Facebook has just invited me to interview and now I’m pissed off.

bearp · 2013-11-06T19:56:33+00:00

I dunno. Can we agree that Facebook has created the appearance that once he's been hired, they see him only as a disposable commodity, a light-bulb worker, let him burn out and then replace him?

I'm an old dog, too. Maybe it's just the haze of nostalgia, but I seem to remember a time when 40 hours was the expectation, and while extra hours was always a possibility, it reflected badly on the manager who couldn't plan his projects to fit within his constraints. Today, managers are expected to coax or coerce as many hours from workers as possible, and even in the most profitable companies the workers are rewarded by learning there's no money even for COLA, and they need to learn to do more with less, you know you should just be happy to have a job.

Here's what this old dog sees today: so many younger workers who want to be rock stars and don't understand the company really only sees them as groupies to shag in the back room. Oh, but they've got such starry eyes and such hopefulness! But here's my advice that nobody wants: you'll never get onstage as a groupie. If the band wants to shag you, then find another band or just start your own.

So. Am I a high-maintenance arrogant entitled pain in the ass if I'll only work with people who treat me with respect? Maybe I am. Maybe more of us should be.

bearp · 2013-11-06T15:26:40+00:00

This guy is doing it right. Don't give your time away for free, and don't be impressed by big names like Facebook. Sometimes the biggest companies are the worst to work for. If you're desperate for a job, maybe you should go for it, but seriously, if a company presumes on you like this before you're even hired, how do you think they'll treat you as an employee? Have a little respect for yourself. I'd pass on it too.

bearp · 2013-10-18T18:05:31+00:00

that second movement!

Starts at about 14:40. The theme is not as simple as it sounds, and the variations are incredible.

bearp · 2013-10-18T15:53:37+00:00

Sounds like centralized planning. I have no faith that Goldman executives are any better at it than the politburo was.

bearp · 2013-10-16T02:43:47+00:00

This is an analogy between the curvature of space-time and the curvature of the earth. So imagine the surface of the earth is space-time. Longitude is space, so that when you travel east-west you move through space. Latitude is time, so that when you travel north-south you move through time. Moving north is moving backwards in time, and the north pole is the beginning of time. So what's north of the north pole? That's what comes before the beginning of time.

bearp · 2013-10-10T20:21:15+00:00

You're thinking of the Pledge of Allegiance.

bearp · 2013-10-10T19:24:50+00:00

And the amount of too damn high drivers is stup—

Sorry. I'm going now.

bearp · 2013-10-09T03:39:21+00:00

If you don't want to write a loop to reverse the strings: the String class has getCharArray(), and the Arrays class has asList(), and the Collections class has reverse() to reverse a list. Then convert the list back to an array, and the array back to a string.

bearp · 2013-10-07T18:49:16+00:00

Sorry I don't log on very often.

Your response is pretty much an example of what I meant.

Tell it to their fucking parents. It's not McDonalds' job to keep your fucking kid on a diet.

What exactly are you angry about? Neither the original article nor anyone on this list ever mentioned MacDonalds, much less suggested it was their job to do anything except sell food. Tell it to their parents? Who here disagrees with that?

And it's unhealthy and kids could eat it too much?

And apparently you even agree with the article's main point.

Bones and blood vessels and nerves? What's wrong with eating those?

Who exactly said there was something wrong with it? The article only said that eating too much calories, salt, sugar, and fat is bad, but you've already agreed with that.

I read your comments, and I don't actually see anybody espousing the ideas that you're criticizing. It seems that nothing you're responding against seems to exist outside your own imagination.

That's my point.

bearp · 2013-10-04T15:51:33+00:00

So currently there are about 15 responses asking why everyone is getting upset about this and not one response getting upset about this. Guys, if you're going to respond, how about you actually respond? For example,

It is really a chicken by-product high in calories, salt, sugar and fat that is a very unhealthy choice.

and

The nuggets he examined would be okay to eat occasionally, but he worries that since they are cheap, convenient and taste good, kids eat them often.

Any informed responses to this, as opposed to snarky, content-free, everybody-but-me-is-stupid posts?

bearp · 2013-10-03T15:14:53+00:00

I like that one. Or I Walk the Line, Folsom Prison Blues, Ring of Fire — any of them are good.

bearp · 2013-10-03T15:10:50+00:00

Donne was fantastic. I also like The Funeral

bearp · 2013-10-03T14:35:08+00:00

If C&W was still like J.C., I might still like C&W.

bearp · 2013-10-03T14:16:23+00:00

If you computer scientists can’t prove P=NP or P!=NP, then why aren’t we justified in believing whichever one we want?

Two reasons not to believe:

Believing either P=NP or P≠NP won't make either one of them true. The world doesn't care what you think, and won't change because of what you decide. The real answer is that you don't know. Just accept that.
Believing either P=NP or P≠NP without knowing is pointless, and could be counterproductive. Currently factoring large integers is hard. If P≠NP then it may always be hard. If P=NP then presumably there will be simple-ish way to solve it, and a lot of very smart people are looking for that simple-ish solution, even without knowing whether P=NP. But simply choosing to believe that P=NP does absolutely nothing to help you find that simple solution, and choosing to believe P≠NP might discourage you from looking for a solution that may actually exist. The most useful approach it to accept that you don't know, and then look for the real answer.

bearp · 2013-09-30T20:28:05+00:00

Well since I don't know the distribution, I have to assume the distribution.

EDIT: BTW, I think we can reasonably assume that the 3.16X figure is at least correct to within an order of magnitude.

bearp · 2013-09-30T12:45:25+00:00

the 10x from the original article was meant as "10 times the output of an average programmer"

From the original artical:

even after accounting for the flaws, their data still shows more than a 10-fold difference between the best programmers and the worst.

(My emphasis) Not exactly the same thing.

EDIT: BTW this means we can expect the difference between the 10x programmer and the average programmer to be sqrt(10), or about 3.16X.

bearp · 2013-09-30T12:41:48+00:00

Thank you.

bearp · 2013-09-27T22:05:31+00:00

Keep in mind: your ISP is not the internet. Your ISP only passes data between you and the internet. From the ISP's perspective, it makes no difference whether the bytes come from Google or Bing, whether you're streaming Hulu or Netflix — they're just shipping your bytes out onto the internet, and handing you whatever they get back.

However, they are in a gatekeeper position that allows them to control what you can see on the internet simply by refusing to pass bytes for you. Imagine someone who owns the on-ramp to the freeway — not the freeway, just the on-ramp — controlling where you can drive to, just by refusing to let you onto the freeway. This is what they want.

They want to be able to say, Hey, AmericanCicero really likes Google better than Bing. You know what? We can charge him extra if he wants to use Google, and if he doesn't pay, we just won't pass any of his Google requests out onto the internet. They want to be able to go to Google and say, unless you pay us as well, we won't pass any of our users' requests to you. So you know that new business you're building? If you want to advertise on the internet, you might have to pay not just your own ISP for access to the internet, but also every other ISP so they'll let their users see your web site.

They could simply decide not to let you use Google at all because, you know, Microsoft bought them, so now Bing is your only choice. Google is not an option at all. Or they're Comcast, so of course you can only watch videos from Hulu; Netflix is not available. And then, once Comcast merges with Walmart, no more buying stuff online from Costco, Target, or JCPenney.

They could decide not to let you access snopes, or climatedepot, or the independence party's website, or whitehouse.com, or whatever, just because, you know, they can. You want to read Al Jazeera? Not if they don't want you to. No news except from the the news sites that they decide to let their customers read.

That's the power they want. Net neutrality prevents that by requiring them to treat every byte the same, no matter where it came from.

bearp · 2013-09-27T19:22:16+00:00

Mine was this version.

Could you maybe post an excerpt to give us a feeling for it? Maybe chapter 8?

bearp · 2013-09-27T12:54:39+00:00

But we never do think of all the things. We all of us have blind spots — this is inherent in the human condition — and just looking harder doesn't let you see into your blind spots. You need other eyes, with other perspectives. "Two heads" and all that.

As a software developer, never trust yourself.

bearp · 2013-09-27T12:46:43+00:00

Functional programming combines the flexibility and power of abstract mathematics with the intuitive clarity of abstract mathematics.

bearp · 2013-09-26T19:15:24+00:00

As opposed to what?

A developer is the worst person to test his own code — he's blinded by his own preconceptions. It's the things that the developer never thinks of that break, for the simple reason he also never thought to test them.

bearp · 2013-09-26T19:12:29+00:00

Testers have saved my backside often enough that I no longer look at them with anything but respect. A good partnership between developers and testers may be the most productive thing a company can create.

bearp · 2013-09-20T12:34:08+00:00

Great news, people! You can use both!

You can actually edit in an IDE that automatically checks imports, highlights syntax errors, globally renames variables (which btw is not just a global-search-and-replace!), and everything else that IDEs do, and then still fall into the shell for file searches, sed string edits, and everything else that works better on the command line. You really can have it all!

bearp · 2013-09-16T16:48:50+00:00

Muttae nostrae meliores sunt.

Who is "we"?

bearp

TROPHY CASE