In Norway’s case, the reason is probably their gigantic sovereign wealth fund. Income from foreign investments held by nationals is included in GNI (as it’s income flowing in to the country) but not included in GDP (because it’s not economic activity that takes place in the country itself).

It’s a trade-off; there’s a cost to using transactions and you can avoid that cost if your operations are idempotent. As you say though, if it’s infeasible to make an op idempotent then transactions are an excellent fallback :)

Um, yeah, the author deleted the post. So what do I do now? Delete my post here? Hope that the post might come back?

Direct democracy existed before computers. But whether it’s a good idea to have citizens directly voting on everything is a separate question. The point of representative democracy is even stronger nowadays, in my view, as things become more complex and the public becomes both less able to comprehend the finer details and more easily swayed by mass media.

Elections are really hard regardless if it’s done by computers or not, but we didn’t get to the point where we figured out the computer side of it at all. What’s worse, is that adding computers into the mix was an excuse to go back on well-tested election related rules, such as secret voting. No, we can’t have voting over the internet or via mobile phones or anything like that.

We should really go back to limiting computer involvement in elections to UI, with the papertrail as the official record of votes. Involving computers in the actual process adds such a huge leap of complexity that it excludes most people from ever being able to verify results. Everyone can verify paper ballots.

I absolutely agree. Voting should be as simple for voters to understand as possible. Introducing an electronic device makes it auditable only to experts and even they might have a difficult job given the many layers at which things can go wrong (including hardware vulnerabilities).

One of the reasons people are advocating electronic voting is their lower cost. Personally, I think this argument is totally wrong. Cost is a factor but not the most important one - not having elections would be cheaper.

100% agree. I counted votes in the last federal election of Germany and that is some serious work, but totally worth it and very hard to tamper with.

Local reverse proxy is a clever idea, and a proxy that you explicitly set up clients trust a la corporate middleboxes (see Lanny’s comment) seems like it can work in some environments too. Sympathetic to the problem of existing solutions no longer working, sort of surprised the original blog post wasn’t more about how to improve things now.

That what browser text zoom is for!

Whatever happened to the end user being in control of fonts and colors, anyway? If minimal sites became common again, I’d like to see client-side styling become much more prominent (say, a font & size dropdown right next to the URL bar on every major browser, along with a background & foreground color selector).

Leaving the web designer in charge of the theming is a boon for branding, but the end user doesn’t care about supporting some company’s branding (which in some cases – like the prevelence of blue-heavy designs – does real harm), and it’s ultimately they who use the thing so they should have full control. Yet, overriding default colors and fonts breaks most websites (not just webapps – which we would expect to be fragile against that – but web SITES).

The best that I’ve found is to just ask them to explain some tech that’s listed on their resume. You’ll really quickly be able to tell if its something they understand or not.

My team does basic networking related stuff and my first question for anyone that lists experience with network protocols is to ask them to explain the difference between TCP and UDP. A surprising number of people really flounder on that despite listing 5+ years of implementing network protocols.

A sample of actual work expected of the prospective employee is fair. There are pros and cons to whether it should be given ahead of time or only shown there, but I lean towards giving it out in advance of the interview and having the candidate talk it through.

Note that this can be a hard sell, as it requires humility on the part of the individual and the institution. If your organization supports an e-commerce platform, you probably don’t get to quiz people on quicksort’s worst-case algorithmic complexity.

I recently went through a week of interviewing as the conclusion of the Triplebyte process, and I ended up enjoying 3 of the 4 interviews. There were going to be 5, but there was a scheduling issue on the company’s part. The one I didn’t enjoy involved white board coding. I’ll tell you about the other three.

To put all of this into perspective, I’m a junior engineer with no experience outside of internships, which I imagine puts me into the “relatively easy to interview” bucket, but maybe that’s just my perception.

The first one actually involved no coding whatsoever, which surprised me going in. Of the three technical interviews, two were systems design questions. Structured well, I enjoy these types of questions. Start with the high level description of what’s to be accomplished, come up with the initial design as if there was no load or tricky features to worry about, then add stresses to the problem. Higher volume. New features. New requirements. Dive into the parts that you understand well, talk about how you’d find the right answer for areas you don’t understand as deeply. The other question was a coding design question, centered around data structures and algorithms you’d use to implement a complex, non-distributed application.

The other two companies each had a design question as well, but each also included two coding questions. One company had a laptop prepared for me to use to code up a solution to the problem, and the other had me bring my own computer to solve the questions. In each case, the problem was solvable in an hour, including tests, but getting it to the point of being fully production ready wasn’t feasible, so there was room to stretch.

By the time I got to the fourth company and actually had to write code with a marker on a whiteboard I was shocked at how uncomfortable it felt in comparison. One of my interviews was pretty hostile, which didn’t help at all, but still, there are many, far better alternatives.

There are extensive resources to help with the evangelism side of things.

Would like to hear your thoughts here after you try it for a couple of days.

Do not conflate addressable unit with byte.

Do you already know about TSAN? https://golang.org/doc/articles/race_detector.html

Or it’s simply because they still have a monopoly.

Windows console resizing is already fixed.

Doesn’t Gnome and XFCE’s Terminal usually do this?

And it they don’t, one can always use dvtm. In combination with st one can get a very lightweight environment (requires less resources than xterm, for example) that’s actually surprisingly nice to use.

Yeah, Terminal.app is amazing

I worked a job where I had to get a 1975-era Fortran contour-map library working inside a 64-bit .NET GUI app. My employer had bought the company which made the library in the 90s, and sat on it until they decided it was time to add it to their newest product. Luckily for me, it had a C interface API for the PDP11, so I hacked up the interface and just pretended to be a really futuristic plotter on a really fast PDP11.

How long were you on these 2-3 person teams? Did you have to maintain what you built for years?