mtVessel

What was it that Dr. Malcolm said?

> Until this day, in my book, the absolute gold standard when it comes to documentation.

Amen to that! I started my career in a VMS shop, did a lot of DCL scripting. I have never seen better technical docs, before or since.

Branding every possible decision as "technical debt" is intellectually dishonest. Each decision you make has consequences. Technical debt is the result of choosing an expedient path over one that supports your wider goals. It's true that there's no perfect state, but only because this is engineering, where we don't care about "perfection", only tolerances.

Question about the TOS:

"However, by posting Content using Service you grant us the right and license to use, modify, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce, and distribute such Content on and through Service. You agree that this license includes the right for us to make your Content available to other users of Service, who may also use your Content subject to these Terms"

Does this mean I should have no expectation of privacy or control over anything I upload?

Sorry, the real problem is figuring out which 10 stories are actually worth reading, per Sturgeon's Law.

From the article: "We ought to add some nuance. For each incremental increase in the frequency of the beneficial mutation, it’s not technically a death that’s called for, but only the failure of one individual to survive and reproduce. Maybe someone just doesn’t get to have her allotted offspring. The point is only that the parent’s genetic lineage must come to an end. But in nature, that usually means mortality for either the prospective parent or the offspring. A reasonable shorthand is, well, just death."

This is what happens when skimmers comment.

I have never been able to fathom why anyone thought that hazard lights and turn indicators should be mutually exclusive.

Let's see, what's worse? Being rudely awakened, or being maimed/killed by a driver who literally cannot see?

I suppose in terms of net impact to society, there's no way of deciding without knowing in advance if the hypothetical victim is Mother Theresa or Hitler, so it's kind of a wash.

But for me (and feel free to disagree), I'm going to err on the side of preventing a devastating impact to a small number, over a minor annoyance to many.

OK, maybe I was a little harsh. But it doesn't matter who the aggrieved party is. He took an action, and now he's trying to weasel out of it by saying, in effect, "yeah, but I had my fingers crossed behind my back, so it doesn't count."

I am reacting to his utter inability to take responsibility for his actions.

I never apologized...I only signed a legal agreement that allowed an apology to be issued in my name.

Christ, what an asshole.

That's only looking at O365, the cloud-based version of Office. Not all companies have migrated to the cloud version yet. If you look at all versions of Office, some sources claim Microsoft has 90% of the Office Suite market. I'm not linking to any, because I don't know which, if any, are trustworthy.

I agree with your first statement, but could you explain how b-trees logically lead to sharding (at some growth point)? What storage structure doesn't lead to sharding eventually?

Generally, I agree. But in many RDBMSs, auto-increment features explicitly do not guarantee gap-less sequential ordering. If anything throws, it's easy to end up with discarded numbers, in which case you need to catch all errors, inspect the state of the sequence and/or the entity you're populating, and re-seed the sequence. At this point, I'd argue you've already left the pristine gardens of set theory and wandered into the thorny brambles of app dev.

Unaware, is my bet. The vast majority of technical writing, both online and in print, is either dumbed down beyond utility, or utterly incomprehensible. Communication is a specific skill, and vanishingly few have expertise in a given field, and the ability to promote those ideas.

This page[1] seems to indicate licensing SQL Server (Standard Ed) for 32 cores would cost $59,472 ($3,717 per 2 cores). Where do you get $700 from?

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server/sql-server-2017-p...

"And my axe", as PTG used to say. The redesign did nothing positive and the site has less and less interesting content every day. They say the action is in the subs, but I still can't find a decent way to discover which ones are worthwhile. I find I'm just hanging on to the few I settled on years ago, and as my interest wanes, I visit less frequently. The day they pull old.reddit.com, I won't bother with the site at all.

As outlined in Dr. Dan Streetmentioner’s Software Developer’s Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations

Isn't DDG just white labeling search results from Bing?

I don't understand the author's claim that the sunk-cost fallacy has nothing to do with loss aversion because, "...[loss aversion] requires a comparison be made between losses and gains." Any consideration of sunk costs is an implicit comparison against what might be gained by investing one's resources differently.

Agreed. It seems far more likely the population with income swings suffered from latent, "sub-clinical" cognitive issues that merely became more pronounced later in life.

Like they say, "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose." And was it Santayana who said, "those who do not remember the past are condemned to recreate it in Javascript?"

Evidence of the demise of desktop computing abounds, but I do hope you're merely being alarmist, not prescient.

Great essay. Please write more.

Or that the divorce rate in Maine correlates with per capita consumption of margarine! (ibid)

...or a tutorial on Javascript

The difference is that the article is investigating using a property in the boundary check. The boundary check is evaluated with every iteration. Your example is only using it in the initialization expression which, by definition, is evaluated only once. This holds true for virtually any language with a for construct.

Yes, but the point is that the gap between rich and middle-class in a single nation, under a single political system, perhaps shouldn't be as wide as the gap between developed and developing nations.

This isn't a single number in TFA that makes sense. $100K was merely "adequate" in 1970? The whole thing is suspect.

Not GPP, but in the tl;dr please state what you offer, not what you think you are ("a free and open source 'Google'"). Tell me what you offer and I'll decide what you are to me.

Bonus points if you can describe the benefits of your offerings without making me read a manifesto.

Best of luck!

Basecamp doesn't have terabytes of data that would need to be available and consistent for every user on every version of the platform.

Tracy Kidder was the immediate counterpoint that came to my mind, as well. "The Soul of a New Machine" probably is (or should be) on every HNer's bookshelf. "Mountains Beyond Mountains" was also a fascinating read about an entirely different subject -- a doctor's humanitarian work.

Also agree that Goodreads reviews require a healthy dose of caveat lector.

"...greater use of effective strategies did not explain the persistence of the grittier types"

"however...the greater use of these two effective strategies did not explain why these high trait self-control individuals tended to enjoy greater success at aversive challenges"

So, in fact, this study identified which strategies were effective in people who were (self-reportedly) already effective at handling aversive tasks.