The main problem with Google Docs is that it is just too complicated - or better to say, has some rules which are quite unique.
For example, normal people get very confused that you can have multiple files with same name. Also the concept of collections is something quite broken since they represented as "folders": yes great on a paper but people assume if a document A in collection X is different document than the same document in collection Y.
I wonder how the above things will map to local filesystem without confusion.
It would be nice to see a storage system demonstrating sets instead of hierarchical disjoint partitions, that I find terribly unfit for human activities since you can't really order things this way. After 30 years of Personal Computing with `folders` it will be confusing, but I'd be interested to see if people can re-adjust and adopt collections/sets.
It is very dangerous to be ignorant about critical computer science fields like cryptography and just go with the cult.
I'm not saying you should build your own cryptography, but a good hacker (or a good engineer how we call them in early 90s) should understand difference between bcrypt, PBKDF2, and scrypt. At least to understand why bcrypt is better than salt+SHA-1. And some other aspects of security.
However, if somebody has no clue about cryptography and security then she/he should go with bcrypt - but I'm not sure if that person should be responsible or in business of storing somebody's critical data at all.
And they both live in San Francisco - which shows that it is all about $$ and not about their political views or principles.
So this is one of the problems I can see with politics today: politicians have no views or principles you can count on. Everything is depended on how much money they get (of course they all stick and talk about wedge issues such as guns, gays, and god which are really stupid).
That is one of main reason people like Ron Paul: you know what you get.
It's interesting to me in part because I tend to think of the SOPA battle as being rooted in the age-old war between North and South -- Silicon Valley vs. Hollywood. Attempting to cripple our industry is just a standard war practice. But to consider that the Senators are both SF residents makes me doubt the premise.
Not sure why you are being downvoted, there are many worries about exactly this, compromise of components used in the US military, when imported from foreign countries.
Unrelated question - but I would to hear what others think.
I noticed that two sites we have developed in the past (chat/dating site and food review site) had much better acceptance in Mexico, Brazil, Netherlands, etc. than in US.
First we thought this is just a western anglo-saxon thing, but we also have much higher acceptance in UK.
It seems like that users in US are not early adopters. Did anybody noticed the same trend?
Yeah, internet usage characteristics vary a lot from place to place. There is an amazing study from 2010 on internet behaviour around the world: http://2010.tnsdigitallife.com/ (swf)
Does anybody know why they were doing this experiment (measuring speed fo neutrinos) at all? Were they assuming that neutrinos travel faster than speed of light in the first place?
as i understand it, they were doing experiments to watch how neutrinos change between "electron", "muon" and "tau" flavors. the timing of when the neutrino was sent from cern and viewed by the experiment was required to match what the neutrino was before and after.
I'm not an expert how to write job posing (and Dave Thomas is an excellent writer), but this is more like "what a developer job posting should NOT look like" then "should look like"
Two important things and one less important:
* job description is more for system admin and not for a developer - your audience will be confused
* if you do not offer either health care or a pension plan, this is then essentially a contracting gig. You probably need to provide exact salary in this case. Probably you need go to hourly rate. In practice, there are only two type of jobs for developers in US: job fully loaded with all benefits and contracting gig. There is very little between.
* less important: too wordy and just too long without exact facts (you know engineers do not like
Am I the only developer who thinks this looks like their own job (albeit with different technology and health insurance)?
My job breaks down to something like 25% tech support, 65% fixing other people's bugs, 10% developing new features. Maybe I'm just bad at managing my career or something.
My job breaks down to something like 25% tech support, 65% fixing other people's bugs, 10% developing new features. Maybe I'm just bad at managing my career or something.
Sadly, that's about the norm in this industry.
There's a reason why the average software engineer burns out after 5 years. The legacy/maintenance burden is a real problem, and it ends a lot of careers.
There's a lot to be learned in maintaining one's own projects, and I think everyone should maintain their own stuff, instead of being "promoted away" from maintenance, but I think maintaining other peoples' code is only a strong learning experience when the code is of very high quality. In that case, it doesn't feel like maintenance.
What happens is that poor maintenance practices lead to more maintenance work in the future, and the norm in the software industry is for maintenance to consume 70-90% of developer time. Sloppy maintenance practices self-perpetuate. With proper practices in place, it should be 30-40% at the worst.
The biggest fuckup in the software industry is that maintenance jobs usually get passed to junior programmers who (a) don't know enough to do them properly, and (b) more relevantly, don't have the power to do maintenance properly. Actually improving the code would require clout in the form of (a) asking people to drop what they're doing and document code they wrote years ago, (b) removing bad functionality from APIs, and (c) having the option of saying, "we need to rewrite this entirely" without risking one's job. The junior developers who get the maintenance projects never have that kind of political power, so the result is that the "maintenance" doesn't achieve lasting code health improvement.
The trick, and very few companies have figured this out, is to create a "maintenance engineer" career track, pay it 30% more so that it's desirable and people have to be turned away from it, and delegate legacy maintenance tasks to people who actually have the relevant skills and can actually (imagine this) improve these legacy modules instead of "maintaining" them indefinitely. The most important thing is to make sure these engineers actually have enough power/clout to do their jobs properly. Which means the maintenance work should go to people who actually have proven skill and can be trusted, not those who draw last.
> The biggest fuckup in the software industry is that maintenance jobs usually get passed to junior programmers ...
Agreed. Moreover, maintenance isn't great at teaching anything but maintenance.
> The trick, and very few companies have figured this out, is to create a "maintenance engineer" career track...
That might be a good idea. I think it should be something you're promoted into, rather than out of, after having spent a while writing and maintaining your own code.
Just think a bit, why are you still on this job?
Are you a mediocre programmer ? Are you poor either mentally or lack a power of will ?
Of course someone should fix other people's bugs and someone should do tech support. As well as someone should be a slave, someone should work as a cleaner or keep streets clean, but why you should do this boring stuff ?
I cannot talk for your the grand parent, but I can think of a million reasons to have such a job. Great colleagues, good benefits (vacation, health-care, etc.), tied to a small town without good opportunities, ...
By the way, fixing other people's bugs and tech support may not always be quite as boring and demeaning as you make it out to be.
Your disdain for menial work is misguided. There's more to life than your work.
The small town effect would seem to apply in my case. I'm not too close to a major metro, but some insane people commute from here.
Maintenance isn't so bad except for how it's managed. michaelochurch addressed this well in his reply [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3024752]. I could do with less tech support, but haven't gotten around to automating it away.
I'm more interested in finding out what's "the norm" for the industry, than in discussing why my particular job is what it is. However, I feel like I shouldn't leave your implication unanswered. I have no reason to believe I'm a mediocre programmer or mentally deficient; quite the opposite. I write solid code, I turn flimsy code into solid code, and I can fix bugs without creating new ones.
