The Whiteboard

user114359

8:00 PM

@durron597 Logistically, I don't think there is really any difference. The only question is how you feel management will react.

user41796

@durron597 Has HR given you the official offer letter yet?

user41796

Not the contingent one, but the official one they mentioned that would be sent after the screening.

user41796

Because until you have that letter, you don't have an offer yet.

Jimmy Hoffa

You don't have an offer until you've completed your first performance review and it's not rejected on account of not being an employee

You don't have an offer until you've been there 8 years and have blackmail dirt that makes you unfireable. Then you've got the job. All yours.

durron597

8:26 PM

i always leave last, especially on a friday, i'm thinking i should bring a lot of my stuff home today and give notice moday.

user41796

yes

durron597

man, there's a ton of stuff on this computer I don't really want to lose

meh

user41796

grab a portable drive...

durron597

my flash drive is at home

Jimmy Hoffa

@GlenH7 you didn't say that out loud

durron597

8:27 PM

could do it on the weekend

user41796

@JimmyHoffa ?!

user41796

I'm assuming any of the things he wants that are on the computer are things he has a right to access and have a copy of

user41796

@durron597 Have you taken your lunch yet today? Run over to the nearest best buy / whatever and splurge $80 on a portable drive.

Jimmy Hoffa

@GlenH7 there's the disclaimer we needed. Though that doesn't stand up in court- everything on the computer is stuff he's signed 100% of rights to away.

durron597

@GlenH7 yes I did

It's not stuff I must have or has any value to anyone other than me

user41796

8:29 PM

@JimmyHoffa No, lots of companies allow for some amount of personal use on corporate equipment.

durron597

I'm talking about some random projects like this one: codereview.stackexchange.com/questions/50962/…

Jimmy Hoffa

@durron597 double lunch Friday! It's the best thing since half-lunch Monday and bowl-of-cereal Wednesday!

durron597

home is closer than the nearest best buy anyway

user41796

@durron597 Another option is to zip it all up and push to something like google drive or drop box

user41796

but that option depends upon the size of the network pipe

durron597

8:30 PM

do you think the code like the above code review post is owned my this company?

Jimmy Hoffa

@GlenH7 I know; I kid. The way the print always reads in those things is crazy but nearly no one even remotely tries enforcing such.

durron597

by

i guess i did write it during company time

but it's not remotely job specific

i guess that code is cc-by-sa now anyway ;)

user114359

They only own it if 1. they have an IP assignment clause that covers it 2. you used company resources and most importantly 3. they assert ownership rights.

user41796

Given the nature of the company you work for, I doubt they care

Jimmy Hoffa

@durron597 in all honesty, as far as the law goes much of CR is probably in a terribly out of bounds area. We all know people post their work snippets there. Guaranteed created on work systems during work time making it proprietary and confidential.

user114359

8:32 PM

If you worked for me I would take one look at that and drop it. I have more important things to do.

Ixrec

I doubt there are many companies who consider any particular snippet of ~50 lines of their code to be a meaningful trade secret

Jimmy Hoffa

@durron597 is it though? Which right is more enforceable? I sometimes ponder the state of myriad bits of code all over SE.

Ixrec

much of which has been copy-pasted into proprietary code bases

enderland

I wonder how many people are technically violating their company policy by using SE at work or using SE code

Jimmy Hoffa

@Ixrec I guarantee you the vast majority do insofar as the contracts are written and termed. The thing of it is they rarely/barely enforce that stuff anywhere, and there's precedent for unenforced rights to be claimed as non-rights; If a company doesn't try to enforce the contract 9 times and then one time they do, the judge may roll over them saying they don't have the right because they're enforcing it unevenly

Ixrec

8:36 PM

I swear I wrote that linear bit shift register completely on my own, no internet help at all

enderland

I'd bet that nearly everyone that views/posts to SE has somewhat violated company policy

durron597

the only major piece of code i've ever copy pasted from SO / SE is properly attributed

36

A: Is there any way to accept only numeric values in a JTextField?

As this question re-appears quite often, I put some more effort in this answer then I would usually do. My vote goes to the JFormattedTextField. IMO each Swing developer should have an improved version of that class in his/her toolkit as it allows to validate almost anything you can think of by ...

Ixrec

@JimmyHoffa oh I'm well aware the contracts do, I meant culturally speaking, like you say they're unlikely to care when it actually happens

user41796

I routinely ask interview candidates what assistance they had with writing their design exercise. Has been interesting to see the ones who copy & pasted from another site and then claimed it as their own.

durron597

and I modified it anyway

Jimmy Hoffa

8:39 PM

@GlenH7 we do a 2-hour coded test in our office on one of our machines if they make it past the verbal. One time the user accidentally left their web browser open full of "How to create jar" - "How to <bla>" stuff

durron597

hm, this code is in my code base, not attributed:

6

A: Is there a better AtomicInteger compare feature for race conditions?

Is it possible to do this without using synchronized? Is there, for instance, an extended AtomicInteger class with a more powerful compareAndSet? You should be able to do that without a synchronized block. No there isn't more extended AtomicInteger class. If I'm understanding you requireme...

(I was looking through old SO questions)

user114359

Any time I post company code on SO I always sanitize it first. Basically write an SSCCE with generic variable names and stuff.

Ixrec

for the record, when I do copy paste stuff from the internet, I put a link to my source in a comment just in case somebody actually cares in the distant future

I assume that's all the covering of bases that will ever matter

user114359

@Ixrec I have written and seen plenty of comments saying "ripped from SO (link)"

user41796

@JimmyHoffa I somehow suspect that wasn't a case of "I don't remember the command line parameters for that..."

Jimmy Hoffa

8:41 PM

@Ixrec when I copy paste stuff from the internet, I just rewrite it from scratch immediately afterwards. Making sense out of it line by line and integrating it into my head so I know what it does and write it the way I would. Seems wasteful sometimes as things come out nearly identical; but then I know what it does and how as well as any other code I wrote from scratch.

ratchet freak

@durron597 That's a stock standard CAS loop just with an extra break

Jimmy Hoffa

@GlenH7 :/ people need to stop failing fizzbuzz. Where are good programmers? Bla.

Ixrec

@JimmyHoffa the one time I actually copy-pasted something, I did exactly that...because for some strange reason the only thing I found to copy paste from was code golfed so I had to de-golf it, lol

durron597

@ratchetfreak I know, that's why I didn't attribute it ;)

Jimmy Hoffa

I'm not sure if it's our recruitment pipeline that is utterly horrid or what; but we are failing in such spectacular color to find anyone who can even tie their laces in code..

user41796

8:42 PM

I'd agree. We've had a number of candidates tell us "I just don't have time to put together the design exercise." Which seems to be code for "Oh, you actually expect me to code?"

Ixrec

normally I just google "last two characters Javascript" and go "oh yeah splice()" because that's faster than reminding myself exactly what the arguments to substr() and substring() and splice() and whatnot do

enderland

lol

durron597

oh, so this is interesting

Ixrec

which isn't something I normally consider cite-worthy

durron597

i finally talked to the guy who is going to be my boss today

i said "i'm mostly a backend developer, but i know this role has some front end components"

user41796

8:43 PM

How'd it go?

durron597

"is there anything you want me to start reading, study up on?"

enderland

@GlenH7 I did a design exercise once for an interview and the people who were interviewing me acted like this was the case for all their candidates, too, I thought... "whaaat? you don't do the easiest thing you can do to get the job?"

Jimmy Hoffa

@Ixrec haha yeah, substr, substring, and splice are killers for me.. but the REPL is one of the things I love about JavaScript. I just open chrome, hit f12 and start playing with things to remind myself...

durron597

he was like "well, html / css / javascript... and perl"

enderland

:P

durron597

8:43 PM

i said "perl???" "yeah we use some ugly library for something"

Ixrec

@JimmyHoffa yeah, I sometimes do that alongside the google result

user41796

@durron597 aren't you glad you haven't given notice yet? :-D

Ixrec

like when I was trying to understand why map(parseInt) does the wacky things it does

durron597

then he said "oh, we use reactjs for something, it would be good to have someone who knows react"

ratchet freak

and you were like give me 3 months and I'll do it better :)

user41796

8:44 PM

@enderland It's ... unusual. I write it off as the folk simply being not that motivated

durron597

then i said "what about jquery? do you use angular?"

Jimmy Hoffa

I do the same thing for .NET using F# interactive to doublecheck myself everytime I want to test how to format a decimal into fixed point string etc System.String.Format("{0:F2}", 2m);;

durron597

he's like "jquery would be good, one of our modules uses angular"

then he said "amazon uses a service based system so each team uses whatever that team's developers want to use, so there's no company standardization of technologies"

Jimmy Hoffa

string formatters or what's actually in the property of something etc like (new System.Uri("https://www.google.com")).Authority

enderland

@GlenH7 I read a great blog about this once, where someone requested that people do a short 2minute youtube video about themselves (I think this was a contest type of thing? can't remember exact, might have been talking about a jbo app) and he was pointing out that by that simple criteria he can screen out anyone not seriously interested

Jimmy Hoffa

8:48 PM

@durron597 this is one of the things they've touted as a great thing in the past; years ago at Employer^^^ there was a memo circulated about amazon's practices regarding process interface standardization and segregation allowing them to have "no company standard tech" just "do whatever you want, but make the interface usable by other processes"

You just gave the first confirmation I've really heard that it actually is like that; we were unsure if that was true or not

enderland

@JimmyHoffa but think of all the missed opportunities for standardization and commonization meetings!

ratchet freak

isolated servers communicating with webservices

durron597

Fortunately, the charging one has been solved now that we've all standardized on mini-USB. Or is it micro-USB? Shit.

Jimmy Hoffa

@enderland ooo...ahhh...and all the devs who are good they could have passed up by deciding just because they don't know blub they are useless

Ixrec

for the record, our company also does that

Jimmy Hoffa

8:49 PM

@Ixrec says anybody can write anything they want?

Ixrec

most of our services are written in C++ but I know there are a few teams using Java, Python, Haskell, Rust, etc out there somewhere

Jimmy Hoffa

@Ixrec haskell? Are they hiring?

Ixrec

one benefit of moving to an internal enterprise github instance is that we now have pretty pie charts of the language distribution

I'm pretty sure haskell was on it, very tiny percentage though

we are always hiring, we're one of those really big companies

Jimmy Hoffa

@Ixrec it was just somebody's hello world app they uploaded

Ixrec

very possibly

I should probably see if I can find it

Jimmy Hoffa

8:51 PM

@Ixrec I've a strong feeling I know what company it is. Also one that's been demonized over years for some awful practices (though you seem quite happy with the place; as are some others I'm aware of). Unless I'm wrong of where you work.

Ixrec

I think I've come out and said it a couple of times so feel free to guess, I'm curious

durron597

me: "oh great"

Ixrec

nope!

might be my fault though, we don't really have our own OS, though some of the unixes we do use we customized so heavily they might as well be ours; there's a general push to port our legacy junk to standard Linux

user41796

@Ixrec Yours is a company that cares about micro-optimizations, so I can see why there would be the near-proprietary OSs

Ixrec

indeed, the core of our software is still Fortran

Jimmy Hoffa

8:57 PM

The really weird thing is imagining any of those company's living on github

user41796

@Ixrec One of our core apps is like that. We're wrapped it a bit, but it does what we need it to do

Ixrec

we are moving things around in such a way that most of us will never have to directly call the fortran or inspect the foundational databases anymore

but it's a slow process

Jimmy Hoffa

@durron597 haha getting cold feet? We would let you run amok in our Java.. :)

and Denver > Vegas

durron597

@JimmyHoffa I'm going to Seattle though

Vegas is just where the recruiting event was

Jimmy Hoffa

@durron597 O_o why did I think you were going to Vegas?

@durron597 ah, interesting.

durron597

9:01 PM

@JimmyHoffa I told you to send me the posting, lol

after all i haven't signed the offer letter yet

but seriously, i suspect it would be difficult for most companies to compete with amazon's offer.

at my experience level.

also, btw, i agree with you about vegas, i would not move there for any reason

the place just makes you feel dirty just walking around

and, no, i would not be interesting in snorting coke off a prostitute ;)

user114359

@durron597 Amazon is well-known for throwing money at their problems, plus I hear they pay Seattle rates no matter where the employee is located.

durron597

9:30 PM

yahoo.com/tech/…

user114359

What's the deal with this question? Closed as off-topic (what to take up next) with a "migration rejected" message. However, it is from 2011, so there is no way it could have been attempted to be migrated 6 hours ago:

user114359

7

Q: What should I do to get started with Windows 8 app development?

I'm looking to get into Windows 8 app development, and from what I understand I should be mastering XAML and C#. Now, there aren't any good tutorials on the internet about Windows 8 yet, but there are a lot of tutorials about WPF, which uses XAML. So what's the best starting point: learning W...

durron597

I got offer letter

trying to decide if i should print and sign it on company printer lol

user114359

@durron597 print it and leave it on the printer

durron597

@Snowman lol

psr

9:34 PM

@JimmyHoffa tie laces. laces.tie. laces.tie(). Tie dammit! Tie the laces. Laces, Tie! this.findLaces().tie(). stackoverflow.com/questions/661815/… only works for disposable shoes. Think! tie :: clothing -> maybe Eff Unit? I can't remember!

I'm not qualified.

user114359

Why does the Windows 10 start menu actively try to be useless?

Ixrec

just add more app tiles, it'll be useful eventually

user114359

I have a few misbehaved programs like Eclipse where the program to start it is different from the program that actually runs. That means I cannot pin Eclipse to the taskbar like I do e.g. Firefox and have it work correctly. I used to pin it to the start menu so it would be at the top. That doesn't work anymore, nor will the start menu find it if I type in "eclipse" (it wants to search the internet). So I have to find the exe file in Explorer.

user114359

I feel like I just went back in time 20 years

Ixrec

I really don't like programs that have "launchers" (in a way that's clearly exposed to the end user at any rate), that just feels antiquated

user114359

9:41 PM

@Ixrec it made sense back when loading a program was a big deal. Hard drives were slow, memory was slow, and having something pop up and show progress before the main program and all of its libraries could load made it feel faster

Ixrec

exactly, that sort of thing used to make sense

@Snowman it is a bit sad to hear that Microsoft still hasn't figured out how to implement basic search functionality

user114359

@Ixrec search worked great in Windows 7, but this feels like a step backward.

Ixrec

I'm still on Win7 and it's kinda crap here tbh

giving Explorer "foobar" still won't give you a list of files whose names contain "foobar"

user114359

@Ixrec I have a few files I could find that way, now it won't find them

user114359

Specifically, I have a spreadsheet on a network drive that I edit almost daily that Windows 7 could find by searching on a partial file name, Windows 10 cannot.

durron597

9:49 PM

just about done taking personal files off this computer, trying to decide if i should clean my cookies and history and passwords from chrome too

i mean i will for sure, the question is do it now or monday

user114359

@durron597 Do it before you give notice

Ixrec

lol

Jimmy Hoffa

10:03 PM

Think long and hard @durron597 about the image you want to leave on the desktop background. Hmmmm......

psr

google.com/imgres?imgurl=https://recodetech.files.wordpress.com/…

user114359

11:56 PM

0

Q: Project Euler 40: directly calculate digits of Champernowne's constant

I implemented Project Euler problem 40 in Java. It works correctly, producing the correct answer. During the course of implementing this program, I wrote a method that directly calculates a digit of Champernowne's constant, as opposed to the obvious brute-force approach. While brute-force is fas...

java programming-challenge

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