dr42's comments

Well I'm glad my water supplier filters that, and I'm glad my electricity provider filters out spikes. While I personally don't want my ISP anywhere near my ip packets, the average person just wants to pay for Internet from an ISP and feel like the ISP is in some way providing more that just data. As the Internet evolves into a utility like water and electricity, more regulation, oversight and consumer protections are inevitable.

I wonder why on that labs page they have stolen Apple's 'settings' icon. It's exactly the same as the one used on the iPhone and iPad. Kind of sleazy of bittotrrent, although I suppose it's culturally consistent with their protocol.

ok, now it's obvious you're just trolling.

all levels of developer are "skilled engineers". The purpose of having names like junior, senior and so on is to hash into the job title some notion of their experience level.

This might be silly to you, but since you're a mathematician, I am rather surprised the reason for names is not obvious.

they have to earn your respect by helping you succeed at your job.

you don't have to respect anyone.

This is a very handy piece of js. thank you

This is just not true.

Bloom filters are marginally more obscure, but I still expect a good candidate to have come across them at some point.

Possibly in your area the candidates you get may have come across them, but then they wouldn't be junior engineers, by definition. If you're advertising for "strong algorithms" candidates then sure, but I bet half the people reading this have never used or come across any probabilistic data structure!

Those aren't basic at all, and I'm not sure why the commenter considered them so. As we all know, junior engineers have very limited exposure to a small area of tech, that's the very definition. It might just happen to be that the dev just finished a CS degree and is great at some of these algorithms, but that doesn't translate into a wide spectrum of technologies, which is only found in people with many years experience.

I was the one that actually picked those, just out of thin air to illustrate my point.

This I feel pretty confident that if they were the best solution to a problem I was having, I would find them through research. is exactly my point. How would you know that a bloom filter might be the best solution unless you know of it's existence in the first place. An architect's role is to suggest areas of research to junior engineers, who very likely may only have some vague memory from algorithms class.

It's not about the ability to research alternative approaches, it's knowing when it might make sense to do so.

an "architect" [sic]

How very cynical indeed. Speaking as a software architect, sometimes it's important to get people to lift their heads up from the day to day adding value and look at new technologies. Many times developers are so focused on the bug/feature du jour, that they aren't aware there are other ways to do things, possibly better.

Having been a developer for a long time, the thing I have found is how much technology repeats itself, and how at its core, its all very much the same. The same algorithms I have used, like bloom filters or priority queues for example, have application in social networks and 3d rendering engines etc. Having done most software paradigms, an architect us supposed to know which ones work, and when they work.

I haven't written slides or visio in years. Nor have I been to Aruba :)

But it's red on green or green on red, not differentiation between the two? I have r/g color blindness, I can't see red berries against green foliage, but I can tell red from green easily.

That's because world history in America is much the same as the world series - fully encompassing of the whole world, with countries as far afield as.... Canada :)

I should have mentioned I grew up and went to school in England, and learning the ins and outs of luminaries like Sir Issac Newton was part of history class.

To be fair, we only touched on American history, and obviously seen from the other side of the coin. We kicked out the religious pilgrims so we could get back to partying and starting the industrial revolution.

This sounds very fishy. Imaging and scaning software, along with printer drivers have built in currency detectors to prevent this.

Few know?

That's part of every grammar school boys education. Or was, in my day. Newton sending a couple of dozen men off to Tyburn to be hanged, drawn and quartered was quite memorable.

I liked it until I clicked the Modest demo and it said my iPad needs Flash installed :(

Wouldn't that be a not-so-great idea for an iOS centric audience?

How exactly is this brilliant? There are way more distractions living in a car, like basic needs, keeping warm, going to the bathroom, changing clothes, internet, charging the laptop, being moved on by the police etc etc. a nice quiet office in some cheap shares space is a much better environment for building software.

that's just one point of view, there were also a lot of very cool Soviet era designs, like the Lomo camera, for example.

Have you seen the sales of SharePoint?

Engineers always think that companies are engineering driven, when in fact mostly they are sales driven. If SharePoint sells well, then its not substandard, even if you don't like its architecture.

The USSR doesn't exist anymore, and this slur on Russians is a little disingenuous, they did, for example manage to get the first man and first woman into space before anyone else.

Talented engineers don't only work at startups, most of the really interesting work isn't done by little companies, they just don't have the budgets to do much more than mashups of existing technology, it's big corps with deep pockets that do the really hard core CS.

Not even remotely true about penicillin, I'm pretty sure that when Flemming discovered penicillin, since he was a biologist and a pharmacologist he had a pretty good idea of its practical application.

x-rays, maybe, but even electricity im doubtful of. While it may not have been possible then to predict all the uses of electricity, i'm pretty sure someone had the idea of using it's power to, well, power things...