sootzoo

If you don't mind dropping a few bucks on Coursera, Tim Roughgarden's algorithms sequence adopted from his Stanford lectures and MOOC are exceptional:

https://www.coursera.org/specializations/algorithms

Can't recommend enough. The material and instruction are top-notch.

I really had problems going this route (Ubuntu host with Windows guest). While the guest ran in VB reasonably well, trying to snapshot a baseline image and generally use VBox differencing disks quickly ran me out of space on the host SSD.

Even with a 256GB drive and a number of tweaks like hosting the Windows pagefile and temp from a passthrough disk, disabling Windows automatic updates, and using an immutable disk containing the OS install/multi-attach for copy-on-write behavior, VBox still used a ton of space to track the differences from my baseline snapshots. Even starting the VM quickly consumed 10-20GB in the new disk image. Was hard to conclude anything other than it wasn't a viable "dual workstation" setup and I capitulated and moved to Windows 10.

Sucks, because it was really quite nice to have a unix under the hood, though WSL makes this a bit more tolerable in Win 10 AU.

It's worth pointing out that this style rule itself is optional, which is to say they're not making a recommendation here, just providing an example of what applying the rule would look like. It carries the same weight as, say, the optional rule about grouping CSS sections and including a section comment[1].

[1] https://google.github.io/styleguide/htmlcssguide.xml?showone...

My experience has been the auto-upgrade works without requiring reinstall (and indeed just did so to GA last night). I don't think there's any specific fresh install requirement.

> They are conspiring to replace an existing employee. That says enough. If the organization were "healthy" they would be upfront with the existing manager and allow him/her to gracefully exit.

You seem to start from this very distrustful premise and never look back.

Would you say the same of someone who gives significant notice of their departure (say, a retirement or medical situation) to the relevant supervisors but doesn't inform subordinates until a replacement is on board? What if that person were a fairly high ranking one in the organizational structure, as it sounds this one is?

Confidential replacement is pretty typical when the outgoing leader has no apparent (temporary) replacement and transitioning duties twice would be difficult/disruptive. It's not broken culture to ensure the wheels keep turning despite a pending high-profile departure.

Not to mention, if a manager and two tech leads are involved, it's pretty likely the outgoing manager is at least peripherally aware of the situation. You could very well be right about this employer, but the presumption that the nature of the search is somehow underhanded or deceitful is pretty one-sided.

I use it daily (running both Visual Studio 2015 and Visual Studio Code). For me, it's a Sublime Text killer.

We have some small node apps, endless python scripts and I routinely deal with configuration files, XML, JSON, even just machine-formatted flat files. It's very good at doing that when I need it to, and being a lightweight IDE when I drop into node or python. Anything that doesn't require me spinning up the full IDE but comes with good editing and search (what I was using Notepad++ and Sublime for in the past) is a win for me.

There are some really nice features in there too, the extension ecosystem is very active and it does what I need it to. Pleasure to use.

Here is Brian Harry at MS on this very topic about a year ago: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bharry/2015/03/12/the-futur...

> "Most of our customers still use TFVC and we value this tremendously. Most people in Microsoft still use TFVC. Most new projects created today on VS Online choose TFVC."

Etc. It's quick and to the point, go read it. And again, has there been some sea-change at MS over the last year on source control? Quite possibly. But so far you've offered nothing but your opinion.

Again, you're citing the source control system as the primary feature. TFS is an entire application lifecycle management suite, not just version control. You seem to (continue to) ignore this. Its closest analogue is probably the entire Atlassian family of products.

On TFVC:

> it sends way WAY too many files up and down constantly

It sends literally zero files anywhere until you interact with the server, as any sane server-based version control system would do. I don't know about your workflow but I don't know what you consider a reasonable amount of I/O to sync a workspace. You can elect "Local" workspaces since around TFS 2012 which can work completely disconnected if you choose.

> branching/merging is expensive as all heck

It's folder-based branching and can be done very quickly/cheaply if you don't store your entire company in source control. And how well does Git handle large files? Git is opinionated on branches and creates them cheaply/quickly; TFVC evolved from CVS-type systems where this was not the prevailing mindset, but again I don't know what you're considering "expensive." Maybe where you work?

> even Microsoft's internal teams are utilising Git and Github

Which isn't evidence of anything other than it's their current tool of choice. That has a lot less to do with future direction of their enterprise products than you're assuming here.

> Microsoft's own consultants

> Microsoft's internal teams

> the Windows team within Microsoft

Do you have insider info or are you just trying to sound like you do?

> Because tfs is dying. Why port over tooling for a source management system that is on it's deathbed?

[citation needed]

Visual Studio Online (which is pretty much TFS in the cloud) is alive and well. And improvements made to VSO have been shipping regularly as updates to accompanying TFS on-prem.

Are you confusing TFS with Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC)? TFVC is also pretty popular as a Visual SourceSafe replacement and has been very stable for us, though the recent support of Git in Visual Studio and TFS has us considering it as an alternate workflow for some smaller projects. I think the support of Git is great, but knowing MS (and what they've said through their usual surrogates) I don't think TFVC is going anywhere anytime soon.

The bigger crime is that there's a perfectly good permalink for every FB post, but nobody seems to use it to reference content, when @-ing a friend is easier, quicker, and supported on every client.

There's no requirement that you use your home address for registrars (or the IRS, for that matter). It's also not terribly expensive to get a PO Box/virtual office address, and if you're concerned about privacy then it sounds like it'd be worth it to you.

Agree with the complaint but not the workaround; there is Tuple<string, string>, after all, so maybe something like this?

   Tuple<string, string> fullName = ParseName(fullName);
   var firstName = fullName.Item1;
   var lastName = fullName.Item2;

It's also much the same content as: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dn802602.aspx

I love the following list on Reddit for TNG and DS9: http://www.reddit.com/r/DaystromInstitute/wiki/algernoneplis...

Windows Server has supported "Core" editions of its products back to 2008 where the UI is simply a login screen and command prompt for remotely-managed/headless operation. In my experience most Windows admins still prefer the GUI. And while it does obviously save some resources not to load the full UI, the cost of the additional cores/memory to run it is minimal by comparison.

Reminds me of Nomic[1], a thought experiment which appears in an appendix to Peter Suber's excellent book, "The Paradox of Self-Amendment" [2]. Choice quote from the introduction to Nomic:

   If law-making is a game, then it is a game in which changing the rules is a move.

[1] http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/10288408/Peter%20...

[2] http://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/10243418

I think he makes the case (and I agree) that if you create a substantial number of TODOs and they manifest as IDE/compile-time warnings, they eventually become noise which you learn to ignore instead of fix.

There's an answer [1] on the linked SO thread (flip to the first page) but basically, the following two lines are equivalent in C:

a[10] 10[a]

This is because a[10] is equivalent to (a + 10), and 10[a] is equivalent to (10 + a), as the first comment on this answer explains.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1995113/strangest-languag...

Just view it in Print mode instead:

http://www.anandtech.com/print/6972/xbox-one-hardware-compar...

Tim Cook, I'd imagine.

> Run the math, if you are paying 2% fees, you are getting straight up robbed. If your employer doesn't offer low-fee index funds, it would be worth your while to make sure that they get some onto your 401k portfolio.

Worth my while, true, but maybe not worth theirs. More flexibility comes at a higher price from the 401k vendor, a crucial part of the scam here. Employers can offer "a 401k" as a benefit but might not view this as a tax-sheltering vehicle through profit sharing or discretionary matching--they could simply see it as yet another benefit expense. As with all employers offering benefits, some are more generous than others. Most employees don't know/care to pressure their employer to offer better investment options, or would prefer to have other benefits improved instead.

> But at least in theory what Wall Street is selling you here is better return than what you could make on an index fund.

Often, 401k's offer few, if any, index funds and at drastically higher fees, even if the fees are lower than actively-managed funds.

To take a personal example, I have retirement accounts with Vanguard (Roth IRA), T. Rowe Price (solo 401k) and, through my employer, with MassMutual. All offer an S&P 500 index fund, but Vanguard's fee is 5 basis points (.05%), TRP's is 30 basis points, and MM's is 90(!). Why am I paying almost 20 times as much in fees through my employer?

Sure, you could put this back on my employer and say, "well, they should offer you a 401k with better options/lower fees/with a better vendor," and though I'd agree, it's not as though I have any say in the matter, which is the point that Bogle and Frontline are making.

As mentioned in the SO question, the head of Google's accessibility team, T. V. Raman [1], is blind. I feel like this speaks volumes about the opportunities for disabled programmers on its own, and, though a bit cliche, reinforces the thing I love most about engineering--in many ways, this line of work is as close to a pure meritocracy as one can get. I hope Mr. Raman would agree that it seems fitting that someone who is blind himself would be sensitive to the needs presented by blind and low-vision users of computer software, and I'm happy he's around to provide guidance for accessibility features for a company like Google.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._V._Raman

That's a great read too. Is the paraphrasing of Peggy McIntosh intentional? Her "Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" (http://ted.coe.wayne.edu/ele3600/mcintosh.html) is a classic in sociology and race studies literature, for anyone interested.

Yes, pretty much. The company is going private, and though the board and shareholders have to approve the sale, they can do so without your explicit approval, of course, just a majority (hence the bump in valuation of 25%). So those shares are no good after the deal closes, because the public company you have shares in just ceased to exist as a public company. Your return on investment is the per-share purchase price times the number of shares you hold.

This is the same thing that would happen in an all-stock transaction: let's say you own shares in Ford, and General Motors announces a buyout of Ford. The end-result is that you now own some percentage of GM, since Ford is now part of GM. Poof: your Ford shares convert to some equivalent number of GM shares. Do you cease to own Ford? Well, kind of, since Ford just ceased to exist. So there's nothing to "hold on to" in the sense you're implying.

More specifically, Microsoft is loaning $2 billion to the consortium of interests buying Dell, as is Michael Dell (~$3.5B) and Silver Lake (~$1B).

Silver Lake is buying for $13.65 a share:

> Under the terms of the deal, the buyers' consortium, which also includes Microsoft, will pay $13.65 a share in cash.

So the stock probably won't sell above that number, but won't be far off from it until the deal closes. Since it's a cash deal, after the deal closes you'll probably be compensated with cash (your shares would disappear from your brokerage account and you'd gain the equivalent cash value).

He's a great writer especially on aviation. For example, his writeup of the mid-air collision of an Embraer regional jet and a 737 over Brazil (http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/2009/01/air_crash200901) was nothing short of fantastic. It's well worth a read.

Spin awareness is definitely weird at first, and I wholeheartedly agree that it's less scary after a bit of experience. Question: did you cover spin recovery? I was under the impression this was basically never done until CFI or CFII.

I assume you mean: in a simulator, in a light aircraft (e.g. a small Cessna or Piper or something similar).

In a heavy aircarft, e.g. passenger airliner? Has this even happened?