Let me guess, if you share that preferred network you might be part of the overweight social circle?
Do strip joints have WiFi? That would be another interesting social circle. Now you can know who in the office likes to kick back and watch the talent.
Look, I obviously pissed off some people who hold Ars in high esteem. All I was getting at is I felt the piece was a little fluffy, light on technical details, and oriented at laymen. Not the website for me, although it probably brings value and enjoyment to millions of people who are not me. Live and let live.
Step 1: Create billion dollar business based on people clicking internet ads
Step 2: Make more old people to click on the internet ads (who else clicks on those ads)
Step 3: Profit!
1) Multi page stories are really annoying.
2) I guess I never read Ars a lot before but there is so little technical detail in the article I don't really understand how Ars can consider itself a technical oriented website. Seems more like a huff post story.
3) Skip to page 6 if you want to see anything about performance/benchmarks. Most of the other 5 pages are thoughts on UI changes.
:-( The younger programmers haven't learnt the rule-of-thumb:
:( You would consider me a younger programmer.
I think the things you bring up: virtual dispatch in a performance critical loop, template bloat, and other performance problems aren't so much a "younger programmer" problem but the result of increasing compute power and the fact that Java and JavaScript are the programming language of choice in CS programs in American Universities. Unless you really had a reason to learn higher performance programming: like a systems programming class or a microcontroller based engineering class, you won't be exposed to the pitfalls you talk about and therefore won't learn how to avoid them. Also: complexity analysis (big O) is huge, and it's amazing how few people look at a nested for loops / crazy STL container searches/finds without realizing the performance implications. I think ignorance of the art of writing performance critical code is equal throughout the age distribution.
Maybe it just my "embedded guy" superiority complex, but you can't get away with that shit in the embedded world.
Although, now that we're getting super powerful ARM microcontrollers I'm actually afraid that average code will become more and more common.
You have to really really fuck something up to have C++ OO code be too slow where you're talking "milliseconds".
Anecdotally, I use to write software that controlled generators. We used a 72MHZ ARM7TDMI with 64K onboard ram and some awfully slow external 8-bit ram chip. Never had any performance problems. Milliseconds is a really long time in the context of embedded software.
If OO is too slow, it's usually because the PEBCAK.
In my experiences as a C++ developer our challenges are mainly architectural. None of us are C++ wizards, we all have many C++/STL books on our desks and are frequently scouring forums when we don't know something. C++ knowledge or the lack of it has never been a problem. Chances are that one of us knows how to do that whacky thing you want to do but can't remember how to do it. If we don't know, its really not that hard to experiment a little and figure it out. Worst case were posing on stack exchange or some other forum.
Knowing how to develop a piece of software with an OO architecture in C++ is the skill that we find to be more important and harder to find in new devs. We have a few open recs right now and although we get many guys with years of C and C++ experience, few if any know anything about OO. Out of the current employees, less than half are 'good' at OO design.
I have worked with guys who can crank out thousands of lines of real time, embedded code for industrial applications. Globals everywhere, no understanding of encapsulation or data hiding, nothing even resembling an interface. That sucked.
Give me a good designer over a "rockstar" programmer any day.
This is exactly how neoconservatives view the free market. Politicians and laws are part of the market and fair game. A company will always strive to maximize profits, if buying laws and legislators maximizes profits so be it.
This is the free market as neoconservatives see it, whoever has the most capital wins.
Titstare just seems like a satire on the completely pointless app genre that seems to be the new popular thing to do if you are a young hip coder looking to score big in the new social/app bubble we are in.
Didn't Facebook start as a way to rank girl's appearance at Harvard? Who's to fault these guys, they could be the next Zuckerberg. Titstare is (however tongue-in-cheek) indicative of the trend of creating valueless apps and hyping them up to billion dollar status and then selling to the highest bidder trying to reinvigorate their failing business. (example: AOL/MySpace/HuffPost).
That may very well be true but I still don't believe that if the person had to be responsible for their words they would say it. I guess my point is that if someone in the media said to me: "We have decided that you are a credible source but we won't publish your name if you give us a statement; what's your opinion on subject X that supports our narrative?" I would be inclined to be hyperbolic and grandiose more so than if my name would be printed next to my quotation.
Sometimes I feel that these "former U.S. officials" and "anonymous staff members" should STFU. It just seems like they use their anonymity to say random shit that will create headlines and stroke their ego. The "don't hire brilliant people" quotation is just stupid. No one that would have to be responsible for their words would say that.
But what possible reason is there of stripping the bos (sic) of HIS moral responsibility for putting the driver in that position (of having to choose between keeping his job and looking at a text) in the first place? THAT is what the judge is getting at, and you have not provided any valid argument against it.
You're begging the question of the drivers job being on the line based on a binary decision: read the text and break the law, or ignore the text and lose job.
Why couldn't the driver just pull over for a few min to correspond with his boss? How do you know that the boss didn't assume that is what the driver would do because it is illegal to text and drive. How do you know there isn't a text to speech device that reads out texts as the driver gets them (actually pretty common in commercial trucks).
If the boss forced the driver to read the text while actively driving, I can see how that should be criminal. But the means of force need to be more serious than the driver didn't want to pull over for a few min to read his phone. If the boss sends a text and the driver decides to read it instead of pulling over, the boss has no control over that and should not be implicated.
When a corporation/government has no independent oversight and an interest in minimising the severity of a disaster the public should have no expectation of receiving accurate information.
The station was even more triumphant when it signed Larry King
I know Larry King wasn't that bad (I found him insightful), but maybe if they take enough of our cable talking heads we might get actual journalists on the news.
When is FOX news going to come to defend Lavabit against the oppressive Obama regime?
Surely the government violating the constitution to get at Lavabit's data and thus compeling them to shut down is as outrageous as Obamacare and all of the businesses FOX claims it is destroying.
I'm sure everyone has already said it but leadership is not management. Leadership is the act of leading, it requires actions not a title.
On a hockey team, the leader is the captain. He leads by example, his teammates respect him. The GM does not tell the hockey players what to do, he manages their pay and who gets fired when the team does poorly.
In engineering, management is not leadership, it is management. The leaders are the guys who when they speak, everyone shuts up. The leaders are the guys who the team goes to for answers. The leaders are the ones who have the trust of the management.
If you are interviewing at a place that doesn't know the difference between management and leadership, and god forbid actually has a management person leading engineers, run. Run away. You don't want to work there. I have worked at places where management people lead engineers. The manager was trying to explain how hard it is to be an engineer to other managers and he said "they write thousands and thousands of lines of code with 10 logic statements on each line just to solve simple problems". That guy was an idiot, he was a management person trying to pretend that he had any technical leadership skills at all. That always fails. Other management people like it because they all speak the same language and they don't have to interface with the awkward engineers, but in the end you cant have management leading technical talent.
Darin Wedel, who was laid off from Texas Instruments, and gained national attention when his wife, Jennifer, challenged President Obama on H-1B use, said that for electrical engineers, 'unless you are in the actual design of circuits, then you're not in demand.'
If you ever try to explain to a lay-person how and to what extent facebook and google know everything about you they are usually not very supportive of it. The people who don't mind are either not sharing anything significant or just don't care because online privacy and data mining isn't something they are really concerned with as it doesn't directly affect their daily lives.
Most people that use facebook don't truly understand the nature of facebook's business model and the technical expertise deployed to harvest their data. Much in the same way that most people can't fathom the extent to which the government can know everything you do on a computer. It's just not within their realm of understanding, most people don't even really understand how the internet works on a basic level.
I think that if people really understood that Enemy of the State (the movie) is a pretty good depiction of the state of government surveillance they would not support it.
It's not fair to conclude that since people are ok with facebook they are ok with being put into a NSA database. They don't understand the consequences of either.
maybe if corporations (like Microsoft for example) stopped the practice of refusing to hire developers with 25 years of experience (like myself for example) with 13 year-old drug-possession felonies (like myself for example) they wouldn't be so desperate to hire foreigners...
I think the number of people in your scenario is not large enough to have any effect in the supply of software engineers. But since we're off topic anyways lets continue.
I do think you have a valid point, and it is a subset of a larger problem involving rehabilitated criminals.
In the US, the laws are setup so that any criminal mistake you make will follow you for life. There are companies whose only purpose is to scrape the internet to grab your mugshot from your pot possession arrest when you were 18 and keep it on file forever so they can sell it to potential employers. These companies have no concern for privacy laws if they exist (for the most part they don't unless you're eligible for expungement).
Further compounding the problem is that even without the private companies compiling public records, there are still public records; and if your name pops up in a record search your probably not getting a job.
The whole point of having a rehabilitation based criminal justice system is to return criminals to society in a way that allows for them to rejoin society in a productive and healthy way. Attaching a stigma to them for the rest of their life is preventing them from becoming productive and healthy members of society.
What's not so simple is actually publically saying something that can be viewed as soft on crime. It's popular to say "I think we should track every criminal because of the children" and is not popular to say "I think we should allow rehabilitated criminals privacy so they can move on with their life". Of course there is a gray area, murderers are different than minor drug offenders. But in our society, there are no gray areas, only criminal or not.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me guess, if you share that preferred network you might be part of the overweight social circle?
Do strip joints have WiFi? That would be another interesting social circle. Now you can know who in the office likes to kick back and watch the talent.
Ars is not a technical website. They are a tech news site.
I said I thought they were a "technical oriented website", contrasted to HuffPost which is a generalist news site (any political bias aside).
Ars seems to consider themselves to be technically oriented: Serving the Technologist for more than a decade. IT new, reviews, and analysis.
Look, I obviously pissed off some people who hold Ars in high esteem. All I was getting at is I felt the piece was a little fluffy, light on technical details, and oriented at laymen. Not the website for me, although it probably brings value and enjoyment to millions of people who are not me. Live and let live.
Try that on linux
Step 1: Create billion dollar business based on people clicking internet ads Step 2: Make more old people to click on the internet ads (who else clicks on those ads) Step 3: Profit!
Wow thats a cool feature. Props to the Safari devs at Apple.
1) Multi page stories are really annoying.
2) I guess I never read Ars a lot before but there is so little technical detail in the article I don't really understand how Ars can consider itself a technical oriented website. Seems more like a huff post story.
3) Skip to page 6 if you want to see anything about performance/benchmarks. Most of the other 5 pages are thoughts on UI changes.
Answer me that smart guy.
That would still be too fast.
I would be fine if I never had to return to Joliet, the place modernity forgot.
I think the things you bring up: virtual dispatch in a performance critical loop, template bloat, and other performance problems aren't so much a "younger programmer" problem but the result of increasing compute power and the fact that Java and JavaScript are the programming language of choice in CS programs in American Universities. Unless you really had a reason to learn higher performance programming: like a systems programming class or a microcontroller based engineering class, you won't be exposed to the pitfalls you talk about and therefore won't learn how to avoid them. Also: complexity analysis (big O) is huge, and it's amazing how few people look at a nested for loops / crazy STL container searches/finds without realizing the performance implications. I think ignorance of the art of writing performance critical code is equal throughout the age distribution.
Maybe it just my "embedded guy" superiority complex, but you can't get away with that shit in the embedded world. Although, now that we're getting super powerful ARM microcontrollers I'm actually afraid that average code will become more and more common.
You have to really really fuck something up to have C++ OO code be too slow where you're talking "milliseconds".
Anecdotally, I use to write software that controlled generators. We used a 72MHZ ARM7TDMI with 64K onboard ram and some awfully slow external 8-bit ram chip. Never had any performance problems. Milliseconds is a really long time in the context of embedded software.
If OO is too slow, it's usually because the PEBCAK.
In my experiences as a C++ developer our challenges are mainly architectural. None of us are C++ wizards, we all have many C++/STL books on our desks and are frequently scouring forums when we don't know something. C++ knowledge or the lack of it has never been a problem. Chances are that one of us knows how to do that whacky thing you want to do but can't remember how to do it. If we don't know, its really not that hard to experiment a little and figure it out. Worst case were posing on stack exchange or some other forum.
Knowing how to develop a piece of software with an OO architecture in C++ is the skill that we find to be more important and harder to find in new devs. We have a few open recs right now and although we get many guys with years of C and C++ experience, few if any know anything about OO. Out of the current employees, less than half are 'good' at OO design.
I have worked with guys who can crank out thousands of lines of real time, embedded code for industrial applications. Globals everywhere, no understanding of encapsulation or data hiding, nothing even resembling an interface. That sucked.
Give me a good designer over a "rockstar" programmer any day.
This is exactly how neoconservatives view the free market. Politicians and laws are part of the market and fair game. A company will always strive to maximize profits, if buying laws and legislators maximizes profits so be it.
This is the free market as neoconservatives see it, whoever has the most capital wins.
About two weeks ago we had this story Silicon Valleys Loony Cheerleading Culture is Out Of Control.
Titstare just seems like a satire on the completely pointless app genre that seems to be the new popular thing to do if you are a young hip coder looking to score big in the new social/app bubble we are in.
Didn't Facebook start as a way to rank girl's appearance at Harvard? Who's to fault these guys, they could be the next Zuckerberg. Titstare is (however tongue-in-cheek) indicative of the trend of creating valueless apps and hyping them up to billion dollar status and then selling to the highest bidder trying to reinvigorate their failing business. (example: AOL/MySpace/HuffPost).
That may very well be true but I still don't believe that if the person had to be responsible for their words they would say it. I guess my point is that if someone in the media said to me: "We have decided that you are a credible source but we won't publish your name if you give us a statement; what's your opinion on subject X that supports our narrative?" I would be inclined to be hyperbolic and grandiose more so than if my name would be printed next to my quotation.
Sometimes I feel that these "former U.S. officials" and "anonymous staff members" should STFU. It just seems like they use their anonymity to say random shit that will create headlines and stroke their ego. The "don't hire brilliant people" quotation is just stupid. No one that would have to be responsible for their words would say that.
But what possible reason is there of stripping the bos (sic) of HIS moral responsibility for putting the driver in that position (of having to choose between keeping his job and looking at a text) in the first place? THAT is what the judge is getting at, and you have not provided any valid argument against it.
You're begging the question of the drivers job being on the line based on a binary decision: read the text and break the law, or ignore the text and lose job.
Why couldn't the driver just pull over for a few min to correspond with his boss? How do you know that the boss didn't assume that is what the driver would do because it is illegal to text and drive. How do you know there isn't a text to speech device that reads out texts as the driver gets them (actually pretty common in commercial trucks).
If the boss forced the driver to read the text while actively driving, I can see how that should be criminal. But the means of force need to be more serious than the driver didn't want to pull over for a few min to read his phone. If the boss sends a text and the driver decides to read it instead of pulling over, the boss has no control over that and should not be implicated.
Too late now but I was meaning that this is no different than Deepwater Horizon / BP. I forgot a word or a question mark.
When a corporation/government has no independent oversight and an interest in minimising the severity of a disaster the public should have no expectation of receiving accurate information.
The station was even more triumphant when it signed Larry King
I know Larry King wasn't that bad (I found him insightful), but maybe if they take enough of our cable talking heads we might get actual journalists on the news.
When is FOX news going to come to defend Lavabit against the oppressive Obama regime?
Surely the government violating the constitution to get at Lavabit's data and thus compeling them to shut down is as outrageous as Obamacare and all of the businesses FOX claims it is destroying.
I'm sure everyone has already said it but leadership is not management. Leadership is the act of leading, it requires actions not a title.
On a hockey team, the leader is the captain. He leads by example, his teammates respect him. The GM does not tell the hockey players what to do, he manages their pay and who gets fired when the team does poorly.
In engineering, management is not leadership, it is management. The leaders are the guys who when they speak, everyone shuts up. The leaders are the guys who the team goes to for answers. The leaders are the ones who have the trust of the management.
If you are interviewing at a place that doesn't know the difference between management and leadership, and god forbid actually has a management person leading engineers, run. Run away. You don't want to work there. I have worked at places where management people lead engineers. The manager was trying to explain how hard it is to be an engineer to other managers and he said "they write thousands and thousands of lines of code with 10 logic statements on each line just to solve simple problems". That guy was an idiot, he was a management person trying to pretend that he had any technical leadership skills at all. That always fails. Other management people like it because they all speak the same language and they don't have to interface with the awkward engineers, but in the end you cant have management leading technical talent.
Darin Wedel, who was laid off from Texas Instruments, and gained national attention when his wife, Jennifer, challenged President Obama on H-1B use, said that for electrical engineers, 'unless you are in the actual design of circuits, then you're not in demand.'
If you ever try to explain to a lay-person how and to what extent facebook and google know everything about you they are usually not very supportive of it. The people who don't mind are either not sharing anything significant or just don't care because online privacy and data mining isn't something they are really concerned with as it doesn't directly affect their daily lives.
Most people that use facebook don't truly understand the nature of facebook's business model and the technical expertise deployed to harvest their data. Much in the same way that most people can't fathom the extent to which the government can know everything you do on a computer. It's just not within their realm of understanding, most people don't even really understand how the internet works on a basic level.
I think that if people really understood that Enemy of the State (the movie) is a pretty good depiction of the state of government surveillance they would not support it.
It's not fair to conclude that since people are ok with facebook they are ok with being put into a NSA database. They don't understand the consequences of either.
Bear in mind
Does your mind feel a little fuzzy?
maybe if corporations (like Microsoft for example) stopped the practice of refusing to hire developers with 25 years of experience (like myself for example) with 13 year-old drug-possession felonies (like myself for example) they wouldn't be so desperate to hire foreigners...
I think the number of people in your scenario is not large enough to have any effect in the supply of software engineers. But since we're off topic anyways lets continue.
/offtopic
I do think you have a valid point, and it is a subset of a larger problem involving rehabilitated criminals.
In the US, the laws are setup so that any criminal mistake you make will follow you for life. There are companies whose only purpose is to scrape the internet to grab your mugshot from your pot possession arrest when you were 18 and keep it on file forever so they can sell it to potential employers. These companies have no concern for privacy laws if they exist (for the most part they don't unless you're eligible for expungement).
Further compounding the problem is that even without the private companies compiling public records, there are still public records; and if your name pops up in a record search your probably not getting a job.
The whole point of having a rehabilitation based criminal justice system is to return criminals to society in a way that allows for them to rejoin society in a productive and healthy way. Attaching a stigma to them for the rest of their life is preventing them from becoming productive and healthy members of society.
What's not so simple is actually publically saying something that can be viewed as soft on crime. It's popular to say "I think we should track every criminal because of the children" and is not popular to say "I think we should allow rehabilitated criminals privacy so they can move on with their life". Of course there is a gray area, murderers are different than minor drug offenders. But in our society, there are no gray areas, only criminal or not.