whitenoice (u/whitenoice)

whitenoice commented on Why most Hacktoberfest PRs are from India pulkitsharma07.github.io/... · Posted by u/pulkitsh1234

ukd1 · 5 years ago

From the outside it does seem boring; a lot of rote learning and not a lot of flexibility once you're out, high risk of getting sick and or sued. 99.99% or more Doctors are not House.

whitenoice · 5 years ago

To be a doctor is as hands-on as you can be unless you speak of radiology, but that too is fascinating. You spend four years of your life doing hands-on work during the residency (rote learning?). There is an infinite amount of learning in medicine! Even after so many years of research, we do not understand the human body completely. I don't know what is you mean by boring; as a layperson, everything will seem boring unless you put in the effort to learn more about a field. But still, liver transplant, heart transplant, lung transplant, surgeries, anesthesia, diagnosing unknown diseases are not interesting? (flexibility? there are so many fields) I suggest you visit a Level 1 Trauma center close to your home and see what goes on in there. Reality is more brutal than TV in this case.

It may be boring to you, and that is ok, but it does not negate the fact that it is a challenging field and demands immense hard work to be one.

whitenoice commented on Why most Hacktoberfest PRs are from India pulkitsharma07.github.io/... · Posted by u/pulkitsh1234

gautamcgoel · 5 years ago

I am Indian-American, and while I cannot comment much about the culture of Indians in India, I can comment a bit about the culture of Indian-Americans, especially second-gen Indian Americans like myself. Many of my Indian-American classmates exhibit the behaviors described in this article. For example, in my high school (a magnet program for gifted students), there were several Indian-American students, many of whom were "high-achieving". Most of them put a lot of effort into trying to buff their resumes to get into good colleges, for example by volunteering on causes they didn't really care about. Cheating was rampant; the attitude many students seemed to have was why actually learn stuff when you can just cheat and get the same career rewards? Almost all of them followed very conventional (read: boring) career paths; in fact most of them became doctors. True creativity and risk-taking was not a personality trait I commonly observed, I'm sorry to say. I was lucky to have very "Americanized" parents who didn't raise me with these backward attitudes.

whitenoice · 5 years ago

Please. Being a doctor is boring? It is challenging to be a doctor, and it is almost impossible to cheat through the USMLE (US Medical Licensing Exam) process. It is a 3 step process, which includes four tough exams taken at registered centers, which are actively monitored. I'm saying this as a spouse of a physician who has gone through the journey, and the amount of work they put in through their med school, USMLE, and then residency is unfathomable. Seeing someone put 14 hours of work every day to achieve their goal is not boring, rather a representation of their desire to drive, achieve, and excel. Also, with so many Indian doctors, it says a lot about their grit and hard work.

whitenoice commented on Checked exceptions: Java’s biggest mistake (2014) literatejava.com/exceptio... · Posted by u/flying_sheep

whitenoice · 5 years ago

Most codebases use lombok, you can use @SneakyThrows or @SneakyThrows(SpecificException.class) - https://projectlombok.org/features/SneakyThrows

whitenoice commented on Checked exceptions: Java’s biggest mistake (2014) literatejava.com/exceptio... · Posted by u/flying_sheep

rovolo · 5 years ago

It's inconvenient because null could be considered a case

  switch(s) {
    case null: return false;
    case "y": return true;
    default: return false;
  }

The broader issue is that Java handles null inconveniently.

1) Every object can be null, switch requires the argument to be non-null, and the type system doesn't warn you when NPE are possible. A type system which handles nullability could fail to compile if 's' is nullable. Kotlin does this, and it let's you opt-in to the NPE with some convenient syntax:

  switch(s!!)

2) It's inconvenient to handle null as a value. To properly handle the null case without throwing, you need to do one the following:

  if(s == null) { ... }
  else switch(s) { ... }

  switch(s == null ? "some-default" : s)

The first way can be made more convenient if you change switch to work on nullable values. The second way is inconvenient, so people generally skip it. If you want switch to only work on non-null values, there're more convenient syntaxes to handle null, such as the 'elvis operator':

  switch(s ?: "some-default")

whitenoice · 5 years ago

You could also use Optional, like

Optional.ofNullable(s).map(i -> {switch (i) {...}}).orElse()

whitenoice commented on Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack coindesk.com/hackers-take... · Posted by u/megadeth

jliptzin · 5 years ago

Seems to me twitter should hire some humans to sit there and manually approve every tweet by all VIP accounts before they go live. How hard could that be? If that’s all they do you’re adding maybe a 30 second delay to every VIP tweet and you’re pretty much guaranteeing that this doesn’t happen again. Unless of course the hackers somehow inserted the tweet directly to the database and bypassing any such measures.

whitenoice · 5 years ago

That will not help, as the imposter could post a sane tweet impersonating the VIP. The person checking would not be able to identify if it's the VIP or the imposter.

whitenoice commented on Everest through the eyes of a Sherpa bbc.com/news/world-asia-4... · Posted by u/max23_

whitenoice · 6 years ago

For people interested in the topic of Himalayan big wall climbing, do checkout the movie Meru - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2545428/ it's excellent!

whitenoice commented on India’s IT industry laid off more than 56k employees this year qz.com/1152683/indian-it-... · Posted by u/codesternews

adrya407 · 8 years ago

>This can be seen from increase in placements in IITs this year.

That's probably because they are pushed by their families, "go and study IT, this is the best paid job at the moment". That doesn't mean that the value, skills, abilities of the new graduates will increase, I tend to believe the opposite.

whitenoice · 8 years ago

What do you mean by pushed by their families? You don't seem to have a good understanding of educational institutions in India. IIT entrance exams are one of the toughest exams out there. Please read this page - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Entrance_Examination_–_A...

So even if families pressure their kids, they will not be able to get an admission in these institutes unless they demonstrate required skills.

Here are past exam papers - https://www.jeeadv.ac.in/Archives-Past-Que-papers.html

For value, skill, and ability, please google the research done by the students at these universities and the firms that hire these students.

whitenoice commented on Netflix: What Happens When You Press Play? highscalability.com/blog/... · Posted by u/yarapavan

toddh · 8 years ago

Hi Jeremy,

I'm very sorry if I've misquoted you or quoted you out of context. I'd certainly correct them instantly if contacted. I've searched my email and I don't see any corrections, so I'm not sure how I can make amends.

I pull a lot of quotes from a lot of sources. Many thousands a year. My goal is always to highlight ideas that I think might help readers do their job better. Highlight is they key word here. That you say those sort of things often is not surprising. My hope is always readers will be made curious enough to follow the link and learn more on their own.

And unfortunately there is no "they" at HighScalability.com. There's only me and there's only ever been me. So all mistakes are mine and only mine. There's never been much money or time to be as comprehensive as I'd like.

I do the best I can, but I often fall short, no doubt. I'm not a journalist. I never said I was. I'm a programmer. Have been all my life. I started this blog a long time ago. It was just stuff I found interesting. For whatever reason it got popular for awhile so I tried to make something out of it. That, like most of the industry is petering out now, so we'll see what the future holds.

The point about interviews is a good one and one I've wrestled with. Over the years I've conducted a lot of interviews. Much less so lately, and that's for a reason. I've learned that presentations at major conferences are usually the best resources. Presenters put a huge amount of effort into making those talks. And everything they say is open and approved for public consumption by definition.

Interviews with someone like me are often a bother, a time sync, so I don't usually get as much out of them. Interviews have a high overhead, taking a lot of time to setup and there's often a lot of red tape and legal wrangling that must go on to get access and content approval. Which is again, why, presentations are such awesome resources.

This article was derived mostly from people working on a project making a major presentation or from primary sources writing an article. I couldn't do better than that.

And regardless, I would still make mistakes. Believe me. It's surprisingly hard to make sense of an interview and turn something from thread mode into document mode. That process is an error prone one because I have to fill in the gaps and there are always gaps.

It's rare that I've ever just published an interview. I don't think they are that useful in general. I want people to read a highly condensed document they can get something concrete out of with minimal effort or just ignore easily if it's not relevant to them. The strange style I've developed reflects that goal. This article was of course different because it has a different audience.

So again, I apologize. But I guarantee my mistakes are never intentional, never for money, and never for lack of caring or effort.

whitenoice · 8 years ago

One solution would be to email your draft to all authors whose content you used in your article and see if they require any amendments. Thanks for writing the article!

whitenoice commented on Data Classes for Java cr.openjdk.java.net/~bria... · Posted by u/mfiguiere

vaskebjorn · 8 years ago

In my experience writing getters and setters has been boilerplate 99% of the time.

But I still write them because situations arise where you do need to change the nature of that property, sometimes dynamically, and then it's suddenly worth it. You can, for instance, change a getter and none of the class's clients need to know or care about the change.

Though I haven't used Groovy much I like their approach to this: "Although the compiler creates the usual getter/setter logic, if you wish to do anything additional or different in those getters/setters, you’re free to still provide them, and the compiler will use your logic, instead of the default generated one."

whitenoice · 8 years ago

You might want to look into Project Lombok. It does exactly that, and it works well.