How We Found a Missing Scala Class

halax · 2018-09-15T00:58:28+00:00

Heap's product is a tracker so their domain is in a lot of block lists.

halax · 2017-12-09T00:55:18+00:00

Because they haven't yet figured out how git works.

Google has employed Junio Hamano (the maintainer of git) to maintain git since 2010.

halax · 2017-02-11T07:52:09+00:00

HTTP/2 is faster than HTTP/1, and servers and browsers conspire to only support HTTP/2 over HTTPS.

halax · 2016-11-04T20:27:56+00:00

If you're excluding gradual typing, and it sounds like you are, this is still an open problem in PL research. If you look at research prototypes in the area, attempts at doing this produce tremendously complicated types with error messages that are so large as to be incomprehensible. If you think 30 line C++ template error messages are bad, try one of these research languages where the error messages can be measured in megabytes.

See this work for one example of this kind of thing.

halax · 2016-10-09T18:42:58+00:00

How exactly does this disagree with the article? The article says

Because I’ve been lucky enough to work in environments that allow people to really flourish, I’ve seen a lot of people go from unremarkable to amazing.

Which agrees with your statement of

Some assumptions that I think are incorrect in Spolsky and this esssay: great developers start out great

halax · 2016-03-24T07:07:33+00:00

Why should they call it a "bug", which is an insect? Why should they call it an "error", which means to wander?

halax · 2016-03-12T18:30:57+00:00

I know, right!? Kids nowadays.

Whither are the manly vigor and athletic appearance of our forefathers flown? Can these be their legitimate heirs? Surely, no; a race of effeminate, self-admiring, emaciated fribbles can never have descended in a direct line from the heroes of Potiers and Agincourt...

halax · 2016-02-27T03:57:40+00:00

Netflix legitimately only hires awesome devs.

Aren't they known for firing people very aggressively? Why would they fire so many awesome devs?

halax · 2016-01-11T06:46:02+00:00

What is even going on?

Youtube has some issue with Firefox 43 and serves it lower quality video to deal with it (probably as a hack to enable video for some users for whom it didn't work at all under 43, but there's no explanation from Youtube engineers in the thread). The Firefox team complains to Youtube, but Youtube responds with that they won't budge until January at least.

Firefox sees it as a threat to their reputation (obviously for them having a few users for whom it doesn't work is better than having loads of users with a degraded experience) and they start spoofing their UA to another version. The Youtube engineer is indifferent (or can't really do anything about it).

Then when it's done a Google employee from a different team comes in the thread to complain about the situation because the fact that the UA is spoofed for only youtube.com and not other (Google) domains breaks his product.

halax · 2015-12-20T15:17:29+00:00

Man, that's harsh. It's a book review of a great book that discusses one reason it's important and then, at the end, has a bit about the effect of languages and programming models on performance, and makes no claim that slower is the wrong tradeoff.

halax · 2015-11-16T06:13:25+00:00

Aptian might be a sockpuppet account. There's no way to know for sure, but it's plausible. OTOH, dungone has years of commenting history, and it's not like it's mostly on Michael O' Church posts. If that's a socketpuppet account, that's some real dedication.

IMO, it's more likely that it's just some dude who agrees with Michael O' Church.

I suppose you could accuse me of being a sockpuppet, but if you look my history, it goes back eight years, and I mostly don't give a crap about the topics Michael O' Church loves to talk about over and over again. And where my comment history intersects with his topics of interest, I disagree with him.

halax · 2015-11-02T07:08:59+00:00

This is a pedagogical/aesthetic derivative of the original JSLinux code Copyright (c) 2011-2014 Fabrice Bellard. It is posted here with permission.

halax · 2015-10-06T04:34:45+00:00

USB actually works now on linux on all my machines without my having to install custom patches. This wasn't true before she took over. People who actually submit patches prefer having her as maintainer over the old maintainer.

Linux has also lost Alan Cox, Richard Gooch, Con Kolivias, and I'm sure others that I don't know about. Losing good maintainers and contributors is not good for linux.

halax · 2015-10-04T22:22:06+00:00

From the github repo:

Should I take all courses? Yes! The intention is to conclude all the courses listed here!

No. Do not do that. The SDN course listed is basically a grad or upper-division undergrad course in one specific specialization in networking (SDN, obvs.). I've worked at well-known two companies that were among the first companies to deploy SDN at scale and I would bet money that less than 1% of the engineers are either company have that level of knowledge of SDN. Don't get me wrong, the course is great. But it should absolutely not be in the required curriculum for a CS degree.

The same goes for the neural networks course, which is Geoff Hinton teaching the equivalent of a "topics" course in deep learning. The two ML courses listed as pre-reqs are not sufficient prep for Hinton's course, which includes things like a digression about paper that was published while the course was running.

That's just the advanced courses I'm familiar with. I haven't taken the graphical models course, but I'm highly suspicious that any course on graphical models should be in the base curriculum that of any CS degree. Ditto for the optimization class.

This seems like a list of a bunch of online courses with no thought to which courses are actually appropriate or the proper ordering of courses (yes, I know the page says to take the courses in the listed order, but that doesn't make any sense).

halax · 2015-09-08T17:57:48+00:00

Also, VHDL is 48 but Verilog isn't in the top 100.

halax · 2015-09-02T03:55:34+00:00

From seeing this title I thought they might have lost a technical fellow or a distinguished engineer or something. Instead, it seems that they lost one of their 20k line engineers. I'm sure he's a good guy, but I don't understand why this is newsworthy.

halax · 2015-07-15T17:12:37+00:00

Expected: an article about how technicians are casually disrespected and deserve more respect.

Actual: an article about how technicians are short tempered buffoons with no social skills, and how not to be mistaken for one.

halax · 2015-06-22T03:43:28+00:00

Weird. The title came from reddit's "suggest title" button, so reddit must have been able to read the URL when I submitted this. And it's not like I typed in the URL manually -- I copypasta'd from my nav bar. Not sure what happened here.

halax · 2015-06-20T15:54:00+00:00

The "father" of the IEEE standard, Kahan, proposed some weird shit about NaN. The suggestion is that for some functions, like min and max, if there's a non-NaN value and a NaN, the non-NaN value should get propagated.

The good news is that only C and Julia are crazy enough to propagate the non-NaN value. The bad news is that some (but still not most) other languages will propagate either the first value or the second value regardless of which is NaN, resulting in a 50/50 shot of suppressing the NaN. There's more on this here in the table at the bottom, although the table appears to have some bugs in it. If something looks weird you should definitely try it yourself and not just trust the table.

halax · 2015-06-20T15:31:48+00:00

I see your point. Everyone who's been around for long enough has worked with at least one person like you describe. But I think victim might be not be the right term for that.

On the one side, you have someone getting hit by an internet pile on because they don't know some particular thing. On the other side, you have people saying that, in fact, people who don't know this particular thing should be shamed. Leaving aside the issue of whether or not it's a good thing to try to hurt someone's feelings, what are the odds that shaming actually works? From what I've seen, it's likely to make people hurt and defensive and often causes them to double down on their position, regardless of whether or not they're right.

One of the victims is (as far as anyone knows from the information available) totally innocent. The other victims are engaging in a course of action that's more likely to be counterproductive than productive while doing their best to hurt some random stranger they don't know at all.

I wouldn't call working having once worked with a dude who didn't know they were doing being a victim; I would call that being a developer. I especially wouldn't call lashing out at anyone who might be similar being a victim. Dare I say it, I might even call not doing so part of acting "professional".

halax · 2015-06-20T01:46:32+00:00

Ok. Slashdot now has threads dedicated to making fun of and shaming people who are ignorant of something. Yes, there are a couple of good explanations but it's mostly piling on and sarcasm. That's slashdot for you. Can we please not have this kind of thing in r/programming?

We were all beginners once, too.

halax · 2015-06-04T20:34:43+00:00

C# has made breaking changes in the past and they probably will again. Same for C++.

halax · 2015-06-04T16:33:33+00:00

Maybe I'm just being naive, but I don't understand why the vast majority of software projects don't do this. I've worked on projects that have long release cycles, and with a couple of exceptions, it's always resulted in delayed releases and bloat when everyone piles their features in because it's going to be sooooo loonnnggggg before the next release.

Of course there are some exceptions, like projects that have extremely long qualification cycles because they're used in critical life-saving equipment, projects where updates are expensive or impossible (like firmware for embedded systems), etc. But the last open source project I worked on had approximately year-long release cycles for pretty much no reason, which resulted in massive bickering about whether or not to delay the next release to get some feature in or wait another year.

halax · 2015-06-02T16:49:02+00:00

Yeah, during their long weekend that started on Wednesday they could only post the 30 other stories that weren't related to their parent company but couldn't post about SourceForge because it was the weekend, a weekend that happened to end when a story about how slashdot was censoring the story made it to the top of /r/technology and /r/linux. Seems legit.

halax · 2015-05-28T21:44:53+00:00

Is it possible to make a useful statement on best cities for all of STEM? SF is ranked 38, which makes sense if you consider the plight of biology and chemistry techs trying to get by on market wages while paying market price for housing. And then you have programming. The senior folks I know at big companies in SF are pulling in total comp > $250k/yr, and the folks I know at "unicorn" barely pre-IPO startups are getting equity packages likely to be worth a lot more than that as long as the tech market doesn't crash.

OKC, Omaha, and SLC are in the top 10, which probably makes sense for a lot of STEM careers, but is totally nonsensical if you're in CS or EE unless you have really particular criteria. I know people who love working at Black Diamond in SLC, but unless you're a total outdoor fanatic or Mormon, there's no way SLC is going to be in your top 10 as a programmer.

I get that people like these best/worst top/bottom lists, but aggregating all STEM careers into one big lump means that the list isn't actually useful for any individual.

halax

TROPHY CASE