kabdib

23 ms·

271.
by kabdib 4y ago
Interviewing is absolutely terrifying. I've been a software engineer for over 40 years and I still get the shakes. And freeze. It sucks hard. Don't worry about the degree. After ten years (even after five) it doesn't matter.
272.
by kabdib 4y ago
I recently interviewed for an embedded position, and had a set of similar questions. The right answer is, of course, "It depends". If you've got 6 bytes of free code space and/or you're scrambling for RAM, you look
273.
by kabdib 4y ago
One wrinkle I liked was to build a monolith, distributing the same bits everywhere, and to configure the actual services to start on an instance-by-instance basis. This simplifies distribution (e.g., "unpack this single zip file, it&#x
274.
by kabdib 4y ago
The classic one is with yacc, where your user is looking at a message like "syntax error" instead of "Missing comma, foo.p line 23". IIRC you could improve yacc error messages but you had to modify the grammar, and it us
275.
by kabdib 4y ago
I think that platforms like Reddit and Twitter have been designed and tuned to keep people in "violent agreement". I found myself engaging in conversations that ultimately were just a time sink. I have better things to do with my
276.
by kabdib 4y ago
A week ago I deleted my Twitter account. Today I'm deleting my Reddit account. I'm keeping Facebook simply to stay in touch with family and a few friends, otherwise it would definitely go. I'm on the fence about HN, but it
277.
by kabdib 4y ago
Unless it's for something specialized (CV, machine learning, etc.) then an advanced degree doesn't seem likely to help, career-wise. For personal growth, sure. But it probably won't open much up or affect your pay. I've
278.
by kabdib 4y ago
Maybe. But to get it to stop, you have to make politicians care more about the actual humanitarian issues than the money they get from special interests.
279.
by kabdib 4y ago
Not all screwdrivers, drills, saws, or computer languages serve equally well for all purposes.
280.
by kabdib 4y ago
The cultural fragmentation of TODO tags is worse than their inaccuracy. I use the classic TODO, BUGBUG and my own (the last one is usually 'xxx' for brevity, and never in checked in to a public branch). That's it. Life is too
281.
by kabdib 4y ago
A cow-orker of mine was maintaining several sizes of notebooks. "I use small notebooks for small ideas," he said, "This medium notebook [holding up a 8x11" sketch pad] for medium-size ideas. At home I have a notebook as
282.
by kabdib 4y ago
Colorblind person here. This is unplayable. I'm actually pretty amused at how hard I failed at this one. 5% to 7% of the male population (and about 1% of the female population) has some form of color perception issue. If you are doing
283.
by kabdib 4y ago
I have often wondered if baked clay tablets are the most cost-effective, durable medium we've invented, in dollars per bit-year. Yeah, you can do archival diamond, or archival ink on archival paper. But will you be able to read it 1,00
284.
by kabdib 4y ago
GoDaddy leaked my account's email address about ten years ago. Contacting GoDaddy support resulted in absolutely no response. (My guess is an unreported breach). Also: Do not ever give a non-throwaway email (or worse, your phone number
285.
by kabdib 5y ago
I had to read that a lot more carefully than I wanted in order to figure out that it wasn't about something that was terribly interesting. (I'm not impressed with Puppet, having had to wade through its innards from time to time. P
286.
by kabdib 5y ago
Nice. I used to maintain an ACM membership (when I wasn't working for a company that provided their Digital Library access), and going through the most recent SIGs and things like Computing Surveys were a critical part of my continuing
287.
by kabdib 5y ago
Not when you have a deadline and your stuff is behind, you don't :-) Happily, it was better than that. Most of these courses were online, and you could just let the videos of actors working through scenarios run in the background and t
288.
by kabdib 5y ago
I spent a couple weeks finding a similar bug, a one instruction window where a hardware "wake up" register could get a stale value if an interrupt-and-reschedule happened at just the right instruction. The fix was to swap two inst
289.
by kabdib 5y ago
"F equals MA and you can't push a rope" will get you though cow-college freshman physics. Not murdering your lab partner helps, too. :-)
290.
by kabdib 5y ago
So far this appears to be a "choose your own difficulty" game. I've deliberately chosen to "git gud" at melee, since I've always sucked at melee. Could level to 99 and just blast through things, but where is th
291.
by kabdib 5y ago
You are correct. I will retract my statement.
292.
by kabdib 5y ago
I disagree with some of their requirements for open source licenses, and will continue to call the code that I have open sourced over the years as "open source" despite them. Their attempt to occupy the term is a little offensive.
293.
by kabdib 5y ago
I just searched for some works by authors I like (some well known, some pretty obscure). Amazon's search results seem better than they were a year ago, when I last tried this; back then it seemed like the results were half promotional
294.
by kabdib 5y ago
Considering you will not be able to exercise your skills in your profession, and that skills rot , even a "paid year-long vacation" is not a good deal for the employee.
295.
by kabdib 5y ago
Thomas Bass' book The Eudamonic Pie describes a project by some people from UC Santa Cruz who did computer-assisted timing analysis of roulette wheels, and did pretty well at applying it (for a while). This was in the late 1970s or e
296.
by kabdib 5y ago
Looks like they removed the fuel in 2013. That's good. Huh, how often have nuclear reactors been in a theatre of war? Is this the first time?
297.
by kabdib 5y ago
NewEgg tolerates serially fraudulent third party sellers. Until they clean that up, I won't be spending any more money on their site. At least I have a chance of recovering my money from Amazon (or a physical purchase from Best Buy).
298.
by kabdib 5y ago
Nice to know :-)
299.
by kabdib 5y ago
Just read through some COPPA stuff. It looks like you could comply with a simple checkbox for "I am over <magic age>", which would be less information for the panopticon. I'm no lawyer and can't say whether Googl
300.
by kabdib 5y ago
Or a fake "welcome to thunderdome" generator . . .

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