is not about "coding passion" or notches on some Github post...this is about whether you can do the job. Although one advantage to a Github profile is I can look at your repos and see whether you understand the basics of using git as well (yet another requirement of the position).

I, for one, think your 15 hours was well-invested.

If you were watching closely and knew what to look for in the first couple of months of 2000, the failures were there. But they were generally minor and easy to overlook as Y2K problems.

I spotted something like half a dozen failures in various systems I interact with which I strongly suspected, based upon the timing, were likely Y2K problems that slipped through testing. For example, I received duplicate bills for one of my credit cards for the January 2000 billing period, and then a subsequent apology for the duplicate bills. They never said Y2K, but the timing was very suggestive.

It's pretty much exactly what I expected from most companies...the big stuff had been largely been dealt with, but a few things slipped through which they could dismiss with some hand-waving. The thing that surprised me was that there didn't really seem to be any high profile disasters (like a company that couldn't ship products, an airline that couldn't issue tickets, or whatever) at all...I figured there'd be at least a couple.

Thanks...long time Sublime user, but I was unaware of Sublimerge. Looks interesting.

Not too interested in the snippet manager, but when I was watching the demo movie, I noticed the author doing inline shell variable expansion. It never even occurred to me that shells could do that. Wish I had known about this years ago.

On bash, it's M-C-e where the Escape key can serve as the "M" portion. Also, M-r to clear the command-line, which I could also have used many times. Bash docs: https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Miscellan...