no1lives4ever

Turbo Pascal back in the day was super fast. One of the fastest compiled languages I had used before we had incremental compilers and background incremental compilation. C/C++ compilers have mostly been a lot slower than those old Turbo Pascal implementations. MS Quick C 1.1 was a notable exception in the C compiler space. It could do 1 pass in memory compilation of most c code. Modern frameworks feel way slower even with scripting languages that require no compiles.

Coming to think of it, my 486 from early 90s when running DOS was one of the fastest computers I have used when it comes to bootup and applicaion load times. I was like type name of program, press enter and the program is up and ready to use. The systems that I had before that did take a lot longer to launch programs and anything with Windows has always felt an order of a magnitude slower. Modern tiny linux disros can match that speed, but then that is only with a very slimmed down system minus any gui. The MacBook Pro with M1 Pro did feel a lot faster than previous macs or windows machines when it came to application launch times and general gui responsiveness, but still no match to those DOS systems.

Chase offers a cashback card. Here is a link to their T&C: https://www.chase.co.uk/gb/en/legal/Cashback-FAQs/

Back in 2005, I bought a car in India. I was trying to pay a part of the purchase price using my credit card. My auto dealer wanted me to add a surcharge. When I called up my card company and complained about this, i was asked to pay the surcharge by my card issuer's call center employee :-(

I used to live in New Delhi, India. In past there were frequent power outages and as a result almost everyone who could afford got either a generator or a battery based power backup solution. Not everyone can afford these, but whoever can would get the backup setup in place.

There exists a similar situation with water supply. What started out as 24 hours running water back in 1970s has ended up as supply at low pressure for < 1 hour once or twice a day. As a result everyone has built additional storage water tanks and added in line pumps to suck water when the supply is present. The in line pumps are illegal, but everyone has one.

getting back to topic, India also has the government frequently shut down mobile and broadband internet to control communal riots and anti-government protests.

Reminds me of a case where I was trying to help debug some legacy code. I had a simple question, what code gets executed when this method is triggered via the network request. And the final answer that i got from the developer maintaining that code was: I have been working on this for the last 9 months and I have not yet been able to find he entry point from where the requests are handled

I would hope that, in future, some chatgpt like tool would be able to answer basic questions like this and help a new developer start getting productive in much shorter time than now.

Then imagine asking that tool to summarise all the business logic applied in the project or ask questions abou which all sections of the code may need investigation to analyze a bug and come up with a solution.

In the end, I would think of these ai tools as something that can function like another junior or even slightly experienced developer in the team.

I have been in enough debugging sessions to know that it is easy to weed out those who are bad from those who have the basics right. But trying to know if a candidate is good with advanced debugging is a futile exercise. You need to be in a few intense sessions with such people to know who are good/bad at these things.

I have only been able to figure this about people after working with them for 6-12 months. Which is why it helps keep references to such people and have them on your teams in future ;-)

And what if the firewall blocks icmp? What if the dns server is internal to the network and is returning a stale ip? There are way too paths down this rabbit hole.

One of the problems with debugging is that everyone seems to approach it differently. With some of the approaches working better than others in some situations. Which is why a group debugging session works great when you have a tricky problem that is not getting solved by one person.

We can definitely test for basic debugging and troubleshooting skills. But I havent found a way to consistently evaluate people who are capable of identifying and finding solutions to complex problems. These days a lot of these come down to framework level experience. With the proliferation of frameworks and tools used in modern apps, it is impossible to find someone who can solve problems involving all of them. So in a big team you want a variety of such experiences to cover a wider base.

Having said that, I have been in many situations where i have had to join a debugging session involving technologies or programming languages where i have had zero prior knowledge and have moved things towards a solution by asking what at times seems like basic queries to help others come up with the solution.

When push comes to shove, go down to the most the basic of debugger tools. Print output to a tracing/console. I have had to resort to some version of temporary print statements in my code to get thru with debugging. And along the way have found many situations where those print statements or the logging/tracing equivalents introduced changes that altered the program's behavior.

I remember finding a situation where output of console.log would not match reality when debugging using chrome's debugger while working on a react app in 2019. Had to resort to making a copy of the variables to get console.log working in that situation.

When it comes to web deveopment, like others have said, it is easy to debug modern web apps with the help of source maps. We have been doing some version of that for a long time now. I remember using source maps with codeview back in the late 80s/early 90s.

I did a 7 day fast, and I mostly ended up losing fat. While I did not do any scientific measurement, i was able to exercise the same post the 7 day fast and my belly fat came down big time.

Maybe body builders lose lean body mass when they fast, but it does not seem to hold true for the average human.

Uber used to have a much simpler app 6-7 years ago. I worked on a product that copied uber and gave whitelabelled uber like apps to taxi operators and other services that required similar functionality.

But even then, we found that the app was hiding a lot of complexity under that simple interface. The uber app of 2022 shows a UI that is a least 10x as complex and hides even more behind that interface.

Something as simple as how uber is able to show you car location in near real time on the screen requires a fair bit of engineering effort to get right at Uber's level of scale.

Here in India a common problem with Uber is that drivers will first ask you about your destination and then decide if it is worth their effort to pick you up from your current location and then drop you at the destination. For most parts this leads to a situation where you have to book 5 or 6 rides till you get a driver who is willing to pick you up. And there are tons of places where no driver will pick or drop you. I am from New Delhi, but I have seen the same issue in most Indian cities with uber or ola service.

Drivers will not cancel a ride and expect you to take a hit in terms of cancellation charges. Now if you have a lot of time, you can wait for the 10-15 or so minutes it takes for uber to cancel your ride and then restart the process. I have spent upto 1 hour to not get a ride on many occasions and this was for a ride to a location where uber drivers will not object to normally and for a pick up location that is also within the areas blessed by uber drivers.

In addition to this, there is a growing list of scams specific to uber and its local competitor ola. e.g. a driver will come near you, start a trip and then drive around w/o you for a while and end the trip. Or the driver will ask you to cancel the ride and pay the money in cash. In some cases the driver will only take a trip if you are paying in cash, as that directly goes into their wallets. Uber and Ola have put in a system where they ask you to enter a OTP for some of the rides, which fixes some of the scams.

Here uber has to use a registered commercial vehicle driven by a driver with a commercial driving license, so there is no concept of someone driving an uber part time. When they started, they subsidized rides heavily and encouraged drivers to buy cars on loans. Now uber has withdrawn all the subsidies and most drivers are stuck with a car and a loan that they

In many cities, uber also gives you a service where traditional metered auto rikshaws (they are metered like taxis, but cheaper 3 wheeler vehicles similar to tuk tuks). These typically seem to work better as you get the auto rikshaw at the regular metered price w/o having to deal with auto rikshaw drivers who would want extra fees over the meter if you hailed them using traditional methods.

For my airport transfers, I have defaulted to the local taxi service that had served me well before uber and which continues to give prompt service. They are more expensive, but they are also stress free. And a missed flight is just not worth the headache for the Uber experience.

Uber has killed taxi services in many cities and the replacement has been worse. Now uber drivers and taxi drivers are both complaining of the low pay and bad business.

Here in India government has come up with a few policies that helps a lot in this regard. Firstly we have UPI that allows for instant bank account to bank account transfers. Most banks give 20-30 free UPI transactions per month. In addition, government came up with a rule to have 0 transaction fees on low value transactions on cards. In addition to this, government has also been promoting a alternative to visa/mastercard with the rupay network. I think more countries need to look into these.

Here in India cash use is still very popular and mostly used for tax avoidance and to avoid surveillance by the government agencies.

The 16” M1 Pro also has amazing battery life. I regularly use mine for a whole day’s work on battery, while with the i9 16” battery rarely lasts more than 3-4 hours under similar loads.

That glued on iMac design was really stupid for a desktop that uses fans. Even my older generation iMac with the magnetically held cover is too much of an effort to clean. And from the looks of it, this new Mac studio suffers from ur same issue. While you can access the fan and the heartsink, it requires too much fiddling and too many screws to make it easy for any user.

If your i9 16” throttles down to 1 or 1.4ghz, then most likely it is clogged with dust. Open the bottom cover and clean both the heat sink and the Fan blades properly. I need to do this to my 16” i9 once every 3-4 months to prevent it from throttling under load.

Interestingly, sharing an external screen using google meet and running something like npm install will easily throttle the CPU even if the CPU usage never shows anything above 15% of use.

I live in a fairly dusty environment that also gets quite hot in the summers. I have to clean my i9 16” MacBook Pro’s cpu fan and heatsink every 3-4 months or else the CPU starts throttling. The MacBook Pro is relatively easy to clean. You just need to know how to remove the bottom cover and the fan plus heating assembly is east to access. But it used to be much easier with the older models. This Mac studio’s design makes it very difficult to clean the heatsink and fan blades. Also the heatsink looks like it has lots of thin narrowly spaced fins, something that will get clogged up really fast in a moderately dusty environment.

More likely Udupi versions of South Indian food that is popular across south India

The problem is when the Bangladeshi Bengali cooks serve food that is mostly alien to them. Mostly what they serve as Indian food is based on north and western Indian cuisine. Stuff that is very different from what Bengalis in Indian Bengal or Bangladesh would cook.

I have had to use excel Ona windows system a fair bit in recent past and the end key sees a lot of use inside excel. It took me a fair bit of time to get used to my laptop’s fn+arrow key combo to get end to work on excel for me. On the mac ctrl+a and ctrl+e so the job of home and better for me as that also works on the terminal.

My daily driver keyboard is the older Apple wireless keyboard. There one that uses the AA battery. Mainly because this has the exact same layout as my MacBook Pro. This keyboard plus the trackpad works great for me. I don’t understand why Apple did not revert to the inverted arrow keys on the external keyboard. Now there is no way to get the same exact layout on a MacBook Pro and with an external keyboard from Apple.

The idea is that as her husband is a billionaire, she had access to better healthcare and more likely to undergo screening. I know many breast cancer patients from India and almost none of them underwent regular screening, and as a result all of them caught the disease as it had progressed a lot more than the case of Seema. As she had access to regular screening, and got diagnosed at a earlier stage, her prognosis was a lot better than for the average upper class Indian with access to quality medical insurance. You must also consider the fact that most medical insurance in India dont cover breast cancer screening.

Reminds me of my attempts to make cheat sheets that I would use during exams. I would write out a small cheat sheet the night before I never needed to use those cheat sheets as I would always remember whatever I had written on them. After a few cases when I remembered the whole contents of those sheets, I would just use them as last minute revision aid and discard them before getting into the examination hall.

Her husband is a billionaire and she has access to some of the best healthcare out there. Not that many people from India get a mamogram on a regular basis. So her husband's wealth must have helped her with the screening that helped her to diagnose breast cancer at an early stage.

The former captain of the Indian cricket team, Sourav Ganguly, recently suffered a heart attack while he was exercising. He was lucky that he was able to get prompt medical attention and recovered. But he was a fit professional athlete who was used to exercise from a young age and even he suffered from cardiac problems.

If in future google changes monetization goalposts, then the poster can potentially make some cash from the older posted videos. And it is entirely possible that one video gets popular and brings in a ton of views and subscribers to the channel.

IMO youtube is the primary platform where those looking for videos will search first up. Thing is that if you have a large number of videos, you never know when one of them will get you a large number of views and subscribers. Or maybe in future google will have different goalposts for monetization. Overall, it is always good to have videos on youtube even if you are not monetizing them.

Typically 3 months these days in India. Used to be 1 month in past, but over the years, all the IT outsourcing firms have started using 3 months notice.

Mostly will not pass safety or minimum equipment standards. Renault was known to sell cars in India with airbags that were inferior to what they supplied elsewhere. Indian emission laws are fairly strict but based on euro standards, so most cars should pass non ca emissions test.

reddit and hacker news has enough of them ;-)

It is simpler than that. Have someone sit opposite you with a mirrored screen and the audio feed going onto his headphones. He can then write the answers that appear on your screen or get shown on another screen around your camera so that you dont look like you are looking away. Spend a bit of time to act about trying to think up a solution, and you have a winning combo. Have seen many people pass online video proctored certification exams using this trick ;-)