rwallace

72 ms·

751.
by rwallace 11y ago
Then you've known a manager who was mature and professional enough to place the welfare of the company above her own ego. Such managers should be the norm; unfortunately the actual state of affairs is that they are rare and precious.
752.
by rwallace 11y ago
I occasionally check my spam folder; it's been years since I've seen a false positive. Though certainly 'I've previously had an email conversation with this person' should override any spam detecting heuristics.
753.
by rwallace 11y ago
Paying the rent on a building takes extra work. Keeping the roof in good repair so it doesn't leak takes extra work. Maintaining an atmosphere of 14% oxygen takes extra work. Just because we call it maintaining existing stuff instead o
754.
by rwallace 11y ago
Because life is about tradeoffs. Optimising for criterion A mean sacrificing the opportunity to optimise for criterion B. And there are far more important criteria than programming languages for which to optimise choice of employer.
755.
by rwallace 11y ago
In my opinion, it is wrong to sit on a scarce resource that you didn't create and are not using, thereby preventing anyone else making use of it. Wine and art are dissimilar cases because they can be created in as large a quantity as
756.
by rwallace 11y ago
1) Most start-ups fail. If you join that start-up and it fails, leaving you looking for another job, are you okay with that? Is that an outcome you can live with? 2) Chronic stress is very bad. Can you set aside your philosophy and avoid st
757.
by rwallace 11y ago
Speaking as someone who self-identifies as a pragmatic libertarian, if I were in charge, the way I would try to help the 99% would start with getting rid of a lot of ways the law supports rent-seeking behaviour by corporations and the wealt
758.
by rwallace 11y ago
Iraq was a clusterfuck, there's no doubt about that, but the current situation there is that American aircraft are among the few things keeping a whole lot more people from being enslaved or murdered by the Isis thugs. So while there a
759.
by rwallace 11y ago
It's perfectly reasonable to say that in the future, human pilots won't be dogfighting, that's the job of missiles and drones, the human's job is to exercise tactical control close enough to not need satellite links. But
760.
by rwallace 11y ago
Actually, aluminum manufacturing is a perfect use case for solar, because it doesn't mind intermittency. (Or put another way, manufacturing energy intensive stuff is a perfect way to provide the storage that solar needs.)
761.
by rwallace 11y ago
I'm curious; can you point to any references?
762.
by rwallace 11y ago
What about contract jobs or consulting work? If you're not an employee, maybe you could skip the HR BS.
763.
by rwallace 11y ago
Yes, it logically follows from simple economic principles: if you're competing with other companies for good candidates (which you are), your hit rate will go up if you look for signals that your competitors ignore or reject, because t
764.
by rwallace 11y ago
Personally I think there is something to be said for skipping irrelevant questions. I don't care where a program installs to, I just want it to work. I want the developers to deal with that kind of detail so I don't have to worry
765.
by rwallace 11y ago
Maybe. But if a couple of hundred janitors and building occupants have died from breathing hydrofluoric acid fumes, and someone still chooses to order the continued use of the floor cleaner in question, that someone should in my opinion be
766.
by rwallace 11y ago
Does she have existing samples of writing that she can point to, not locked up under copyright? If so, then I would point to those samples and suggest those should be relevant data for assessment and I'd like to get further in the proc
767.
by rwallace 11y ago
That sounds intuitively reasonable, but does an interview actually have significant accuracy in filtering out people who will do badly on those criteria? As far as I know, such data as is available says human intuition is completely wrong a
768.
by rwallace 11y ago
Well if we're going to talk about worst case, the safety worst-case from coal might end up being a rerun of the Permian mass extinction, so nuclear is still the very clear winner.
769.
by rwallace 11y ago
Given that most start-ups fail, there is necessarily an element of gamble in doing one, and the classic advice 'only gamble what you can afford to lose' is classic for a reason. Thus, when thinking of doing a start-up, ask yoursel
770.
by rwallace 11y ago
Well yes, that's my point. I was responding to a post that was basically suggesting 'drones could in some circumstances be dangerous' implies 'we shouldn't use drones at all' and objecting to the double standar
771.
by rwallace 11y ago
Well, as far as safety goes, consider the following possible delivery vehicles for small packages: 1. A couple of kilograms of drone, that typically won't kill you if it runs into you. 2. A couple of thousand kilograms of vehicle, heav
772.
by rwallace 11y ago
I don't know why someone downvoted you - a clear and honest answer deserves an upvote in my opinion. But, while I understand what you're saying, and for all I know maybe being humble works well for you as internal company culture,
773.
by rwallace 11y ago
Agreed, but when it comes down to it, that's laziness or incompetence at the executive level. The personnel department should not be given that sort of power; that's not what they're for. It's the CEO's job to make
774.
by rwallace 11y ago
He says he's been using the explicit query language for a couple of months. On that timescale, I can see how it might still feel okay. But as the months become years and your code grows in complexity to meet an ever lengthening require
775.
by rwallace 11y ago
Excellent article. Just one quibble: he claims a module shouldn't be over 30k lines. Counterexamples: Linux, Postgres, Boost, LLVM, V8, all in the million line range. To be sure, each of these has an internal module structure, but that
776.
by rwallace 11y ago
A lot of this is arbitrary and capricious, but banning marijuana is so blatantly stupid that there is actually some movement of late to reverse the ban.
777.
by rwallace 11y ago
Humans are prone to the irrational assumption that fault is a rivalrous good, so everything must be the fault of A xor B. It seems to me the evidence supports the conclusion that communism is a miserable failure and the idiotic policy of
778.
by rwallace 11y ago
I don't think the reason is any need for research. There have been quite a few occasions when I've made suggestions regarding how to fix obvious, major flaws. I've stopped bothering, because the response in all cases has been
779.
by rwallace 11y ago
I'd find it more forgivable if it was laziness, but I've seen too many cases where designers put in extra effort to make things worse to believe that. I think it's ego. Good design is about doing what the users want rather th
780.
by rwallace 11y ago
At the moment I'm looking at trying to compile some stuff on Windows, that has Visual Studio project files, with clang instead of Microsoft C++. This would involve making msbuild do things it wasn't exactly designed to do (assumin

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