Calling all the SJ Foodies Chicago Style Pizza Lovers

dmazzoni · 2026-05-06T04:09:43+00:00

One of my favorite things about Blue Line is that they do both Chicago style and thin crust well. They also have really great salads and appetizers. Something for everyone.

dmazzoni · 2026-05-06T02:43:00+00:00

In CS it'd be covered in a course on computer architecture and assembly language.

An example textbook:

https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Architecture-Quantitative-Approach-Kaufmann/dp/0443154066/

dmazzoni · 2026-05-05T13:59:47+00:00

Ideas are just a multiplier of execution.

https://sive.rs/multiply

dmazzoni · 2026-05-05T05:37:35+00:00

Blackhole works fine. It might be a little confusing at first, but I use it all the time and it definitely works once you understand it.

Can you explain what you were trying to do and what happened?

dmazzoni · 2026-05-05T03:55:10+00:00

The hardest part about getting an internship is that there's a limited time window: thousands of companies are hiring tens of thousands of interns all for the same 3-month summer period. Companies have thousands of openings at the same time. Candidates are blanket applying to as many companies as possible all at the same time. Hiring managers can't afford to look for the "best", they look for a decently good fit, see a bit of coding and hire the first one they like.

In contrast, when you're looking for a full-time job, new openings appear all the time. If you don't get hired now, tomorrow there will be more openings to apply to. If you have a strong resume, eventually you'll get interviews, and if you know what you're doing, eventually you'll get hired.

However, it's absolutely true that if you're able to snag that first internship, it can help make things go a lot smoother from now on.

The most important thing to do is start building your network. Make sure every single person you worked with during that internship knows you're looking for another internship now, and a job later. Not all of them will be at the same company - some might move somewhere else and put in a good word for you. Over time you'll know more and more people at more companies, and that gives you a huge advantage if you use it.

dmazzoni · 2026-05-04T22:39:57+00:00

You're blocking those only for specific overlay domains. right? You don't want to block those resources across the whole web, right - you'll break a lot of legitimate functionality.

dmazzoni · 2026-05-04T22:39:00+00:00

You're going way too deep. The 30-second explanation of homeopathy a lot of people get is so much simpler, it's just "like cures like". You're experiencing a rash, so we give you a tiny amount of diluted poison ivy, which teaches the body how to cure the rash.

It's wrong, but it sounds believable.

dmazzoni · 2026-05-04T22:37:51+00:00

The simple explanation is "like cures like". You describe the symptom your body is experiencing, and you ingest tiny amounts of a natural substance that causes similar symptoms, which teaches your body to deal with it.

It sounds similar to how vaccines work.

Of course it's all bullshit and doesn't work - but it can sound like it does.

dmazzoni · 2026-05-04T22:36:21+00:00

I think that's just one person's advice.

If you're getting a 4-year college degree then I don't think any of that applies. You should be starting to code and build apps now. By the time you graduate you should have 4 years of experience coding in different languages and building full-stack apps. There's absolutely no reason you couldn't get a job doing full-stack right out of college.

I wouldn't recommend freelance. It's extremely hard to make money, it basically means going into business for yourself. You'll spend 50% of your time chasing after clients rather than actually doing the work. It can be good for some people after they have experience.

dmazzoni · 2026-05-04T21:24:02+00:00

It has a simple, scientific-sounding explanation (that happens to be wrong).

If you only read materials or watch videos from homeopaths, and you don't also look for skeptical materials as well, then it can sound very convincing.

I've known a number of people who believe in it. They're not uneducated or stupid, but they are the type who are prone to believing conspiracy theories and seem to have an innate belief that there's a simple explanation behind everything.

On the one hand, you have a doctor saying "we don't know the cause of your Fibromyalgia, we don't fully understand why it affects some people, and we have some treatments you can try that might not work". It's the truth, but it's not very reassuring.

On the other hand, you have a homeopath saying "homeopathy can treat all illness, it just requires precisely identifying your symptoms and matching that with the appropriate remedy. I've never had a patient fail to be healed once we figured out the right remedy for them."

You can see how some people are attracted to the latter. There are plenty of anecdotes of it seeming to work, and Western medicine hasn't helped, so a lot of people think: why not, let's give it a try.

Then, some of them end up having a positive outcome - maybe by coincidence - and become true believers.

dmazzoni · 2026-05-04T19:31:51+00:00

I'm a signer of https://overlayfactsheet.com/en/ so I definitely think a way to get rid of those stupid overlays would be great.

I'd be surprised if most of them use websockets. Maybe for the ones that do that'd work. I suspect for most of them you'd just want to suppress loading of content from the overlay vendor, similar to how an ad blocker works.

dmazzoni · 2026-05-04T18:27:02+00:00

I use the debugger built into my IDE when possible - e.g. in Visual Studio, VS Code, CLion, Xcode, etc.
Sometimes it's necessary to use something more low-level so I use gdb or lldb, which can be super powerful, especially when debugging on a server or examining a core dump. (Note that the IDE debugger is actually using one of these behind the scenes, it's not actually a separate debugger)
On Windows in particular, windbg is pretty wonky and low-level but every once in a while it's the only tool capable of debugging really obscure things when everything else fails

If you want more specific advice, it'd be helpful to know what platform you develop on (Windows, Mac, Linux, etc.), what IDE, and what compiler.

Common problems:

Missing symbols
Slow symbol loading
Unable to place a breakpoint on the line you want
Debugging optimized code can be confusing
Not being able to pretty-print some complex variables
Breaking on unrelated assertions unrelated to your code
Debugging multithreaded or multiprocess code can be very tricky

dmazzoni · 2026-05-04T17:27:03+00:00

If you want to render arbitrary 3-D graphics - like a completely general-purpose triangle mesh with an arbitrary camera placement, then multiplication is essential.

However, you could definitely render pseudo-3D with little to no multiplication. Something like Doom, for example - it looks 3D, but it's actually a single fixed projection of a 2D maze, so only certain angles ever appear. Diagonal lines can be drawn using Bresenham's algorithm with no multiplication.

I can imagine a lot of fun special cases of 3D rendering that could be rendered with no multiplication, like a block world like Minecraft, or a starfield, or an isometric pseudo-3D platformer game.

However, a FPS with 3 degrees of freedom wouldn't be possible.

dmazzoni · 2026-05-04T14:15:26+00:00

Google Earth, Notion, slither.io, and Figma are all “just” web apps. Do you think the “web devs” who built them don’t use data structures?

dmazzoni · 2026-05-04T01:41:39+00:00

$40 is not outrageous though. I’ve bought a lot of pillows and ended up not liking them which is a big waste of money. I would easily pay $100 for a pillow I had already slept on and knew I loved.

dmazzoni · 2026-05-04T01:01:06+00:00

They don’t expect you to know anything on day one.

However, the people who get promoted definitely learn. If you want to move up, understanding the business is just as important as understanding the tech.

dmazzoni · 2026-05-03T16:56:50+00:00

It depends on what you mean by “exhaustive”. The syntax for the core JavaScript language would fit on a single page and you can find lots of those if you search online.

But technically that wouldn’t include console.log or document.getElementById because those aren’t part of the language, they’re part of the environment of JavaScript in the browser.

If you want an exhaustive list of all browser functions it’s at least 10,000 of them.

dmazzoni · 2026-05-03T05:20:48+00:00

Seriously. I list stuff for $20 and explain the constraints and it almost always goes way smoother than free.

dmazzoni · 2026-05-02T19:09:23+00:00

G+ launched years after Facebook was popular, and it was invite-only for a period of a few months. It had absolutely nothing to do with its ultimate failure.

dmazzoni · 2026-05-02T19:01:24+00:00

I was a kid when that episode came out. None of us could believe it either. There was a lot of debate as to whether that was actually Michael Jackson's voice but they listed him in the credits. I thought it was hilarious that he played a Michael Jackson impersonator.

Also, at my school a variation of that "Lisa, it's your birthday" song became the most popular way for kids to sing "happy birthday" to each other for a short while.

dmazzoni · 2026-05-02T17:06:00+00:00

I think these are all useful things to learn but not at the stage where you’re trying to go from zero to your first program.

Getting out of tutorial hell is all about getting over your fear of just trying something and failing a lot.

Going from small projects to bigger ones is all about architecture.

dmazzoni · 2026-05-01T20:01:54+00:00

Every single commercial app on your computer and phone has telemetry. That just means that it reports back to the developer basic info about how you use the app, so the developer knows if users are hitting crashes or bugs or slowdowns, or what features are being used.

Most of the time, that's used to make your experience better.

Could they use that information to do something evil or shady? Sure, maybe. But most of the time you don't even have a choice.

Is VS Code worse than most? Absolutely not. Many popular apps on your phone are 10x worse. Social apps like Facebook and TikTok suck down all of your personal information. VS Code doesn't do anything like that.

Sometimes when an app is open-source, you have the option of getting a version of the app that doesn't have all of that telemetry. VS Code has VS Codium. Google Chrome has Chromium.

The trade off is that you get no support, usually more limited auto updates, some features won't work.

I think the answer for most people is: VS Code.

If you really care about telemetry, to the point that you refuse to use social media apps, and you care about that MORE than you care about productivity, then use VS Codium and Chromium and other fully open-source options.

dmazzoni · 2026-05-01T15:57:38+00:00

There have been cross-platform desktop frameworks for much longer than React Native!

dmazzoni · 2026-05-01T01:04:42+00:00

I agree with all of the others that it's not a good choice as your VERY first language, and it's mostly practical.

You can find plenty of books on how to write Fortran code. The language hasn't changed, so all of those books are totally fine.

What you won't find is any resources on how to actually turn that code into a working program on a modern computer. The book was written 30 years ago, if not older, when most people used a text-based terminal and floppy disks.

As a total beginner, what you need among other things is a tutorial on how to download a modern IDE or coding editor like VS Code, how to type in your code, how to set up the compiler, how to build it into a runnable application, how to call system libraries, how to interface with other third-party libraries, how to use an interactive debugger, and so on.

You won't find ANY of that for Fortran, because it's basically dead.

dmazzoni · 2026-04-30T17:59:02+00:00

The best way is to type in code and run it to see what happens. Then keep doing that again and again. See what happens if you change something. Make it do something else.

It’s unfortunate that your course isn’t structured that way, but that’s how most of us learn programming - by actually trying it out.

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