Optimizers "completely eliminate" code all the time, at least for good code. You'd drown in such warnings in the last C codebase I worked on. E.g., our standard called for all variables to be initialized at declaration, in some trivial way that can't itself have errors. So you get a lot of: int foo = 0;... foo = NonTrivialFunction(bar);// do something with foo
We expect the optimizer to remove the "= 0" wherever it's redundant, so there's no performance cost to this helpful technique.
Or again MyClass *pFoo = NULL;... pFoo = FindIt("bar"); if (pFoo == NULL) {
return ERROR; }
Perhaps the compiler can prove that FindIt will always return a non-null value for the constant input, and can optimize away the null check. That doesn't in any way make the null check bad code (nor the initial NULL assignment, which likely got optimized away as well).
Well, it kindof is, but the spec doesn't try to call out every stupid thing you need to warn users about. Compiling with warnings, extra warnings, and pedantic warnings enabled will find a lot of stuff. But those are warnings, not errors, for a reason: sometimes you really do know better.
Circular argument ("begs the question", for real). A code prover is non-trivial code. If I assert that all non-trivial code has bugs, then you can't use a prover to prove otherwise (and anyhow, there's not a proven-correct stack to run it on).
Static analysis tools are a useful part of code review, but nothing more than that.
* A bug in killall(1) has been discovered. It makes killall -INT to deliver SIGTERM rather than the desired SIGINT, and may cause blocking behavior for scripts that uses it, as -I means âoeinteractiveâ. A workaround of this would be to use -SIGINT instead. This bug has been fixed on FreeBSD-CURRENT and will be fixed in FreeBSD 10.0-STABLE.
* A regression in pw(8) does not remove a user from groups not specified in the provided group list when the -G flag is used. This is expected to be corrected in FreeBSD-CURRENT and FreeBSD 10.0-STABLE.
* ipfw(8) fwd action can send packets to the correct interface with a wrong link-layer address when the route is updated. This bug has been fixed on FreeBSD-CURRENT and will be fixed in FreeBSD 10.0-STABLE.
Oh? I can believe it was BS by the standards of your culture, but other cultures have different values and norms of behavior. Isn't that neat? And what a boring world it would be if we were all exactly the same.
More importantly for/. how is this news for nerds? Is Dice this intent on turning Slashdot into a political discussion site for people who "like technology"?
Slashdot doesn't really have "glory days", but I'd prefer the goatse trolls and page wideners and GNAA trolls of old - all of whom could at least be modded down - to blatant click-trolling in the story submissions.
This doesn't surprise me at all. The "institutional left", (which is well represented in DC but probably not representative of the left-leaning public) has reached the point now where they'll seize any excuse for a larger, more powerful, more well-funded government, even crossing traditional lines to become defense hawks.
I expect the Democratic Party (at the federal level) to increasingly support any government program with a budget, even the military, to the increasing frustration of the voters, as the money starts to run out. At the state and local levels, acceptance that the budget can't be infinite is coming much faster and earlier, and politicians (on both sides) are discovering that cutting budgets isn't actually the end of the world, but that hasn't started trickling up to the federal level yet.
No social welfare system will stop you from getting leukemia in your 20s. Sometimes life just blows up - what happens afterwards is where a social welfare system comes into play. And a responsible adult should be able to handle any one thing going wrong on his own, because almost everyone's life blows up eventually form illness, divorce, or layoff with extended job hunt. We shouldn't need the assistance of others unless we get hit from two directions at once (though in one's early 20s it's a bit different, as it does take time to save).
Never worked for a start-up?. Programming shops aren't hatched fully formed, you have to hire engineers in the order that you can find them, and sometimes that means the senior guys don't start first.
What did you understand by "specific technology"? (I'm trying to guess what "UNIX skills" you'd actually be paid for today.) Are there really still jobs where you bang together shell scripts for a handful of servers? Are there really still servers around running those crufty old proprietary Unices from 20 years ago, each different in it's own special way?
Or are you talking about general maturity and lessons learned as an admin, and not specific tech stacks?
Only applies to the US mail, which Amazon rarely uses. Also, that didn't stop my book club from refusing to honor returns when they had a software bug where they'd send you every book you declined if you were using paypal (a bug which they've never fixed AFAIK).
If insurance companies were competing for my business, I'd have no problem with that. Let each take their best guess at my risk, and I'll go with the cheapest. The one who tends to guess most accurately will grow at the expense of the others.
Of course, health insurance today is nothing like that at all. I wish it were actual insurance, against unexpected risk, that I bought just like car insurance (with a similar pool for the highest risk few% where insurers just had to eat the losses as the price of doing business), with my employer no where in the picture.
What are you going on about? Assuming he had the sort of presence where the questioner might believe he had never lied before (it's an old story), that's the most amusing possible answer.
Look, work should be about some reasonable combination of productivity and enjoyment. A team that gets along well together is more fun and more productive than a team where everyone thinks the other guy is an asshole. Of course you can go too far - you can go to far with anything in life - that's hardly insightful. But as one among many criteria? It's probably a good one.
The point of the tennis ball question (or overly-cliched manhole cover question) is not to see if the candidate already knows the answer, but to assess how he deal with a problem he hasn't thought about before. Can you reason from what little you know, and make some sense of a strange problem. Microsoft's famous (and now long retired) "how many gas stations are there in Seattle" question is the same way. Of course you don'know, of course you normally google stuff like this, and of course you won't get a precise answer. None of that is the point - the point is: can you reason about a problem from minimal data?
But IMO those are stupid questions for a programmer, as you can get the same sort of assessment while getting the candidate to write code on the board.
Engineer not managing or working strictly as an architect later in your career means you failed somewhere.
Bullshit. Plenty of larger companies have a real technical career track these days. Of course, I recommend that veteran engineers try their hand at both management and pure "architecture" along the way, both for breadth and incase that's been your true path all along. However, a senior engineering position beats a mid-level manager position IMO, both for job stability and for stress (plus it totally sucks having to be the guy doing layoffs when things go bad).
Just remember, too much experience is bad. After you have 10 years experience you'll be too old to be employable. Anywhere. Ever.
Only if you've been deeply irresponsible in your own job skills. One thing I learned early that that expertise in any technology stack will only last 5 years or so before it's worthless. Sometimes you have to move on, even to a lower-paying job, just to freshen your skills (as I recently did). Sometimes you have to directly focus on improving your non-technical skills in a real way. But you only become unemployable when you stop learning new professional skills.
20-mumble years of experience and still going here. Going back through my email, I was contacted 12 times last quarter by recruiters who seemed credible in having senior positions to fill, and a couple who didn't. I've certainly met and interviewed people who have made themselves unhirable by focusing too narrowly for too long, but as long as you remember that each specific technology that you're expert in will be meaningless in 5 years (and that salary doesn't go up when you're older like it does when you're younger), you won't have this problem.
I've also been in that position, but to remain so past your mid 20s starts seeming like your fault. The less stable your income, the more important your savings. Of course, sometimes life just blows up, but that's much rarer than people living paycheck-to-paycheck
Slashdot Mirror
Optimizers "completely eliminate" code all the time, at least for good code. You'd drown in such warnings in the last C codebase I worked on. E.g., our standard called for all variables to be initialized at declaration, in some trivial way that can't itself have errors. So you get a lot of: ... // do something with foo
int foo = 0;
foo = NonTrivialFunction(bar);
We expect the optimizer to remove the "= 0" wherever it's redundant, so there's no performance cost to this helpful technique.
Or again ...
MyClass *pFoo = NULL;
pFoo = FindIt("bar");
if (pFoo == NULL)
{
return ERROR;
}
Perhaps the compiler can prove that FindIt will always return a non-null value for the constant input, and can optimize away the null check. That doesn't in any way make the null check bad code (nor the initial NULL assignment, which likely got optimized away as well).
Well, it kindof is, but the spec doesn't try to call out every stupid thing you need to warn users about. Compiling with warnings, extra warnings, and pedantic warnings enabled will find a lot of stuff. But those are warnings, not errors, for a reason: sometimes you really do know better.
Circular argument ("begs the question", for real). A code prover is non-trivial code. If I assert that all non-trivial code has bugs, then you can't use a prover to prove otherwise (and anyhow, there's not a proven-correct stack to run it on).
Static analysis tools are a useful part of code review, but nothing more than that.
Wow, you weren't joking!
* A bug in killall(1) has been discovered. It makes killall -INT to deliver SIGTERM rather than the desired SIGINT, and may cause blocking behavior for scripts that uses it, as -I means âoeinteractiveâ. A workaround of this would be to use -SIGINT instead. This bug has been fixed on FreeBSD-CURRENT and will be fixed in FreeBSD 10.0-STABLE.
* A regression in pw(8) does not remove a user from groups not specified in the provided group list when the -G flag is used. This is expected to be corrected in FreeBSD-CURRENT and FreeBSD 10.0-STABLE.
* ipfw(8) fwd action can send packets to the correct interface with a wrong link-layer address when the route is updated. This bug has been fixed on FreeBSD-CURRENT and will be fixed in FreeBSD 10.0-STABLE.
Bugs in killall() and pw()? Wow.
Oh? I can believe it was BS by the standards of your culture, but other cultures have different values and norms of behavior. Isn't that neat? And what a boring world it would be if we were all exactly the same.
More importantly for /. how is this news for nerds? Is Dice this intent on turning Slashdot into a political discussion site for people who "like technology"?
Slashdot doesn't really have "glory days", but I'd prefer the goatse trolls and page wideners and GNAA trolls of old - all of whom could at least be modded down - to blatant click-trolling in the story submissions.
This doesn't surprise me at all. The "institutional left", (which is well represented in DC but probably not representative of the left-leaning public) has reached the point now where they'll seize any excuse for a larger, more powerful, more well-funded government, even crossing traditional lines to become defense hawks.
I expect the Democratic Party (at the federal level) to increasingly support any government program with a budget, even the military, to the increasing frustration of the voters, as the money starts to run out. At the state and local levels, acceptance that the budget can't be infinite is coming much faster and earlier, and politicians (on both sides) are discovering that cutting budgets isn't actually the end of the world, but that hasn't started trickling up to the federal level yet.
No social welfare system will stop you from getting leukemia in your 20s. Sometimes life just blows up - what happens afterwards is where a social welfare system comes into play. And a responsible adult should be able to handle any one thing going wrong on his own, because almost everyone's life blows up eventually form illness, divorce, or layoff with extended job hunt. We shouldn't need the assistance of others unless we get hit from two directions at once (though in one's early 20s it's a bit different, as it does take time to save).
Never worked for a start-up?. Programming shops aren't hatched fully formed, you have to hire engineers in the order that you can find them, and sometimes that means the senior guys don't start first.
Because he was telling a joke. I expect poking fun at obsessively literal geeks.
What did you understand by "specific technology"? (I'm trying to guess what "UNIX skills" you'd actually be paid for today.) Are there really still jobs where you bang together shell scripts for a handful of servers? Are there really still servers around running those crufty old proprietary Unices from 20 years ago, each different in it's own special way?
Or are you talking about general maturity and lessons learned as an admin, and not specific tech stacks?
Wow, those sound like amazingly boring ways to live one's life. Why keep living if you're going to stop learning?
Pretty sure those laws relate only to the USPS.
Only applies to the US mail, which Amazon rarely uses. Also, that didn't stop my book club from refusing to honor returns when they had a software bug where they'd send you every book you declined if you were using paypal (a bug which they've never fixed AFAIK).
If insurance companies were competing for my business, I'd have no problem with that. Let each take their best guess at my risk, and I'll go with the cheapest. The one who tends to guess most accurately will grow at the expense of the others.
Of course, health insurance today is nothing like that at all. I wish it were actual insurance, against unexpected risk, that I bought just like car insurance (with a similar pool for the highest risk few% where insurers just had to eat the losses as the price of doing business), with my employer no where in the picture.
What are you going on about? Assuming he had the sort of presence where the questioner might believe he had never lied before (it's an old story), that's the most amusing possible answer.
Look, work should be about some reasonable combination of productivity and enjoyment. A team that gets along well together is more fun and more productive than a team where everyone thinks the other guy is an asshole. Of course you can go too far - you can go to far with anything in life - that's hardly insightful. But as one among many criteria? It's probably a good one.
The point of the tennis ball question (or overly-cliched manhole cover question) is not to see if the candidate already knows the answer, but to assess how he deal with a problem he hasn't thought about before. Can you reason from what little you know, and make some sense of a strange problem. Microsoft's famous (and now long retired) "how many gas stations are there in Seattle" question is the same way. Of course you don'know, of course you normally google stuff like this, and of course you won't get a precise answer. None of that is the point - the point is: can you reason about a problem from minimal data?
But IMO those are stupid questions for a programmer, as you can get the same sort of assessment while getting the candidate to write code on the board.
"The sheep is a liar! Um, I mean no."
If there's a steady paycheck in it, I'll believe anything you say.
Engineer not managing or working strictly as an architect later in your career means you failed somewhere.
Bullshit. Plenty of larger companies have a real technical career track these days. Of course, I recommend that veteran engineers try their hand at both management and pure "architecture" along the way, both for breadth and incase that's been your true path all along. However, a senior engineering position beats a mid-level manager position IMO, both for job stability and for stress (plus it totally sucks having to be the guy doing layoffs when things go bad).
Just remember, too much experience is bad. After you have 10 years experience you'll be too old to be employable. Anywhere. Ever.
Only if you've been deeply irresponsible in your own job skills. One thing I learned early that that expertise in any technology stack will only last 5 years or so before it's worthless. Sometimes you have to move on, even to a lower-paying job, just to freshen your skills (as I recently did). Sometimes you have to directly focus on improving your non-technical skills in a real way. But you only become unemployable when you stop learning new professional skills.
20-mumble years of experience and still going here. Going back through my email, I was contacted 12 times last quarter by recruiters who seemed credible in having senior positions to fill, and a couple who didn't. I've certainly met and interviewed people who have made themselves unhirable by focusing too narrowly for too long, but as long as you remember that each specific technology that you're expert in will be meaningless in 5 years (and that salary doesn't go up when you're older like it does when you're younger), you won't have this problem.
I've also been in that position, but to remain so past your mid 20s starts seeming like your fault. The less stable your income, the more important your savings. Of course, sometimes life just blows up, but that's much rarer than people living paycheck-to-paycheck
"Fit with group" is a completely reasonable hiring criterion.
One imagines he possessed a sense of humor, and was poking gentle fun at obsessive literalist geeks.