ElliotH

I love seeing a change ringing article on HN, especially with well labelled diagrams!

The move to a framework system where we can all ring what we like and just describe it within an agreed upon nomenclature is a great improvement rather than the legacy Decisions. Having strict rules always seemed quite dated to me - the ringing police after all do not show up if you ring a "banned" performance. But agreeing on names makes communication possible - a good role for a central body.

Jump changes are fun too, but I don't think I agree with the article that allowing them has really led to a revolution. The top performances on BellBoard are of commonly rung non-jump methods. In fact I don't think I've seen a jump method be featured at all. Philip himself doesn't seemed to have published a performance of "Jump" anything since 2013. For many I think it remains an interesting novelty.

This is good news. The dart language has been getting more complicated without corresponding quality of life improvements. A first class record object without messing around with macros would be a great start.

At Google there’s not really such a thing as code that never changes. Your dependencies will shift beneath you, even if it’s just the compiler itself. More likely though the libraries you use have been updated, a robot or two have come through and applied automated fixes etc etc.

So if we’re using it once a year, (we do have tools like that, maybe not strictly annually but certainly rarely) then you do indeed want it to be automatically built on some kind of recurring basis so it’s ready to go when you need it. And the tooling makes it (relatively) easy to have that happen.

In the UK it seems a clear upgrade. I can be sitting on a train downloading Netflix shows between stops before we go underground. Speed tests often higher than I get at home over VDSL. Couldn't do that on 4G.

I wonder if this has the same downsides as golden and screenshot type tests, where you end up over-asserting resulting in tests that break for unrelated changes?

Obviously that’s a risk for hand written tests too but it’s easier (today… who knows what copilot like systems will offer soon!) for a human to reason about what’s relevant.

I lived in a house with one of these in Bermuda. Lesson learned that it’s not a good idea to use up your water pressure while the power is out as then your pump doesn’t work. Otherwise seemed to work great.

I didn’t write Java professionally before joining Google. I interviewed in Python, there’s a much wider gap between those two languages than between C# and Java. I’ve also worked with people who used to write C# since it’s kinda common in line of business finance stuff.

Forget the hundreds of hours in leetcode. If you actually want to work for one of those companies, get in touch with a recruiter and see if there’s a role that suits. Ask for prep time later if you need it.

I’ve personally appreciated people willing to talk about the topic of death and the person who died. As opposed to those seeking to provide distraction. In particular I couldn’t stand anyone seeking to give a positive spin on it to “cheer me up”. It’s a bad thing. Just marking it and being with the person is enough.

I’ve used such a Cisco system. Compared to regular video calls the latency and quality was light years ahead, much more natural conversations were possible. By which I mean it was possible to laugh, interject, and generally have a realistic conversation with a colleague in another country without having to compensate for video lag in that very careful way I find necessary on Meet and Zoom.

That said, there was no “emotional connection” like the Google one is described as offering. It was still a video call. There was no forgetting that. I suspect the 3D and the apparent physical closeness to the display add a lot.

Depends what you mean by sustainable. Pinboard has taken care of my bookmarks since 2011, it’s still here in 2021. Nothing I put up on my VPS in 2011 still exists.

How do the estimates work? Are my guesses shared anywhere?

My experience of Ruby, which is admittedly a few years old, is that people did use multiple Ruby environments through e.g rbenv to manage different sets of gem versions, which is what "virtual envs" are the equivalent of.

Now, I do agree the Python tooling situation is kind of a mess, but there you can still do:

"pip install the-package"

And you're just as good, all the other tools are when you're trying to do stuff harder like:

- Maintain multiple development environments - Publish new packages - Build binary packages - Handle Windows

I think on Ruby you need tools beyond "gem install" to do those as well. The point is how we achieve simplicity while keeping the ability to do those things.