mabbo

Many years ago, as an undergrad, I had a conversation with a grad student friend about the Selection algorithm (which will find the kth largest item in an unsorted list in O(n) time). I loved it, but when I tested it in practice it was slower than just sorting and selecting well into the billions of elements.

My friend said "that may be true, but consider the philosophical implication: because that algorithm exists, we know it's possible to answer the question in O(n) time. We once didn't know that, and there was no guarantee that it was possible. We might still be able to find a better O(n) algorithm."

I feel the same way about this. Sure, this might not be faster than Dijkstra's in practice, but now we know it's possible to do that at all.

Not all time spent interacting with a screen is "screen time".

The problematic thing is kids spending endless hours just absorbing rather than playing or interacting or doing stuff. It culminates in kids (and adults) who cannot mentally handle being bored- they must have the screen to relieve the horrors of the idle mind.

If achieving these same goals is easier without an app for you and your kids, then by all means, do that. But an app on a screen is a very powerful tool to structure and organize things. My daughter is still a bit young for this one, but I can see how useful it will be when she's a couple years older.

I got a sleep study at the age of 24 because my then-girlfriend (now wife) said "I got used to the snoring, but that thing where you stop breathing really freaks me out". The what now? In hindsight, I'd had signs of sleep apnea since I was in my teens despite being a healthy weight.

I was diagnosed with 'mild to moderate' sleep apnea and told to not drink, and to exercise more. No CPAP needed. And they were right- if I do those things, I don't have many problems. But then again, I can't always do those things.

What really helped though, and I'm loathe to even say it, was taking high absorption magnesium. I hate it because there are very limited studies that say it should work, and it's mostly promoted by absolute quacks. And yet, when I take it, I sleep really well without snoring or having apnea issues and if I stop, I sleep terribly.

I learned about the median-of-medians quickselect algorithm when I was an undergrad and was really impressed by it. I implemented it, and it was terribly slow. It's runtime grew linearly, but that only really mattered if you had at least a few billion items in your list.

I was chatting about this with a grad student friend who casually said something like "Sure, it's slow, but what really matters is that it proves that it's possible to do selection of an unsorted list in O(n) time. At one point, we didn't know whether that was even possible. Now that we do, we know there might an even faster linear algorithm." Really got into the philosophy of what Computer Science is about in the first place.

The lesson was so simple yet so profound that I nearly applied to grad school because of it. I have no idea if they even recall the conversation, but it was a pivotal moment of my education.

Sorry Dang. I hadn't realized it was coming off that way, but I'll be my best to check myself in the future.

I can see how what I said would be construed that way.

I'm not disagreeing with you. This was a very bad idea.

But I was a few hours away from becoming a parent, hadn't slept much in days, and was not thinking very well.

Sub-optimal decisions were made.

What I find interesting when comparing the US the Canada on topics like these is that in Canada, there is self-interest in demanding workers be protected. Like beyond the fact that it's a good thing you do.

Because we have a public health care system, funded by taxes, having a large number of young men out of the work force (not paying taxes) and using the health care system effectively means my taxes, everyone's taxes, are higher.

There's incentives for our government to protect workers from risks that will cost a fortune to fix.

In America, there's only the "because it's the right thing to do" reason, which is never enough for anyone to actually do anything.

> My guess is the industry just isn’t educating workers about the risks.

My guess is that the companies that did were undercut by the ones that didn't.

When my wife was super pregnant and overdue, friends were consistently asking for updates. I made a website called "is<wife's name>stillpregnant.com" and put a very very minimal website there. It was literally just route53 and cloudfront in front of an S3 bucket.

But that meant I needed to make updates from the hospital with my phone. I mean yes there were probably better options but I was a bit busy at the time to think of them.

Let me just say that writing raw HTML files using textedit for Android was not a great experience. It's just not the right interface for making complex text.

Maybe LLMs will help with this, allowing us to describe what we want at a higher level, through voice or text. But God help me I do not want to try to write valid HTML on a phone (after being awake for 35 of the previous 36 hours).

At $110/h, 70 h/week, that's $7,700/week, so $23k for 3 weeks of hell.

That's about 1/3 of the median US household income in 3 weeks.

If I didn't have a family, had the skills, and lived in the area this would be an interesting way to put away some cash.

It worked, FYI. Thanks!

There is a need for runtime configurations, yes, but it's important to put them behind an interface intended for that, and not one intended for something else.

> Make feature flags short-lived. Do not confuse flags with application configuration.

This is my current battle.

I introduced feature flags to the team as a means to separate deployment from launch of new features. For the sake of getting it working and used, I made the mis-step of backing the flags with config files with the intent to get Launch Darkly or Unleash working ASAP instead to replace them.

Then another dev decided that these Feature Flags look like a great way to implement permanent application configs for different subsets of entities in our system. In fact, he evangelized it in his design for a major new project (I was not invited to the review).

Now I have to stand back and watch as the feature flags are being used for long-term configurations. I objected when I saw the misuse- in a code review I said "hey that's not what these are for"- and was overruled by management. This is the design, there's no time to update it, I'm sure we can fix it later, someday.

Lesson learned: make it very hard to misuse meta-features like feature flags, or someone will use them to get their stuff done faster.

No no don't tell me this. I had things I wanted to get done this weekend!