eranki

7 ms·

1.
by eranki 11y ago
I used to do it this way until I read this article a while back -- the hot start method gives me much easier-to-peel eggs than the cold start used to. I start with my eggs from the fridge and usually toward the end of their lifecycle though
2.
by eranki 11y ago
Here's an interesting paper on the prevalence of these misconceptions in both students and teachers (at least in Germany). http://myweb.brooklyn.liu.edu/cortiz/PDF%20Files/Misinterpre... TLDR: 80% of methodol
3.
by eranki 12y ago
Interviews are hard because programming is an incredibly complex task with few qualified candidates. Any programming challenge other than the most basic questions is going to have a long-tail distribution in the time it takes a person to an
4.
by eranki 13y ago
Trying to become a successful academic seems about as insane as trying to become a rock star. Here's Peter Higgs on the subject of how academics today compares to the past: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013&#
5.
by eranki 13y ago
Nobody knows how to identify "talent" other than in retrospect. We say people are talented when they produce results, and then we select little anecdotes about their story to allude that it was destiny. We can't settle this debate because w
6.
by eranki 13y ago
The best food in the world isn't freely available to everyone. The amount you pay for software may not correlate with quality (expensive government contracts vs. a few smart guys making a website) whereas top-priced meals are consistently g
7.
by eranki 13y ago
agreed. i think this convenience is confusing. also would make it hard to explain that a two-dimensional complex vector contains two complex numbers, not one.
8.
by eranki 14y ago
Why do we always feel the need to upvote posts like these as if we don't discuss them every 2 weeks? Next up in the topic cycle: Discrimination in tech. Why working more than 40 hours a week is killing your productivity.
9.
by eranki 14y ago
You missed the point, which is that people are likely to pull out their phones at totally inappropriate times these days. Go to any restaurant or bar and see how many dates/couples/groups are just staring blankly into their phones. That doe
10.
by eranki 14y ago
I think the benefit would be that people will ask more in-depth subject questions rather than "getting-to-know-you" type questions (to which we would get answers too short to satisfy). I think HN has become increasingly focused on people ra
11.
by eranki 14y ago
The problem is corporate culture and chasing secondary indicators of productivity (hours spent in the office, lines of code written, emails sent). The actual output of knowledge workers is hard to determine and bursty (you can spin your whe
12.
by eranki 14y ago
I used to like Quora a lot but always hoped it would grow out of its Silicon Valley cliqueyness... I think a lot of these recent changes ensure that it's going to continue only serving that niche.
13.
by eranki 14y ago
I think the alternative being proposed though (no brand name but lots of drive) assumes lots of coding experience outside of the classroom.
14.
by eranki 14y ago
I really enjoyed my MIT education, and maybe it made me smarter, but I can't say it made me a much better programmer. We had exactly one class (6.170) that was a practical programming course and the content should have been familiar to anyo
15.
by eranki 14y ago
Two points: 1) "Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it." - Feynman Most smart scientists and engineers I know (not just web programmers) work on their problems due to some combination of:
16.
by eranki 14y ago
Only read a few pages, but I would eliminate a lot of the introductory formalism. Most people don't need to be confused by the different sets of numbers, or common uses of variable names, or how to alter the shape of functions.
17.
by eranki 14y ago
I like doing this and changing all the variable names as well so I'm forced to keep track of what's doing what
18.
by eranki 14y ago
lol, nobody gets paid to see the positive things. Everyone else at the company is also being paid to be critical and fix problems (lawyers, finance, HR, CEO, etc.).
19.
by eranki 14y ago
I agree, it's a straw man. Also, who ever implements their own data structures anymore? These days people use native-language maps freely, which may be implemented as trees or hash tables.
20.
by eranki 14y ago
Also life expectancy changes as you age: http://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html By the time you hit 60, you've gone from ~75 to ~80.
21.
by eranki 14y ago
But simplification is the hard part... Being able to understand a solution and being able to come up with a solution are two very different things.
22.
by eranki 14y ago
Asymptotically, the question with more coconuts is more interesting. I haven't verified this for sure (there are some assumptions), but: With the "naive" asymptotically correct solution (go up a constant number k of floors, then linearly se
23.
by eranki 14y ago
lol why are you so mad -- perhaps you couldn't make this out through your tears of rage: "Why not just plan ahead? Because most of the time, it was a very abrupt failure that we couldn’t detect with monitoring."
24.
by eranki 14y ago
It's actually more like dumping fuel for an emergency landing instead of dumping passengers, if we really insist on using completely irrelevant analogies.
25.
by eranki 14y ago
I thought about it, but honestly, I think it's important to try to fight against all the sanctimony and handwringing that surrounds security. People should feel comfortable talking about security as a tradeoff without diluting the argument
26.
by eranki 14y ago
^ For those that wonder why there is even a separate clean log.
27.
by eranki 14y ago
Thanks! Good point. We actually repurposed our offsite database recovery to clone slaves off a master (after LVM was no longer performing), so that's a great way to get more testing in.
28.
Scaling lessons learned at Dropbox, part 1(eranki.tumblr.com)
418 points by eranki 14y ago|84 comments
29.
by eranki 14y ago
NULL-terminated strings are understood to be the only acceptable way to pass around strings in C. safercopy() will not be writing or reading garbage from memory, but the strings produced as output are not going to be well-formed unless the
30.
by eranki 14y ago
I don't know about way better. We had the experience of being both in managed hosting and the cloud from 1 server each to hundreds, and the cloud was better the entire way, with comparable costs. Especially if you're going to include engine

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