mechanical_fish

7 ms·

1.
by mechanical_fish 10y ago
We didn't have iPhones in 1995, but television filled the same role. The result was no better. It was probably worse. We'd spend hours watching TV, often while simultaneously being really bored. I can hum the theme song to "
2.
by mechanical_fish 11y ago
The stakes are high, so I'm going to be blunt: This is terrible advice. [1] The amount you're trying to save with "option 4" can be estimated fairly accurately; it's about 0.09% per year. [2] Over forty years, this
3.
by mechanical_fish 11y ago
In tandem with looking up the data, I also recommend broadening your social circle by meeting a former alcoholic or two. They're not hard to find. Alternatively, you can read their memoirs, which are even easier to find. I don't r
4.
by mechanical_fish 11y ago
Fixed. Don't get me wrong, I own and rather like Rumours , though I cannot spell it. It helps that, after spending a decade mostly not listening to classic-rock radio, I can hear the thing with fresher ears.
5.
by mechanical_fish 11y ago
My theory continues to be that the music industry is just unlucky. They entered the internet era with a product that was perfectly positioned to be annihilated by Napster, iTunes, and YouTube. The pop single was a great product in its day.
6.
by mechanical_fish 11y ago
You certainly can get clients through email, and I can think of no more valuable skill you could practice than the art of composing a really good email to a consulting customer who lives twelve time zones away. It is not especially difficul
7.
by mechanical_fish 11y ago
Your questions are good and relevant ones, I agree. Let me rephrase them a little: "Hello, coworker! Did you enjoy the cake we both got to eat the other day in the company cafeteria?" "By the way, I'd like to ask you a q
8.
by mechanical_fish 11y ago
It's highly relevant to getting a job on a software team, but only because most teams are assembled via interviews, and verbally relating stories from your past in a face-to-face meeting is the most effective interviewing technique. An
9.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
Quite a few RIT grads have come through my employer's engineering teams. There seems to be, or have been, a program there in "network engineering" or something, which places a big emphasis on practical systems architecture an
10.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
If the question is an algorithms type question, then there is no ambiguity, and either the interviewee answers it or they don't. Imagine that our interview goes like this: --- Q: Can you implement a red-black tree? A: I don't kn
11.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
You may think you're doing the candidate a favor by offering to handwave away the details, but the vaguer question might actually be worse. "Can you write a correct implementation of an AVL tree on this whiteboard, in any programm
12.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
Let me get the plug in first: if you are on a Mac, try Dash, the app that looks up docs for you. I have it mapped to a keystroke in emacs, and I can sometimes park the cursor atop, say, the word 'render' and look it up in one moti
13.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
I work for a very large Drupal hosting company. We host important web sites on Drupal for corporations big and small. Web service software is not secure unless you patch it rapidly. There is no silver bullet. Last year there was a big secur
14.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
Hosting your own email works great until you try to actually send any. [1] But if you send enough, you eventually have to deal with the spam infrastructure. Customers will complain that critical transactional emails ended up in user spam fo
15.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
Wow, I forgot just how many days that was, I see. Though I now remember that one of my labs had a storage dewar full of precious biological samples that was a bigger version of this design, and we only refilled it a couple times a month. $5
16.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
The non-pressurized LN dewars I've seen had a "plug" that was just a cylinder of foam that slid into the neck of the dewar, with a light plastic cap on top. It was lightweight enough to bob upward at the slightest pressure, r
17.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
It's true, it is easy to get carried away by the fact that the Leidenfrost effect can protect you from small splashes of nitrogen on your skin. As the demos show, it's even possible to dip a BARE hand in... very briefly. For the
18.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
And, honestly, they are not that hard to learn. Compared to the amount of time it takes to understand the semantics of "stdout", the time required to learn the spelling of "stdout" is nothing. In a world where millio
19.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
Read and discover: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/11/07/doing-business-in-japan/ (I could pull an answer to your question out of this -- hint, search the page for a dollar sign -- but if you're rea
20.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
The USA is not Japan. Others have already pointed out that our geography is different. But that might not even be the real problem. I am a fan of trains, but I live in Arlington, Massachusetts, which is not on Boston's rail-transit net
21.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
Speaking of emeritus employees: When do salarymen retire? What happens after that? Does the salaryman finally get to see that beach in Hawaii that his wife has been visiting every year, or does the pension not always stretch that far? Do th
22.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
The glib response is " what 'inefficiencies'?" The U.S. version of the social contract has advantages, but "greater overall efficiency" is not one of them. U.S. employees are also trained on the job. The diffe
23.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
Yes, and I also nerd out on the design of online discussion forums. So watching this discussion trip over a misfeature and nearly fall into the darknet was sad, and sad again.
24.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
Sigh.
25.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
Like anybody, I have a reflexive tendency to feel pride when a number goes up, but pride in my average-point ranking is tempered by the knowledge that it's a statistic-of-convenience. It's not necessarily there because it's w
26.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
Rackspace may have thought that they could mitigate the issue without taking this drastic step. They certainly didn't want to do global reboots. The engineering team probably spent some time running tests and scribbling on whiteboard
27.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
I used to have a static website, before I wised up and moved to Wordpress like everyone else. I found that, once I restricted myself to the features of static pages, the security risks of Wordpress were a lot less scary: - You can't ha
28.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
In fact, those links look different because they are semantically distinct, and the underlying logic becomes clear as you read. The small-caps links are inline references to other sections of the same book; their distinct typesetting distin
29.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
You may notice that I carefully elided C to Objective C when selecting examples of things that change. :) I'm also not sure this is a counterexample. It's just the opposite perspective. From the perspective of a parent, a three-ye
30.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
What are you afraid of? Go is compiled. You have the compiler. You have the libraries. You have your code. You have perpetual licenses to run these things, and even to fork them. Construct yourself a solid build chain, the kind that works

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