Since interrupt is/was the fastest cast type, I try to leave 2 untapped islands at all times, so I can cast a counter-spell in response to their interrupt, thus negating it and allowing me to get back to coding before I was ever interrupted.
I mean that was Christmas time, and to give you an idea... still to this day when I say "Alexa, turn off the kid's TV" you can hear them yell in protest from the other room. That alone was worth the effort.
As I waited for the Echo Dot that I ordered "for my wife" for Christmas, I researched custom code, came to the conclusion that expecting Alexa to go to the cloud for a simple "pause my TV" command was really stupid, so I coded around it, because I am a programmer and that is what we do.
I learned in my research that the Echo can talk to several different kinds of "smart" things without going to the cloud. The "Phillips Hue" being one of them... so that was my back door.
Like 10 minutes of googling told me that there is an open-source implementation of the phillips hue protocol: https://github.com/bwssytems/h...
it didn't work for me right out of the box, but I fiddled with it for a few minutes then it was fine.
From there I wrote in a few minutes a rest endpoint that could take commands from the Hue bridge, and run (locally on my computer) the code of my choice.
All told about an hour after my device arrived at my house, it can control the Roku boxes attached to both of my TVs, and it can run specific movies off of my media server with no round-trip to "the cloud" needed
it is a simple use-case, and required a little bit of "non-amazon" thinking, but it was really easy. Any self-respecting developer could do it.
I worked for one of the infamous banks that crashed the world economy in 2007.
Our systems that approved/processed home loans had a CEO driven initiative called "cup of coffee" wherein we could process and approve a home loan in less time than it would take to finish a cup of coffee.
It was wildly successful. We took a process that had 8 hours of computer processing time, and 1-3 days of human roadblocks, and LEGALLY, coded it into an 8 minute (or less) process. That included things like title checks, credit checks, flood hazard determination, etc
Here is the problem... here is how it crashed the economy:
It did exactly what it was supposed to do.
"If you have 0 defaults you are lending too little, if you have 10% defaults you are lending too much" - Actual quote from business requirements.
So we built in basically a dial for risk... Turn the dial up, lots more loans, lots more risk, turn it down, less risk, less profit.
The CEOs took out every single obstacle in his path, and turned the dial to 11. Of course he did.
What is an AI going to do? The same damn thing, but maybe a little faster.
I dunno, maybe we need someone sitting at a desk saying "Are you sure, honey, that's an awful lot of risk"
How about private infrastructure, like private roads built with private money and the owner of the road charging to build/operate/maintain it? Naah, impossible, that's a government's job.
I mean... lots of areas have that. I live in Dallas where just about any highway worth driving on is a private toll road. Even people who claim to be free-market libertarians love to complain about private toll roads. The roads are awesome, and almost always have a higher speedlimit, better quality, and included roadside assistance.
The main problem with "private infrastructure" in Los Angeles is that if there were space for more roads, they would already be there. Which leads us to some sort of BORING (get it!?) proposition.
I guess I live in an area where split checks is the norm. There is no way that culturally people I hang out with would accept the whole "I had a steak and 6 beers, you had a salad and water, so lets go halves on dinner." thing.
I have never "split" a check outside of separate receipts, and I have never even witnessed it being done, except on humorous sketches about heavily imbalanced checks being split like the above scenario.
buying tickets and stuff too. Nobody I work/live/hang out with would ever presume to spend someone else's money. That's really weird.
I am 36, I would say that I am just an old person, but even including the bad old days of cash I have never in my life been in any of the situations people have listed as great examples of using Venmo.
But really "startups" in the technology sector are supposed to be "disruptors" so wouldn't it be the job of a startup to take the current situation (be it net neutrality or Cable-Company controlled blood-letting) and turn that into a surprising profit model that exploits some weakness or failing of the status quo?
The tighter Comcast squeezes the rock, the easier it should be to wriggle through the cracks in their failing business model.
The second most ridiculous thing in "Atlas Shrugged" was that Dagny Taggart invented a perpetual motion train "powered by ambient electricity in the air."
Of course the most ridiculous part was the part where CEOs joined together to create a utopia in Colorado with no poor or working people, just their own bootstraps, where they presumably ate nothing, repaired their own lavish houses, and needed no help from tradespeople, doctors or other "takers" who were not rich CEOs and obviously just wanted a handout.
Venmo is some stupid "payments wallet for your mobile phone" kind of thing, you have probably never heard of it, and they probably paid for this story in an attempt to make themselves more relevant.
During the last writer's strike, NBC un-cancelled "The Apprentice" (which had low ratings) and aired "Celebrity Apprentice" during "Must see tv" Thursday.
Trump would not be president today if NBC had decided to pay their writers instead of airing cult-of-personality bullshit.
In Dallas I live 1/2 a block from the bus stop, and worked in a building off the same bus line. This is the best possible scenario for public transit in Dallas, and it took 1 hour and 15 minutes to get to my work, at a cost of 80 dollars per month when prepaid (or 5 dollars per day). Conversely taking my car it is a 10-15 minute drive to work and about 30 minutes home (worse traffic).
That is before I changed office buildings. At the new building, my car commute is the same. On a bus? Almost 2 hours, including 2 bus changes, and 1 mile walking.
My commute at both offices was one of the best of any of my coworkers.
Dallas is big. the Dallas Fort worth area s gigantic. It is 1500 square miles of solid suburb with the occasional high-rise. and it is almost impossible to survive without a car. Uber helicopters will not change that.
In Dallas, Texas even most people living at the poverty line completely ignore public transportation. This would have zero effect on that, don't worry.
If anybody with 186 million dollars gives a fuck about a "destroyed career" they are either addicted to smashing fabrige eggs; or otherwise mentally ill.
only 3 candidates (out of hundreds) ever mentioned that you could overflow the stack. One of them limited the size of N and displayed a warning if you tried to present a value that would blow out the stack. All of those people were hired.
* We had a simple test that any developer should expect to pass.
* Hiring with highly competitive wages and benefits in one of the top tech markets in the US
* We only interviewed people with a degree in computer science
* We had a lower than 20% success rate at candidates writing working code (even ignoring syntax problems and semicolons, and just looking at logic flow)
What was this massively hard test?
1) Write a function that uses recursion to output the Nth iteration of Fibonacci (test includes full explanation of what fibonacci is)
2) Write a function that determines if a given year is a leap year (test includes full explanation of how to evaluate if a year is a leap year)
Nothing tricky at all, a simple "have you ever written code, and can you follow instructions/requirements?"
My 11 year old can pass this test. Tons of people with "Master's degrees" and "10 years experience" have no idea where to start.
It is not shocking that 95% of developers from *ANY* pool of people are worthless. It is not limited to any nationality or country of origin.
This seems to be an article about brigading; but it is not. This article is an attempt to get ticket-buyers to distrust movie reviewers by inflating the perceived effectiveness of stupid IMDB reviews.
Look, Turkey is fucked up and the Armenian Genocide is a real thing that is important. This movie is mediocre at best, according to a bunch of movie reviewers who are probably (almost certainly) not on the Turkish government's side.
It can be both: Botters could have deflated the IMDB rating and the movie could still be bad.
IMDB ratings are garbage, professional movie critics aren't that great either, but they are also not under the sway of the Turkish Propaganda machine, and they think it is a boring cookie-cutter movie.
So I would say it seems more likely Hollywood is gaming the battle against critics, by exposing online trolls, and using the narrative in its own favor.
Developers code. Developers review code. Developers write code to test code.
Developers can't touch production.
Automated checks of ANYTHING are golden because you aren't relying on people, and you aren't pitting people vs people.
It is all about consistency when you boil down to the bones of a well-running team.
Start with those rules and actually follow them and you end up with a pretty awesome setup, because Developers will naturally gravitate to defensive, test-driven programming when those are the rules.
1) All code is reviewed before it is merged, this is easily enforcable in bitbucket or github, probably others, but use one of these two anyway. It won't stop all your problems, but it is great triage and it forces lone-wolf mitigation. I don't even care if the reviewer is an expert... this isn't a gate keeper activity as much as it is a sanity check. "hey why did this variable get set, then re-set before you checked it?" or "hey how come you deleted 90 source files?"
2) All your code goes through some kind of code-quality gate like Sonar Qube or some other Linting tool. This can find and highlight common mistakes, and get them fixed before they are even reviewed. Developers hate to modify a pull request, so give them as many free "oh if I fix this nobody will bother me" wins
3) All unit tests must pass before code is merged. This is slightly tricky but you are going to need Jenkins or some other tool that is not as widely used as Jenkins; and integrate it into your bitbucket/github.
4) All deployments are automated. Sure you can have someone push a button, but they shouldn't have to fiddle with anything. And whoever is pushing that button can't be a developer.
5) Since your deployments are automated, your QA system is exactly like your production system (but maybe smaller scale) this way you are actually testing the thing as it will be deployed. "Kinda sorta how it will work in prod" is never a good test. If your QA deployment is automated, and the deploy is broken in QA,
then you have to fix it before it goes to prod. Ideally your developers can't touch QA either, but you can work toward that.
6) Since your developers aren't touching production, they will be forced to do things like: write actual helpful log messages, not make code changes that break the deploy, and reproduce production problems in Unit Tests so they stay fixed forever.
nothing about city traffic will fundamentally change.
well in the shorter term it will get orders of magnitude worse. In many areas, it would be cheaper to have your car circle the block indefinitely than to buy/rent a parking space. Certainly for the duration of a meal or trip to the store, "drive to nowhere, then drive back" will be the standard way to "park".
Slashdot Mirror
Since interrupt is/was the fastest cast type, I try to leave 2 untapped islands at all times, so I can cast a counter-spell in response to their interrupt, thus negating it and allowing me to get back to coding before I was ever interrupted.
I used a 20 year old soundex implementation to correct street names that were misspelled on home loan applications. My boss's boss called it AI.
I mean that was Christmas time, and to give you an idea... still to this day when I say "Alexa, turn off the kid's TV" you can hear them yell in protest from the other room. That alone was worth the effort.
As I waited for the Echo Dot that I ordered "for my wife" for Christmas, I researched custom code, came to the conclusion that expecting Alexa to go to the cloud for a simple "pause my TV" command was really stupid, so I coded around it, because I am a programmer and that is what we do.
I learned in my research that the Echo can talk to several different kinds of "smart" things without going to the cloud. The "Phillips Hue" being one of them... so that was my back door.
Like 10 minutes of googling told me that there is an open-source implementation of the phillips hue protocol: https://github.com/bwssytems/h...
it didn't work for me right out of the box, but I fiddled with it for a few minutes then it was fine.
From there I wrote in a few minutes a rest endpoint that could take commands from the Hue bridge, and run (locally on my computer) the code of my choice.
All told about an hour after my device arrived at my house, it can control the Roku boxes attached to both of my TVs, and it can run specific movies off of my media server with no round-trip to "the cloud" needed
it is a simple use-case, and required a little bit of "non-amazon" thinking, but it was really easy. Any self-respecting developer could do it.
There is no faster way to get your initiative funded than to utter the word "Compliance." Well done, IT team, you got your pet robots.
I worked for one of the infamous banks that crashed the world economy in 2007.
Our systems that approved/processed home loans had a CEO driven initiative called "cup of coffee" wherein we could process and approve a home loan in less time than it would take to finish a cup of coffee.
It was wildly successful. We took a process that had 8 hours of computer processing time, and 1-3 days of human roadblocks, and LEGALLY, coded it into an 8 minute (or less) process. That included things like title checks, credit checks, flood hazard determination, etc
Here is the problem... here is how it crashed the economy:
It did exactly what it was supposed to do.
"If you have 0 defaults you are lending too little, if you have 10% defaults you are lending too much" - Actual quote from business requirements.
So we built in basically a dial for risk... Turn the dial up, lots more loans, lots more risk, turn it down, less risk, less profit.
The CEOs took out every single obstacle in his path, and turned the dial to 11. Of course he did.
What is an AI going to do? The same damn thing, but maybe a little faster.
I dunno, maybe we need someone sitting at a desk saying "Are you sure, honey, that's an awful lot of risk"
How about private infrastructure, like private roads built with private money and the owner of the road charging to build/operate/maintain it? Naah, impossible, that's a government's job.
I mean... lots of areas have that. I live in Dallas where just about any highway worth driving on is a private toll road. Even people who claim to be free-market libertarians love to complain about private toll roads. The roads are awesome, and almost always have a higher speedlimit, better quality, and included roadside assistance.
The main problem with "private infrastructure" in Los Angeles is that if there were space for more roads, they would already be there. Which leads us to some sort of BORING (get it!?) proposition.
I guess I live in an area where split checks is the norm. There is no way that culturally people I hang out with would accept the whole "I had a steak and 6 beers, you had a salad and water, so lets go halves on dinner." thing.
I have never "split" a check outside of separate receipts, and I have never even witnessed it being done, except on humorous sketches about heavily imbalanced checks being split like the above scenario.
buying tickets and stuff too. Nobody I work/live/hang out with would ever presume to spend someone else's money. That's really weird.
I am 36, I would say that I am just an old person, but even including the bad old days of cash I have never in my life been in any of the situations people have listed as great examples of using Venmo.
I kid, I kid. 760 would fail anyway.
But really "startups" in the technology sector are supposed to be "disruptors" so wouldn't it be the job of a startup to take the current situation (be it net neutrality or Cable-Company controlled blood-letting) and turn that into a surprising profit model that exploits some weakness or failing of the status quo?
The tighter Comcast squeezes the rock, the easier it should be to wriggle through the cracks in their failing business model.
The second most ridiculous thing in "Atlas Shrugged" was that Dagny Taggart invented a perpetual motion train "powered by ambient electricity in the air."
Of course the most ridiculous part was the part where CEOs joined together to create a utopia in Colorado with no poor or working people, just their own bootstraps, where they presumably ate nothing, repaired their own lavish houses, and needed no help from tradespeople, doctors or other "takers" who were not rich CEOs and obviously just wanted a handout.
how is the pixel smartphone a competitor to Amazon Echo?
Venmo is some stupid "payments wallet for your mobile phone" kind of thing, you have probably never heard of it, and they probably paid for this story in an attempt to make themselves more relevant.
During the last writer's strike, NBC un-cancelled "The Apprentice" (which had low ratings) and aired "Celebrity Apprentice" during "Must see tv" Thursday.
Trump would not be president today if NBC had decided to pay their writers instead of airing cult-of-personality bullshit.
In Dallas I live 1/2 a block from the bus stop, and worked in a building off the same bus line. This is the best possible scenario for public transit in Dallas, and it took 1 hour and 15 minutes to get to my work, at a cost of 80 dollars per month when prepaid (or 5 dollars per day). Conversely taking my car it is a 10-15 minute drive to work and about 30 minutes home (worse traffic).
That is before I changed office buildings. At the new building, my car commute is the same. On a bus? Almost 2 hours, including 2 bus changes, and 1 mile walking.
My commute at both offices was one of the best of any of my coworkers.
Dallas is big. the Dallas Fort worth area s gigantic. It is 1500 square miles of solid suburb with the occasional high-rise. and it is almost impossible to survive without a car. Uber helicopters will not change that.
In Dallas, Texas even most people living at the poverty line completely ignore public transportation. This would have zero effect on that, don't worry.
If anybody with 186 million dollars gives a fuck about a "destroyed career" they are either addicted to smashing fabrige eggs; or otherwise mentally ill.
Shame they didn't hire me. I could have drained all the IP and talent from that place for a fraction of the cost.
only 3 candidates (out of hundreds) ever mentioned that you could overflow the stack. One of them limited the size of N and displayed a warning if you tried to present a value that would blow out the stack. All of those people were hired.
In my experience as a team lead/hiring manager:
* We had a simple test that any developer should expect to pass.
* Hiring with highly competitive wages and benefits in one of the top tech markets in the US
* We only interviewed people with a degree in computer science
* We had a lower than 20% success rate at candidates writing working code (even ignoring syntax problems and semicolons, and just looking at logic flow)
What was this massively hard test?
1) Write a function that uses recursion to output the Nth iteration of Fibonacci (test includes full explanation of what fibonacci is)
2) Write a function that determines if a given year is a leap year (test includes full explanation of how to evaluate if a year is a leap year)
Nothing tricky at all, a simple "have you ever written code, and can you follow instructions/requirements?"
My 11 year old can pass this test. Tons of people with "Master's degrees" and "10 years experience" have no idea where to start.
It is not shocking that 95% of developers from *ANY* pool of people are worthless. It is not limited to any nationality or country of origin.
This seems to be an article about brigading; but it is not. This article is an attempt to get ticket-buyers to distrust movie reviewers by inflating the perceived effectiveness of stupid IMDB reviews.
Look, Turkey is fucked up and the Armenian Genocide is a real thing that is important. This movie is mediocre at best, according to a bunch of movie reviewers who are probably (almost certainly) not on the Turkish government's side.
It can be both: Botters could have deflated the IMDB rating and the movie could still be bad.
IMDB ratings are garbage, professional movie critics aren't that great either, but they are also not under the sway of the Turkish Propaganda machine, and they think it is a boring cookie-cutter movie.
So I would say it seems more likely Hollywood is gaming the battle against critics, by exposing online trolls, and using the narrative in its own favor.
Eleven minutes ago was a nice little light, indie timetravel movie. It was like the anti-thesis of Primer.
Developers code. Developers review code. Developers write code to test code.
Developers can't touch production.
Automated checks of ANYTHING are golden because you aren't relying on people, and you aren't pitting people vs people.
It is all about consistency when you boil down to the bones of a well-running team.
Start with those rules and actually follow them and you end up with a pretty awesome setup, because Developers will naturally gravitate to defensive, test-driven programming when those are the rules.
1) All code is reviewed before it is merged, this is easily enforcable in bitbucket or github, probably others, but use one of these two anyway. It won't stop all your problems, but it is great triage and it forces lone-wolf mitigation. I don't even care if the reviewer is an expert... this isn't a gate keeper activity as much as it is a sanity check. "hey why did this variable get set, then re-set before you checked it?" or "hey how come you deleted 90 source files?"
2) All your code goes through some kind of code-quality gate like Sonar Qube or some other Linting tool. This can find and highlight common mistakes, and get them fixed before they are even reviewed. Developers hate to modify a pull request, so give them as many free "oh if I fix this nobody will bother me" wins
3) All unit tests must pass before code is merged. This is slightly tricky but you are going to need Jenkins or some other tool that is not as widely used as Jenkins; and integrate it into your bitbucket/github.
4) All deployments are automated. Sure you can have someone push a button, but they shouldn't have to fiddle with anything. And whoever is pushing that button can't be a developer.
5) Since your deployments are automated, your QA system is exactly like your production system (but maybe smaller scale) this way you are actually testing the thing as it will be deployed. "Kinda sorta how it will work in prod" is never a good test. If your QA deployment is automated, and the deploy is broken in QA, then you have to fix it before it goes to prod. Ideally your developers can't touch QA either, but you can work toward that.
6) Since your developers aren't touching production, they will be forced to do things like: write actual helpful log messages, not make code changes that break the deploy, and reproduce production problems in Unit Tests so they stay fixed forever.
What else are you going to do, drive to Europe? Take a 20 hour cab ride to your meeting in New York?
At [airline] we have you by the nuts, so fuck you.
nothing about city traffic will fundamentally change.
well in the shorter term it will get orders of magnitude worse. In many areas, it would be cheaper to have your car circle the block indefinitely than to buy/rent a parking space. Certainly for the duration of a meal or trip to the store, "drive to nowhere, then drive back" will be the standard way to "park".