sporkenfang

Kudos on the IDE, kudos on helping your girlfriend, but it could have done without the "I'll solve all the problems with technology and then she'll see me as the hero I am" schtick. It made it kind of an uncomfortable read, even though you did clearly build something with a use case, which is always admirable.

I've had a thing ever since grad school (I lived in a 400 sq. ft. apartment, so it was necessity then) that if I buy a thing, I have to donate something else -- particularly for clothes. It's amazing how much less crap I've accumulated than friends and family of a similar age.

For whatever reason,

> "I've been able to track down some well-meaning but ultimately flawed attempts at fixing things that then blew up and became something much bigger. The folks who I pinged about it were amazed that I somehow had managed to "guess" that a specific member of their team had been poking at a specific box"?

read like "I didn't like what someone did on a machine I had to troubleshoot, and told their manager" to me.

I was also reading this prior to coffee, mea culpa.

There are two things I don't like here:

- the author seems to call out specific individuals, by name, to their team leads, based on where they were ssh'd in, instead of bringing up the issue with that person first and asking for the logic of why they were on the box doing the thing (sounds like a lot of assumptions combined with finger pointing)

- it sounds like there's no well-configured monitoring or observability at the DC/rack/machine level involved, at all, which is surprising in a modern enterprise setup

With you 100%. Sure, meeting people at work happens— in America people spend 8-12 hours a day there. But best to not act on anything until one or both parties don’t work at the same place.

My dad had a slightly gross phrase for this: ‘don’t shit where you eat’.

As in there’s no sense in potentially poisoning workplace relations if a romantic overture or relationship doesn’t go well.

If you want to go the low-commitment route, a lot of makerspaces have plenty of equipment for building / making activities and offer classes in subjects as diverse as TIG welding and sewing.

Actually, it's a relatively popular harvesting practice for non-organic crops -- kill them all at the same time so they're all ready to harvest. Differs by region, but afaik in the US foods labelled as organic can't be harvested in this way.

You're correct, nobody is claiming that. I simply pointed out that "free speech" and saying whatever the hell you want are two different things. One is protected by law. One is not, and if I held an opinion you found morally wrong or vice versa, the other is not beholden to hear it, nor to serve the opinion holder if either party is a business. And I don't think that's bad.

Sure society may have prevailing moral standards, but the thing about having an opinion (which I think I'm proving with this comment) is we all, myself included, have forgotten that means we don't have to share it.

So the thing about free speech is https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/first_amendment the first amendment means the government shouldn't be able to suppress what you say. That's all. Corporations aren't the government and shouldn't be held to the same standards.

I do! Not because I feel like I know anything, but because logically I know there's quite some distance between an engineer and someone wanting to be an engineer. I see it every time my team gets a summer intern.

I got started by re-connecting with a group I led at university and being introduced to folks teaching business and practical engineering skills at a local accelerator (which seems to be primarily populated by college students and people without much experience trying to start their own companies). It's been a learning process -- both in terms of learning what people really ought to know before they apply for their first job versus what's normally taught and trying to fill in some of the missing bits, and learning where I myself have skills gaps.

I found this (mental health issues of colonization) to be one of the most interesting parts of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. It drags on a bit but plenty of folks go batshit, so that lends a tinge of realism.

Research papers cite scientific sources, sorry. Out of curiosity I've read the document being discussed here and clicked a random sample of the links and none of them I clicked led to peer-reviewed science (though a couple are Go links and a lot are Wikipedia).

The tone of the language is nice, but the Wikipedia citations remind me of my time teaching high school five years ago. Anyone who wrote a paper without citing in a significant way five scientific sources (google scholar provides free pdfs, how awesome is that?) got an automatic zero.

Wikipedia has good information but it's hardly what one would want backing themselves up for something like this.

I think the answer is to put the money you'd spend eating fish toward solutions for this so that fish is safer to eat again, until that's true.

This. Not interested in pen testing at all, just want to build things that don't suck from a security perspective. Happy to break things along the way to gain perspective, and I like to know how things work, but I'm a software engineer who likes security. A builder, not a breaker, by nature.

Interestingly I had the opposite but complementary conclusion: if we end up forming many long term relationships through cooperation and maintain them we all are better off.

I had no idea Hass avocados were mainly descendants of one tree!

Possibly, but where I live we get the same sort of tourists from China. I'd love to see some of the more interesting parts of Chinese history in person, but I'm not entirely sure I want to brave a whole lot of people acting like that to get to them.

Thanks!

How can we stop it and replace it with saner, greener tech (or replace the use of fossil fuels altogether)? That's the better question once we know how it got here.

> Also, typed function parameters are painful. Declaring a parameter as a `f: () -> int` instead of `f` requires that you think about what the signature needs to be. What if you don't know? What if you want to change it?

This is actually my favorite thing about languages with strong type systems where type inference is less emphasized -- if you're looking at a function definition, even if you're not terribly familiar with the language, you know what the thing is supposed to do. Sure, it's nice to let the compiler infer your types at compile or runtime, but it's really nice to just be able to read the code and be able to see what a function is at least meant to do, based on what it returns.

Even if it means dying a year earlier I'm going to eat salted butter and drink red wine and enjoy it. Better to enjoy less than to have more you don't enjoy?

Javascript frameworks. Try timing the loading of a text-only or text/html/css site, then your favourite site built with React or Angular.

I'm hoping for a possible future in which there is massive rezoning in the U.S. so that mixed neighborhoods (residential, business, etc) within reason, like bodegas and offices and apartments and row houses together, not cement plants next to kindergartens, are universal. I just bloody hate driving and the less I have to do it the happier I am. Would rather be outside getting exercise.

It's not for no reason -- lots of people who go other places than America / English speaking countries adopt names in the local language as well, for convenience and ease of movement in the local culture.

Explaining how to pronounce a name with multiple vowels in a row is goddamn hard in a lot of places.

C++ offers too many options for how to do things. C is a nicely restrained subset. The end.

> I told the candidate you will not get the answer.

I've had an interview like this. I said thanks for your time and walked out of the room.

I'm not interested in being told problems are unsolvable, I'd really prefer to work in a culture where there's a growth mindset. Even if a problem is unsolvable for me right this second, would it not be within the realm of possibility that with more experience or with a couple other folks on a team, I could solve it?

Aptitude might be flat due to current methods of K12 schooling. Just a thought. I don't think people are any stupider now than they have been, just methods of schooling have changed significantly in the last 50 (even 20) years.

I'm not necessarily talking coursework, either -- how students are treated is very different.

Er... I don't think that's universal, but sure, you'll find some programmers there.

> Does no one live in suburbia or have kids? The idea of sharing a car just doesn't make sense. it's part home / workshop / storage area. Maybe innovation solves this. Your rental minivan will dump its pod of crap at your house when it drops you off and picks it up when you call it.

Ok, so this is in no way a criticism of you or your kids, but having kids doesn't have to mean that (e.g., would you let your kid leave her crayons on the subway? in the public library?). Sure, kids anywhere could occasionally mean kid vomit, but that's what damages fees are for, right?

Lots of people, my sister included, have kids and don't even own cars, today, right now.

That's the hard part of having a bunch of authors -- jamming together lots of opinions and fragments of work. Better to max out at 4-5, or preferably, 3, since it is easier to converge on a single topic and work on aspects of it instead of having too much related stuff in scope.