The Whiteboard - 2015-08-12 (page 1 of 2)

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user20683

12:19 AM

@MichaelT cordyceps O_o

user55340

Cordyceps /ˈkɔrdəsɛps/ is a genus of ascomycete fungi (sac fungi) that includes about 400 species. All Cordyceps species are endoparasitoids, parasitic mainly on insects and other arthropods (they are thus entomopathogenic fungi); a few are parasitic on other fungi. Until recently, the best known species of the genus was Cordyceps sinensis, first recorded as yartsa gunbu in Nyamnyi Dorje's 15th century Tibetan text An ocean of Aphrodisiacal Qualities. and known as yarsha gumba in Nepali and ""summer-grass, winter-worm" in English. In 2007, nuclear DNA sampling revealed this species to be unrelated...

user20683

@MichaelT I'm well aware of what it is

user20683

just an odd thing to have in a drink

user20683

outside of China anyway

user55340

That's the 'herbal mix' of that company.

user55340

12:22 AM

sodapopstop.com/products/detail.cfm?link=64 sodapopstop.com/products/detail.cfm?link=196 sodapopstop.com/products/detail.cfm?link=197 sodapopstop.com/products/detail.cfm?link=194

user55340

12:46 AM

sigh - was searching for a musician's name. Jason... "json" -> "no results found"

user55340

And in the "smart people in Alabama" category... "Rocket City Rednecks"

user55340

Rocket City Rednecks - Moonshine Rocket Launch

user55340

Travis S. Taylor

Travis Shane Taylor (born 24 July 1968 in Decatur, Alabama) is an aerospace engineer, optical scientist, science fiction author, and star of National Geographic Channel's Rocket City Rednecks. Taylor has written more than 25 technical papers, 14 science fiction novels and two textbooks, and has appeared in multiple television documentaries, including NGC’s recently highly rated special When Aliens Attack. == Personal biography == Taylor grew up in rural North Alabama alongside his older brother Gregory, a Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force Reserves. As a boy, Taylor read science fiction and...

user55340

Rocket City Rednecks - Watermelon Defense

user55340

(and if you want to hear it from Neil Degrasse Tyson and Bill Nye - startalkradio.net/show/rocket-city-rednecks )

user55340

12:59 AM

(I wonder if this oneboxens)

user55340

soundcloud.com/startalk/rocket-city-rednecks

user55340

Nope.

2:02 AM

@Rufflewind - The first question posed is off-topic at Programmers. Ultimately, it boils down to a poll-by-example which is a poor fit for the StackExchange Q&A format. The second question is marginally on-topic but would certainly need some backing research to make it a more interesting and constructive question. And to round out the trifecta, the third question is obviously off-topic for Programmers as it's focused upon implementation only. — GlenH7 42 secs ago

user41796

@enderland Good to hear. If nothing else, it helps scope what your options are.

@GlenH7 You still here?

user41796

Why, of course!

@GlenH7 So amazon sent me an intake questionaire

There are lots of questions like "please tell us anything about yourself you think would be useful"

They also asked all of the relevant intake technical questions like "what is your experience in Java"

user41796

"I love books" "I love automated warehouse systems that fulfill orders faster than mere mortals." "Jeff is da bombz"

2:07 AM

Yeah, that's what I'm wondering

Should I put crap like that?

user41796

I'd put you at expert level with Java

user41796

If you're willing to deal with the voodoo of the JRE.... That's clearly in the realm of expert

Lol, with the amount of money I'm asking for, I'd better be expert level.

user41796

Understanding that no one is expert in everything

user41796

From what I understand... Amazon used to be a helluva lot more insular in who they would hire. And then they realized that wasn't working.

2:09 AM

Well, so the question is like, should I put irrelevant stuff like "I like books"

user41796

But they want to maintain the fluff regarding people being passionate about the overall corporate mission and hiring top notch hacks.

user41796

So the question is where your line is at in the schema

should I put quality of life stuff like "I want to work in a larger team and not sit by myself in a cube all day"

should I put stuff like "I like Amazon because"

user41796

@durron597 Gotta spin that to be positive

@GlenH7 Well sure

user41796

2:11 AM

If you love books, then that's worth putting in there

I'm applying to work in their ads team

Let me give you the exact wording of the questions:

user41796

If you love how Amazon completely disrupted the traditional book selling market dynamics, I'd put that in there

1. In the "Areas of Interest section": Any other information that would help us match you to your ideal role?

Turns out TFS has a build system. Looks like we're going to use CruiseControl to automate it.

2. In the "Technical Self Evaluation section:" Are there any other technical skills not mentioned that you would rank yourself highly in?

(first instinct to that is "no")

user41796

2:12 AM

@RobertHarvey We're using something to automate our builds within TFS. Not sure what it is though. Does require daily checking to make sure the builds didn't break.

3. Any other information that you would like to share that would be relevant to this process?

@GlenH7 I can live with that. I'm living in Nuget Package Hell right now.

user41796

@durron597 "I'm a trained assassin through the ancient art of ...." :-)

So anything would be an improvement.

user41796

@RobertHarvey Blech, turn off automatic updates via nuget. Burns me every single damn time.

2:13 AM

@GlenH7 My name is Thomas A. Anderson

user55340

You want to work on large systems - that dealing with a small company, while having its challenges, has difficulty in feeling "useful"

@MichaelT to question 1 or question 3?

(that is true)

user55340

(this was a point a former cow-orker of mine made when going from Employer^^ (dealing with point of sales and tens of thousands of transactions) to Employer {new head} - the new one is a smaller company... its "we deal with a few score of clients who buy our specialized software")

user55340

I've gone from the few score back to the hundreds of thousands in the size of the database too - I certainly understand that feeling.

user55340

Its something that Amazon has the opportunity to do - "even the small changes are grand when looked at on the scale of such a company"

user41796

2:16 AM

Those are some pretty astute observations

user55340

If you aren't passionate about the product, be sure you are passionate of the code and the process you are going to deal with.

@MichaelT I'm applying to the ads team

hard to be passionate about ads.

user55340

There are people who are... but the tangent to that is "I like working with the code and creating the best product, whatever that product may be"

user55340

(the employer who had the recruiter who did that absurd taped video interview didn't quite get that point - possible I didn't make it clear enough... its kind of hard to be passionate about writing software to collect on student loans)

user55340

Apr 29 at 2:18, by MichaelT

Its part of the "no, I can't get excited about working there at an interview, because I know it is very much like everywhere else I've worked... not that that is good or bad, its just you won't find me going 'yippie! I want to work with collage loan finance systems'"

2:21 AM

Here is what I have right now based on this conversation:

Answer to 1. Any other information that would help us match you to your ideal role?

Answer to 2: Are there any other technical skills not mentioned that you would rank yourself highly in?

Answer to 3: Any other information that you would like to share that would be relevant to this process?

@GlenH7 thoughts?

user41796

@durron597 One second, chatting in Skunk Works too

kk

user55340

Is this a <textarea> or a <input type="text">?

user55340

(wondering about their expectations for length)

user41796

@durron597 - A1 - meh. I don't feel any pain motivating you there. And / or, there's nothing unique about that answer. Why do you want to make that move?

user114359

2:28 AM

Cross-posted and OT, needs to be nuked:

user114359

0

Q: Fire success function in MVC using ajax for text file data

I'm simple fetching data from text file Which is on my desktop and display on alert dialog.This code perfectly worked for me if I use this as separate file on my desktop as html file with textfile.But when I include this code given below in MVC Project.It does not work. <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <

asp.net-mvc jquery ajax asp.net-mvc-4 asp.net-mvc-3

@GlenH7 because it's either pouring or 105 degrees here and I think they will pay me a lot more money, lol

user41796

@Snowman Needs more down votes. :-)

user41796

@durron597 Spin. Spin. Spin.

user41796

@durron597 - Back A2 with some anecdotes

user114359

2:31 AM

@GlenH7 I gave it one already

@GlenH7 This is an intake form

the box for section 1 is like a line and a half in work doc

user41796

Back A3 with examples from current work with actual numbers. And show why those numbers matter. No, they don't play in the same arena but they pretend to care to the same level as your current industry does.

the box for section 2 is like 3 lines, same for section 3

user41796

As it has a huge experience on the end-user (guinea pig) experience

So in #3, stop talking about what they are likely to care about, and instead talk about what I've done (cut 8 ms turnaround to sub 1 ms)?

user55340

2:34 AM

They have lots of people who write to "what they care about" - set yourself apart.

user41796

@durron597 yes

user41796

I once had an interviewer ask me how I handled multi-tasking and he / she presented some hypothetical example that I think wasn't quite hypothetical. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to stifle my laugh. But I was able to follow up immediately how I dealt with much more demanding situations on a daily basis.

@GlenH7 Did you get that job?

user41796

No, but I did clear that round of interviewing.

user41796

IIRC, they were willing to give me the offer but they told me they thought I'd be bored after a few months.

user41796

2:38 AM

Er, so I guess, yes, I had the offer. But I didn't take it.

user55340

(making sure the interviewer doesn't think you'll get bored there soon - this is part of the where the "working on large systems" things plays into it)

A2 revised:

A3 revised:

I'm not changing A1, the box is too small.

user41796

@durron597 s/5 minutes/short period of time/ aka. Don't make them look like asses.

user41796

@durron597 2nd sentence needs some grammatical love to make it flow better.

@GlenH7 I remember at my old job it was three in the morning and they had stared at the same VB6 bug all night (we were all pressed on a deadline) and I figured out it had to be an issue where they were passing a String into a function that had a Variant Parameter.

user41796

2:42 AM

@durron597 A1 still needs love.

Ah VB6

@GlenH7 I don't know how to give it love in such a small space

user55340

(Interviewers don't tend to appreciate people ragging on the former or current place of employment)

user41796

That's what I'd start with

user41796

@MichaelT Ain't that the truth

@GlenH7 Can I remove the last 5 words?

user41796

2:44 AM

@durron597 Substitute in something else

user41796

You need to say why you want that challenge

@GlenH7 I meant for space reasons

Maybe I'll shrink the font.

user41796

Oh. Gawd, what a crappy intake form.

user41796

Yeah, shrink the font.

user55340

"If you specifically ask me to critique them, I will answer. There are certainly many things I would do differently, though I will admit I don't have full awareness of the history that lead up to that design nor am I the one making the business decisions on the ROI of changing the design (which I am sure someone years down the road will critique too)"

user41796

2:45 AM

it's probably all converted to plain text on the back end. <sigh>

@GlenH7 yeah lol

user41796

@MichaelT That's really good.

@GlenH7 A3 s/when //

In the second sentence

user41796

@durron597 That should work, yes

user55340

Quite a bit ago I saw an article about "why the new hire is always so productive in the eyes of management." A portion of it was the "unencumbered by the way things work and the implications of a change." Many times there aren't issues with changes that people are worried about, but they still have to consider them. The new guy doesn't.

user55340

2:49 AM

Make sure you are prepared for the "why do you want to relocate" question or however its worded to make HR types.

@MichaelT Because I want to get paid gobs of money

Because it's bloody hot here

I'm not british, but that's the only way to put it.

user55340

I'm going to warn you of:

user55340

88

Q: Employer wants work-loving employees, and not paycheck-loving employees

During previous salary negotiations, I've heard that my employers will often use the following argument: We want our employees to work here because they love the work, and not because they love the paycheck. With my negotiations coming up, I feel pretty prepared, but not for this. In my mi...

salary negotiation

user55340

The employee that is purely enticed by a paycheck can easily be pulled away to another place. Sniping is a real problem that Amazon has (people hiring away from them)

user55340

The left coast tech market is very competitive for top brains. They can be willing to pay well for the top brains, but they also know that other companies can also pay well too. This goes to that 'passionate about your work' thing.

user41796

2:53 AM

Fundamentally, all companies want to be fluffed and told how wonderful and attractive they are to potential employees. Which, not ironically, is the exact same thing all employees want to hear from potential employers. All just part of the game.

user55340

It takes several months of investment to get an employee up to speed on everything. If you get hired away before that investment has been paid off, they lose money on you.

user41796

@MichaelT jynx. But your way of saying it was much nicer.

user55340

This is why there's some places that have the "$5k to quit today - here's the cash" program.

user55340

It costs them less than $5k to not have to train someone who will get hired away after they've invested the time.

user55340

Amazon isn't a young company either - their golden handcuffs aren't as strong as smaller companies can do.

user55340

2:56 AM

(I was hired as employe 6xx at Employer^^^ - I had a few thousand shares as options to start out with... with a vesting period - the golden handcuffs... new employees now there are lucky to get 100 options as part of signing.)

@GlenH7 Sent. Thanks again

@MichaelT this is interesting...

user55340

@enderland It was 2-3 years ago... don't recall where I saw it. Maybe HN, though trying to search for that is... requiring significant google-fu.

user55340

This also goes to why consultants appear to be so productive to management layers.

5:45 AM

Hi

4 hours later…

9:20 AM

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it should be asked to the guy who invented calendars, not to programmers. — Quentin 42 secs ago

1 hour later…

10:42 AM

Perhaps programmers.stackexchange.com would be a better fit for this question? — starbeamrainbowlabs 6 secs ago

1 hour later…

12:03 PM

Why the downvote? — Basile Starynkevitch 6 mins ago

^^^ really, why? Apparently we need to welcome and answer questions from homework / interview cheaters, so that more of them come here and ask more questions like that

I'm going to throw something out there: A Repository pattern over a file structure that contains potentially tens of thousands of files.

12:34 PM

Happy Coffee Day (Coffee Day|Coffee day|coffee day?)

1:32 PM

1 hour in, lots of code, still no coffee...I wish I had a secretary...

Working with a file structure where you can't depend on anything other than a file extension to determine that something contains parseable data (and not even the data that you want) is painful. No guaranteed directory structure, directory names, file names...

You grow that file structure to tens of thousands of files...and to do anything, you need to recurse down and start cracking files.

Every time I solve one problem, I find two more.

@ThomasOwens then stop using regexp...

@JimmyHoffa Maybe the problem is that I'm not using regexp.

what a difference a name makes; since realizing the name StreamProcessor for what I'm putting together yesterday, I've been bulldozing through design decisions that had been vexing me as the terminology clarified the design concept I was driving at

@ThomasOwens only if you think solving one problem should help you find three more instead..

@JimmyHoffa Would those three be easy to solve and not make any more?

1:42 PM

@ThomasOwens in all seriousness, this whole thing is the smell of what happens when you have poor underlying design; people always think you can just deal with it later, but don't realize it makes everything you do afterwards worse (which makes everything you do after that even worse ...) if you don't correct it before it's sanctified into the system core

It is poor design. Well, poor requirements, really. There's so little specification on what the raw data looks like before processing that the processing software, along with anything else that works with raw data, needs to be able to consume an insane number of possible options.

The individual pieces of data are well-defined in terms of structure and valid content. But how that data is organized into directories isn't.

26

Q: roslyn failed to compile code

After I have migrated my project from VS2013 to VS2015 the project no longer builds. A compilation error occurs in the following LINQ statement: static void Main(string[] args) { decimal a, b; IEnumerable<dynamic> array = new string[] { "10", "20", "30" }; var result = (from v in ar...

c# .net linq roslyn

It's perfectly valid for every file to be in its own directory. NBD.

@ThomasOwens The list monad exists to deal with non-determinism. Sounds like you want one of those.

I keep staring at my whiteboard, hoping the answer just appears. It's not.

1:52 PM

@ThomasOwens it helps if you write something on it

@ThomasOwens I don't really understand the problem

@ThomasOwens this whiteboard? or another whiteboard?

@ratchetfreak Both my whiteboard and window have notes. I keep erasing and redrawing and sketching models and algorithms.

;)

You don't need to design the file system as a class structure

1:53 PM

@durron597 No, in fact, I can't.

So what's the problem then?

just use File (or compose it into a more useful object) and recurse

I'm trying to make it more performant. But I don't think I can. I honestly thing the answer is to look at every single file, sort it into one or more appropriate buckets, and then query the buckets.

@ThomasOwens by "performant" you mean "parallelized"?

Or you mean "do less operations"?

@durron597 I think threading is a solution. But I'm trying to see if there's any opportunity to short circuit any operations and not do everything for every file.

But without a consistent directory structure or file naming scheme, I think I need to actually look at file contents.

messing with the file system tends to get IO bottlenecked

1:56 PM

@ThomasOwens whenever I feel like I don't think I can make something more performant after a lot of effort - is when I realize now is the time to start peaking at those ever so evil data structures and algorithms that have been tweaked and tuned by data and information scientists for decades..

I'd ultimately like to minimize disk IO, but I just don't see how.

@ThomasOwens caching is usually the first reach.

if (file.isDirectory()) recurse(file); if(file.getName().endsWith(myExtension)) parse(file);

@durron597 That's pretty much what I have now. I have x threads in a thread pool (default to numCores, I think). When I come across a directory, I add a new task for the thread pool to work on. When I come across a file with my extension, I parse it and flow it down.

@ThomasOwens in it's naive form - is the performance acceptable to the task it's been given? If not, why? Can the why be re-engineered?

1:57 PM

why are you creating a task per directory?

@durron597 Why not?

maybe the multithreading model is the problem

It's faster than a single thread.

just throw all the files into a queue and let the threads grab a file when ready

@durron597 THIS SOLUTION FROM YOU!?!?!

:)

1:59 PM

That's an interesting approach...I wonder if it would be better.

Now I am The Master

maybe you need SSDs instead

@ratchetfreak That would help.

Woot! My periodic stream processing service refactor looks clean, well separated and nice! Yay!

I might actually be ready to...check in...CRAZY.

@JimmyHoffa HAPPY COFFEE DAY

Let's say I want to read 100 medium-to-large files and I have 10 threads. Does it make sense to assign 10 files to each thread, and then have each thread read one BUFFER_SIZE at a time, then advance to the next file, then loop back

or, should you read each file to completion before going to next file.

I'm thinking the latter is faster

2:06 PM

depends on how caching works out

@ratchetfreak Are you saying the answer to that question is hardware dependent?

or do you mean software cache

OS/disk controller dependent

@Ampt get me coffee. Please, get me coffee...

@JimmyHoffa I'm imagining you scratching the inside of your elbow while looking around nervously

I feel like I'm starring in a survival horror named "One Breakroom Too Far"

2:17 PM

@JimmyHoffa We should put together a chatbot. In the Tavern or SOCVR you just type !!/coffee and it makes coffee for you

@durron597 could I drink it? oh goodness it just occurred to me, buildings need a service! I should go to a website for my building, enter my room number and coffee just be brought directly to my desk. It could be a building wide service and they could bill the companies in the building directly. This is spectacular.

@JimmyHoffa It's like Uber, but for coffee.

@JimmyHoffa Hey, maybe the people that do that could also take dictation, answer your phone, organize your papers, manage your calendar

WE SHOULD TOTALLY RUN WITH THIS IDEA. NO ONE'S THOUGHT OF IT BEFORE

@durron597 that would be much more expensive than just coffee

@JimmyHoffa If you just want coffee, buy a $150 keurig and put it at your desk

2:21 PM

(who needs a phone answered? who has papers?)

@durron597 I've been tempted; I have one at home..

@JimmyHoffa If you're even more on a budget, just put a regular coffee pot at your desk. Maybe splurge for a microwave too

@durron597 ick, drip coffee... and who needs a microwave when you have coffee?

(yes, less delicious coffee. morer cheaperer too)

@JimmyHoffa I'm assuming you're not going to drink a whole pot by yourself before it gets cold

user55340

The real goal is a desk kureg or whatever.

@MichaelT for certain. The key is I literally didn't want to get up from my chair while I was doing that refactor for the first hour and a half this morning right when I sat down... If I could have just pushed a button on the keurig and turned back to my IDE that would have been ideal. Didn't want to lose track of the work-queue in my head for where I was in the refactor

2:27 PM

@JimmyHoffa amzn.com/B00005CDPY

The keurig with a nice large internal water basin is what I needed so I don't have to go to the break room to get water

or a USB coffee maker,

great for frying your USB hubs

user55340

Hmm. keurig.com/Beverages/Coffee/Eclipse-Extra-Bold-Coffee/p/… I wonder if they know something about Java coders.

@ratchetfreak the water is the issue. I have a french press sitting here, but don't even need that. I fine-ground my beans so I just put them straight in my cup. All I need to do is go to the break room, pour hot water and creamer in my cup, come back to my desk and put the grinds in..

@JimmyHoffa pap-ers? What is this thing you speak of.

2:28 PM

@DocBrown what brings you here this fine Coffee Day?

@durron597 you assume wrong.

user55340

@JimmyHoffa go with bottled water: waterjoe.com

@MichaelT Nah, it would be called the IntelliCoffee then

@JimmyHoffa ... just get a kettle then

Keep these at your desk:

Naming things is hard...

2:30 PM

@JimmyHoffa keep a bottle of water in your desk

user image

yeah a bottle of water and a means for heating it would suffice..

user55340

@ThomasOwens one of the great problems.

@ThomasOwens but important as I pointed out earlier this morn'!

@ThomasOwens BarFooThingy

2:31 PM

@MichaelT blasphemy! You can't suggest that on coffee day

user55340

@durron597 use it to make the coffee.

user55340

Or soup, or jello.

user55340

Caffeine Jell-O shots. Think about it.

@MichaelT ...can you make Jell-O with coffee? This sounds spectacular...

I don't even like Jell-O, but I really want some Coffee Jell-O now

user image

user55340

2:35 PM

@JimmyHoffa make jello with water joe.

@MichaelT why water joe?

oh, caffeinated water? I see

user55340

It's caffeinated water.

user55340

You could make coffee with it too...

Now I want to make decaf coffee with it just to spite whoever took the caffeine out of the beans

do you guys ever worry or feel uncomfortable reaching out to someone you've never met before at work?

2:37 PM

@enderland Yeah. But I usually have someone make an introduction first.

@enderland I worry that I'm going to get the wrong person / office / desk whatever

I don't worry if all I need to do is email.

It's interesting to me, I have nearly no inhibitions about that, but culturally it's a bigger deal for most people (like India - even if the person is the right person, they are very uncomfortable doing that)

user55340

@enderland remind me to tell you about signing the cardS for a guy who went to Montana here... In the reaching out context. When I can properly and fluently anecdote.

@enderland how do you mean "reaching out" ? I don't spend a lot of time socializing across departments randomly at work if that's what you mean?

@JimmyHoffa like, if you are working on a thing that requires you to talk to a completely different team - initiating that conversation

2:51 PM

@enderland oh, nah, I've worked in bureaucracies of enough size that it's been a common affair in times past. Perhaps people who are used to a more casual culture like you find in small offices where everyone knows everyone, they'd feel a bit of anonymity-shock moving to a larger organization...

@JimmyHoffa I think that americans in general are much more comfortable with crossing over and just initiating conversation or setting up meetings with people they don't really know

user55340

Btw, @JimmyHoffa fermentingcellarswinery.com/wines.html - look at the one in the lower right.

@MichaelT do they ship?

user55340

They might. They are a very small winery though. Colorado isn't a problematic place to shop to IIRC.

@MichaelT right, we got on the list to allow that shit like 10 years ago when a bunch of states were making such allowable

user55340

3:04 PM

It's also in part that Colorado is a shipper. California and Wisconsin are also fairly prominent shippers of alcoholic beverages.

winespectator.com/webfeature/show/id/50258

we got the law in 2006 according to wikipedia

I need to get an EXE from my work computer to my home computer so I can use VPN.

I can't email it since the corporate email strips out VPN. I can't get to Google Drive / Dropbox.

Alcohol across state lines? Forget about it

@ThomasOwens thumb drive

thats why distributors exist - getting permits to ship alcohol across state lines is a friggin mess

3:06 PM

@JimmyHoffa Oh yeah. I do have a thumb drive. I hope that the encryption software for it works on Win10 when I get home, though.

@ThomasOwens can you just rename the exe? I've done that often to get around dumb things like that

@enderland I tried that. It actually scans the file, it looks like.

It knows it's an executable somehow and strips it from email messages.

@ThomasOwens I actually worked one job where the network specifically forced all computers to have thumb drives turned off so computers wouldn't recognize them. I just burned a blank with the data I needed when I needed to transfer data...

user55340

@Ampt private to private - not bad given both states allow. When in Cali, sending wine toy parents was not hard at all via ups.

oh, well, yeah. Just box it yourself, very, very well before bringing it in ;)

3:08 PM

@MichaelT "wine toy parents" strike me as a great autocomplete mistake?

user55340

Winery to private is also not problematic in most cases. Retail to out of state... That's another problem.

user55340

@enderland yep.

I interviewed once at shipcompliant.com in Boulder, there whole business is logistics software to help companies track their compliance and generate reports and request permits for shipping alcohol

there was a phd student in my group years ago who quit midway through to go work at a brewery...

mmm that feeling after you completely reorganize/refactor 20 classes, moving them into new assemblies and changing their configuration, check in, delete your branch, get fresh: Kick it off and watch it run flawlessly from a clean get

user41796

3:18 PM

IT WORKS!!!!

user41796

Yeah, I can relate

user55340

define: progasm

user55340

Hmm.

user55340

catb.org/jargon/html/P/progasm.html

user55340

(Note where that term originated)

3:24 PM

@MichaelT people in the bay area are so utterly out of touch with reality it's depressing; Heard an on the radio a piece yesterday while I was heading home where they were interviewing business execs in LA talking about tech businesses starting in places outside of the bay area - like LA and Santa Monica OH NOES! And with each exec they interviewed the message was endlessly "There's no tech business outside of the bay anywhere, and no tech talent outside of it either"

I just wanted to smack people. Such brainless ignorance.

I think people on the coasts (especially big cities) who have lived their entire lives there sometimes are quite out of touch with the majority of the USA, at least by landmass :P

it's odd being in another chat where 80% of the people are in SFBA or Seattle

made worse in that (most) US citizens believe that US is the only country that exists

@ratchetfreak South America exists too!

and then I hear about how much money they're making and how much competition there is for skilled programmers, and wonder why people live elsewhere :D

3:28 PM

@Telastyn CoL and quality of living... will never get me to move to either area, maybe Seattle but definitely not bay area

sure, but even considering cost of living...

user55340

And how much they hate the traffic or can't buy a house for less than $2M nearer than an hour commute?

user55340

@enderland Seattle has serious growing pains right now.

user55340

Traffic on par with LA.

I just drew up a class diagram and sequence diagram for what I just made real quick. I just made a ChainOfResponsibilityCompositeBuilder.

3:31 PM

@Telastyn they work their fingers to the bone and their income isn't significant enough to match the CoL difference.

I need a vomit emoji.

@ThomasOwens or a ChFRspCmpBl if you're a contractor!

you're expected to put in stupid hours (@Telastyn didn't you spend time in the bay?)

@JimmyHoffa - there are folks making 2-3 full multiples of my salary. CoL isn't that bad.

I dunno about the stupid hours. that tends to vary from company to company.

user55340

@Telastyn depends on if you have a kid you want to send to school or not.

3:32 PM

I did. Never worked stupid hours.

No kids

no kids is awesome btw.

user55340

Because you aren't going to send them to a public school that is overcrowded...

@Telastyn no? My understanding is it's easily that bad... a $200k house in Wisconsin is probably $1m in the bay, that's a 5 multiple. Am I wrong in that cost estimate?

user55340

So add on another $30k for private school.

probably more than $1m in the bay, but there's more to CoL than housing.

user55340

Parking spots can cost a few k a year if on an apartment. Or you'll pay that in parking tickets.

3:34 PM

@Telastyn yeah, but housing is an immense portion of CoL, especially when it increases 5 times..

your monthly outlay goes way up with housing over 5 or 6 times the cost...

true, but you'll also not be in comparable housing because the lifestyles are different

user55340

If you want s 1m house, that's a 1h commute. So add on the cost of gas each way.

@Telastyn you mean you'll be in a closet? Which goes back to, if you have a kid...then what...

and because the house is 5x

user55340

And time lost.

3:36 PM

I had a nice townhouse right outside of downtown SJ (2 car garage included) for the same amount as my house+yard in MN

user55340

What year?

2005ish? But I went straight from the townhouse to the house & yard.

the main point though is that the spare bedroom and extra garage stall isn't worth the 5x cost and pretty easily sacrificed.

so that alone I don't think is prohibitive.

@Telastyn not sure I understand what you're saying; 5x housing cost would be pretty prohibitive for me lacking a 5x income increase (which would be AWESOME considering my income)

though I may be way off in what housing cost would be - or what my increase might be (5x would be damn cool). I've heard far too much about the bay's 80 hour work weeks and brogrammer culture which is one of the other big turn offs. They may both be total nonsense though; perhaps I should have moved my family to the bay...

Though I find it odd, if there's "so much competition for programmers" - why don't they recruit outside of the bay to ship people in more?

If I had no family I definitely would have gone just to give it a whirl.

May have liked it, who knows

it's 5x for identical housing. The main cost of housing there isn't the house, it's the land.

user55340

They try. That's how I got out there. However, it also means getting people to move.

3:49 PM

@Telastyn yeah but the thing is - identical housing is kind of a need if you have a family... you can't make your wife and kid live in a closet...

user55340

There was a bit on HN / reddit a bit ago about companies complaining they couldn't find talent locally...

to get similar cost housing, you end up getting far less land, and slightly less square footage, but it's just as nice.

At least for me, I have way more space than I need because housing is so cheap here.

@MichaelT to be fair, it's a problem everywhere- my boss just finished interviewing the 4th in a row career coders who couldn't fizzbuzz...

yeah, Amazon has been doing recruiting drives around here quite a bit (not SFBA, but...)

@Telastyn well, housing isn't cheap here, perhaps it wouldn't be so bad in the bay area compared to what I have in mine (we're probably double your housing prices here; 200k gets you a solid 4 bedroom newish house there, which would be ~500k here)

user55340

3:54 PM

If you are willing to live in the country where cranes and eagles fly overhead, you can get a nice house for $100k here.

@MichaelT (people don't want to live where cranes and eagles fly?)

more like 300k for that here.

200k puts you out in the sticks

user55340

There is less culture. Younger types tend to like the nightlife.

@Telastyn ok, so we're about 2x your housing then

yeh

3:57 PM

granted, there's a range; I got into a place for $180k because it was built in the early 70's; my understanding is there's very little range in the bay - no matter the age or size, it's all about the location. Who knows, maybe 8 years from now I'll be selling my place to move there where I'll work on a bus into work and not be doing those dreaded 80 hour weeks... everything's fluid. Though the bay is in a bubble right now it seems..

would be awesome to not have to drive in the morning, just sit in my bus or self driving car working peacefully rather than dealing with traffic

like I said, most of the cost is the land (size/location), not the house.

so lower variance.

as always before; forums. Reddit, I think Quora allows this stuff too? Don't know. SE wants wikipedia-quality authoritative content. Subjective questions aren't going to get this kind of authoritative responses, so it just doesn't fit with the whole SE networks goal. — Jimmy Hoffa 47 secs ago

4:22 PM

minneapolis.craigslist.org/hnp/sof/5167965947.html

I feel like if you want a skilled mainframe assembler programmer you're going to need to offer more than 55/hr

@whatsisname you're also going to need to post somewhere other than craigslist...

I'm sure trawling craigslist for jobs is exactly where you find all the people of sufficient age to be skilled mainframe assembler coders

You'd be surprised

I've picked up several odd-jobs off craigslist over the years

and some friends of mine have gotten respectable jobs from craigslist ads

interesting

utterly unexpected

many cities you have to pay to post job ads on CL too, so it's not complete nonsense

@ThomasOwens - Can you at least do an in-memory or on-disk index after you have parsed them? Or re-organize or rename the files directly? Admittedly you still have to read everything once. (Not sure of exact requirements). And do you need a full parse to know enough about what is in the file?

4:25 PM

a lot of job ads for engineering/programming though have completely ridiculous amounts of pay though

@psr I was thinking about creating some kind of on-disk index that I can read after the fact to save time on future processing. But I need to understand more about the long-term storage of the data and how useful such a thing may be to me or others.

As far as renaming, no no no no no. I can't do anything but read the files. Can't touch their structure. And my parser is designed to parse completely. That doesn't take much time, though. It's actually a very quick parse per file.

The biggest problem is that no one here, in the interface documentation, specified that this is the directory structure that the data shall be written in so that all of our software that parses it can very easily understand it.

Anyway, I'm out. With any luck, I'll be WFH this afternoon. Hopefully this VPN client that IT gave me will work on Windows 10.

Aaaargh 4 days too late

4:53 PM

@whatsisname that was my first thought.... 45k-55k a year? really? (using YEARLY_SALARY/1000 as guideline)

user41796

@enderland Your rate base is off

user41796

That's per hour

user41796

but still low for a contractor with those skills

@GlenH7 45 * 1000 = 45k

user41796

but it's 45 - 55 / hr

user41796

4:56 PM

and there's ~2000 hours in the average work year

user41796

so it's a 90k - 110k offer over the year

@enderland the hourly rule of thumb is 2080 hours per year

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