> By early 2015, I had an overwhelming impression that Google is a much sloppier technology than I ever imagined.
After working there, I can definitely agree with this. Their engineering chops are pretty high but not only are there tons of bugs with their products (though complexity can cause that), but they also have very poor documentation for everything, so if you run into an awesome bug, your likeliness for finding an obvious solution without having to pnig the team responsible is about as reliable as a coin toss.
That's actually terrible advice, in my opinion. Raising a family is REALLY hard work that requires a lot of time and dedication out of you. It also restricts what you can and can't do; quitting jobs that you hate or moving somewhere to seize an opportunity become astronomically difficult with a family.
Families are important, but why limit your potential early?
I worked for Two Sigma for about a year. They've been on a hiring spree for years, and I understood why: they're trying to build Amazon-level technology for just them.
Excellent company to work for; highly recommend them!
It's excellent until you realize that you're paying WAY more for every click than you would with AdWords and that their reach is only limited to Yelp and doesn't do THAT much to boost your presence. My mom was considering it for her daycare business but I argued against it for this reason and many other small businesses that have dealt with them concluded the same thing.
Word. My Qy8 IEMs from some no-name Chinese electronics company were $25 shipped and sound just as good as Jaybirds! I was shocked that they've gotten this good now.
Linus's comments make a lot of sense but the fact of the matter is this: a number is a number is a number. If I run the same "flawed" benchmark suite on last year's iPhone 5, it will tell me that, yes, its CPU is indeed slower than that of a 6S. The tests might not holistically represent real-world usage but they output just enough data to tell me quantitatively how much better one phone performs over another in a vacuum.
The "real" benchmark; actually running automation on a cross section of phones against a few popular apps, would probably be a more useful test. But Anandtrch and their cohorts don't seem to agree.
The Echo is awesome; my girlfriend and I have had it for the last few months and LOVE being able to just play music by telling it to play. It's also an AMAZING bluetooth speaker; seriously, it's so fucking loud and on point. It's worth every penny.
I met a TSA airport agent a few months ago and, naturally, asked him exactly this. Apparently, the TSA purposely does not release accurate statistics as a security measure and that he and his colleagues have definitely stopped a lot of potential, but minor, scenarios from happening.
I could be wrong and uneducated about this, of course.
> As a dark-skinned man who oftentimes sports a beard, I'm treated like a terrorist every single time I walk through security. To them, I'm a second-class citizen - no question about it.
As another (very) dark-skinned man who has also donned something close to a beard, I've noticed that (a) I've been treated the same as everyone else at all of the major hubs and (b) Everyone else gets treated like cattle.
Same for when I've travelled with my family, and my Mom and Dad are dark.
I've definitely had my fair share of stupid racists (okay, maybe less than my fair share; I got lucky somehow); going through airport security hasn't been it.
I think one of the best and clearest examples of a useful monad is the Error monad in OCaml (and Haskell, I think). Error is a type that can return two different things depending on the result of a computation. One could use exceptions for this sort of thing, but this is much, much cheaper.
Some people find it hard because they are not interested enough to really take the time to understand it.
Others just don't have the mind for it, like how some don't have the body to dance or play sports at a professional level.
There are, indeed, some concepts that come naturally to only a handful of people (kernel development is hard for me; interesting, but hard), but I think the fundamentals are pretty easy to grasp for most of the mainstream languages.
You don't need that much memory if you're setting up a simple IMAP server; you could probably do it on a super cheap instance on AWS, Rackspace or similar.
I am failing to see what the big stink is about "giving up one's privacy" when using "the cloud." Yes, there are some shady providers that might put their hands in the cookie jar at their convenience. That sucks. Google isn't one of those providers, though. What advantage would they gain from reading people's mail at a whim?
Regardless, one's privacy is already compromised the moment they sign up for Internet service; that information can be made available to the right people after one subpoena.
I actually like declaring my variables at the top. To me, this seems more readable than searching for declaration statements throughout the code.
Why should I not do this?