The Whiteboard

1:15 AM

It's depressing how much literature there is on logical clearly-thought-out analysis and approaches to things in this industry that is just wholey ignored, largely never read, or if read either dismissed out of hand or appreciated with hollow words and zero follow-through ("Oh yeah, that is a really great point and makes a lot of sense!" - "Alright, so I'll use a <not-normally-used> approach for doing this, cool?" - "Well, no for this case I think that's a bad idea - look let's just do it how we always do, I appreciate you keeping abreast of these things though, you should tell us some more…

user20683

@JimmyHoffa Managers are just as lazy as programmers, they are just better at applications of graph theory regarding humans

Jimmy Hoffa

and that's just blanket across everything in this industry, technical decisions, design approaches, language choices, performance analysis (stack ranking is still the de facto approach), deadlines (Tom DeMarco sure was a smart guy though, I loved his book!), estimates (Just throw more people at it, in this case I think that'll work great), hiring practices (I'm sure he can pick it up quick enough, he only had a few errors in his sample code)

@WorldEngineer or they really believe the bullshit that comes out of their mouths, because if they didn't they'd surely have choked to death on it by now just from recognition of the sheer volume.

user20683

@JimmyHoffa Belief doesn't need to factor in.

user20683

Orthopraxy is the defacto in every major world religion except Christianity

psr

So, which is better, node or ASP MVC?

user20683

1:21 AM

@psr node on the principle that it's more portable. ASP on the principle that it's more mature

Jimmy Hoffa

@WorldEngineer I wish I could separate these two things, <obscenely-offensive-statement-of-the-day>I sometimes think religion may have just built a logic-kill-switch into a large enough portion of the populations brain with the word "faith"</sorry-i-just-dont-understand>

user20683

it also depends on what you're using it for

user20683

@JimmyHoffa Religion doesn't kill logic. Religion is used to justify the lack of logic already there. Logic can be taken uncritically just as easily

user20683

Go read Alastair McGrath sometime

psr

@WorldEngineer After reading Wikipedia I can't distinguish between the orthos, except orthodontist.

Jimmy Hoffa

1:22 AM

@psr node. Just write it like untyped lambda calculus, you'll never have to repeat yourself or put type annotations all over just to express that you want this function to create a function that returns a function which takes a function (doing that in C# makes something that looks like a C++ type signature taking up two lines everywhere you pass it around)

user20683

@psr Orthodoxy is in your head. Orthopraxy is what you do. Orthography is how you write.

Jimmy Hoffa

@WorldEngineer just "faith" - conceptually it's to accept something regardless of any logical analysis dictating it's correctness or incorrectness

user20683

@JimmyHoffa Faith is a very Christian way of being

Jimmy Hoffa

@WorldEngineer Orthogonality is how people feel in relation to the shit they say - which is essentially what I don't understand.

psr

@JimmyHoffa I think probably node would be more pleasant, and MVC better for career. Also, not sure if other developers would do horrible things in node or not.

Jimmy Hoffa

1:24 AM

@WorldEngineer nonsense, many religions ask for that particular concept

user20683

@JimmyHoffa Judaism asks that you uphold 600+ mitzvot

Jimmy Hoffa

@psr debugging their horrible things will suck. They are likely to require a lot of training to get their head around CPS to begin with

@WorldEngineer and pastafarians demand I accept some monster in space

user20683

node.js the right way is a good (and very short) intro

user20683

node is very very good at doing ADD things

user20683

not so good at numbers

user20683

1:26 AM

it's very much the liberal arts major of web frameworks

psr

ADD?

Jimmy Hoffa

@psr go watch that recent crockford on ES6 presentation if you are to be doing JavaScript -> whatever you may think of Crockford, his approach to JavaScript is quite simply Right. It's a focus on significant minimalism and he details the techniques he's become accustomed to nowadays to remove even more of the language and remain truer to a simple AST

user20683

Attention Deficient Distraction

user20683

:P

user20683

I/O tasks

user20683

1:27 AM

stuff that doesn't require the event loop to be tied up for long

user20683

node actually feels really natural from my embedded background's perspective

psr

@JimmyHoffa His stuff is really unpleasant to read due to the attitude, and he is super-opinionated, but I think he has good ideas.

user20683

I don't think what he says should be taken on faith

user20683

I don't think even Knuth should be taken on faith but he's so far outside what I'm capable of at the moment that I kind of have to

psr

@WorldEngineer Using his lint program tells you that. Wow is that opinionated!

user20683

1:31 AM

@psr I find C#'s preferred method of braces to be twitch inducing :P

Jimmy Hoffa

@psr yeah not read - I agree with you, but his recent JavaScript presentation was really good and how he details never using this and how he talks about handling types in JavaScript are really worth understanding

he spends like 10 minutes talking about new ES6 features, and then 30 minutes talking about why it's dangerous to do x, y, z, et al in JavaScript and how to do the same things in safer ways

psr

@JimmyHoffa I currently only use "this" when I'm being lazy. I'm worried that I'll have to battle people to get them not to try to write C# in ES.

@JimmyHoffa infoq.com/presentations/efficient-programming-language-es6

That one?

Jimmy Hoffa

@psr node would make it hard being CPS through and through, if you don't want the battle go ASP.NET MVC, they're both perfectly good approaches, I would say both equally good for career, though being in C# opens you up to having the ability to take on real number crunching and data processing with nice simple interop that's not through a web service to a more capable runtime, so there's good reasons for it too

the bigger danger with MVC is that it is so conventions based, and you'll just end up with the cargo-cult application of SO copy-pasta and 30 nuget packages integrated together to create a Spring sized labyrinth of un-code integrating everything

user20683

MVC is a presentation scheme

user20683

the fact that it's anything else is problematic

Jimmy Hoffa

1:36 AM

@psr yes, this one.

psr

@WorldEngineer ASP.NET MVC

Jimmy Hoffa

@WorldEngineer someone needs to fucking hire you

psr

@WorldEngineer I try to never use MVC to describe anything because it means different things to everyone and seems to lead to really silly discussion.

user20683

It's a local version of the client-server model

psr

I know, but the discussion is never worth it.

user20683

1:39 AM

fair enough

Jimmy Hoffa

@psr if the people around you are sub-par to begin with, this choice is relatively moot, so go with whatever you want, because they're going to shoot you in the foot with any tool you give them. If you have faith however this may not be the case, I would argue Node.JS allows for more code-deduplication techniques, more simplicity in implementation, and may also open you up to the ability to hire a less cargo-cult-design-patterns-enterprisey sort of folk in the future

user20683

You can also bolt it into C++ if need be

user20683

if you need a cargo cultish type in the future

Jimmy Hoffa

in that case they'll start shooting him in the face...

user20683

@JimmyHoffa Yes, but they won't have watched the global namespace carefully enough and then they will be shot in the face too

Jimmy Hoffa

1:41 AM

@WorldEngineer if they're coding in C++ either their head is by now bulletproof or out for maintenance.

psr

@WorldEngineer Is that a pro or a con?

@WorldEngineer Also, we seem likely to use Angular.js. So we can potentially have MVC fractally everywhere. MMMVCVCVC

user20683

@JimmyHoffa Or missing altogether. Explains the massive number of cephalothorax monsters in video games...

user20683

user20683

@psr yes

Jimmy Hoffa

2:08 AM

@psr yeah, I effing hate this crap everyone's doing "let's put MVC on the client side and make it talk to the MVC server side" -> There's something about the magical 3 layers of abstraction, it was one layer on each machine in the N-Tier's original descriptions where you get to use DCOM back in the day, then it become N-Tier in-process with the API->Logic->Repo, and now it's 3 layers in the API, then a logic layer then a repo, with 3 layers on the client too...

People just love slicing things into threes, there's some layer they don't want to be in maybe, and a layer they do want to be in, and they just don't even want to touch the other one so they put a layer inbetween

Henceforth, all 3-layer designs will be known as Sandwich-Design

you got bread on one end, bread on the other, and some ambiguous space between - people always focus on the simple sides and hope that somebody else has written all the libraries they'll put in the middle because that's where all the shit get's vague and if you fuck it up you end up with a provolone and kidney bean sandwich

@psr if you can convince people - do whatever MVC crap on the client you want be it angular or whatever if it makes people feel better, but make your service a simple data service which does zero HTML rendering or otherwise, services that stick to data require way less maintenance than when everyone decides they need to render on the server side (which is shit because you don't have a fucking DOM on the server, just fake-DOM's that are leaky as hell abstractions)

@WorldEngineer I prefer the thorax monster over the cephalothorax ones...

user20683

@JimmyHoffa serious sam has those too

Jimmy Hoffa

@WorldEngineer I recall, that game was fun times...

user20683

@JimmyHoffa still out there

user20683

they did HD versions recently

Jimmy Hoffa

I'm sure, but for that mindless co-op run-n-gun genre I haven't yet found anything that beats Left4Dead2 for me, I prefer it to the serious sam arcadeyness style

PayDay 1 is a great entrant in that style, still need to buy PayDay 2

or what is it with claptrap? Bound something or other

psr

2:18 AM

@JimmyHoffa No chance I was rendering HTML on the server. (O.K., it's possible somebody will do something like "Lets put the HTML files in a database, because databases are way cooler than files" but if so that's some other thing that doesn't have any direct interaction with the services).

Jimmy Hoffa

those were good

@psr as soon as you're doing ASP.NET MVC it's going to be really hard to convince people not to use razer

which is serverside templating

(razor? I shave with one of those, not sure if they spell the templating engine that though...)

psr

@JimmyHoffa I think in this case they don't want to. I think angular will do enough templating for everyone's templating needs. Or at least they currently think so.

user20683

razer I think

Jimmy Hoffa

and if people already know they're going to do clientside templating like Angular.JS - as soon as you have someone doing serverside templating to now you get to have some of the most entertaining debugging sessions ever "Oh, this snippet of HTML is sent down by the server but it doesn't fit into our client's template-hole right, so we'll just use this other clientside template hack to fix it real quick as a shim.."

user20683

razorSQL

Jimmy Hoffa

2:22 AM

@psr thing is, vast majority of what you read on ASP.NET MVC is people showing how they made data-bound forms using razer or did their validation or bla bla bla... so if your folks aren't particularly comfortable with a straight data-service and MVC to begin with, they'll start reading tutorials and trying to apply them and start asking to use razer just because it's what they're learning when they try to learn ASP.NET MVC

psr

@JimmyHoffa I can see that happening. I really don't like server templating anyway. Back in ASP.NET days I was the guy not using the stupid server HTML generation. Apps worked great but stunk in job interviews when I couldn't remember how the controls worked beyond "not well enough to bother with".

Jimmy Hoffa

because there's conventions that tie the templating engine to the routes engine to the controllers and their models, and if you remove one piece - like the templating engine - then you have to break the conventions and think for yourself how to make it all work

psr

@JimmyHoffa All I really need is basically an API, which I'm sure the client will want in JSON.

Jimmy Hoffa

@psr haha yeah, I did enough winforms to learn exactly the same thing - server side templating is just garbage

user55340

The Beer Tree

user55340

2:24 AM

user55340

Jimmy Hoffa

@psr yeah, I wrote an ops monitoring console in MVC like this. MVC does make stupidly simple restful stuff easy. It's fine for that, it's just a risk that other people might try to use all the other parts of the ASP.NET MVC conventionally suggested sandwich design

but as soon as you start doing Node.JS like that you might well find yourself using Express and or Sails to get routing and such handled and then people may just do the same thing... I don't know how encouraged server-side templating is in the express/sails communities

@MichaelT ....this makes me wish I was taller :(

psr

Probably mostly not stupidly simple rest stuff. Probably more like an API.

Jimmy Hoffa

@psr ? how do you mean? Like soap? MVC doesn't support that particularly - you'll have to start hitting WCF at that point

(any reason you don't just start thinking WCF for this? Other than the fact that it's an extensions nightmare for everyone who hasn't spent years dealing with it's particular brand of crazy)

or you could just do it as OData

(depending on what it does)

psr

@JimmyHoffa They will likely want JSON rather than SOAP, but being able to serialize to either wouldn't be horrible.

I have been away from .NET stack too long to know OData, and have only done a little WCF.

Jimmy Hoffa

2:28 AM

you say "an API" -> To me that means a service which is exposed either as URI's (rest) or SOAP (Action header for routes)

SOAP returns XML, the WSDL defines the schema and it's not a JSON one :)

psr

@JimmyHoffa Yes, but they may want to send a JSON object rather than hit a URI.

Logically the same services though.

user55340

@JimmyHoffa but the output is at the bottom...

2

psr

Or use a web socket instead of AJAX, quite possibly.

Jimmy Hoffa

@psr ....they'll have to hit some uri, if the uri simply reads the post body for routing then it's not technically peoples normal concept of "rest" but I guess I just use REST to mean data-service hosted on HTTP that's not using SOAP and works with standard HTTP requests

user55340

On the website, there's a prototype that looks like an end table.

psr

2:32 AM

@JimmyHoffa Yeah, that. Sometimes people count that as rest, sometimes not, as far as I can tell.

Jimmy Hoffa

@psr you want Node.JS at this point, if you're not certain and you may want web socket or want the option to try different things before pinning down exactly what you want - don't go .NET because it'll pen you into a corner as soon as you start. By the time you have the simplest prototype working it'll have too much code in it for you to back off and change your approach.

@MichaelT truer words...

psr

@JimmyHoffa Not exactly an advertisement for .NET

Jimmy Hoffa

@psr I rarely advertise for .NET

I know it too well to do that

Node.JS allows a much better prototyping space - if you know .NET as well as I do and you can just put the infrastructure of it together in your head and come up with something that will meet your reqs then it's not so bad, but if there's any prototyping/discovery that needs to happen, .NET takes a ton of investment before you find out where you went wrong and makes it take a lot longer to change infrastructural mistakes

user55340

The curse of enterprise class environments - there is always more ritual around getting a working thing than the more 'scripting' and 'dynamic' languages.

user55340

But, on the other hand, I would contend, that once you do have it set up, being able to identify problems is often easier because it is in more clearly defined roles.

Jimmy Hoffa

2:37 AM

@MichaelT yes. C# will admittedly run circles around Node.JS if you need to do any resource intensive processing, and has other boons like that in it's favor, but you really have to know ahead of time and take much more of a big-design-up-front approach or else you won't shoot yourself in the foot, you'll misplace it in a locked closet and spend 6 months looking for the key.

user55340

Unless the person really wants a proof of concept or prototype only, most often they will get to the resource intensive processing at some point.

user55340

Or knows it will never scale beyond N for whatever reason.

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT which is why I'm always miffed that people say shit like "right tool for the right job" then when you get to that point they're like "what you want to do that part in another process in another language? no no this system is written in X, STFU sit down and make it work."

user55340

(With XYZ technology, you could scale up to 1000 terminals --- but in the store, we only ever have floor space for 16... allowing up to 32 will give us room to grow until we hit stores that are 2x city blocks... and then we'll have other problems first)

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT heh yeah, you identify the issues real easily, then spend a year wishing you could fix them knowing it would likely break too many other things because it's so inflexible

granted with the flexibility of perl sometimes people write solutions like...well like people write in perl ;P

(why am I still here? I'm going to play video games or something. Today has been exhausting. I blame you @MichaelT for those links to that Michael O Church dude's blog. And you guys call me a cynic, that guy's downright depressing...)

user20683

2:43 AM

@JimmyHoffa that guy is marinating in silicon valley

Jimmy Hoffa

@WorldEngineer sounds like, but his about page places him in Baltimore. I guess he was marinating in silicon valley

user20683

@JimmyHoffa go play yer game, here's a thing for later: blog.skylight.io/rust-means-never-having-to-close-a-socket/…

user20683

and a thing for now:

user20683

Jimmy Hoffa

@WorldEngineer I tried adding you on Steam btw

user20683

2:49 AM

I'm only occasionally on there these days

user20683

GMA 950 is annoyingly bad

gnat

6:52 AM

repeated crap-thrower at SO...

@Dai Please stop using Programmers.SE as your toilet bowl. See meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/6483/… — gnat Sep 27 at 9:31

@Dai Please stop using Programmers.SE as your toilet bowl. See meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/6483/… — gnat 1 min ago

1

A: Cutting down on off topic posts

Per my observations, a lot of such posts come here because of misleading comments at Stack Overflow. For an example, here are just few recent cases at SO that directly led to users posting very low quality, outright off-topic questions because of comments directing them at Programmers: here, her...

gnat

11:25 AM

I'm not very experienced with stackexchange,but someone from stackoverflow lead me here to post questions of this nature. — Rhynoboy2009 41 secs ago

Stack Exchange

5:02 PM

Ars Technica » Stack Exchange: Why throw early and catch late?

posted on October 11, 2014 by Stack Exchange

When handling exceptions, throw when the errors occur.

Charles E. Grant

5:19 PM

Does anybody have any recommendations for an open source templating library callable from C? Currently we write out our data as XML and then apply XSLT transforms to generate HTML output, but our XML file can be as large as a couple of GB, and the XSLT transform quickly runs out of memory.

Robert Harvey

5:32 PM

@CharlesE.Grant You need to be a bit more specific. Otherwise, this amounts to a 1/2 hour of research on Google.

Are you trying to find a replacement for your XSLT library that won't run out of memory? Or are you revisiting the whole idea of using XSLT at all?

@gnat Dai appears to be a member in good standing at Stack Overflow, with 4 years of participation, a respectable reputation, and a rather significant pedigree (he works on the javascript engine for Internet Explorer). You could potentially be a bit more polite to him.

Robert Harvey

Question for the day...

Ever since the DDD question about poking the database to determine if a duplicate exists, I've been pondering the reasons why people ask "best practice" questions like this.

Presumably, if someone is using DDD to build an application, then by definition, it is a large enterprise application. If it's a large enterprise application, that means that there must be an architect that is overseeing the development effort.

So why don't these folks just ask their architect? Or is it the architects that are asking these questions? Or are these developers using DDD where it is not needed?

amon

6:15 PM

@RobertHarvey I don't know the answer, but I'm sure it has “cargo culting” written all over. You assume people are using the correct tool (here: design methodology) for their problem. Instead, people use whatever they see someone else use who seems to be successful, or just keep on using what they've always been using, even if not appropriate.

Charles E. Grant

@RobertHarvey We're looking to replace XSLT entirely. We have data sets that we want to output in XML, a variety of tab-delimited formats, and HTML. The XML and tab-delimited formats are no problem to generate directly, it's the HTML that's a headache. The body of the HTML is mostly a data table, but there is also a long preamble that contains a handful of values that need to get filled in for each run.

Oded

DDD has become a "default architecture" for some, regardless that it isn't one (that is, a single architecture). People who don't get it but feel they need to use it as it is "a good thing" will try use it in their applications - even though the only thing it add is complexity.

Charles E. Grant

@RobertHarvey We're currently using libxml2 and libxslt, and we distribute the XSLT template file along with our executable. We'd much prefer to actually have the template be part of the binary. I did find package gnu.org/software/autogen, but I'm hoping to hear other suggestions.

Oded

What is the issue in outputting HTML directly (consider XHTML, or HTML that conforms to XML), given that XML output is already in place?

Robert Harvey

@CharlesE.Grant And C is your principal language? This may seem a bit obscure, but have you considered writing your templates in a "data as code" language like common lisp or scheme? That's what Paul Graham did, and it seemed to serve him well. There are several Scheme interpreters and compilers, some written in C, and some which produce C as output. Or they easily interoperate with C. Some flavors of scheme are deliberately designed to be scripting languages for C.

Charles E. Grant

6:26 PM

@Oded The HTML contains thousands of lines of fixed text and JavaScript. Storing that as static strings is ugly and difficult to maintain.

Oded

@CharlesE.Grant static strings are one option. Another it to store these as text templates and distribute them with the application (allows for updating the templates only, without altering the executable).

Granted, this is easier with some languages than others... and since I don't use C, I don't know how difficult it is.

gnat

@RobertHarvey yeah next time he sends yet another poor soul to post a bad question at Programmers I will kiss him (both times he advised, asker cross-posted their off-topic garbage at Programmers)

Charles E. Grant

@RobertHarvey C is the principal language. This is for a bioinformatics tool that gets redistributed to a wide variety of end users. We try to avoid external dependencies. For example we include the source for libxml2 and libxslt and statically link to our own copy of the libraries, rather than make them install those libraries on their system.

gnat

...four years should suffice to learn how your advice is perceived...

@RomanC I know what you mean, and there was a time when I believed myself that askers are able to differentiate. But after I discovered that 99% of them interpret "take a look at site" as "go there and repost", I totally dropped that. Now I prefer black'n'white. If I'm 100% positive that it will fit, I flag for moderator to migrate. Otherwise I abstain of recommending any particular site (sometimes referring asker to Which computer science / programming Stack Exchange do I post in? - again, without mentioning any specific site) — gnat Aug 14 at 17:35

Robert Harvey

Apparently he's paying as much attention to you now as he was then.

Charles E. Grant

6:34 PM

@Oded Well yeah, that's the general idea of a template engine. What I'm looking for here is an existing library so I don't have to reinvent the whee. Thanks for your input though.

Jimmy Hoffa

@CharlesE.Grant anything is callable from any language if you're willing to use IPC. IPC is really not particularly hard these days in most languages, it's so requisite as it's what supports our abilities to "use the right tool for the job"

not to mention the sheer amount of data transfer people are doing in their applications of all languages

Robert Harvey

@CharlesE.Grant So basically you're looking for a new XSLT engine that won't run out of memory, right?

Preferably written in C, or having a C API.

Jimmy Hoffa

fuck it all, buy more memory. It's cheaper than the time you've spent having this conversation.

Charles E. Grant

@JimmyHoffa True, but we're trying to avoid external dependencies.

gnat

@RobertHarvey I ain't going to cry over that. 100-200 more comments at SO like that and I'll gain enough evidence to officially request to include "programmers" into single-flag-deletion list

would be great if word "programmers" was added to this list, at least at Stack Overflow — gnat Sep 1 at 9:57

Robert Harvey

6:36 PM

@CharlesE.Grant What is your product's system requirements?

Jimmy Hoffa

@CharlesE.Grant you guys could always write it yourselves, alternatively, you could use something someone else wrote because it'll save you time and money and there's really no good reason to avoid external dependencies as a rule

Robert Harvey

Is it even possible to process XSLT linearly? Maybe the memory problem is an intrinsic one.

> For those who’ve been lucky enough to avoid the hideousness of most programming jobs, here’s how many software companies work: business comes up with the ideas and defines the work, product managers intermediate and sit in on interminable meetings, and programmers just implement. Most “scrum teams” are just ticket shops. The engineer has no autonomy.

> This is business-driven engineering. I’d call it “waterfall of sewage engineering”, but decrying a “waterfall” makes it sound like I support much of what is called “agile”, and I don’t. The problem with “agile” is that it’s still closed-allocation, business-driven engineering, meaning that nothing was accomplished. Trying to “fix” business-driven engineering is like putting salt on a turd to make it edible: it just doesn’t work that way.

@MichaelT: Harsh.

But probably true. Much of the ceremony that I have at my current job is just that: ceremony.

It does sort of force people to document things, though.

> This may be paradoxical, but when you have an engineer-driven firm, you get better engineering and better business. See, business-driven engineering rots the mind, because it takes what should be a creative and challenging discipline and turns it into “Write me seven classes and 17+i story points by Friday.”

> It’s also part of why there’s an age-discrimination problem in technology; if you spend your 20s doing that crap, you actually will be a corporate executive (as in premature dementia; not necessarily as in rank and salary, unfortunately) by age 30.

user55340

7:11 PM

@RobertHarvey when working with larger groups of people, the ceremony of how things are set up, while awkward, can lead to a better expectation of what the code is like and a faster adoption of the now less different mental model the other coder was doing.

Robert Harvey

@MichaelT The key concept there being "larger groups of people."

user55340

@RobertHarvey Larger groups of people is not only now for a group of 3, but also those next dozen poor souls who will be working with the code in the future.

Robert Harvey

Yes, but the notion that every project, no matter how small, needs DDD, multiple tiers and dependency injection, is probably a bit misguided.

Presumably, the author of that blog post is talking mostly about classes and interfaces.

@MichaelT Is it really true that Haskell engineers make less money than their C++ counterparts?

> Most software jobs are career-killing, talent-wasting graveyards and employers know this, so when there’s a position that involves something interesting like machine learning, green-field projects, and the latest tools, they pay less.

> The reason this is such a disaster is because of its long-term effect, both on programmers’ careers and on the industry. Market signals are supposed to steer people toward profitable investment, but in software, it seems to fall the other way. Work that helps a programmer’s career is usually underpaid and, under the typical awfulness of closed allocation, jealously guarded, politically allocated, and usually won through unreasonable sacrifice.

Ouch.

Is this uniquely peculiar to software development, or does it happen in most other professions as well?

Wow, this guy seems... A bit bitter.

user55340

7:43 PM

@RobertHarvey did you read @JimmyHoffa 's comment about it?

user55340

17 hours ago, by Jimmy Hoffa

(why am I still here? I'm going to play video games or something. Today has been exhausting. I blame you @MichaelT for those links to that Michael O Church dude's blog. And you guys call me a cynic, that guy's downright depressing...)

user55340

And Jimmy provides an example from his wife's career path - zoo keeper. Its a sought after job and so the pay is lower than it would be otherwise.

user55340

23 hours ago, by Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT Just reading the second one here I'm reminded of a little known tidbit I learned from my wife - she was a zookeeper, usually you must have at least a BS in biology or similarly advanced biological sciences sect (her's is animal sciences from Purdue) - and often times a MS or more is required/competed with. The job of a zookeeper is coveted to the point that: On average these highly educated people are paid in the $10-$13/hr range, working long hours doing physically demanding work

Robert Harvey

Yeah, I can see that. Never thought that way about my own profession, though.

user55340

@RobertHarvey there's pressure on both sides in some places... google pays lots to attract the best, and people want to work there. But if you're not google, and you want to attract google quality talent? you're going to pay more than google is... or need to make it a place people want to work at.

Robert Harvey

7:52 PM

I'm guessing that 80 percent or more of the software development work out there is the kind that doesn't require a rocket scientist.

user55340

@RobertHarvey Nope... and they've got some awful jobs too...

Robert Harvey

How do I stay away from those places? :) My wife has a full-time job now, so I can afford to be (a little) choosy.

user55340

Think about the person that has to watch the videos that are flagged for being... well, wrong to make sure the flag was correct.

Robert Harvey

OK. >_<

So in my interview, I ask "Is this the kind of job like the guy who has to watch the flagged videos to make sure the flag was correct?

"The kind that needs brain bleach at the end of the day?" (read: the local bar)

user55340

@RobertHarvey The kind that needs to make sure a psychotherapist is part of the health benefits.

user55340

8:04 PM

@RobertHarvey Tech Confessional: The Googler Who Looked At The Worst Of The Internet - note the material discussed isn't exactly SFW... its well, the worst of the internet.

user55340

And well, thats a buzz feed link too.

user55340

Old /. discussion about it from 2 years ago: The Worst Job At Google: a Year of Watching Terrible Things On the Internet

gnat

8:51 PM

@RobertHarvey is that guy also worth kissing for throwing the crap at Programmers?

Perhaps programmers stackexchange. — Erik Allik 7 hours ago

-1

Q: Generating simple graphs with arrows in SVG

I am looking for a library that allows me to generate simple dependency graphs such as the following in the SVG file format (alternatively, also PNG): As I want to embed the generation in a Scala program, I would prefer to have a JVM-only solution. I would like to refrain from writing my own S...

"perhaps". Yeah sure

Robert Harvey

@gnat That's a different guy. Maybe he's better looking.

Robert Harvey

9:12 PM

> One of the most important lessons to learn is the importance of self-mentoring. Once you get out of school where people are paid to teach you stuff, people won’t help people who aren’t helping themselves.

Charles E. Grant

9:46 PM

@RobertHarvey My apologies, I had to step away from the computer. We distribute a source tar ball generated using the GNU auto tools. We target Linux and OS X. The bioinformatics problem we solve scales with the size of the input dataset, so it may run on anything from a desktop with 4GB to a cluster with 128 nodes each with 16GB. The frustration is that it turns out that the XSLT transform is the memory limiting step, easily overwhelms even a 16GB machine.

@RobertHarvey The conclusion we've come to is that XSLT is tremendous overkill for the relatively simple transformation we're doing. As I mentioned we have several thousand lines of boilerplate HTML and JavasScript, but we just need to plug a few values into the preamble, and then insert a long (1000 rows) table.

Robert Harvey

10:10 PM

@CharlesE.Grant Are the transforms simple enough where you could simply write a program in between an XML reader and writer?

Charles E. Grant

11:08 PM

@RobertHarvey Sure, but that's exactly the sort thing that template engines are for. There are lots of template engines around, but I haven't been able find one other than autoscan that I can link to from C. I was really just trying to make sure I wasn't missing some existing resource before I jumped in to writing coding a solution myself. Thanks for your input though.

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