johan_larson

It's not quite a monopoly. Small-time online personalities can choose at least between YouTube and Twitch right now for video. I expect there are a few less popular platforms, too. Anyone care to comment on which ones?

So, if I want to buy a bottle of water in this bold new future, it will have to be a glass bottle?

Not too surprising. Organizations expect loyalty of their members, and particularly of their more senior members. Open protest, such as organizing a walkout, is an act of disloyalty, so it's not surprising that Claire suffered for what she did. She's lucky, I suppose, that she wasn't kicked out right after the walkout.

I wonder why some of those very senior engineers don't leave. Anyone who got to Senior Staff or Principal at Google has some very impressive accomplishments to their name. Transitioning to a CTO role in a smaller company wouldn't be difficult. Why settle for stasis?

Google didn't invent whiteboard interviews. Microsoft was doing it way back in the early nineties.

It's entirely possible that this state of things will continue. Google will continue to be a/the leader in online ad sales, and periodically they will try to expand into some other lines of business, never with any particular success. That's not the best possible place to be, but it is a good one, particularly since ad sales are so very lucrative.

That's my take, too. Google is good at designing and building software systems. They are also just fine at running them. Where they tend to have trouble is sales and customer support. I expect that's a product of where they had their biggest success: in help-yourself ad sales. I makes perfect sense that an organization would double down on its strengths.

One drink a day is quite a bit of drinking compared to what I consider normal, and the difference between 914/100,000 and 918/100,000 is small.

I'd say the advice that you can drink in light or moderate amounts without any significant risk is still sound. But if you're not inclined to drink for other reasons, you shouldn't start doing so for your health.

How are these strip-shops able to resell the heavily debt-burdened companies they create? That's the part I don't get.

Yeah, "reading socks" sounds sort of like "lovemaking hat'. Huh? Why would you need one?

Glad to hear they're finding a way to make money.

My impression is that Indigo is a seller of physical books at a time when reading is increasingly going online, so they are turning into an odds-and-ends store for the people Stuff White People Like was written about.

It's as if people started drinking less and less coffee and Starbucks slowly morphed into a kitchen-gear store.

The one reason that comes to mind is that doing it implicitly lets you use structures in terms of interfaces even when those structures come from codebases you don't control .

Suppose Bob's codebase has a structure implA that implements interface A, and you want to use in terms of its interface. If the language requires Bob to declare implA as an implementation of A, you have to persuade him to do so in his codebase. But if implicit implementation is enough, then you can just use implA directly as an A with no changes by Bob.

But yes, this is a sore point. It would be convenient to be able to declare structures as implementations of particular interfaces, even if the current implicit behavior were preserved.

Yes, the pattern isn't useful for function calls that return results that are used as parameters in later function calls, which tends to happen all the time.

No. Based on what I've read, it seems to be Slightly Different Java. Is there some important difference?

When I had the opportunity to choose, I felt I could find useful ways of doing things. The problem was that I often had to accommodate myself to someone else's choices that had been made years before, and I had to understand what the heck they had done before I could make useful upgrades. And with many ways of doing things, some of which are hugely reliant on really non-obvious behavior controlled by cryptic settings in control files or annotations, that can be hard.

I don't know. I've worked in three different languages for years on end, and they all have different pain points. C++ is too complicated, and generics are part of that complexity. Java has an ok basic language, but the ecosystem is weird and fad-prone, jumping from beans to patterns to annotations to injection, searching for the One True Way. Go is a little too simple, which sometimes leads to rewriting fairly straightforward stuff that a few clever general mechanisms would let us write once.

This experience makes me suspect that there will always be some pain point with the language. We'll never be happy; that's impossible. The only thing we can do is choose what type of unhappiness we are willing to live with.

The thing I love about Go is its fundamental clarity. It's very upfront and literal. I find it easy to understand what is happening in any particular bit of code. And I suspect that whatever complexities we add would compromise this clarity in the name of brevity. I'd spend less time being bored, and more time being puzzled or incredulous. And fundamentally, I'd rather be bored.

Well, yeah, the Europeans have good work-life balance. But that comes at a price. European rates for software developers are way below what they are the US. Also, there are far fewer big opportunities. There simply aren't any FAANG-tier companies in Europe. They're all American, and there are a few players in that league in Asia. But Europe doesn't have any.

Yes, that was definitely over the line for the Soviet Union to demand that Finland hand over a buffer zone. But in fairness the soviets did have some reason for concern. Finland had historic ties with Germany. Germany had helped the non-communist side of the Finnish War, notably by training the Jaeger troops.

Still, I expect Finland would have been only too happy to sit out the war as a neutral, like Sweden did. But the Soviets didn't give them that option.

At Google, hires had to be approved by the founders as of 2013. This was when the company was hiring a few hundred people per week, so the founders got a spreadsheet with links or something like that. And apparently they did sometimes say no to some people.

It seems like a bonkers practice to me. I understand that it is important to hire good people. But this could be delegated several levels down, at least for entry-level hires. I suppose the top dogs could worry about promotions and hirings starting at the level of the junior managers, if they wanted to.

Not all of us are in a position to work only on great products.

My impression of Oracle products is that they are frustrating to work with, feature-rich rather than elegant. They can work well, but take a lot of configuring and tuning.

The ex-Oracle folks I've worked with have been a mixed bag. Their reports about working for Oracle have also been mixed, skewing toward the bad. I suspect the company is basically run by sales, not engineering, certainly not customer support.

Number 6 on the Forbes list of software companies, with a market cap of 176 billion. Their main product is very heavily used by a heck of a lot of companies. It's just a bit messy and configuration-intensive, so it doesn't get a lot of respect among the techerati.

A software engineer looking for work could do a lot worse.

We need a Pants on Fire emoji. Or maybe a Pinocchio Nose.

That's fine. But there aren't a lot of people like you, and only a few places in the US are a good fit for that kind of lifestyle. It really only works in the densest hearts of the biggest cities, like New York and Chicago, and the odd college town or retirement community.

There are reasons why 90+% of US households (and some 97% of households that include a worker) have a car.

Yeah, I don't know why anyone would tie themselves to public transit in the US if they had a decent job. US public transit is for people too old, too young, or too poor to have a car, and for people commuting into very dense areas that it is impractical (too expensive) to bring a car into.

Rust, maybe. I'm not particularly leading edge myself, so I've heard of it but never actually tried it.

You don't say how much you already know about software. I'll assume you know little or nothing. Advice for an already proficient programmer would be different.

Your bio background will definitely count for something at biotech companies, and they hire plenty of software developers. But you need to add some sort of credible training or experience in software. I know there are community colleges offering two-year programs; that would probably be enough. Then go looking for an entry-level software development position at some bio-focused tech company. Someone who knows both bio and software will be a very attractive candidate.

Girls-choose seems to be a workable solution. Assuming an event is suitable for men and women in a roughly even mix, the women get together in a preliminary event to choose the guys they want from a list of candidates.

Jobs had a steady job at Atari before he left to start Apple. I seem to remember he offered the first version of the Apple I (or maybe II?) to HP while he was there, but they turned him down.

This is too weird to go mainstream as is, but perhaps some aspect of it could be Starbucksed for the mainstream.

Armies typically have minimum (and sometimes maximum) heights, to ensure soldiers will fit into uniforms and standardized gear. The US Army, for instance, has had a minimum height for men of 5' 0" for a long time.

If those who are drafted are killed in really vast numbers, a disproportionate share of the children in the next generation will be fathered by men who were not drafted, including those who were too short.