There is a fantasy theory that you can just only explain to them why something is bad, and they’ll understand and stop to do it by themselves. In contrast to past generations that are painted as caricatures that only had rules with harsh punishment, never talking and explaining. Looks obviously extremely appealing on paper, at least a generation of "modern" parents fell into the trap and are struggling with teens and young adults highly insecure and non adapted to the adult world.
Repetition. Then make them repeat, to see if they understood why (they _will_ roll their eyes, until they age enough).
The only thing we were punished for in my childhood was lying. Not forgetting/not following on promises ('yes I will do it, don't worry '), that was fine, but saying 'i did it' when it wasn't done, that was getting harsh punishment. You didn't clean the toilet after use despite multiple warnings? As long as you admit it, no punishment, only a calm talk. I destroyed my little sister room and ran out for an hour during a teenager fit? Calm talk, asked to fix everything the best I can (and I did). Lying after the fact? Yeah, you've gained a curfew, and an unpaid job. The 'where were you' that most kid are asked in their late teenage years was always answered truthfully, even when it was doing illegal stuff (happened with my younger brother, in front of my even younger sister). Calm discussion, no punishments.
A few year, my sister called my dad at 3 am, while inebriated and high, and afraid (I don't remember if it was because she didn't trust her friend to drive her or that she felt weirdly bad and was afraid of GHB). The trust built in the early years from this approach might have saved her life.
I own a MagSafe charger and unless the author added a third party black case (?) around the puck, then that’s not a real MagSafe charger. I haven’t heard of cases for it but that doesn’t mean they’re not common, of course.
In a distributed system it may not be appropriate to rely on a timestamp like this without accounting for the possibility of clock skew (unless the system provides a guarantee that timestamps are monotonically increasing.)
SQL databases have had auto increment columns for ages, and they can be used to help with this problem.
For a “guide” I wish it would discuss some of the pitfalls of the presented approach along with alternatives.
A recent HN submission [1] highlighted that a surprising amount of detailed employment history is shared by employers with third parties.
When I pulled mine it said “SW Dev Eng 4”, curious to see if that’ll change to “Associate” after I quit… or if third parties track the entire title history, like they do track salary history.
The average California tech worker maybe not, but plenty of them are sitting on $500k+ in cash with yearly incomes in that same range. At that point what does $100k mean? $100k makes no difference in the person’s day to day life. If you like the house and you end up in a bidding war, the $100k is more than worth it.
> According to prosecutors, he used that information to seek unjust enrichment through a series of beneficial stock trades that generated $227,000 in profits and avoided $377,000 in potential losses.
This seems like a trivial amount of money for someone that high up to jeopardize their career or spend years of their life in prison for. I would maybe even understand the risk/reward if it was in the tens of millions but this sounds nowhere close.
I am genuinely curious to know if this happens regularly - what is the real motivation for committing a crime that barely pays relative to the penalties?
We can’t be afraid to change code. If your code change caused a production issue, what’s stopping someone else from causing a similar issue even if they aren’t refactoring?
I have worked on teams where people don’t know what the code does and the test coverage is spotty. It’s a minefield and only a matter of time before something breaks. It sounds like your refactoring work was a much needed step in the right direction.
There needs to be sufficient testing and monitoring in place to catch problems earlier than production, so that people are not afraid to change code.
Would you be willing to share more details about the specific problem you ran into?
> The obsession with status and notoriety and money to the complete exclusion of intellectual curiosity.
To me this resonates with the idea that FAANGs swallow up promising engineers and have them work on mundane problems to help generate revenue.
Certainly there are novel or interesting problems to be solved even in these mundane areas, but I wonder what we may be leaving on the table as a species - if many of these brilliant people were to focus their energies on other problems or research, what could we achieve?
Tangentially, are there positive (but not necessarily profitable) uses for the pile of cash that big tech is just sitting on?
I've heard from numerous people that FAANGs hire talented engineers and give them busy work or projects that never launch in a way to keep them from working for competitors. Is this actually true?
Yup. It’s not intentional or malicious, but it’s the end result.
You have teams that grow because the manager find work to do and no project is ever closed as finished or mature so tons of engineers are wasting time making incremental improvements to systems that already fulfill all requirements.
You also have these engineers see this and decide they can reinvent the system better because they’re so immersed and knowledgeable about it and boom you have huge numbers of worthless initiatives the size of which depends on how persuasive the lead is.
> "FAANGs swallow up promising engineers and have them work on mundane problems to help generate revenue."
That reminds me of how 10 years ago, the smartest people in the world were working for investment banks on high-frequency trading to improve tiny efficiencies on stock market profits. And today they're working for FAANGs to improve ad targeting.
Both cases are really just shifting money around, not creating new technology or wealth. But apparently improving marginal efficiencies of administrative work reaps more short-term profits than creating new value.
