I've heard that at companies that did stack ranking, managers of groups with high performers would actually seek out poor performers who didn't care about their ranking from other groups, to add to their group so that they wouldn't have to give a poor mark to their own people. These poor performers became hot commodities. Talk about gaming the system...
Readit Newskaiby commented on Blizzard manager departs in protest of employee ranking system bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/minimaxir
> It feels like Rust’s design guides you towards good abstractions and software designs.
> The compiler is very picky, but once code compiles it gives you the confidence that it will work reliably.
> Sometimes I had trouble making the compiler happy with the design I was trying to use, and then I realized the design had fundamental issues!
I experience a similar sentiment all the time when writing Rust code (which for now is admittedly just toy projects). So far it's felt like the compiler gives you just enough freedom to write programs in a "correct" way.
I don't really do unsafe/lower-level coding, so I can't speak to much there however.
kaiby commented on Dad takes down town's internet by mistake to get his kids offline bleepingcomputer.com/news... · Posted by u/FridayoLeary
In regards to screen time management and as a tech enthusiast dad of two kids--I have learned that simple low tech solutions work much better than most other more complicated methods. For example to limit screen time at night... we have a rule that all of the kid's devices need to be charged over night downstairs in the kitchen. I have a charging station setup in the kitchen for all their devices.
Also during the week devices are only allowed upstairs for homework use only.
> kid's devices need to be charged over night downstairs in the kitchen
How do you prevent them from going downstairs after you've fallen asleep?
kaiby commented on Buy it for life: Durable, Quality, Practical buyforlife.com/... · Posted by u/emre
Properly seasoned it will be as non-stick as Teflon or better. Especially carbon steel, which is also lighter - the main down side of cast iron is weight. Teflon flakes are much worse for you than a bit of iron ever will be (not really an issue in these amounts).
I've seasoned my cast iron pan many times. I don't think it ever beats teflon, though it gets to a point where things wash off of it pretty easy with just water and a chainmail ringer.
I love small and medium sized games. I'm nearly done working on one now actually (although I can't release it at the moment).
If anyone is looking for games like this here are a few single player games I'd recommend:
Monument Valley
Mini Metro
A Good Snowman is Hard to Build
Gunpoint
Snakebird
Braid
Sayonara Wildhearts
Super Mario Run
Untitled Goose Game
Race the Sun
I have to add Outer Wilds. Never been so wow'd by a space exploration game.
kaiby commented on Json-Base – Database built as JSON files github.com/Devs-Garden/js... · Posted by u/davidbarker
Someone at my old company basically did this and put it into production.
The first problem he encountered was that multiple connections couldn't both be using the database at a time without clobbering each other. "No problem," he thought, this is a good use case for micro services. A service sitting on top would ensure that there was only one operation being performed at a time.
Next, his problem was that the database would get corrupt sometimes when something bad happened in the middle of writing the file. His solution was to put the entire JSON format inside of a JSON string. If it could be parsed successfully, then he knew the whole file was written. Then all he needed were "backup" files for each table, in case the current one was corrupt.
Next, his problem was that querying and iterating through a large table performed badly, since it required parsing the entire thing first. Querying several times required the whole file to be parsed every time. The solution was to move SOME of the tables over to JSON-inside-SQLite.
EDIT: Oh yeah, the next problem was how to structure the data inside of sqlite. He decided to make a single table called "kitchen_sink" that held every JSON value. There was a column that said which "collection" it belonged to. There was another column that represented the row's primary key. So you could quickly query for a collection name, and a primary key, and get the full JSON row.
So the next problem was that you couldn't query quickly for things that weren't the primary key. So new columns had to be added called "opt_key1" and "opt_key2" where certain rows could put key values, and indexes could be added on those columns, so you could quickly query by it's first optional key, or it's second optional key.
As others have mentioned, there are a ton of off-the-shelf solutions that would have been more than adequate for this.
My question is, why didn't he go for any of the existing solutions when setting them up would've still been faster than rolling his own DB-in-a-JSON-file solution?
I'm not a business guy, but if Apple's going all-in on ARM processors, and then they expand into the server market (which the article speculates on), could we potentially see Apple opening a new product branch devoted to competing in the Cloud space with AWS, Azure, and GCP?
Imagine developing apps on an ARM-powered macbook, deploying onto ARM-powered servers owned by Apple, specifically for applications to be used on MacOS & iOS devices.
kaiby commented on Working remotely: I want my shared whiteboard blog.codecentric.de/en/20... · Posted by u/dkupfer1
I've been using Invision's Freehand tool [0] for whiteboarding in online meetings (also it's free). It's mostly worked about as well as a virtual whiteboard could be. It also allows for collaboration so everyone can draw on the same whiteboard at the same time.
A fair observation. I do think there's some value to concerns over style, but far too many tech writers give them undue prominence.
I couldn't champion your bulleted points harder. Honestly, if I had a say in it, any tech writer working on developer documentation should be able to code/build/perform/use whatever task or api they're documenting without the help of an engineer. They should be able to read and understand code, and they should be willing to do so, even more so than the average engineer using some library code. They should be capable of understanding a library deeply and synthesizing and summarizing that understanding for users of the library.
Just as tech writers in the medical field need to know quite a bit about medicine, tech writers in software should be required to know quite a bit about engineering software. There's plenty that do, but there's also quite a few that don't--I think it's a side effect of the field's relative youth.
I really wish more writers would code and do exactly the things you mention, such as implement robust code sample testing, etc.
The ideal technical writer, at least for software engineering documentation, is a hybrid of a traditional technical writer and a software engineer[^1].
[^1]: This excludes user-facing software documentation, which is essentially a totally different field than those that deal with writing for developer or engineer audiences.
The issue with that though is that if someone could read/write code, they would probably choose to be a SWE instead of a tech writer.
I'm not sure why this is, but I suspect that it's an combination of higher pay and an interest in writing code over writing documentation.
In my experience I would say that a good SWE will attempt to write good documentation, as having to answer questions in the future about how stuff works over and over takes more time than just documenting things properly the first time.
kaiby commented on Show HN: Version Control for Databases github.com/infostreams/db... · Posted by u/akie
Which databases can this be used for? Based on the usage of phpmyadmin and WordPress in the examples, I take it only works for MySQL?