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pqhon Turning a Job Opening into a Dream Job for Top Talent

Plus I'd argue that more vacation time would mean each employee has a more even spread of the workload. You depend less on individuals, and more on the team.

pqhon A first naïve look at Truffle Ruby

The stack traces suck sometimes with the metaprogramming. I have never chased down exactly what causes it, but sometimes you'll have lots of library code calls mentioned, and nothing from the application.

pqhon Why Did a Billionaire Give $75M to a Philosophy Department?

I think it may be the degree in those cases.

pqhon What's Hiding Inside Egypt's Great Pyramid? Tiny Robots May Find Out

Yet also the thrill of the unexplored goes away when one doesn't bother to explore.

pqhon People leave managers, not companies

I'd agree that micromanaging is a bad sign. Too often I get micromanaging about style critiques like "turn this into one if statement instead of nested ones and it's more clear", but absolutely no comments on the meat of a significant refactor. To be clear, I think style rules are important, but this is the same guy who writes 150+ character lines with ternaries like they're going out of style.

pqhon How I review code

And if people are writing 150 character plus lines, those are really, no joke, a lot harder to read. If the line is going to break anyway, why not just break it yourself at a spot that makes sense?

pqhon How I review code

Text of the tweet so people don't have to click:

A common fallacy is to assume authors of incomprehensible code will somehow be able to express themselves lucidly and clearly in comments.

pqhon Commission fines Qualcomm €997 million for abuse of dominant market position

If I wanted to understand the differences in how the EU manages big companies versus the US, with points from all sides, where would I start reading?

pqhon How to tame the tech titans

I think you're neglecting the effect corporate backing can have on encouraging research from people who are less startup-minded and more I-like-knowing-I'll-have-food-on-the-table-minded.

pqhon How to tame the tech titans

I mostly agree with the points leading up to the suggestion of mandatory data sharing. I'm still mulling that over.

But I do agree that just breaking up Google, for example, wouldn't necessarily be a good thing. Of all the tech giants, I think Google is still doing the most good in terms of investing in innovation. Their research teams are varied and doing the fantastic.

Disclaimer: I don't work there and forewent an offer to network my way in.

pqhon Fellow Engineers: This is where your money comes from

Though you're more likely to shape your own failure. Let's be real.

That's not to say don't try, but be aware of the full picture.

pqhon Intel Has a Big Problem

How do people find the addresses to even start probing for stuff like this?

pqhon JS things I didn’t know existed

Use case for labelled breaks: collision detection in video game, where anything colliding with anything else ends the game, resets a counter, spawns Godzilla, who knows. With labels, you can break out of the top loop very efficiently.

pqhon Meltdown and Spectre Linux Kernel Status

They really could have done a tiered release. Keep the knowledge of the vulnerability as close as possible for the ~6 months they had it, then release it to a greater (but still restricted) set of people for another ~6 months.

the worst case would have been someone in the latter set leaking the info, which is just what we have now. So it could have been potentially better. There was really no reason to drop a bomb like this.

pqhon Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

On top of that, the video games I play and enjoy are decidedly unreal and often intentionally simple or stylized.

pqhon Walkable Streets Are More Economically Productive

I'd live in a big city if more cities and building architects cared about green spaces and noise. I'm glad people are doing research here.

pqhon SPAs are harder and always will be (2013)

Indeed, code reuse, testing, maintainability, etc are harder with the latter pattern. And with the latter you also end up using at least 3 languages in the same files. It's just really awful.

Yes, browser-rendering SPA frameworks are heavyweight, but they give an undeniably-better development experience. And that shows in the quality of the interfaces created through them, assuming your interface requirements are complex enough to justify it. I mean, I'm happy with Hacker News' interface and it's simple, but if I'm building the next Google Calendar, I am not using ajax and server-rendered templates.

pqhon Mozilla Files Suit Against FCC to Protect Net Neutrality

My rep sent a canned, formal-language-adorned "get stuffed" in response.

pqhon To Save Drowning People, Ask “What Would Light Do?”

http://www.icr.org/article/plants-math-ration-food-use/

This is a really cool example of plants using math too.

pqhon To Save Drowning People, Ask “What Would Light Do?”

Let me put it this way: never have I heard an explanation in terms of classical mechanics. In my intuition, the billiard ball model of physics makes perfect sense. But a current taking the path of least resistance really seems like it "knows" the best way. And it's amazing.

pqhon To Save Drowning People, Ask “What Would Light Do?”

Except "why does Snell's law over a continuous gradient effect the path of shortest time?" is equivalent to asking "why is the universe quantum?"

It's plenty bizarre that electricity follows the path of least resistance, light the shortest path, etc.

pqhon The frenetic race to build Detroit's Amazon HQ2 bid

Correct me if I'm wrong, please. Doesn't any sufficiently-complex non-linear optimization problem degenerate into heuristic trial and error? There's a progression of better and better solutions. With the unpredictability of the real world, and the low number of trials they'll get (this is their second HQ), I wonder greatly what they've got going on.

pqhon What Really Happened with Vista: An Insider's Retrospective

Try the Cinnamon WM on Linux. It's the best of both Mac and Windows' interfaces without the worst of either.

pqhon How to Interview Entry Level Software Engineers

Contrary to the analogies being drawn by sibling and child comments, work is different from dating or interviewing potential roommates, in that you typically have to give up a previous job when accepting a new one and if you don't make it through the trial run, you're unemployed.

It would be great if the only reason people could be let go were legitimate, but that's hardly the case.

pqhon We’d love to link you to this website but it’s impossible

Not everyone is so lucky. Why should you be the one to feel undermined in that case?

pqhon North Carolina Is Ordered to Redraw Its Congressional Map

Additionally, geography does matter for the group for similar reasons. Proximity constrains economics and policy.

pqhon North Carolina Is Ordered to Redraw Its Congressional Map

The two parties run the organization which works to keep any other parties out of televised debates. They don't care what anyone thinks as long as both parties agree to cooperate on screwing everyone else over. They're willing to have an uneasy truce with each other at the expense of all others.

pqhon Meltdown and Spectre Linux kernel status

I downloaded the microcode updates from Intel, but hesitate to apply them because one of the expected directories does not exist on Manjaro, so I'm out of my element on how supported the update would be. Do you happen to know if in general microcode updates are distributed in packages? It seems that's probably the case, and if so, I'm fine waiting.

pqhon Legends of the Ancient Web (2017)

Even earlier than that, Plato had somethings to say about philosophers and kings.