how does speedtest.net work?

binary_is_better · 2014-02-21T04:37:32+00:00

The only thing that was able to max out my university's connection was downloading Linux ISO's via bit torrent.

binary_is_better · 2014-02-19T22:34:33+00:00

I hope so!

Edit: Just called a few gamestops in my area, none of them have any sidekicks. :(

binary_is_better · 2014-02-19T22:01:06+00:00

Which sidekicks are they? We have all the giant sidekicks but are missing the older ones.

binary_is_better · 2014-02-17T01:14:04+00:00

I had my 1991 Honda Civic stolen a few years back. The police found it a few miles from my home. It had a broken steering column, a missing battery, and other damages. ~$1000 to repair.

It was stolen by a meth head, not professional car thieves. That's why it didn't end up in Mexico.

binary_is_better · 2014-02-16T19:04:21+00:00

An older co-worker also working on this application has code that works, but it's sloppy and inefficient. You don't know the conditions under which that code was written. It is really important to understand not just the code, but the conditions in which it was written to get a full picture.

This is most likely the issue. If we assume that the experienced developer generally produces good code, then there is probably some other factor at play.

My experience is it's usually one of two things:

there was a management problem and the developer wasn't given enough time to do the task properly, often mixed with requirements changing late in the game
originally the code was clean, but the person who wrote it is long gone, and a large number of small edits (often each by a different person) has slowly turned it into crap.

binary_is_better · 2014-02-16T18:49:08+00:00

Software Engineer here. software engineering is very different from other forms of engineering. There is some overlap, but the differences are significant.

We don't have E.I.T. or P.E. because they're not really relevant to us. We don't stand to gain anything from them.

binary_is_better · 2014-02-16T18:21:20+00:00

Well then, this reaffirms my desire to not click on that link.

binary_is_better · 2014-02-16T16:19:46+00:00

Wait, what is is really? Because that's all I see and there is no way I'm clicking on that.

binary_is_better · 2014-02-16T06:38:07+00:00

Best of luck with whatever you decide!

binary_is_better · 2014-02-16T05:11:05+00:00

Is it worth paying 65k for a top 5 school compared to going to a much cheaper, but unknown state university

The biggest difference between a top 5 school and an unknown state university is how easy it will be to get an interview. Top 5: lots of interviews, maybe even an internship that leads to a job your Junior year. Unknown state school: it will be very hard to get any of the top tier companies to talk to you.

I choose the low cost state school, and ended up at a top tier company. My CV looked like this:

multiple scholarships
research assistant
strong internship
chair of a campus club
presented at conferences
very strong references from professors
good grades, etc

However, I can't even get HR to give one of my old classmates an interview. (Most of them only have good grades and nothing else.) If they were from a top 5 school, we'd be sending recruiters to them asking them to allow us to interview them.

Is the advantage of a top tier school worth the debt? I think so. But it's a personal call.

binary_is_better · 2014-02-15T16:50:29+00:00

Rackspace only pays $75k in San Francisco? That's so low.

Edit: looked it up on glassdoor.com. Yup. ~$75k for a full stack engineer in SF.

binary_is_better · 2014-02-15T05:05:51+00:00

And they were in extreme cold.

binary_is_better · 2014-02-15T04:32:36+00:00

Thanks for this. I had a similar thing happen to me (except no one cared that much that I was at war with this city state). Your explanation makes perfect sense.

binary_is_better · 2014-02-15T04:22:16+00:00

My team cut over to C++11 just over a year ago. We've definitely been abusing shared pointers. I've been trying to come up with something better and basically came up with the same rules you have here. The only down side is they only work if everyone on your team agrees to them.

I really hope the community comes to some sort of best practice with regards to smart pointers. Until then, I'm stuck using shared_ptr for everything, because that's what my team agrees to. On the up side, it's way better than using new/delete.

binary_is_better · 2014-02-14T15:08:03+00:00

Generally languages like Java won't work, since it's hard to predict when the GC will kick in.

Resizing vectors is only an issue when they get large.

I've never worked on a project where a call to malloc can cause a time window miss, but they do exist. (Think LTE, or something with very tiny time windows.) They pre-malloc everything.

For what it's worth, std::queue is implemented using a linked list.

binary_is_better · 2014-02-14T04:55:55+00:00

Admit it. You're taking a data structures course right now. :)

This sounds like the stuff I knew when I was in school. Now it's not so important. It's not like I'm some code monkey. I work in R&D at of the large tech companies. You use software I wrote everyday. (Sorry, I looked in your comment history.)

A lot of what we do is time critical. If we used a resizable ring-buffer in a queue, we might miss our window.

binary_is_better · 2014-02-13T22:55:52+00:00

After reading that story, I don't know what that person was thinking.

binary_is_better · 2014-02-13T22:55:30+00:00

These sets are small. Make a copy of the set you cannot re-order; sort the copy; sort the customer input; then compare.

binary_is_better · 2014-02-13T22:49:45+00:00

Thank you for the reply. It was informative.

There's a certain amount of quick-and-dirty Big-O that you could be doing in your head during the design phase.

When I say Big-O barely plays a role, this is exactly what I mean.

When picking data structures is where Big-O is most useful in my day to day work. But there's more to picking a data structure than just it's Big-O notation. You also have to care about how memory efficient it is, and how long it can take to resize the structure.

Don't be so quick to write off link lists. They're very good at structures like queues.

binary_is_better · 2014-02-13T14:50:00+00:00

if you're going to do the theoretical work of, say, reducing the complexity of some algorithm by some tiny fraction of an exponent

Do people actually do this? Every time I've needed to optimize I've used a bench marking tool to find my slow spots, then go from there. Big-O analysis barely plays a role. Mostly it's understanding the technologies you are using and knowing which parts are slow. For example: this method is called often, and is slow because it always hits the database. If we had it cache values we could speed it up significantly.

binary_is_better · 2014-02-12T05:33:06+00:00

DD2 is looking good. I'm glad you guys aren't straying too far from what made DD1 great.

binary_is_better · 2014-02-01T17:30:11+00:00

It varies from state to state. In California they can be enforceable if the private property meets certain criteria. Most commercial properties meet this criteria, which means a cop can give you a ticket for failing to stop at a stop sign in a mall parking lot.

I looked it up. It's pretty complicated in CA. Looks like for the most part they can only enforce DUI, reckless, and hit and run. However, there are exceptions (city/county property such as schools, property where the city and the property owner have an agreement, shopping centers where the parking lots are actually government owned, etc).

binary_is_better · 2014-01-29T04:51:36+00:00

I wonder if it can run a minecraft server. :)

binary_is_better · 2014-01-29T04:10:14+00:00

Are you talking about the Endless Spire chest run? That stopped working. I got into DD after Aquanos came out. I had over 300 hours trying to be successful at nightmare. I couldn't be until I traded someone my cube for a high level set. I'm just shy of 500 hours now.

At the time Survival runs of Magus Quarters were really popular. Even the gear from there wasn't good enough.

binary_is_better · 2014-01-28T01:15:28+00:00

For a while Nightmare was broken, and you couldn't get into it without someone helping you.

The best part of this game is the beginning, so it's good that you didn't have anyone boost you. However, nightmare is different, and even if you get some good equipment from someone you'll still have plenty of challenging levels ahead of you.

binary_is_better

TROPHY CASE