nickm12

26 ms·

301.
by nickm12 7y ago
This is a good attitude. Promotion is not just "more of the same" but is really moving to a different job and it may not be a job you like better. That said, people want to get promoted largely for some combination of increased st
302.
by nickm12 7y ago
I'm a 43 year old software engineer. I definitely do not have the ability to focus on coding (and mathematics) the way I did 20 years ago. It's difficult to describe why exactly, but it's sort of like my ability to reason for
303.
by nickm12 7y ago
Came back from the link to leave the same comment. It's impossible to use that selector.
304.
by nickm12 7y ago
It's technically correct, but let's not cheapen the word moon for this rock. "Natural satellite" will do.
305.
by nickm12 7y ago
The gripe was not that it doesn't work well on Windows. It was about a culture of not caring about getting details right or valuing correctness. Windows was just used as an example of not caring about correctness. The time API was anot
306.
by nickm12 7y ago
I abandoned iOS when Apple made the decision to limit the programming languages you could use to write apps in (the infamous "section 3.3.1" change in 2010 that was quickly backtracked). That was probably the high water mark for c
307.
by nickm12 7y ago
> If Python 2.6/7 had a mode like -b... Agreed. This was a major mistake in the migration story for Py3. They bet on the static translation approach of 2to3, which is just inappropriate for a dynamic language like Python. Better to
308.
by nickm12 7y ago
I'm not an economist, but this seems like a strange index. Is job quality really binary? Are pay and hours sufficient to make a binary determination? Without analyzing the data, it seems like a proxy for income inequality. If salaries
309.
by nickm12 7y ago
Python is too dynamic to do a source-to-source compilation that works 100% of the time. Yes, you can get 80% there or maybe even 90% there, but the last 10% is a killer. For a small program, you can stop all development, certify the progra
310.
by nickm12 7y ago
I agree with the sentiment; this message is quite long for an invalid character in a file. House style in the companies I've worked for is to include a link to a bug report and or code review that provides more context for those who wa
311.
by nickm12 7y ago
2to3 is such a small part of the solution. It only takes care of basic stuff, but to really get things right you need to know the types.
312.
by nickm12 7y ago
I'm all for mountain climbers climbing mountains, hackers hacking systems, and people otherwise doing it "because it's there". But when I read the developer's blog post, it sounds like he thinks this thing is going
313.
by nickm12 7y ago
My money is on C++ as the winner for "language which supports the most number of these patterns".
314.
by nickm12 7y ago
+1. Another benefit of rapid releases is being able to release major refactors behind feature gates. This approach was taken when Mozilla shipped an mp4 parser written in Rust [1]. By having rapid release cycles, they could spend a cycle
315.
by nickm12 7y ago
Right. Desktop software is also much more difficult to QA than server software because of the lack of control over the environment and the difficulty of rollback.
316.
by nickm12 7y ago
Can you give concrete examples? For the software I use that is on a rapid release schedule, (Firefox, Chrome, Dropobox, probably others I'm not even aware of) I don't notice any sort of quality issue. The only "pain in the b
317.
by nickm12 7y ago
It's a decade too late to be saying so, but the Python foundation really missed the boat by not developing a version of the Py2 CPython interpreter that was instrumented to support straddling code. The 2to3 approach of statically trans
318.
by nickm12 7y ago
Continuing to support a fork of Py2 is something that large companies can do. But the third-party ecosystem is also going to be lost. It's really not feasible.
319.
by nickm12 7y ago
The social networks weren't the ones who made RSS die off. The base of publishers and users just wasn't there. That said, RSS is not dead, just not as visible as it used to be.
320.
Why does Rust not optimize code assuming that mutable references cannot alias?(stackoverflow.com)
13 points by nickm12 7y ago|1 comments
321.
by nickm12 7y ago
With RSU (restricted stock units) the price is not given; the number of shares is. Basically, you are granted a number of shares to vest on a particular date (the vest date is the date the shares are yours). For public companies, the vest d
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by nickm12 7y ago
This is a really poor article with a click-bait headline. I was expecting this to be a case study where Python type annotations just couldn't work due to some interesting specifics of the projects. Instead, it's some petty gripes
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by nickm12 7y ago
> Python has always been Guido van Rossum's language regardless of who he worked for at the time. (from the article) I think the high-level point that Python has not been tied to a company is true, but it's not been true that P
324.
by nickm12 8y ago
Totally agree with what you say about multiple choice programming tests. I have a PhD in computer science and have worked as a programmer for over a decade. For fun, I took a practice AP CS exam with my son, which had similar multiple choic
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by nickm12 8y ago
Programming competitions are to programming as fencing is to sword-fighting. I'm not trying to denegrate people who compete in programming competitions—they require hard work and talent like any competition, but it is a very specific s
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by nickm12 8y ago
> Solving CS trivia, technical puzzles, riddles, brainteasers... I never know what people are talking about when they complain about brainteasers and riddles. In my career, I've interviewed at Amazon (x2), Google (x2), Apple, Facebo
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by nickm12 8y ago
The argument for "flat" is that management is waste and unnecessary process—you should just give smart people rein to attack your problems. This notion is idealistic and appeals to people who have been burned by bureaucracies, but
328.
by nickm12 8y ago
I think it is just the opposite. Principal engineers are PEs because they don't want to manage people but instead be responsible for technical systems. That said, I've seen PEs be managers of small teams (~4-5 engineers) for shor
329.
by nickm12 8y ago
It's worth mentioning that the level of "principal engineer" means different things at different companies. Some companies have "principal" and "sr. principal" while others have "staff" and &quot
330.
by nickm12 8y ago
This is a very common industry term and I've never been in an organization where it was considered condescending. It's mostly synonymous with "non-manager" and seems much preferable to that.

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