meuk

Broken mini USB connectors are a pet peeve of mine. I literaly threw away my last three phones for the single reason the mini USB port wouldn't hold on to any cable anymore.

This doesn't bother most other people, but I like to use my phone for longer than 2-3 years. I really don't see the point in buying a marginally faster phone every other year. It's wasteful for the environment and costs a lot of money.

First, I don't think that, in this situation, the client should be in direct contact with the developers. I'm not sure how the situation is (if the developers are physically working at your client's location or not), but I think all questions and remarks go through you, since you are the project manager. They will probably give you a lot of shit, but I think that one of your responsibilities is to shield the developers on the project from this kind of shit.

Also, I would try to communicate that the client probably is an expert in their business, and your developers are not. At the same time, your developers are experts at developing, for which you need to know an enormous amount of details about the business. If they seem idiots, it's because they lack domain knowledge (and it might be worth it to try to do something about that in cooperation with the client -- I'm not sure he's open to this but you can always ask him for suggestions on improving domain knowledge).

On the other hand, don't give the client any reasons to be an asshole. Underpromise, overdeliver, and communicate timely and clearly.

Awesome, this was exactly the type of comment I was hoping for!

This is a bit random, but there are some formal systems for Euclid's elements out there (see, for example https://arxiv.org/abs/0810.4315).

I think it should be possible to implement this in a dependently typed language like Idris, but haven't really worked on this (yet). Any thoughts?

This seems to be more of a tautology than a paradox.

I haven't encountered a single mini-USB port that I couldn't use with any mini-USB cable (however, these are mostly devices that I don't use as often as a phone, so my view may be biased).

Micro-USB ports, on the other hand, just stop holding connectors, even after I cleaned the port.

Agreed! I was already prepared to be annoyed by sketchy metaphors that didn't quite make sense, but this was delightful and very informative to read.

I do see a problem with this. I don't use my phone for much more than messaging, browsing, and navigation. Yet, I have to buy a new smartphone every two years because it gets slow and the USB port breaks. This isn't just an inconvenience, it's changing our perception of what tech is and how it should be. People think its normal that technology sucks, and anticipate it works that way. The reason that Steve Jobs, while being a disgusti g human being, made good products, was that he actually called out the bullshit.

This can be explained clearly in two sentences:

Division is the inverse of multiplication (a * b / b = a / b * b = a). However, multiplication by 0 is not injective (we have x * 0 = 0 for every x), so multiplication by zero can't have an inverse operation, and both 0/0 and 1/0 are undefined.

There are links to pdf files near the headers of the chapters, although the pdfs are called "obsolete", so I guess they are not the latest version or miss content.

Letting a windows programmer use vi in an interview is just cruel. I mean, I like vim after months of practice, but just exiting vi(m) is notoriously hard for a newbie.

I really don't think these are valid complaints. First, if you work for a boss there's always a big overhead you pay (for your boss, HR, the company building, trips for management and senior coworkers, etc). Second (correct me if I'm wrong!), I think the USA is one of the places where the government taxes for entrepreneurs are quite low, compared to many other developed countries.

> It's awesome that something so popular is so well engineered that it doesn't need changes.

There, fixed it for you. In particular, I'm glad that the OO cancer hasn't spread to something as basic as a build system.

Looks like they 'fixed' this in Chrome for mobile. The URL bar no longer disappears on his site (but it does on most other sites).

"No one I know ever learnt programming without making any mistakes." True! In fact, I don't know anyone who programs without making any mistake.

It recently occurred to me that if you use that matrices represent linear functions, you don't have to do tedious math to prove that matrix multiplication is associative (that is, (A * B) * C = A * (B * C), which allows us to write A * B * C without brackets, since it doesn't matter how we place the brackets anyway).

For a matrix M, denote f_M(x) = M * x. Then f_{A * B} = f_A(f_B(x)) so that f_{(A * B) * C} = f_{A * B}(f_C(x)) = f_A(f_B(f_C(x))) and also f_{A * (B * C)} = f_A(f_{B * C}(x)) = f_A(f_B(f_C(x))).

So f_{(A * B) * C} = f_{A * (B * C)} = f_A(f_B(f_C(x)))

Articles like this make me feel very smug about my decision never to go down the rabbithole of learning C++.

I feel perfectly comfortable with using pointers (and my intuition about them) in C.

Netherlands. I am a starter and work part-time (4 days). I'll make more than 25k next year, don't worry ;)

In Europe, the situation is different (cars and gasoline is a lot more expensive here, and salary in tech is a lot lower), and your argument doesn't make much sense. A new Toyota Corolla is 25k euro, which is more than 28k dollar. That is more than my gross year income and about 8 years of rent (and I work as an IT consultant, which is not a particularly bad job), and I still completely neglected recurring costs (taxes, gasoline).

If you buy a new car, you're paying for the fact that it is new, even if you can't see it. I did a quick search, and found a gorgeous Audi A8 that looks like it's new for 6k. You can buy a crappy old car for about 1k. So anything in between should get you something modest. Most people I know buy used cars, and I rarely have heard anyone having troubles with them (IDK, are American cars less reliable?). If you buy a relatively new used car, you get all of the advantages you list, and none of the disadvantages.

A couple of thoughts: The recipes are nice, but contain a lot of meat. This is very expensive. Where I live (the Netherlands), it would be closer to $10 per day (only counting dinners). Just the meat will be something like $4 for a single portion. Besides, I would first save money on bigger things like modest housing and not having a car before trying to save on food.

I usually make combinations with: 1. Vegetables (for vitamins): beans, broccoli, cauliflower, spinach, tomatoes, bell peppers 2. Meat-like (for proteins): Ground beef, chicken, meat replacements 2. Filler (for carbs): Potatoes, pasta, rice 3. Optional extra's: Sauce, cream, cheese (cheese is expensive though!)

This allows me to cook fairly quick and cheap.

> I made ... 15000 dollars from that exit. Let me put that figure in perspective. That is the same amount a recent college grad would make at Facebook in 2 months.

Excuse, but it is really hard to empathize with the author for me after reading this. Complaining about 15k that's being tossed into your lap is not going to make you look good.

Awesome work! Some things I wonder (maybe these could be in the README.md?): - Apparently, this is an assembler and an emulator ('runtime simulator'). In the 'bottles of the wall' example, prinf is used, which is a reference to a label in another file. Is an object file used for this or does the assembler just use the labels in the open files? - Is there a list of the system calls you implement? Did you follow an example or standard or did you just make up some system calls?

Disclaimer: I'm no RISC-V expert and I didn't look at RARS for very long, so these might be stupid questions.

Specify 'getting started with'. You can buy a microcontroller, program it in C and be completely oblivious to the architecture. If you want to understand RISC-V itself there's the specification, which is free and very readable.

That's horrible. What if you want to type 'Ggle'?

Well, job pay seems to be based on status anyway. Switzerland is ridiculously rich either way.

Just my two cents: learning by "experience" works, but is extremely inefficient, and you don't always get the feedback of your work. You always learn by experience, but you do as much as you can to learn to avoid making mistakes in practice. Compare it to learning to drive: Yes, you learn driving by experience, but you still need driving lessons to avoid getting in accidents.

You can try to learn on your own by reading, but if you want to make serious progeaa, you need a teacher, it's as simple as that.

Sounds like excellent advice. In the Netherlands, we have spaces where you can leave and take books. You could always bind some books yourself (google 'DIY book binding'), or buy a small batch of books, and leave them at such a place.

I also remember there are companies that allow you to publish and sell your work, and handle the printing and shipping. I don't remember the exact companies, but that sounds like a good fit for the poster.

That's like the first point he makes:

  I'm totally serious. If you pull it off -- and in many structured jobs, you simply can't -- this simple tip alone can make a huge difference in productivity.

I would argue that social skills are very valuable. At least, in the projects where I ended up, there are a lot of people writing code of debatable quality in a big, messy codebase. Asking around and communicating stuff helps you understand what's going on, and what to touch and where to stay away.

I don't think it is unheard of to have a judge interpret the intention of a law.