minighost's comments

minighost | 1 year ago | on: Harvard will require test scores for admission again

No I ended up going to a university where CS was probably the smallest major on campus. But I worked my ass off to learn CS on my own. The tests wouldn’t have predicted the outcome I’ve been able to enjoy based on scores I received.

minighost | 1 year ago | on: Harvard will require test scores for admission again

I didn’t do well on my SATs back in the 90s. I’m not a good standardized test taker and I was working at a dialup internet provider while in high school, probably 30 hours a week. It left next to no time for studying for the SATs. As a result I got pretty bad scores because I was perpetually exhausted.

Still, I ended up getting a SWE job at Google in 2004 and working my way up to L8.

I think standardized tests are fundamentally bullish!t because they test more your ability to have time to prepare and study and think mechanically under artificial time constraints. None of which are associated with success in college. Some jobs, say a trauma surgeon, need to evaluate for the time constraint decision making, but a software engineer does not.

minighost | 2 years ago | on: How to write unit tests in C++ relying on non-code files?

A function that both opens a file and does something with its contents should be refactored. It’s painful to find code like this and happen to have a string or pointer to some buffer that already contains the data that needs to be converted but the conversion function is buried inside a function that tries to open a file. Go’s io.Reader is so elegant at this.

minighost | 2 years ago | on: Twitter’s Rebrand to X Could Be a Trademark Nightmare Thanks to Microsoft

No one even mentions Google X which rebranded to just X years ago. Clearly it’s been effective that no one even points this out. Yet another winning project.

minighost | 3 years ago | on: An ex-Googler's guide to dev tools (2020)

The author is absolutely right. codesearch is amazing. Blaze/bazel is amazing. When will sourcegraph support bazel repos? :-)

minighost | 8 years ago | on: Show HN: Generate high-res images of code samples with Chrome Headless

Vim can do this

1. Open your script/code in vim editor

2. Enable syntax & set the required color scheme

:syntax on :colorscheme darkblue

3. Print the file in PS file format

:hardcopy >/tmp/filename.ps

4. Convert the PS file to PDF format

$ ps2pdf /tmp/filename.ps

5. Now you can open filename.pdf

minighost | 12 years ago | on: Microsoft shouldn't have reinstated the start button in Windows 8.1

The problem is that they tried to merge desktop and tablet user experiences in the first place. The idea of having to perform a full context switch / screen jump to launch a new app is a weakness of tablets... not a strength that should be forced on PC users. The ability to have N applications on screen at once, and launch others without losing any visibility into current windows, is something they lost... that's the problem.

minighost | 12 years ago | on: Amazon launches Amazon Art marketplace

I sell my nature photography: mikewiacek.com :-) Drop me a note and I'll give you a hackernews price :-)