johan_larson

9 ms·

31.
by johan_larson 7y ago
Yeah, if fame/status/respect is what you're looking for, astronaut is not a great deal right now. Way to much effort for what you get. But that's not the only reason to pursue the profession.
32.
by johan_larson 7y ago
It's not quite a monopoly. Small-time online personalities can choose at least between YouTube and Twitch right now for video. I expect there are a few less popular platforms, too. Anyone care to comment on which ones?
33.
by johan_larson 7y ago
So, if I want to buy a bottle of water in this bold new future, it will have to be a glass bottle?
34.
by johan_larson 7y ago
Not too surprising. Organizations expect loyalty of their members, and particularly of their more senior members. Open protest, such as organizing a walkout, is an act of disloyalty, so it's not surprising that Claire suffered for what
35.
by johan_larson 7y ago
I wonder why some of those very senior engineers don't leave. Anyone who got to Senior Staff or Principal at Google has some very impressive accomplishments to their name. Transitioning to a CTO role in a smaller company wouldn't
36.
by johan_larson 7y ago
Google didn't invent whiteboard interviews. Microsoft was doing it way back in the early nineties.
37.
by johan_larson 7y ago
It's entirely possible that this state of things will continue. Google will continue to be a/the leader in online ad sales, and periodically they will try to expand into some other lines of business, never with any particular succ
38.
by johan_larson 7y ago
That's my take, too. Google is good at designing and building software systems. They are also just fine at running them. Where they tend to have trouble is sales and customer support. I expect that's a product of where they had th
39.
by johan_larson 7y ago
One drink a day is quite a bit of drinking compared to what I consider normal, and the difference between 914/100,000 and 918/100,000 is small. I'd say the advice that you can drink in light or moderate amounts without any si
40.
by johan_larson 7y ago
How are these strip-shops able to resell the heavily debt-burdened companies they create? That's the part I don't get.
41.
by johan_larson 7y ago
Yeah, "reading socks" sounds sort of like "lovemaking hat'. Huh? Why would you need one?
42.
by johan_larson 7y ago
Glad to hear they're finding a way to make money. My impression is that Indigo is a seller of physical books at a time when reading is increasingly going online, so they are turning into an odds-and-ends store for the people Stuff Whit
43.
by johan_larson 8y ago
The one reason that comes to mind is that doing it implicitly lets you use structures in terms of interfaces even when those structures come from codebases you don't control . Suppose Bob's codebase has a structure implA that impl
44.
by johan_larson 8y ago
Yes, the pattern isn't useful for function calls that return results that are used as parameters in later function calls, which tends to happen all the time.
45.
by johan_larson 8y ago
No. Based on what I've read, it seems to be Slightly Different Java. Is there some important difference?
46.
by johan_larson 8y ago
When I had the opportunity to choose, I felt I could find useful ways of doing things. The problem was that I often had to accommodate myself to someone else's choices that had been made years before, and I had to understand what the h
47.
by johan_larson 8y ago
I don't know. I've worked in three different languages for years on end, and they all have different pain points. C++ is too complicated, and generics are part of that complexity. Java has an ok basic language, but the ecosystem i
48.
by johan_larson 8y ago
Well, yeah, the Europeans have good work-life balance. But that comes at a price. European rates for software developers are way below what they are the US. Also, there are far fewer big opportunities. There simply aren't any FAANG-tie
49.
by johan_larson 8y ago
Yes, that was definitely over the line for the Soviet Union to demand that Finland hand over a buffer zone. But in fairness the soviets did have some reason for concern. Finland had historic ties with Germany. Germany had helped the non-com
50.
by johan_larson 8y ago
At Google, hires had to be approved by the founders as of 2013. This was when the company was hiring a few hundred people per week, so the founders got a spreadsheet with links or something like that. And apparently they did sometimes say n
51.
by johan_larson 8y ago
Not all of us are in a position to work only on great products. My impression of Oracle products is that they are frustrating to work with, feature-rich rather than elegant. They can work well, but take a lot of configuring and tuning. The
52.
by johan_larson 8y ago
Number 6 on the Forbes list of software companies, with a market cap of 176 billion. Their main product is very heavily used by a heck of a lot of companies. It's just a bit messy and configuration-intensive, so it doesn't get a l
53.
by johan_larson 8y ago
We need a Pants on Fire emoji. Or maybe a Pinocchio Nose .
54.
by johan_larson 8y ago
That's fine. But there aren't a lot of people like you, and only a few places in the US are a good fit for that kind of lifestyle. It really only works in the densest hearts of the biggest cities, like New York and Chicago, and th
55.
by johan_larson 8y ago
Yeah, I don't know why anyone would tie themselves to public transit in the US if they had a decent job. US public transit is for people too old, too young, or too poor to have a car, and for people commuting into very dense areas that
56.
by johan_larson 8y ago
Rust, maybe. I'm not particularly leading edge myself, so I've heard of it but never actually tried it.
57.
by johan_larson 8y ago
You don't say how much you already know about software. I'll assume you know little or nothing. Advice for an already proficient programmer would be different. Your bio background will definitely count for something at biotech com
58.
by johan_larson 8y ago
Girls-choose seems to be a workable solution. Assuming an event is suitable for men and women in a roughly even mix, the women get together in a preliminary event to choose the guys they want from a list of candidates.
59.
by johan_larson 8y ago
Jobs had a steady job at Atari before he left to start Apple. I seem to remember he offered the first version of the Apple I (or maybe II?) to HP while he was there, but they turned him down.
60.
by johan_larson 8y ago
This is too weird to go mainstream as is, but perhaps some aspect of it could be Starbucksed for the mainstream.

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