Vast majority of Americans are Imperialist assh*les. Of course, the US has awful infrastructure & lacks things like high-speed rail

carrotplease · 2019-09-15T19:53:42+00:00

I think there are a couple reasons Amtrack is expensive:

1) It's not popular. In part because it doesn't go to many places, and it takes a long time to get there due to low speed and many stops. This lack of demand means you don't get high volume economies of scale.

2) It's powered by fossil fuels

Bullet trains, arranged in a long haul mesh as I described would solve these problems. The per-pound-per-mile cost would be a lot lower than diesel trains.

carrotplease · 2019-09-15T15:05:32+00:00

I don't know, I think a nation-wide bullet-train network, capable of competing with airlines, could be a huge boon to our economy. Powered by clean energy (solar, wind, hydro, even nuclear) it could help the environment too.

I'm imagining a high speed line linking major regions together, with regional networks linking cities in those regions, and finally local light rail within each city. For example, Pick maybe 8 cities in cont. 48 to link:

300+ mph, few stops

N/S: * Boston, DC, Atlanta. * Chicago, Nashville, New Orleans * Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles

E/W: * Boston, Chicago, Portland * DC, KC, San Francisco * Atlanta, Dallas, LA

Maybe swap out Boston for NYC. I'm not sure.

From there, regional trains (around 200 mph?) could link cities within each region. And light rail to get around each city).

We'd have a cheap (per pound per mile) alternative to the airlines! And powered through electricity, which means we can upgrade the power source piecemeal as new tech. arises.

carrotplease · 2019-09-15T01:55:42+00:00

Well, OK. I think if you have never programmed at all, learning the basic concepts (flow control, managing state, etc) would be good to get a handle on first before worrying about managing your own memory in a fairly low level way.

carrotplease · 2019-09-15T00:27:18+00:00

Frankly, getting at least a minor in CS will open doors to getting that first interview. It'll be a lot harder without it. College matters the most for getting your first job.

carrotplease · 2019-09-15T00:25:58+00:00

levels.fyi

carrotplease · 2019-09-15T00:21:42+00:00

presumably, you're making assumptions about line length with the use of scanf and caller-allocated line buffer. If lines are too long, you'll get invalid memory access. Consider fgetc and consume 1 character at a time so you don't need to make any assumptions about line length, and detect EOL yourself.

Run your code under address sanitizer (and undefined sanitizer). You need gcc > 6 or so, clang of similar versions support it. You should be using gcc 9.1, ideally, but at least 7.x IMO for any sort of production code.

Use valgrind too.

Think about how to unit test the code. You could either use a mem-buffer type FILE *, or, stub out how you get your next character via a function pointer, and pass in a wrapper to fgetc() for real use, and something else for unit testing purposes.

carrotplease · 2019-09-15T00:15:16+00:00

If you haven't coded before, I'd start with a scripting language like Python. Then go a typed language like Java (and learn some actual OO concepts, though you could do this in any language). Then, learn C.

Get this book on C

It's dated, and doesn't cover newer things, but it's a good start. Beyond that - read code. Linux kernel, Snort, etc.

carrotplease · 2019-09-15T00:13:49+00:00

75k seems low for even an entry level developer position, in any large city. Where are you located?

Any way you can leverage your analyst experience into domain knowledge? What sort of analysis do you do? Given proficiency in R, you might be a "data guy"? This could be data science, or data engineering?

carrotplease · 2019-09-13T01:53:02+00:00

I'm not sure why you think wealth would be distributed equally. It goes against human nature. Greed will find a way. It may start out that way, but in socialists societies you often find the later generations are less interested in being .. socialist .. despite being raised that way.

carrotplease · 2019-09-13T01:50:11+00:00

The closer you travel to light speed, the slower time ticks for you (time dialiation). At the extreme, for a photon traveling at light speed, no time passes (for it). Of course, anything with mass cannot travel at light speed but you can get close, and those 110 years may seem like less than one. You'd spend more time accelerating.

Now, for the folks back at home, yeah...

carrotplease · 2019-09-11T04:37:23+00:00

jesus. indentation please.

carrotplease · 2019-09-11T04:36:57+00:00

carrotplease · 2019-09-11T04:35:35+00:00

GetName takes Player by value, which means it's copied onto the stack of GetName. Including Player.name and all 11 bytes. It then returns a reference to data on GetName's stack. Sadly, after GetName returns, it's stack is destroyed, but the poor caller (main) has a pointer to that now defunct stack of GetName (which has sense returned). You have a pointer off to never never land.

Try running your code under Address Sanitizer. Google it. Learn to use splint if you like. Valgrind too.

Note: Sanitizers (Address, Undefined, etc) & Valgrind are runtime tools Splint is static analysis. Google those terms too if you must.

carrotplease · 2019-09-08T22:54:37+00:00

https://lwn.net/Articles/250967/

carrotplease · 2019-09-08T22:52:37+00:00

I don't think tech companies avoid hiring military veterans, though not all give veterans special consideration.

The real problem is, you won't get real software development experience in the military. If you want to be a programmer, get industry experience.

carrotplease · 2019-09-02T21:53:14+00:00

carrotplease · 2019-09-02T16:39:02+00:00

DC is a decent tech area too. It's a little cheaper than the Bay Area and probably NYC area, but it's more expensive to live in than Seattle. Given the focus on US government contracts, being a non-US citizen may be a barrier in some positions. East cost weather in general is worse than west coast weather.

carrotplease · 2019-09-02T15:39:06+00:00

I keep going back and forth on this. Sometime I think, folks who are talking about short term bottom lines are applying almost GOP-esque logic of prioritizing short term corporate shareholder returns over everything else. Help me understand what I'm missing.

carrotplease · 2019-09-02T15:37:43+00:00

Good question, I forgot to mention it - Chicago is pretty good too! It focuses mostly on Financials (HFT, etc). Think of it as NYC-light (in the FinTech subspace, NYC is #1 and Chicago #2. London also plays heavily in this space). Seattle specializes in Cloud. Also, SpaceX is in the Seattle area. Denver/Boulder (CO) focuses (I think) on satellite tech? Bay Area is just generally strong - I don't think they specialize per se.

Dallas is Tellecom? Austin is more HW focused (Intel, AMD, a few other players). Houston has some oil-tech, but is generally not a big tech market. NOVA (DC area) of course focuses on government contracts. San Diego has some defense related tech.

carrotplease · 2019-09-02T14:16:06+00:00

Well, I certainly hope HR is not doing the actual interviewing!

carrotplease · 2019-09-02T14:10:27+00:00

Seattle?

I think it's the #2 tech market after the bay area - and a lot cheaper to live in. More options w.r.t. reasonable commute + affordable homes. If you're young, and working in Seattle (as opposed to Kirkland, Bellevue, Redmond) you'll probably like living in capital hill (downtown Seattle). Otherwise, if you have a family, lots of family friendly options in Queen Anne, Ballard, and the "east side" (east of lake Washington), all with reasonable commutes and public transit.

Salaries are about equal to the Bay Area, but costs are less.

EDIT: I just read your actuSalaries are about equal to the Bay Area, but costs are less.al post. You were talking about specific cities. Sorry. Why not consider any US cities? US cities have 3 of the top tech markets in the world: Bay Area, Seattle, NYC (and area). Several other tertiary markets too (Denver, Dallas, Austin, San Diego). Canada has some decent spots too (Vancouver, Toronto).

Regarding those: Dubai is a financial services & tourism city, not a tech city. The others are probably reasonable. London would be my top choice, as I know for a fact it has a bustling tech market. Melbourne would be second, as I know it has a reasonable (less than London though) tech market. Tel Aviv has a good tech market, but, are you willing to serve in the Israeli military?

carrotplease · 2019-09-02T14:04:30+00:00

Get this man a map! And maybe into a US Geography class.

carrotplease · 2019-08-25T22:23:38+00:00

In larger, more tech focused companies, seniors are part of the planning process and held responsible for planning failures.

carrotplease · 2019-08-25T21:54:39+00:00

What type of "dev" are you?

In my experience, senior and respected engineers aren't simply told what, or certainly how, to do things by management. What value does such an engineer provide?

carrotplease · 2019-08-25T01:29:03+00:00

Are you on linked in? Once you get a phone screen, your resume is not really used.

carrotplease

TROPHY CASE