mechanical_fish

10 ms·

31.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
Absolutely. There is nothing wrong with the interview that you describe. You are learning exactly what you need to learn. Better to learn it today than six weeks into the job. It is important to be polite, though, so to make it out of the
32.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
Years of someone's life versus government operating expenses? Have you spent much time on jury duty? Hanging out in a room full of prospective jurors, some of whom are literally praying for the day's cases to get settled before
33.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
It's the "replacement principle". Alice and Bob are co-founders. Bob gets hit by a bus and goes on disability for N months; he's out of the picture. The company must now replace Bob. Does it have the resources to do th
34.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
First-year computer science sounds like a lot of work. I've been told, at various times, that every first-year CS student should know Java, Python, C, assembly, data structures, algorithms, operating systems, and compilers. I guess the
35.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
Apple incorporated most of these patterns into Cocoa and Cocoa Touch. Great! That means I could just learn to work with Cocoa and Cocoa Touch and skip the tedious exposition. I would try to explain why I've never been able to pick up
36.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
But our grandfathers' Space Corps existed, and still exists [1]. And it stood strong. It's just that the force it stood against was the United States and NATO (or, from the opposite perspective, the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pac
37.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
I call upon the over-the-top stylings of professionally trained chef Alton Brown: http://youtu.be/iKkf9YYwmGQ ... to explain, kinda painfully, that you can't use a sharp knife on a stone counter or you'll dull the
38.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
It's not that simple, at all. From my Pinboard archives (what would I do without Pinboard?): http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/magazine/what-anesthesi... For every 1,000 people who undergo gener
39.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
A quick search for "locked-in syndrome" turns up this citation: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16186044 "It has been shown that more than half of the time it is the family and not the physician who f
40.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
Nationalizing the health care industry is itself fraught, though. I wonder: How much would our national dental health improve if we merely offered universal coverage for the simple stuff: cleanings, photographs, and X-rays? The standard o
41.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
Depression is an illness. If the guy had died of cancer, would you be reading so much into his decision to "let himself go"? (I confess I find this turn of phrase so repugnant that I can barely bring myself to type it, even inside
42.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
The core of the story is that the aliens can't accept the notion of a meat-based lifeform. The idea that they might not just be wrong, but also in serious denial, is a cute twist. Have you really never encountered an intelligent life
43.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
It's a story about squick. The aliens aren't merely having trouble grasping the concept. They are revolted by the concept. Indeed, as you've noticed, their revulsion appears to be the thing which prevents them from gettin
44.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
Don't be fooled by the huge apparent "supply". That's like counting up all the five-paragraph essays and unsold screenplays in the world and concluding that we have an oversupply of great writing. What we have is a huge
45.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
Any rule of thumb as general as the one I proposed is bound to have exceptions. For one, when the tenants know each other and have formed a consortium to allow their data to be aggregated, it's not the kind of "multi-tenant"
46.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
Twenty-first century rule of thumb: If the single-tenant architecture is the thing that you build first, because it's less effort, you should probably never bother with multi-tenant, unless a truly compelling rationale appears. VPSes a
47.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
No, your second sentence is factually incorrect (except for the first clause, of course). Don't let the fact that you're not interested in building a business fool you into thinking that building a business is more difficult than
48.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
This can happen and I wouldn't call it unusual. (Companies do this to interviewees all the time, let alone consultants. That is rude. You're supposed to tell a candidate if they're moving forward or not, because many cand
49.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
Do postdocs ever end in your field, or can you build an entire forty-year career out of a succession of three-year postdoctoral appointments? If you can work as a postdoc forever, can you do this with confidence? Which is to say, what are t
50.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
Most of the time, the factually correct answer to "why did you choose to work with Language X?" is "because when I arrived on the job, the existing software was implemented in X". Is that a well-reasoned opinion? "I
51.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
Here's some answers that meet your criteria: They answer the question, they give a reason, and you might disagree with it. "My favorite language is Haskell because it lets me reason about the correctness of my program before I eve
52.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
Accounting isn't always intuitive, but in this case I believe it is: His liability for the chicken is $25, because what he owes you is not "a chicken", but "$25 worth of chicken". To see this, imagine what happens
53.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
If you think that's bad, don't get me started on chairs and desks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=105026 (Incidentally, since writing that N years ago a physical therapist talked me out of the Aeron, which
54.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
You should absolutely rebind Caps Lock to Ctrl. I guess it's time once again to mention the Kinesis Advantage keyboard on HN. You can rebind every key. You can rebind control and meta to keys that are under your thumbs, and put one cop
55.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
Yes, my company has used SurePayroll and it works exactly like this. They charge fees, as well as presumably making some money on the float. The fee is around $40 per month (per employee, I suspect) and it is money well spent. There are pai
56.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
You don't have to make hiring decisions based on the result, but you can use it to narrow the five or ten you want to interview. It may or may not be wise to reject 95% of your applicants out of hand based on a psychological test [1]
57.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
The fully-loaded cost of a full-time Rails programmer is, let's say, $15k per month. An Amazon m3.large with 7.5GB of RAM and a 32GB SSD costs $64 per month if I reserve a year in advance. (And why wouldn't I, given that the propo
58.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
Okay, I'll take your word for it. Let me put on a different hat and try a different tack. --- This is the best time in your life to go to college. It will be harder to go back, later. But you're wasting your limited college ti
59.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
As you may have realized, any adult older than forty went through college back when it was lots cheaper and students routinely graduated with job offers in hand. You may be wise to discount our advice. I wouldn't spend fifty or a hun
60.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
A zeroth-order argument for the utility of modern painkillers: you can take acetaminophen and ibuprofen at the same time for "twice" the effect, without either risking deadly liver poisoning from acetaminophen overdose, or stressi

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