Recent submissions

Comment · 6 years ago
Comment · 8 years ago
This sounds more psychotic than hypocritical to me. "I'll win in a fight", is this a normal way of thinking? I'm a US citizen and I can honestly say this thought has never crossed my mind while driving. My thought when passing a cyclist is to make sure I'm giving them enough room and hope I'm not doing anything to make them fearful. I thought most people were this way, and it seems obvious to me that it's the right way to act. How prevalent is this other, "I'll win in a fight" attitude?
Comment · 9 years ago
I'm not surprised at all. My observation has been that teachers - even ones who are brilliantly good as teachers - are abysmal PowerPoint users. Every one I've seen has made the same kind of mistakes:

  - Way too many slides for the time available
  - Numerous slides that with both paragraphs of text and elaborate diagrams
  - Slides that cannot be read at all by the audience because everything is too small
  - Reading verbatim from slides in the presentation
  - A firehouse of information that is impossible to remember or even follow
  - Zero narrative flow, no sense of what are key points
[edit: fix formatting]
Comment · 9 years ago
You're not in it to win it anymore. Get out while the getting is good, relax a bit, prepare for your next shot.
Comment · 9 years ago
So what? It sounds like you are using this argument to excuse companies whose practices are causing workplace injury.
Comment · 9 years ago
Let me put this into terms that you might better relate to.

To a person with kids, being lectured about the right choices to make in their lives with regards to their kids by someone without kids is much like being an engineer forced to endure the ignorant suggestions and misguided directives of a clueless non-technical manager.

Comment · 9 years ago
What? How do you suppose this surveillance will be conducted?

It sounds to me like you are proposing that we solve the problem of individual companies having to hire some people to look at bad things by having the government hire a whole bunch of people to look at bad things.

Comment · 9 years ago
Obviously you have no kids and no interest in persuading anyone who does, to be throwing around this "failed parent" talk for anyone raising a child with special needs.
Comment · 10 years ago
Which of the following seems more likely?

A recruiter who was already giving the guy the wrong interview, and whose job revolves essentially around HR and sales, made mistakes in asking a series of technical questions.

An expert with decades of relevant technical experience misunderstands and confuses basic networking and system topics.

Comment · 10 years ago
A bit OT and I hate to be a pest... but can you guys please start offering laptops with more than 1080p displays? It's almost Kafka-esque that my phone has 77% more pixels than a $2,500 graphics workstation laptop.
Comment · 10 years ago
21:40. He mentions in the video that they had a one-producer, one-consumer input queue that they originally implemented with clojure.lang.PersistentQueue. They engaged Cognitect for some code review/consulting, and Cognitect's advice was to use a regular Java ConcurrentLinkedQueue for this instead.

I think this particular example supports this "Cognitect snake oil" theory very poorly. I don't think PersistentQueue can be properly considered a first-class data structure in Clojure, as it doesn't even have a constructor function in clojure.core. The Clojure documentation, and the other writings of Rich Hickey and Cognitect don't encourage people to use this data structure. It exists, I think, for completeness and because there are some situations where it's appropriate, but unlike the core Clojure persistent data structures - maps, vectors, seqs, etc. - it's not designed as a general abstraction that covers the vast majority of general use cases.

Clojure is meant to be a practical language. It's hosted on the JVM and other platforms, and designed to make it is easy to use what those platforms provide. Where it's sensible to do so, Cognitect and other Clojure developers would certainly advocate using Java libraries to solve problems.

The other thing mentioned in the GP post was the idea of not using STM. This falls under the same umbrella. There are problems for which STM is the best solution, but there's a big space where something simpler is the right answer. In my observation, overuse of Clojure's STM is far more often the result of a developer impulse of "wow this is a cool looking feature, I want to try it" than any advocacy by Rich or Cognitect.

I also have some firsthand knowledge here, having been involved in a Cognitect engagement. I have some concerns about Cognitect as a result, but certainly nothing like this suggestion that Clojure is a real manifestation of the old fake Bjarne Stroustrup interview. [1]

[1] https://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/joke/cpp.htm

Comment · 10 years ago
Restarting is different from reloading. Take a look at `clojure.tools.namespace.repl/refresh` - which in recent versions of CIDER is triggered with `cider-refresh`. It does what you're asking - blows away all the loaded namespaces and re-compiles them from source, synching up the running code environment with what's in your source files.
Comment · 10 years ago
This article describes some seriously clueless agile practices.

A massive reorg and restructuring dictated from the top to enable agile, a bottom-up methodology.

They dictate that everyone must do Scrum - even support departments for which it's laughably mismatched - rather than allowing any level of team-driven process selection, and then 9 months later they open it up to allowing teams to choose, including letting them choose waterfall. Their messaging was this was always the plan, which is either a lie as apparently many people at MIT believe, or evidence that of even deeper cluelessness.

My opinion is that this Charles character has no business running a technology org.

Comment · 11 years ago
You are perhaps trolling/satiring but there are certainly people who feel this way, even if they don't state it in such up-front absurd ways.

Our founders responded to taxes they didn't like by seizing the contents of cargo ships and dumping them into Boston Harbor. If we described that in the same terms as many are talking about Baltimore, the headline would read, "rioters loot ships, smash cargo".

Compare the circumstances: "the government is taxing us and we don't like it" vs. "the government is killing us with impunity."

America was founded on a fundamental distrust of government, and certainly not on the idea that law and order is of higher importance than justice and liberty. "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants," is what America is about. When agents of government are systematically brutalizing and killing people, America is not a "sit back and ask nicely for it to stop" kind of country. America has always been about taking it to the streets

It's white hypocrisy alone that lets us pretend that if the situation were reversed and whites were the victims of this kind of pervasive government brutality, we would be just sitting at home and drinking tea while writing letters to the editor and blanching at the thought of doing anything violent. Bullshit! We used to do this all the time, until we set up minorities to take the abuse for us.

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