alecbz

32 ms·

331.
by alecbz 5y ago
FWIW the libs in abseil existed as internal-only code for a while at Google before they underwent the effort to open source them, and I think it still likely represents just the tip of the iceberg of Google's internal C++ libs.
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by alecbz 5y ago
Is there any language with a type system that enforces that possibly user-provided strings/data are tagged as such and forced to be sanitized before use in potentially dangerous functions? This seems like the kind of thing that if done
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by alecbz 5y ago
> but something like a library to make directory structure As others comments point out, doing this well is subtle and tricky. This is absolutely the kind of thing that individual teams ought not have to maintain their own copies of. Agr
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by alecbz 5y ago
I'm confused: what did the `create_a_directory` helper do before it shelled out to `mkdir -p`? Just a trivial wrapper around the `mkdir` C function?
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by alecbz 5y ago
Ah interesting. I have heard that London has a strong and somewhat unique pub culture. I'm not sure how much this applies elsewhere. Re. the rest though, maybe it's a "you get what you put in" thing to an extent, I think
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by alecbz 5y ago
I mean, one can have whatever view of rights they choose, but many rights are often considered to be contextual. E.g., in the US, you have a right to not have your picture taken indoors, but outside in public spaces you don't have this
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by alecbz 5y ago
OOC how often do other neighbors knock on your door just to say hi/introduce themselves? This seemed somewhat common growing up in the suburbs, but I think has literally never happened in my adult life in a city.
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by alecbz 5y ago
Fair enough. Though you didn't mention the pub, which is what the parent comment started with? OOC roughly whereabouts do you live?
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by alecbz 5y ago
For real, I feel like people throw around "how to make friends" advice that is not at all consistent with how they came to know the actual friends that they have.
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by alecbz 5y ago
I wonder to what extent this actually becomes less of a problem the more people use AWS. At this point AWS being down just feels like "the internet is down", it's hard for customers to be too mad at any company being down w
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Ask HN: Sources of Community?
3 points by alecbz 5y ago|0 comments
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by alecbz 5y ago
Volunteering is nice but I think rarely takes up enough time to be a significant part of one's life. I'm not going to form deep connections with people or feel a deep sense of accomplishment volunteering somewhere for an hour or t
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by alecbz 5y ago
I'd say I think I need a sense of purpose or fulfillment in my life. If you're describing that as a void that needs to be filled, than sure, that's me.
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by alecbz 5y ago
I didn't say anything about putting all my resources into it? Are you saying that a career, uniquely among things one can spend their time on, requires putting all one's resources into it?
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by alecbz 5y ago
"Please Don't Give Up On Having Kids Because Of Climate Change" https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/please-dont-give-up-on...
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by alecbz 5y ago
I've never chased down the source but I'm pretty sure this is bullshit, or at least wildly misunderstood. I believe that: * especially long, unpleasant commutes can be a significant source of unhappiness * shorter commutes are _co
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by alecbz 5y ago
What if working with others and having an impact is what brings me the most fulfillment?
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by alecbz 5y ago
> it possible that everyone has "aphantasia" but some people confuse remembering having seen something with actually seeing it? So FWIW, the way I would describe how I "see" things in my mind is exactly how I'd d
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by alecbz 5y ago
I think this is coming from one particular government department, not all of gov.uk
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by alecbz 5y ago
Something that keeps me from wanting to work for myself is how much I think I value/need to be working with other people. Both just as a form of social interaction, because my work is important to me and thus naturally I find I can con
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by alecbz 5y ago
Sometimes I can't believe that as an industry we've failed to internalize things we've known about for almost half a century. It'd be one thing if there were managers out there actively disputing the ideas in the book, b
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by alecbz 5y ago
OP addressed that: > So the next logical step is to present the Wilson score directly, but this merely shifts the confusion elsewhere -- the user may find an item they're interested in buying, find it has one 5-star review, and yet
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by alecbz 5y ago
This is a fair point but it's not as if knowing with items are actually good is something that should only be available to power users. The real goal ought to be: making sure your customers get access to actually good things. Not merel
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by alecbz 5y ago
I always heard "I don't know how to count that low" as more of a tongue-in-cheek joke about Google's scale, not necessarily a sign of smug superiority, or that work at smaller scales "didn't matter". Like
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by alecbz 5y ago
People need to talk to each other to quickly debug and understand what the problem even is. To understand that the fix is a change to equipment in a data center, and on top of that what that change needs to be, how to make that change safel
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by alecbz 5y ago
Line managers should definitely have technical chops.
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by alecbz 5y ago
This kinda feels like a answering "what does an engineer do all day" with "writes code". Like, ok sure, but that's not the the detail that's interesting. What are you doing in these meetings, how do you help th
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by alecbz 5y ago
Could you really just not have managers in an org that reached a certain size? Past a certain point hierarchies and power structures are going to form, and an explicit management structure is way to make them clear and explicit. I think in
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by alecbz 5y ago
Comments like x = 4 # Sets x to 4 Are of course silly and I'd laugh at them too, but comments when used correctly are hugely valuable. Even a stale comment can be helpful in giving you a sense of what people were trying to do. Do you n
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by alecbz 5y ago
Can you be more specific about the problems? This is some combination of: * Different companies do things differently and you should have some humility about the way things are done here * There's definitely a lot of cruft that can acc

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