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rfeather's comments

rfeather | 9 years ago | on: Car firms linked to child labour over glittery mica paint

Not just America. Most of the manufacturers listed are European. Not to say US corporations are innocent of this.

It's pretty upsetting to me since I own a car with glittery paint from one of the listed companies. It makes me curious as to how to solve the product sourcing traceability problem for the ethically minded like us.

rfeather | 9 years ago | on: How to Get Your Apartment Off the Grid

It's great that the author wrote up their approach, but one thing I don't see is how this was managed with the landlord. There is some clue in that the landlord installed the solar water heater. My interest comes from my belief that my landlord (or more likely the condo association that our apartment is in) would never allow this sort of installation. Aside from "aesthetic concerns", solar panels can potentially cause insurance rates to go up (firefighters don't like to douse electricity generators with water).

rfeather | 10 years ago | on: Google says self-driving car hits municipal bus in minor crash

I'm with you up until the software being inherently unsafe bit. I've seen a lot of code I wouldn't trust with anything, let alone my life, but in your own examples: trains are partly safe due to automation, warning systems, etc. and cars have gotten safer at least partly due to things like ABS and traction control which rely heavily on algorithms. However, those are relatively simple systems compared to a self driving car and a lot more "bugs" will likely show up as more AI drives more miles.

rfeather | 10 years ago | on: Happy people don’t leave jobs they love

One of the great things about my boss is that he talks frankly about the fact that many of us will move on and actually gives advice on what to try in your career "someday". This isn't because we express, or have much reason to express, dissatisfaction. It's simply pragmatic. Highly skilled workers have options and often ambition and curiosity too. Searching for " software job tenure" seems to indicate that most go through many companies in a career. Sometimes a company really does fail it's employees, but sometimes it really is just a chance to try something new. The point being, the author is speaking in too general terms. It's probably ok, even necessary, to not be everything to every employee.

rfeather | 10 years ago | on: How We Deploy Python Code

I've had decent results using a combination of bamboo, maven, conda, and pip. Granted, most of our ecosystem is Java. Tagging a python package along as a maven artifact probably isn't the most natural thing to do otherwise.
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