candu

14 ms·

91.
by candu 6y ago
That's the good old Pareto principle for you: the last few percent are going to take a lot more effort than the first 95%. More to the point, this falls into the category of safety-critical systems, with the added wrinkle of potentia
92.
by candu 6y ago
Exactly. If we're willing to settle for "as good as a human" in autonomous vehicles, then IMHO all this expertise, R&D, time, effort, money, etc. would be better spent on the public transit and/or active mobility sol
93.
by candu 6y ago
To put that in context: 1 cubic foot of flour is 37 lbs; of sugar, 50 lbs; of water, 62 lbs. If you've ever tried to pick up a sack / large bucket of any of these things, it's like that but even denser. Compound that by the
94.
by candu 6y ago
Also not affiliated with them, and have been very satisfied so far. OTOH, I'm in Canada, and I've only used them for personal transfers. I have no idea how they perform for businesses, nor do I know whether they work well for ind
95.
by candu 6y ago
Some ideas: 1. Prepare for meetings - set aside 10-15 min to go over any background info, agenda items, etc. Take notes as you prepare, so you can consult them during the meeting. 2. If something comes to you during the meeting but you don
96.
by candu 7y ago
Yeah, I wish that science reporting would either a) mention specifics on methodology or b) link directly to papers. Without this plus a stronger push for open-access publishing, readers often have absolutely no way to verify claims like thi
97.
by candu 7y ago
...except that, in said dark ages, that got people executed for treason or witchcraft or what have you. Here, it could very well save lives. Many democratic governments have tried voluntary restrictions - some people are complying, but oth
98.
by candu 7y ago
Also in Canada here, albeit the big-city part - our telecommunications sector is uniquely bad in terms of bandwidth / service for value and consumer choice. We have organizations like Internet Society Canada ( https://interne
99.
by candu 7y ago
OTOH, I'd love to see the mental / rhetorical gymnastics demanded of our politicians to defend tech companies from large fines associated with privacy violations while simultaneously excoriating those same companies over privacy v
100.
by candu 7y ago
There's an assumption here that one can easily self-learn to self-study. It might be true for some proportion of HN readers, but it's not clear that this generalizes. After all, those of us who self-study are often learning progr
101.
by candu 7y ago
Speaking as someone with Asperger's who considers himself both a good programmer and capable of navigating / leading cross-functional prioritization discussions, and who likes knowing the context behind his work: maybe you shoul
102.
by candu 7y ago
This is a great point in general: sometimes the problem isn't an adversary using knowledge in your field against you, it's the unintended consequences of progress / changes in adjacent fields. It also underscores that, when d
103.
by candu 7y ago
IMHO it's a good idea to learn things at different points on the adoption curve - learning to balance "cutting edge" with "already widespread, I just haven't used it" helps in making good judgments about tool s
104.
by candu 7y ago
The thing that jumps out at me about HTTP/2: even if your browser can send N parallel requests for different entities, you're still making N database queries and incurring N request overheads. This means that every layer of your s
105.
by candu 7y ago
Similar to many of the other comments here: you should figure out what "success" means to you. It's easy to make the default assumption that success means lots of money and long working hours, at which point you've defi
106.
by candu 7y ago
To add to this: a common problem with these projects is that, even though the requirements are vast and extremely hard to pin down, stakeholders insist on pinning them down up-front anyways because that's how it's always been done
107.
by candu 7y ago
The point here isn't about structured vs. unstructured logging: it's about addressing the possibility that legitimate users get blamed for theft. This sort of dispute is probably going to end up in a legal forum at some point.
108.
by candu 7y ago
Not sure how they do it exactly, but one possibility is CCTV cameras watching drop-off locations. You can then compare footage at the timestamp it was reported on-location if there's a dispute. Combine this with a few anti-theft proce
109.
by candu 7y ago
...which is the value of robust systems designed to limit the impact these people can have. This is precisely why mechanisms like separation of powers and whistleblower protections matter. This is also why social conventions around honesty
110.
by candu 7y ago
From [1], a terse one-liner that outperformed many longer and more complicated entries in The Second International RoShamBo Programming Competition: int henny() { return((*opp_history?opp_history[random()%*opp_history+1]+1:rando
111.
by candu 7y ago
This particular argument? Not as phrased, no. The main point often raised around the right to bear arms is that, as currently interpreted in the US, it comes at a steep cost in homicides and suicides. Encryption doesn't really have co
112.
by candu 7y ago
Don't have separate get / set functions? async function changeBalance(account, amt) { /* * BEGIN; * * UPDATE accounts * SET balance = balance - amt * WHERE id = ${id
113.
by candu 7y ago
Your general point is solid, but one quibble with the numbers - even the pricing page has an "enterprise" tier "for very large businesses". There's no way a company with 5000 Slack users is paying the sticker pric
114.
by candu 7y ago
It's almost as though...we as a society continually assess whether the harm from some activity exceeds benefit, and react accordingly? Or maybe we're starting to expect that people building things have responsibility to foresee po
115.
by candu 7y ago
Fair point: sometimes things are, in fact, bad enough that a rewrite is warranted. IMHO, this is where the "senior engineer" mantle becomes less about engineering and more about interpersonal / organization-navigational skil
116.
by candu 7y ago
For database testing, I often use a "ramdisk", or in-memory filesystem: sudo mount -t ramfs -o size=512m ramfs /path/to/mount/point, initdb, pg_ctl start. (There's a bit more bookkeeping to generate passw
117.
by candu 7y ago
Perhaps...people are assessing this offer and deciding it doesn't, in fact, have strictly better expected value? The prevailing wisdom is that equity grants have an expected value near zero. Once the prospective hire also factors in t
118.
by candu 7y ago
Have a home garden, don't really use much of 1) or 2), and we get enough rain throughout most of the growing season that usage of 3) is pretty light - on the order of "we water the garden for 1-2 minutes once every 2 weeks or so,
119.
by candu 7y ago
Ah - the goal is not necessarily the choice / freedom of readers, but that of other writers who might be drowned out, intimidated, or otherwise coerced into silence. When this happens across a large and popular enough cross-section o
120.
by candu 7y ago
Among other things, it enriches private prison operators through exploitation of indentured labour, disproportionately incarcerates low-income / racialized people on non-violent drug offenses, costs the average US household nearly $170

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