thearn4

Alternative outcomes of WW1 represent some of the most interesting "What if?"s of the history of the 20th century.

It's a fascinating conflict to read about, since it seemingly could have gone either way up to nearly the end of the war. Compare that to WW2, where by late 1942 I think it was more or less clear that the axis powers would not be winning on the offensive, and it became more of a question of how absolute the end would be (armistice vs surrender).

WW1 also lacks as clear of a "good" vs. "bad" narrative as the WW2 has, which makes it complex, and complex history is typically more interesting to me.

Obligatory shout out to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast. It's not a perfect academic take on the topics he covers, but he weaves a good story.

> I was brought in for an iOS app development job interview

> A couple of the interviewers said they weren't too familiar with Objective-C either, so I clearly wasn't getting interviewed by their iOS teams.

Google's onboarding process is such an enigma to me. I went through a few of the remote interviews for SWE a few years back (I didn't commit to an on-site one in mountain view though). It seemed very odd to me that, near as I could tell, they don't really give an indication about what you would be working on until after you are hired and oriented.

I use supervisord a lot as well, though I actually had issues getting it up and running on the latest Ubuntu. It seems that it isn't enabled immediately after installation via apt-get, but has to be manually enabled. Minor hiccup, but a small pain.

edit: specifically, I think this was my issue: https://github.com/Supervisor/supervisor/issues/735

which seems to be patched now.

I've had similar experiences at some hackathon events. The local Startup Weekend event a few years ago was similar, but in some ways that is more predictably skewed to who can give the best pitch, so that one didn't rub me quite so bad.

Along the same lines, there were a few local meetups where people were going to plan some ideas for innovative uses for public data sets, and what kind of data we should try and get released from the city & county. The whole thing ended up getting de-railed by non-tech "thought leader in a turtleneck" consultant types giving their personal pitches to market their brand, and nothing solid came out of that. Those who were interested in building something formed a separate group and went their own way.

At the risk of sounding like a delicate snowflake, I would really enjoy more "tech events for people who really want to get their hands dirty".

How is the trackpad on the surface pro line compared to Macs? Its something that I care about now that I never used to until I started using Macs more.

Same, still running a 2012 13" MBA. I recently replaced the battery, but it's still doing the job as my primary personal machine.

I'm considering getting a new machine in the coming year, but also don't feel like its critical that I do it.

Sadly, that describes more than a few EEs and MEs that I've worked with in the past. Where the act of turning a key in a commercial software package starts to displace practical design considerations that they learned in the classroom.

Quite a few potentially:

http://imgur.com/a/ebvfk

What were the technical buzzwords that companies used to signal hotness in the industry before the ML hype train (startup or not)?

I know on the process & management side for large organizations, there's been a revolving door of Lean/Agile/6 Sigma/ISO 9000, each with their own set of certifications, colored belts, and army of advisors/consultants.

I like the idea of always being retrospective and asking what can be improved, but it's made me a bit cynical seeing management chase fads based on whatever a vendor tells them.

> So you can imagine having your app in Java, but still call Python for something else if you really wanted too.

That's a pretty interesting possibility, I might tinker with this. I don't mind Java, but vastly prefer Python+numpy+scipy for technical computing and algorithmic experimentation. Java for the GUI/platform specific stuff with the creative stuff in Python works well for some side projects that I've done. In those cases, I interfaced them via REST API to a server, then later translated to pure Java.

Like others have said, when Google Reader disappeared I stopped following RSS feeds directly, and moved to aggregators like HN and Reddit.

Great information, thank you for sharing!

I can't help but also mentioning that I'm not a big fan of the scroll-jacking script on the site, but I guess some designers have an affinity for it.

I think some of the physical engineering disciplines are at least partially gate-kept and signal applicant value through membership to professional organizations and certifications (FE & PE exams, etc.)

Top Secret clearance invesigations cost about $60k back around 2005ish when I was in the military. They might be a bit more expensive now.

Finances are, in fact, one of the things that are scrutinized very carefully. Susceptibility to bribes is a major indicator of security risk.

Sadly, we have some annual mandatory web-based training modules that use web applets in my workplace.

> CS

> engineers

I think it's important to realize that these are two different things. One is a formal research science, the other deals with practical problem-solving and implementations.

Your typical software engineer likely has a CS degree, but CS researchers and software engineers are two separate populations. Sometimes the same person will do both, but usually not at the same time in their life or for the same organization.

edit: for example, you don't even need a computer to learn computer science fundamentals. A notebook or deck of playing cards will do fine.

But isn't CS one of the formal sciences (together with mathematics, statistics, etc.)? Familiarity with mathematical notation should be pretty foundational for active researchers in the field I would think.

Trefethen & Bau's "Numerical Linear Algebra" is a pretty good primer, though the last few chapters I remember being a bit lacking (it's been about 6 years though).

I ran a debian-based distro on a Lenovo thinkpad in graduate school from 2008 to about 2011. I had basically the same experience. Everything worked 95% of the time, but that other 5% felt entirely random and pretty dehabilitating.

Now I use a mix of Win, OS X, and Ubuntu depending on what I am trying to accomplish. I make heavy use of Linux servers, but have no inclination of using one as a primary end-user desktop environment again.

These two lists made a lot more sense to me than the "most popular technologies" category. Which I think should be worded "Most common languages for questions" or something along those lines.

But like others have said, I need to double check that I'm not living in a bubble while the rest of the technical world openly and not-ironically loves javascript.

Same, I'll be 55. My son will be 23. Either our generation fixes it, or his generation will have to fix it in their first jobs out of college (sorry kids!)

> they need driverless cars. That's ten years away

Honestly even that seems way overly optimistic in my opinion, if we're talking about R&D + regulatory acceptance & general adoption.

Great article. The FFT and it's many applications (especially convolution-based ones such as matched filtering) is one of my favorite algorithms, and possibly one of the more important ones developed in the 20th century.

I'd put the Simplex method as a close 2nd.

This rings true. I just fixed our 5-year old Kenmore fridge - a 15A glass fuse blew after a storm. Of course it is soldered into the power control board directly without a housing, and the manufacturer lists it as an unserviceable part. They'll only sell the control board as a whole unit for $200+.

Despite that, a few minutes with a soldering iron and a trip to home depot, it's fine now (and has a proper fuse holder to boot). I think people are going to have to learn to get more comfortable hacking their appliances moving forward.

This reminds me of a 4chan greentext story, but I can't seem to put my finger on which one.

It seems reasonable to me. Certainly, even if you don't get all of the questions correctly, this exam tells you more about the proficiency of a candidate than a standard graduate school exam like the GRE (in the US) does. Especially if a student can explain some reasoning for incomplete problems.

Some number theory, linear algebra, calculus of variations, combinatorics, etc. From the applied math side of things, it isn't terribly deep. It's actually right about what I would expect from an applied math student who was good at the undergraduate level and ready to study at a competitive university.

For general admissions for any discipline though, I'll agre it's probably a bit rough for non applied math grads. At least it doesn't include any analysis, abstract algebra (groups, rings, fields, etc.), or topology. Which would be murder for non-math majors.

Appropriation of eastern asian (particularly Japanese) cultural terms is an odd trend in the American tech community. I cringe a bit every time I see a listing for a Java/Javascript/.NET/$LANGUAGE "ninja", "samurai", or "sensei".

I know it's not done to be offensive, and maybe defended by saying "we're just honoring their culture" or something like that. It's just kind of awkward, can't we agree on that at least?

To be clear, I grew up in Cleveland and have been listening to a comparable debate my entire life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleveland_Indians_name_and_log...

This is exactly why I use Tinfoil for Facebook on my android phone. It's just a webview around FB's mobile site.

I do believe that this is true, but I can't help but also believe that the timelines that the tech community has in mind are absolutely too optimistic. I think like many promising innovations (AI, VR, etc.) it will have periods of rapid innovation followed by contraction and lull, repeated many times until general adoption is realized.