4,910 karma · joined April 18, 2008
I do not speak for my employer or my ex-employers.
Curious about many topics outside of programming.
http://twitter.com/strlen
* Spring Boot for web services and application. Absolutely amazing and easy to use, my favorite feature is easy integration with external authentication services. Yet there is no longer much Scala support around for Scala and the Spring framework. Clojure may be a bit better in this case as Clojure collections implement the Java collections interfaces unlike Scala. Another issue is heavy use of reflection by frameworks like Spring which tends to work poorly with Scala.
* Android applications. Dalvik is a register based and not a stack based VM; scalac produces code optimized for OpenJDK which may run inefficiently on Dalvik.
That said in these cases you have the option of using Kotlin. While it does not differ terribly from Java, it supports pattern matching (which I don’t believe is supported by Java, but I may wrong as I haven’t used versions higher than 8 extensively.)
This is very hard to do and feels very unfair, but try to own this rather than say "but this is what I was told to do." If the person is a manager she isn't writing code day to day; she is likely experienced and can offer helpful suggestions, but she can be wrong or vague, or you may simply not be familiar with the way she uses certain terms. Try to discuss these suggestions with technical leaders or the more senior engineers on the team, they will likely have more context.
Make sure you're actively listening to what people are really saying in meetings. Volunteer to take notes if it helps and then review them with the participants at the end to make sure you got their key points.
When I worked at Amazon, I was really impressed by how seriously folks took the "Leadership Principles." Two particularly struck out: "disagree and commit" and "have a backbone." Obviously the two conflict with each other at first view, but on a second look the theme is the same: know when and how to listen to others and accept their suggestions, but also know when and how to convince others to accept yours.
Note however that DBOS inverts what sqlpal is doing.
Contrast the song with Перемен (Changes): the unofficial anthem of my birth country‘s democracy movement. While the song is explicitly non-political (it is about making internal changes), it is able to convey the sentiment in USSR in the late 80s and early 90s (the song was written in 1985. prior to Perestroika.) To put another way, a song about the “gentle Nietzschean”/Schopenhauerian thesis of artists changing the world through their work, highlights the elective affinities between the agents of cultural change and the agents of political change.
An important thing to note: Kino’s front man, Victor Tsoi is of Korean descent. h Soviet Koreans, aka Koryo-Saram (there is roughly 1mm of them today in former USSR) came to Russian Empire during the Koryo dynasty (mostly from mid 19th to early 20th century.) They played an important role in the early days of USSR, but we’re deported to Central Asia as Stalin as he suspected them of harboring pro-Japanese sympathies (this would be equivalent to suspecting Jews of harboring pro-Nazi sympathies, which he also did in the case of my paternal grandfather the minister of transportation for Soviet Belarus.) Over 10% of their population died during the deportation.
Their plight was largely unknown until glasnost. The Kazakh film maker Rashid Nugmanov of Игла (Needle) fame - movie about drug addiction, a topic rarely discussed for most of USSR’s existence - which starred Tsoi and featured his music - portrayed their story in his critically acclaimed historical fiction film Месть (Revenge.)
In a tangential note relevant to HN’s usually discussed topics, Russia’s richest woman - she created e-commerce site wildberries while on maternity leave - is also of Korean descent: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatyana_Bakalchuk
Rotoscope could be used for Spiders.
Some example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWEfVZN64jU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syTqQ-TU_c8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aew6MJLyVL4
The range with standard battery is ~40 miles (but if battery is drained, one still has pedals.) Top speed (with electric motor alone) on level ground is in excess of 35 mph. With a basket and/or saddle bags it is a reasonable grocery getter.
My online complaint with this specific bike (not applicable to other models) is too few gears, not foldable, and lack of shock absorbers on the forks (can be worked around by deflating the large motorcycle like tires.)
Note that I am sure it is also legally limited in speed and acceleration as it does not require a motorcycle license. An electric bike legally registered as a motorcycle and capable of reaching 100 kph on level surface (yet with ability to pedal for exercise or to extend range - again classical motos often had that) is an item I would like to some day own or build.
Lithium Ion batteries are truly a revolutionary invention.
This was my parents first exposure to UNIX: they have used indigenous machines (Minsk series, an early RISC-ish design), as well as PDPs but the PDPs they used did not run any UNIX variant (likely due to lack of MMU or sufficient core.)
Dear lazyweb, has anyone been able to get this going on the Herculus emulator? I am giving my father (if you read this site and know him, please dont disclose) a surface tablet for New Years (per russian custom of giving gifts on secular holidays), would be neat to install this inside Hercules (or other emulator), if needed under WSL2 (which runs on even the cheapest surface.)
See also cgroups: while this feature is used by the container run times, it predates Docker, and can be used standalone with normal processes.
That said, seeking to be routinely intoxicated could itself a symptom of something else wrong in their work or personal life. This would be a non-controversial statement to make about "hard drugs", alcohol, video games, risky relationships, etc...
To be fair, if those possibilities are true, they would also be revolutionary and should be considered (e.g., do they imply a mechanism that makes panspemria feasible?).
Likewise for an previously unknown mechanism of methane production - this itself would help us understand the origin of life. (This is one explanation, "geological" one, mentioned in the article.)
"Single celled microorganisms found to exist in conditions on Mars that mirror some of the conditions in which single celled microogranisms exist on Earth", however, seems to be a more boring one - if turns out not to be true, understanding why that happens to be the case, is also valuable.
It seems as if there were two distinct cultures of engineers. Those working on workstation-grade hardware networked over TCP/IP (whether running proprietary UNIX, open source UNIX, or Windows NT) -- and Java emerged out of this.
The second cultures were developers building mainframe applications; usually they would be ones working on problems related data processing, planning, and automation for businesses (not just enterprises but also many SMBs, government organizations, hospitals, etc...)
Java clearly emerged from the first culture being built by a vendor of networked UNIX workstations. Some of Java's most memorable failures - either exceedingly complex and brittle systems like RMI, JMS, and J2EE (I mean this literally: not modern Java EE like Jersey/CDI/etc... but EJB 2.0) or features that were in retrospect far ahead of its time (JINI or JXTA, compare with consul/etcd/zookeeper and the idea of a service mesh today) came as an attempt to commoditise approaches commonly used by the first group as frameworks for solving the domain specific problems of the second.
I believe Microsoft SQL server uses Hilbert curves: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/sp...
While far from everyone eligible to join Mensa does so (and as you've said, there's a very good reason for that), there is likely large enough to be able to form a statistically significant sample that resembles the general population with the same IQ which I suspect is readily available (at least in US SES by IQ can be gauged from GSS -- where the WORDSUM question is a "good enough IQ test", or from college statistics -- where the SAT is also a "good enough" IQ test for the purpose of a general study; not sure about UK.)
This isn't a "correlation vs. causation": I don't believe the study was looking for or claiming a causal relationship; I suspect it could well be the reverse: increased anxiety about predators being a push for better ability to predict where the predator might appear -- i.e., visuo-spatial intelligence (there is also some data that suggest that Homo Sapiens intelligence may have evolved accidentally out of certain neurological disorders).
So if the question is "is this a real correlation", there's good reason to think that the experiment was indeed designed to handle any confounding factors like the one you suggested. This is probably a better experimental sample than "college students who volunteer to take part in a psychology study" and easily allows for the most obvious variables to be controlled.
I doubt we have the data to compare philosophers as opposed to programmers in terms of intelligence (and this is an empirical question), but consider Alan Turing: a highly competent early programmer (he was known to be an expert debugger as well) and (almost incidentally) hugely impactful in philosophy of mind as well.
On the other hand, in terms of impact, insight can be just as valuable as intelligence. Bryan Magee once asked Bertrand Russell about who he considered to be most intelligent person he's met: Russell's answer wasn't Einstein, but rather Maynard Keynes; Einstein's contribution came from his insight (incidentally one inspired by his reading of Kant and Schopenhauer) rather than from intelligence alone. This point (on insight vs. intelligence or "percepts" vs. "concepts") is one that Schopenhauer also harps to a great deal (in between his vituperation of Hegel, of course.)
This implies that if it is indeed true that philosophy has much greater impact on the world than programming, it doesn't necessarily imply anything about intelligence of philosophers relative to that of programmers. Indeed, it's quite possibly that some of most influential programmers (in terms of influence on the wider world) aren't always the smartest (consider startup founders, especially for startups solving social/economic/business as opposed to purely technical problems -- not always great programmers -- and their subsequent software specialist hires.)
Orthogonally, sometimes the influence of a programmer can be behind the scenes. Take epistemology for example: if you asked someone how they know something, it's quite possible that their answer might mention Google in some way or another (possibly fallaciously, of course) -- yet few think of Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Craig Silverstein, Sanjay Ghemawat, and Jeff Dean in the same vein as Plato (with his Meno and Theaetetus) when discussing "why is that we say we know know X."
As for Carmack, consider how much virtual reality (and here I am not just thinking Oculus, but even more so the 3D labyrinths of the original ID Software Games) might end up influencing metaphysics in the long run.
Not every point of disagreement is important: not every value has relevance to a family and not every value one holds is equally difficult to compromise. It's more important to agree on things like finances, children, moral/ethical standpoints, etc... than on politics, music, or hobbies and interests.
Likewise, one can feel lonely or empty due to insufficient social contact, wrong kind of social contact, insufficient exercise, or due to physical or psychological conditions.
Healthy empiricism is vital: like you said, our senses are telling us something for a reason (our ancestors wouldn't get far on the savannah if the predator they saw with their eyes was just as likely to be a fantom as the real thing, or if feelings of loneliness or isolation were just as likely to suggest eating more of a certain berry instead of joining a hunter gatherer pack), but it's important examine evidence impartially and in total (like a physician would do) as well as to make falsifiable hypotheses (one can never say "i have this specific pain due to a twisted wrist from an accident" with full certainty, but one can say that this is not the case if the wrist is not fractured in the first place and thus avoid treatment specific to a twisted wrist.)
I'd advice the OP to quantify the social contact one is getting and to describe its qualities (with evidence for and against) and make an action plan that tests the hypothesis, rules out some common alternatives (e.g., if one has family history of depression or physiological conditions like thyroidism, see a doctor first; if one is also not getting insufficient physical exercise, try that as well.) and a fall back plan if those aren't the case (perhaps taking a vacation to see if one needs a change of scenery, going to a conference and talking to others in the industry to see if a different group of colleagues might help.)
One somewhat bad advice I keep hearing is to enter into something that involves a long term commitment (e.g., get a pet, change jobs, or most commonly and more dangerously go to a dating site) as the first and/or only thing to try. All of these things are good and in many case help (e.g., now that I'm married and have two dogs, I find myself feeling less lonely than I did prior to this, even some of my closest friends have moved away recently), but have the tendency to act as short term distractions from a deeper or more difficult problem. It may end up doing little to help or might make things worse in the long term (neglecting a pet, hurting one's long term career, or getting into a codependent relationship) IF done without any reflection beforehand, that is "just because" it seemed at the time that to be the easiest and most obvious thing to do.
Personal thanks to you for both Cap'n Proto and Sandstorm.