kozukumi

Sounds like you have a buggy or faulty device.

The camera hump is annoying as it means the iPad Pro can't lie flat on a table any more.

I fail to see why a normal person would want the extra things in an iPad Pro. Sure for some professionals it has some good features but a normal content consumer/light content creator (edit pictures, write some documents) it is just overkill with TrueTone display, etc.

Yes the CPU power is on the same level as an Atom/i3 from what I have read which is interesting but what does it really offer that the Air doesn't offer to an average user? I guess it is similar to how some of those average consumers also buy a MacBook Pro when they don't need any of the extra power over an Air (although lack of retina display on the Air is a valid reason thinking about it).

The biggest complaint I have with the iPad Pro is that it runs iOS. If it ran a touch-friendly ARM-version of OS X that would be awesome.

I know a couple of people who have worked for Adobe. I can't offer anything super insightful but they both liked it there. It isn't "glamorous" like Facebook, Google, etc. It sounded just like most other big IT companies. They were both working on the transition from a boxed product to their cloud platform so not the core products (Photoshop, etc.) but more the back-end platforms.

Do you know what you will be working on?

God damn Diane Greene hit it out of the park with this one! Amazing work getting Apple to migrate so much away from Amazon.

Nah not Snowden, it was just a joke because in TV shows whenever there is some kind of computer crime the technical specialists in the show (black hats turned white, etc.) talk about how the criminal is untraceable because they were hidden behind 7 proxies or such. Not saying you are a criminal it just made me smile/chuckle when you mentioned routing Tor over VPN which is also going through another VPN which in turn is on Tor, etc.

In my experience a lead developer is the primary contact and owner for a specific feature or program. This person should know everything about what they are lead of inside out, they make decisions on design and implementation. They are able to support members of the team that are below them. They can delegate work to those in their team. Review the work done and offer constructive feedback. Communicate their ideas and vision to those below and above them. Present their ideas and concerns to management and stakeholders with ease.

So there are a few buzzwords in that but that is pretty much my personal experience of what a lead developer should be.

I think part of the problem is that there is no industry standard definition of what a lead developer is. It has been my experience it is abused in the ways I mentioned in my previous post.

Again this is all just my personal experience. We are all shaped by our history and though we try and not judge people automatically it will happen from time to time.

So you're the guy they are talking about on TV who has "bounced through 7 proxies" ;)

Of course we can agree on that. However I hope you will also agree with me in that the term "lead" for many things gets thrown around quite easily in the tech world.

What annoys me is I often see companies promote an inexperienced (due to age) developer to lead or architect or some other title when they are really not that at all. The company does it to keep the person happy [read: shut them up] with a title rather than pull out the company wallet and pay more. I know dozens, maybe even in the hundred+, people who were duped into that. Often because "it will look amazing on your CV!" or "we promise we will review your pay if things work out in 6 months" in the hope you forget about it or don't want to bring it up.

The problem I have with this is that it devalues the actual lead, architects, whatever the current trendy title is.

I look at it this way - A lead developer could be lead on a very important bit of software that somehow fits into something that could cause loss of life. If it were a structural engineer they wouldn't just be promoted to a lead architect after a couple of years in the game. Same with a surgeon or registrar or a judge or detective or ... the list is very long! Except in IT for some reason.

I do not mean to belittle anyone who is a lead developer and under 30. Good for you if you really are skilled and experienced enough to truly deserve that title, my problem is over the years I would say a good 90% of those "lead" somethings under 30 are not deserving of the title.

Very true but in my experience the number of under 30 year olds who have the experience to be an effective lead developer is extremely small. Yes you get some amazing 20-somethings but more often than not it is just someone who was given the title rather than a proper pay rise or similar and they took it to make their CV look better. Of course it is just my personal opinion from my own experiences.

He does look a lot younger. Lucky him!

No we were talking about Brandon Philips :)

I would have said he looks more like a young-looking mid-20s, no idea how old he actually is, couldn't find anything in my 5 seconds Google search. Out of interest how old is he then?

> A couple of months ago I did a 'homework' assignment for an interview (it involved writing a simple REST service in go, even though I have at least one personal project demonstrating exactly this skill -- to an even greater degree -- in my github profile).

I would have asked them to look at that code and ask me any question they have about it. If they are not willing to do that I wouldn't have bothered continuing the conversation with them.

> the mid 20-something lead developer

Okay I am going to do something I don't like to do which is judge somebody on their age but a "lead developer" at around 25? Sorry but unless that person is some rockstar programmer (conceived with a copy of K&R in the womb) I find it very hard to believe somebody 3-4 years out of uni has the experience to be a "lead" at very much.

> told me he thought I was a better programmer than him.

Well that is something I guess, at least he didn't think he was God's gift to the programming world!

> Now, what do you suppose happened next? I never heard from them again and all of my attempts at communication were ignored.

Yes drives me insane. It is so fucking rude.

> I'm starting to think my age is becoming a factor (mid 30s)

Could be, hopefully not but a company that puts a mid-20-something as the "lead" developer might only be interested in getting young and therefore cheap employees.

> and also these kids have no sense of respect and professional courtesy.

Very true. That is partly why I don't think a mid-20s person can be a "lead" for much as they don't have the professional experience to lead. A lead developer isn't just a great programmer but also a great leader. Somebody for the regular staff to look up to and rely on for mentorship.

> I'd like to say this was an isolated incident, but that would be a lie.

It happens to us all. Some companies (IT and other) are shit. It is just the way of the world. Don't dwell on it too much, it is just more mental energy wasted and they already wasted a whole Saturday of your life yet were not even respectful enough to call and say "you were great but we prefer this other person". I mostly hate having that conversation (giving and receiving) but it has to be done, it is about respecting that persons time and even though you are not offering them a job you can offer them feedback so they do not walk away from the process empty handed. Sometimes that feedback is all they need to better themselves in the future.

> Stupid me just spent his Saturday doing another such project, though at least this one presented a more interesting problem.

Live and learn. In the future if you already have demonstrations of your work then ask them to look at that first and if they want to continue the process then you look at doing something specific for them. At least you seem to have found a small positive from it in that the problem was interesting :)

> The fact that so many employers treat candidates like this tells me that the whole "it's hard to find good developers" line is a lie.

A lot of the problems with finding a good dev is just finding a good employee for the company as a whole. You might have a good developer who is an asshole and will only cause issues.

Anyway just move on and forget about them. It is cliché relationship advice but you deserve better than them.

Reading that KB article and Microsoft are being total dicks with such complicated instructions when they could have offered a download to a tiny program which simply allows the user to opt-out of all upgrade prompts for N months.

Holy fuck are you serious?

Yeah that was the point :) You can wrap up the contents but everything else is open.

Email was not designed to be secure, it was designed to be convenient. Trying to make something that is insecure by design secure is never going to be secure.

Having said that taking some steps to better protect yourself is a good idea. Just don't fool yourself into thinking you are secure from a body such as the NSA.

TL;DR Pretty much everything is in C/C++ unless it is Oracle/Apache related which also has some Java or Microsoft who use C# for a few things (but not much).

golang is a nice language but I just can't find a reason to use it over other languages for anything other than networking/server projects.

How many HN readers are using golang for things you would normally use Java or C++ or Python or ... for? What is it you are working on? And how have you found using golang?

I seem to recall Xbox One with Kinect and its voice commands doing the same :)

I am trying to work out what use the Windows SDK is without Visual Studio (which also includes the Windows SDK!).

Yeah I have been following the Clang\C2 work. I guess that is what the LLVM project would rather work with Microsoft towards rather than rolling their own. It will certainly make life easier for cross-platform C++ to use Clang/C2 over C1/C2. Having to install Visual Studio to get it is a bit annoying though, I would prefer to fire up a VM with just Clang and the MSVC/Windows headers to command line compile. Visual Studio is a big install inside a VM which is annoying.

I quick question you may know the answer to, does the Windows SDK not come with the Windows C++ headers anymore? I installed the Windows 10 1511 SDK the other day but even a full install didn't give me any of the stdlib which I thought it would do? I understand they removed the compilers but I thought the headers still came with it?

Yeah I prefer year version numbers too. Makes life easier to know how up to date everything is from a glance.

It would be nice if they could at least keep the documentation up to date on which MinGW-W64 builds work and which don't etc. I just don't have the time to muck around with things when I can just grab a MinGW build and it "just works" out of the box.

With how friendly Microsoft are getting with Clang I was hoping we might see a LLVM+MSVCHeaders build appear. I am sure it is possible considering the new MS.

I know I am lazy in wanting a one-click solution but my build environment is very important to me. I don't want to have to hack it together using blog posts from 6 months ago that might or might not give me a stable setup. I don't think it is too much to ask for something like TDM's GCC installer.

Yes but that installer doesn't actually install a fully working environment, you need the standard library from MinGW or MSVC as well.

I love LLVM/Clang but I wish there was a simple tar (or several) I could download and extract on Windows that gave me a full working environment. Finding information on what you need and where you need to put it sucks for someone who wants to just get up and running quickly.

As I have mentioned before my wife works in the games industry (producer not programmer) and her opinion is that the games industry treats programmers like shit. Maybe a true mad genius programmer isn't treated so badly but the 99% are seen as code monkeys that can be fired without a moments notice. It is a pretty horrible environment from the sounds of it.

Have you written about how you found the process? The good and bad things, etc. With UWP being so new and untested it is hard to find much information on porting an already established codebase to the platform. How is performance, etc?

Yeah you won't get such high salaries up in Scotland. Outside of London I know Bristol pays well also. I think Manchester has some good things going for it also but never worked there myself.

What exactly do you mean by native mobile? To me that could mean mobile device firmware or Android NDK type thing.