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pmikesell

321 karma · joined December 8, 2010

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pmikesell··on Uber, Postmates Sue California to Block Gig-Worker Law
Yes - I just meant that we're going to see a ton of comments here from people who want to let it be know that they think Uber, Postmates, etc are super evil and everything the government can do to shut them down is what they deserve.

It is samethink. A lot of people posting here hold these positions because they read them in the last story about these companies and they want to join in on the rabble. And discussion or nuance gets lost in this blizzard of conformity of opinion. It gets boring after a while.

pmikesell··on The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius
Not the point of the story, but he didn’t do it though, right? It was probably this? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_1965
pmikesell··on You can fool some of the people, all of the time
Sort of, I guess. But it’s also the idea that most people receive a lot of information passively as a result of whatever ads are shown to them on tv, YouTube, Facebook, etc - so all that money goes to the volume of propaganda pushed out promoting one result or another. Important concepts often have nuance, and that means some good and some bad, and if you’re on one side or the other you can tell the part of the story you wish to become the narrative.
pmikesell··on The Machine Learning Software Engineering Interview
You can absolutely fake this. There’s a huge difference between coming up with and implementing something vs understanding it enough to be convincing.

Have you actually tested this out?

pmikesell··on A Forty Year Career
“twelve different ways to spell the same damn thing”

Sorry, what does that mean?

pmikesell··on What Happens to the Body on No Sleep
I secretly suspect this is everybody, and the people who claim to be coming up with real solutions in their sleep are back justifying what happened when they had enough time to sleep well and felt nice.
pmikesell··on Experts who say we shouldn't worry about superintelligent AI are wrong?
Because that’s also what a brain is doing. The thoughts of a housefly may not be very apocalyptic, but there’s an evolutionary path from there to humans, which definitely could be.
pmikesell··on Kickstarter doubles down on its anti-union stance
I worry that tech workers may be under-informed about what a union may mean. A union can be in many ways similar to a corporation with its own power structure and demands.

Just 4 examples from my time in a union shop:

  1) Pay raise and promotion via seniority only

  2) Being warned by the shop steward that I was "working too fast"

  3) Heavy coercion to contribute to specific political candidates

  4) Going on strike for reasons I didn't agree with

Maybe a tech union would turn out better somehow. I for one would not want to go back to that situation.
pmikesell··on Kickstarter doubles down on its anti-union stance
Have you ever worked a unionized job before?
pmikesell··on Modern C, Second Edition
Why? I guess it's because some interpreted languages are also compiled?

"Compiled" traditionally means "not interpreted", or rather "compiled to machine code".

pmikesell··on California Approves Statewide Rent Control
That would remove rental units from the market and further increase cost of living for folks who can’t purchase.

What would be the positive effects?

pmikesell··on California Approves Statewide Rent Control
>>> If you made a viable investment in a property and are currently renting it out, wouldn't rent increases just need to equal inflation in order for you to maintain the same level of profitability?

Not necessarily - taxes on property owners don't follow inflation. They may go up greatly compared with inflation.

>>> I hardly see why maximizing profits should be seen as a necessity---especially when it comes at the cost of pushing people out onto the streets.

Because if don't allow it to be profitable people won't do it. Particularly in California it can be quite risky the rent out a property. It's an extremely tenant friendly location, so much so that evictions for major infractions can take several months, or in some cases years.

pmikesell··on Game developer loses multiplayer service code
This is common. Most places use their revision control system as backup for their source code and take backups of their database. This makes sense because the source code holds no state. Why would you back up the server? What would you do when you had 100 servers? You’d take backups of the running disk state of all of those? To what end?
pmikesell··on Ask HN: Do senior engineers have a mental model before coding?
Well, Linus is one of those people: https://lwn.net/2000/0914/a/lt-debugger.php3

>> I happen to believe that not having a kernel debugger forces people to think about their problem on a different level than with a debugger. I think that without a debugger, you don't get into that mindset where you know how it behaves, and then you fix it from there. Without a debugger, you tend to think about problems another way. You want to understand things on a different _level_.

pmikesell··on In effect, Seattle is decriminalizing the use of hard drugs
Hey - good point! What does that even mean?

I think, from reading that abstract, that they’re claiming it causes drug prices to rise and lower the overall rate of drug use. If they don’t mean that, then I have no idea what that’s supposed to mean.

pmikesell··on VMware Acquires Carbon Black for $2.1B and Pivotal for $2.7B
Good point - this was information leakage that, even if you had traded on it - would not be insider trading.
pmikesell··on The Browser Monopoly
... I'm talking about before that. Netscape went from 90% to 6% once IE started bundling on Windows. Firefox "taking over like crazy" is a later comeback.
pmikesell··on The Browser Monopoly
Netscape Navigator was something like 90% at one point. Netscape fell down to single digits against IE and then started climbing back up. That's the point at which the chart in the article begins. That's what I'm referring to when I say "losing the war". 90% -> 6% is losing.

I'm not like an IE fan - I don't user Windows for anything other than gaming, I just remember what the browser wars were like in the early 2000s.

pmikesell··on Why so many Chinese students can’t understand the Hong Kong protests
Can you explain this a little bit? Isn't there a big issue right now between India and Kasmir? You're saying it's actually under the administration of China?

I'm sorry if this sounds naive - I guess I have no idea what's going on in the world.

pmikesell··on The Browser Monopoly
I'm a technically minded person. I've been using web browsers since NCSA Mosaic. I switch browsers probably once per decade (mosaic -> netscape navigator -> firefox -> chrome).

At the time I started using Chrome IE was the dominant web browser and firefox was losing the war because content creators were continually accidentally making things work in IE only. (By "accidentally" I mean that the standards were very confusing, and understanding what would work with which browser was a continual battle, and Microsoft had a good 15 years under its belt of attempting to make the web a windows only affair).

So then Chrome comes along, backed my Google, and people started treating it as a first class citizen. Sites were belt to run with, and tested on Chrome.

Fast forward to now. I actually do want to have a wide array of ad sponsored content on the internet because I appreciate the free content and I'm not going to pay 30 different 5$ per month subscriptions for stuff I might read. Are they tracking me? Yes. When I search for lawn mowers online I get spams (which gmail seems to filter just fine) and my rarely logged into facebook feed is full of lawn mower ads. I use in-cognito when I want to see what a google or linked in search looks like without my user context. I use ABP when sites are too aggressive with their ads.

And it's all fine. I suspect my current experience is common, to answer your question.

pmikesell··on I feel like im talking to the borg
I used to work a hard labor job. People got injured. I got injured more than once. Some people died. It was part of the job and we knew what we were getting into in exchange for money. It was the best way we had to make a living.

I don't know if conditions were as hard as working in an Amazon FC, but it was definitely hard work. We needed the money and appreciated the opportunity to earn a living.

If the media had decided that we were some kind of downtrodden worker class cause and had descended upon us to ask these kinds of antagonizing questions our answers would have been very much the same. I'm sure we would have answered back with our employers talking points when ridiculed for the type of work we were doing. People in tech do this all the time when they explain why they work at some tech company "changing the world".

This whole thing is in very poor taste. This public Amazon FC bashing feels very much like virtue signaling and I find it disgusting.

pmikesell··on Python Is Eating the World
```--max-line-length=120``` passed to flake8 will switch it to 120. Use another number for a different length.

Things like max line length should be something your org or your fellow contributors decide on, not something dictated to you no matter what the language.

pmikesell··on When to Shut Down a Startup [video]
Is it possible for you to figure some idea out that could be your last chance moonshot for this company? Maybe it’s better to go out with one last boom or bust push instead of slowly dribbling away?

Best of luck to you - sounds like a tough spot.

pmikesell··on Anomalous CPU utilization on Windows build node caused by ads
Everything you say is true, but I also remember every time slashdot would publish browser usage percentages it was something like 70% IE. visible perception did not match reality, even then.
pmikesell··on 'Spacious' shutters all SF locations
I’ve never heard of spacious but it’s something I would have totally used. It sounds like a great idea.
pmikesell··on What Is a 'Nautical Mile'? (2011)
What I mean is, at least in the US it is defined as an arc minute at the equator, not just any great circle.
pmikesell··on What Is a 'Nautical Mile'? (2011)
Also at the equator - the earth is not a perfect sphere.
pmikesell··on GCC should warn about 2^16 and 2^32 and 2^64
Yes, or 1 << 31, for example.
pmikesell··on I got asked LeetCode questions for a dev-ops systems engineering job today
I don’t think this is a great approach. You’re selecting for good talkers. There are many great engineers and coworkers who don’t do well on these types of verbal psychological games.

Folks are given all sorts of interview advice about leading to claim things like “my greatest weakness is that I work too hard”.

pmikesell··on Firefox Monitor
It sounds like this was email addresses only, and they're very shady about how they acquired this information in the first place.

"The real question that the researchers and Troy Hunt, founder of Have I Been Pwned?, want to know is how Verifications.io got its hands on all of this information in the first place. The Estonian-based company has refused to respond to questions from different news outlets and has taken down its entire website as of March 4, 2019. " [1]

and

"Verifications.io ensures third-parties’ email marketing campaigns are being sent out to verified accounts, and not just fake emails. " [1]

[1]: https://www.idtheftcenter.org/763-million-records-exposed-in...

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