> the fourth I have to take due to state apparatus' nagging and legal threats.
I get a letter every month from the licencing people, it just goes in the bin. I've had 1 visit, he asked to come in, I said no. That was basically the end of it.
(For the record, I have a TV but I currently have no way to watch live TV on it, so why should I have a licence! I don't use their service)
I was having a conversation with my dad about how if a virus had a 10% death rate it would be terrifying.
His reply was that 10% was nothing, that means you've got 90% chance to survive. Then said you've probably got a 10% chance of being hit by a bus every time you cross the road. Just absolutely no idea what probabilities are at all or ability to extrapolate probabilities from real world lived experience.
Same thing, I still have at home a desktop I've built when I was 17 (now I'm 30!) and still runs fine for day to day tasks, of course with Linux on it. It has 8Gb of RAM (DDR3), 512Gb SSD (not original of course because back then they did cost an astronomic price) and an i7 CPU that I've overclocked, an NVIDIA GPU with 2Gb of memory that still plays older games fine.
To me there is no reason to update a PC if you don't use Windows or MacOS that forces you to purchase a new hardware to do the same things. Just look at Windows 11, full of useless AI features, weights a ton, and in the end it's probably faster a PC from 25 years ago with Windows XP.
I think the existence of the internet as a mass-market entertainment platform used by billions of non-tech users is part of it. SV from like the 1970s/1980s seemed a much more innocent place.
The microcomputer/home computer boom (1978 to let's say 1998 or so) and growth of software companies selling packaged box software you could run on your PC was in many cases not run by people who I would categorize as fundamentally evil.
Did a lot of weird cut-throat business stuff happen in the 1980s? Probably. But it all seems very cute and pales in comparison to today.
Well, for one they had less capability to execute evil plans on a worldwide Internet scale.
Maybe some of the early 80s tech entrepreneurs very well could have become the same sort of founders that are in this list of horrid a16z things. But the reach and scale just wasn't possible.
The whole paradigm of software development, and distributing that software product to end users was completely different than what we have today.
It's an external contract first ORM. It brings strict typing but doesn't go into object persistence management.
It's similar to what OpenAPI/Swagger does for REST.
Being contract first means that both SQL and corresponding application data bindings get generated from the same universal spec.
Cons :
- It can make using platform-specific features harder than in plain SQL.
- It makes database app code and SQL statements dependent on the whims of evolving generators libraries. Which is not a problem 'per se' but imposes an oversight cost, especially if you customize said generators or develop your own.
But it brings many architectural advantages. Compared to typical ORM
- Runtime initialization time is very quick if not instant.
- Bindings can be precompiled in separate lib, only rebuilt when schema changes, making faster builds.
- Schema management, meaning versioning and migration strategy planning can be centralized. That to me is a big thing for long lived business projects with multiple deployments in varying environments.
- From the code it makes a database closer to a standard service API. There might be a parallel to make with using stored procedures as database interface.
Yeah, from the post it might even be more limited than Django (python) ever was. For example it allows the user to define its own fields, which was used over a decade ago in libraries to extend Django and provide json support long before it was officially supported.
I used to be on a forum with only half a dozen people, someone in the group hosted it. We wanted to share images so someone wrote and hosted a pubic file sharing site...
We never shared the link to the uploader publicly, yet within a couple of weeks the URL was out there somehow and he was getting all manners of horrific stuff uploaded to it, he had to close it down just to protect himself.
Take C#, if you want a new language feature or syntax added you have to propose it to the language design team, they have to decide it's worth implementing then you have to wait on it being implemented and released and your tooling updated.
If I want some new syntax in a LISP, I just write a macro.
e.g. the following threading macro in clojure
(->> x
foo
bar)
Takes x and passes it as the last argument to foo, then the result of foo is passed as the last argument to bar. Alternative you have -> for passing it as the first argument. These are from the standard library, but if they weren't they would be trivial to write yourself.
And no strings involved when you write macros in lisp either. It's just lists, your macro is just building a list. Because the syntax is just lists and there's no difference between lists and the syntax.
And that particular threading macro looks a lot like monadic code in Haskell, which looks a bit like Forth, which looks like a shell command with pipes.
Macros let a domain programmer (as opposed to the compiler writer) in Lisp implement almost any other programming paradigm as a native language feature.
I hate when they do this. I'd rather just buy the physical book, donate it to a library and then obtain the liberated version of the ebook "elsewhere".
All my experience in trying to hire developers has been wading through an endless stream of people who were just useless.
Me: I want to represent a 2d grid, what data structure should we use?
Them: A string?
This was someone applying for senior engineer. Others I've had filled their CV with SQL related acronyms. But couldn't explain what a foreign key was and then stubbornly insisted that at their current corp they would never ever use foreign keys in their SQL database!
I've had senior engineer when asked how to check if we had a 2d array with an item at x,y tell me if anything is on the same column or row, they couldn't do it, couldn't even verbalise how to approach it.
"Web Developers" who didn't know the difference between GET and POST. Web Developers that have never heard of PUT or what it would be used for.
I have a question I usually ask which is "How would you convert a Julian yyyy-ddd date string to a military yyyy-mm-dd date string?" (I explain how a Julian date works if they aren't familiar with it.)
The answer that almost guarantees I'll hire you is "there's got to be a library function for that, so I look in the manual". Almost as good is somebody whiteboarding how they'd convert ddd to mm-dd (and then account for leap years, etc.)
I get a disturbing number of people who say things like "I would communicate with the person asking for this to see what they're really intending blah blah"
My favorite answer was on a phone interview where he just hung up and wouldn't answer when we called back.
> I get a disturbing number of people who say things like "I would communicate with the person asking for this to see what they're really intending blah blah"
Sounds like they know this question is a “gotcha” question but just misinterpreted which direction you were going with it.
Some will ask a question like this expecting you to treat it like a puzzle and outline how you’d solve it as-is; others ask it as a way to probe how you’ll deal with strange or misguided requests (the case you noted as disturbing); and others yet will ask it to see how you’d practically solve it (your intention).
Seems like a bad interview question without context regarding kind of answer you’re looking for.
No, it's a pretty good interview question because it tells me if somebody's instinct is to reinvent the wheel or not. What I didn't expect was how many people couldn't say how a wheel even works.
People are not generally answering interview questions based on instinct, but rather based on what they think the interviewer wants to hear to get the job. I would have interpreted this is as a leetcode style algo question and started by treating it as such, even though IRL my first instinct would be "get a lib that does it". Awful, awful strategy.
It appears that either answer would be accepted, and so I'm fine with it. If it really is there is one correct answer then I'm against this. This feels like a problem where a good enough solution can be done in the time of an interview if you do it by hand (though if anyone knows about dates they will expect there is a lifetime of fixing special cases left if you don't use the library)
I prefer fizz-buzz as a question because it is obvious there isn't a library. It is also a problem you should be able to do in an interview. It has enough weirdness that there is no best answer, despite having several workable paths you could try.
I mean, any answer is "accepted" in the sense that the whole point is to let me see how you think about solving simple problems. What has been distressing is seeing the number of applicants who can't even try, when it's the trying I want to see.
It is shocking how often there is one acceptable correct answer and they don't care about the approach to solving problems only the score in a pass fail way.
Its not. Any interview question where you are looking for a specific answer is already suspect, but especially if you don't properly provide context for the question in what you would expect, things become a shit show.
If you would ask someone to write a piece of code, and a part of the problem is this conversion, then you would be right to expect they reach for a library, but even if they don't you would be giving them the opportunity to explain themselves, and judge the explanation, not the answer. Also, if your test is "does this person reach for a library at the right time", you could do a lot less esoteric and confusing by just asking them to add 10 days to a date. If you just ask this one specific problem, it is likely they assume you are looking for them to demonstrate the skills involved in actually solving the problem, i.e. leetcode.
This is also why some people give you the blabla answer, because it is indeed very unlikely that someone needs to do this legitimately. This is because its a toy problem. Someone's professional reaction to the problem in isolation should indeed be: this is weird, I've never been asked something like this, what's up?
Finally, even though the question is terrible, I would still rate the "whatsup?" response higher than the "leapyear" response. I would want a developer to triple check that this problem needs solving, before they would solve it themselves.
Finally finally, if there's one answer to one question that, when answered trivially in a way literally taught in most basic programming courses (use the standard library / a third party library), makes them a "guaranteed hire", I also have significant doubts about the level of talent you are bringing in, as any experienced interviewer will tell you that qualified people will get important questions wrong, and unqualified people will get important questions right.
I understand that this reaction might be quite harsh, and I know better than anyone that its hard and time consuming to do good interviews, but please consider that you are rejecting people who may be very confused and sad by this way of rejection.
But that's why the context of the question is important. It's not clear from your comment, but I'd give a different answer if the question was strictly academic in nature (reinventing the wheel) or focused on practical work realities (use a library).
Even using a library isn't that practical. It may be the zeitgeist in JavaScript but that doesn't mean it's actually a good idea. Nobody remembers left-pad? If you're writing Java or Python then checking if your date class can already do it is a good idea.
I've managed to work in tech for 30 years without ever significantly coming into contact with javascript professionally. I hire Ada and C programmers for a stodgy defense contractor where we have to wear ties and it takes 6 months to get a new library approved; unicorns don't really thrive in this environment (or in Fairfax County in general).
I unironically not as a joke think that rolling a dice after vetting candidate credentials is about as good as most recruiting policies or better. To much bias for players.
Like talk to the person abit to avoid obvious toxic people and then fact check the credentials.
So yeah draw lots. Guessing right on whether you want a practical response for the gotcha or for them to solve the puzzle adds no value to the process.
I get a letter every month from the licencing people, it just goes in the bin. I've had 1 visit, he asked to come in, I said no. That was basically the end of it.
(For the record, I have a TV but I currently have no way to watch live TV on it, so why should I have a licence! I don't use their service)
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