Their tech stack looks interesting and despite the anecdotes from this thread and the fact that I haven't ordered anything from them yet (I am outside the U.S), I am inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt.
The Amazon monopoly needs some competition and better it come from a company that's innovating with a better tech stack. I am confused about why they decided to get off a membership model, though...
In this case, the article is clearly a piece that's advocating coffee drinking. When research crosses over from "setting up and experiment and proving/ disproving a hypothesis" to "advocating something as good or not good in general", its important to look at the source of funding and apply a heavy discount on the validity of the research if its advocating "for the money".
This is not research "related" to coffee, so your hypothesis is not valid in this instance.
Are you sure the proportion was the same? Reason I am asking is because for people who are bad at programming, there are various process/ management roles available that might better suit.
It seems rather impossible to me that someone would voluntarily continue programming for a couple of decades and not be excellent.
Beyond the 30's, I imagine people would be passionate about it to continue taking up programming roles. And this passion should translate into excellence.
Happy to be corrected if you have any data-points.
It seems rather impossible to me that someone would voluntarily continue programming for a couple of decades and not be excellent.
I don't have any hard data I'm afraid - just my fallible recollections ;-)
Some of ways of getting non-excellent old developers that I've observed:
* Not all old developers have been programming for a couple of decades. People can and do come into development late - and suffer all the normal problems of newbie developers.
* You'll be amazed at how little work you can get away with in some large organisations. When you have a couple of hundred people on a project you will find one or two Wallys from Dilbert.
* The devs who have sunk deep into some gnarly legacy system or language. Being the person who knows the right bit to tweak in the middle of a 1500 line procedure in the middle of a big-ball-of-mud project might be stupidly valuable to a company - but produce a lousy developer in any other context.
* The "senior" developer / architect / lead who has been Peter Principled to their level of incompetence, but whose team is good enough to cover up the deficit in leadership ability.
* The large chunk of bad developers (of all ages) who don't realise they're bad developers. Folk can't improve until they understand where they suck.
One thing I might add is, develop a pipeline for writing (1) don't judge your first draft, (2) schedule time to review each draft and edit ruthlessly, (3) edit once more before publishing.
The most important way I have improved my writing is to give myself permission to just write when working on the first draft. Write without any judgement and trust that the subsequent steps in my workflow will catch any issues and produce polished writing.
Edit: A book recommendation "Weinberg on Writing, the fieldstone method" by Gerald Weinberg. Excellent advice from his experience writing several books as a consultant and technology writer.
I think the reason may be less nefarious. This election is a case study of how much reality can diverge from expectations. And how people can hold on to these expectations till the very last moment, even though data says otherwise.
For this reason, its a very interesting election to study and analyze from a technology perspective. E.g. has the internet really succeeded in disseminating data and viewpoints effectively, or has it made our "bubble walls" more rigid. What is the role of fact checking and factual reporting when it comes to the media, has technology made getting to the truth easier or harder?
Very interesting for the hackers on this site...
Also, in discussing this election, its unavoidable that Romney is painted in a bad light. He lost after a spirited campaign that was alas never as close as he and his team portrayed it to be.
Look at the scale, against a base number of 12M+ facebook likes, losing hundreds is a rounding error. The OP seems to be getting the slant on his graph by manipulating it in rather grotesque ways.
P.S. Yes, people seem to be dissociating themselves from the Romney loss (and the man himself) in alarming numbers, none more so than within his party. But this does not seem to be a valid measure.
@Jacques, the people who host blogs on your network are lucky :-). I wish more businesses emulate the good example you are setting by thinking about your "customers" success...
Most programmers start-up something around the SAAS space, just because its within their field of expertise and I can see how a hybrid product + online app is a size-able competitive advantage. Its also a creative challenge. Looking forward to your book and discussion group to illuminate the product business side and how it fits in with software...
The page looks good overall, to the point. Some pics, maybe of the product itself or you with some customers and their pets would be a great idea. Looking forward to your updates.
Just one issue with that. If Microsoft is storing the hash, how does it know what the original password was and whether it was greater than 16 chars? If the algorithm is as above, then I just have to enter a password greater than 16 chars against ANYONE's username to be prompted for a password change and compromise their account.
Two arguments. The first is Microsoft doesn't need to know that the hash belongs to a password > 16 chars, it just needs to detect that the user is entering in 17+ characters and has not updated their password since the Hotmail update, and assume that they are submitting a password that is 17+ characters which should now be invalid, validate the old hash upon submission, fail authentication and prompt an "error" and ask for the truncated password, and then calculate a new hash and authenticate against that. Theres absolutely no reason for them to be doing that though, and it doesn't make a lick of sense either.
Occams Razor suggests it's much more likely that back in the dawn of time some programmer thought a varchar(16) was more than big enough for a password column, it's even possible that's a consequence of how Solaris stored email/user passwords back in '96 before Microsoft bought Hotmail...
I _strongly_ suspect this means Hotmail has been storing cleartext passwords forever - people postulating strange workarounds whereby they might be able to detect password lengths in spite of storing hashes instead of passwords seem to me to be spectacularly unlikely compared to the much simpler alternative that they've been storing plaintext passwords truncated to 16 chars.
> it's even possible that's a consequence of how Solaris stored email/user passwords back in '96 before Microsoft bought Hotmail...
From what I remember, Hotmail was a FreeBSD shop before Microsoft bought them, and ended up spending a boatload of money switching all the servers to NT.
But to the main point, I agree the 16 char limit smells strongly of plaintext passwords. However, there might be an argument that at one point those were all hashed for a massive security update. That would maintain the 16 char limit of the plaintext password since that would have been what the hash was generated from, but solve the issue of actually storing plaintext. I'd like to give Hotmail/Microsoft/Windows Live ID the benefit of the doubt and not immediately assume that they are _currently_ storing plaintext. (yeah, I know I shouldn't give anyone the benefit of a doubt in regards to security procedure)
They don't need to know the original password, they first check if your supplied password (which can be greater than 16 characters) when hashed matches the hash they have in the database currently, then if it does and it's greater than 16 characters truncate the length of the password you supplied to 16 and then hash that and update the database with it.
So do I hear a +1 for good social security? Looks like a very clear line from having social security and a safety net to leading in science, tech and inventions/ start-ups, which is growth, i.e. the lifeblood of any economy.
Not everyone thinks like that. Besides when a person wants money for survival larger view of the economy is the last he will care about.
All I'm saying is people who work their whole lives to get their kids a decent education and those kids themselves are most likely to take a safer path in life. Because they want all their sacrifice to result in a better life. I am not saying start ups don't offer that. But start ups are often risky and ridden by failures. Who would like to be in a situation where they see their parents slog their whole lives to put them a decent place, and now as kids they waste all that by failing in things whose risks they understood pretty well. In such cases, will the parent lives, their work have any meaning?
Now imagine a situation if your basic education, food, clothing and shelter are more or less taken care of. You have good medical care. You don't have to take any risks to just survive. You know if you fail, you always have some basic things taken care of. The infrastructure is there, there is lesser corruption and bureaucracy to worry about.
When you ask why people are afraid to take risks its the former reason.
In the latter situation risk only has a time value, and nothing much.
Their tech stack looks interesting and despite the anecdotes from this thread and the fact that I haven't ordered anything from them yet (I am outside the U.S), I am inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt.
The Amazon monopoly needs some competition and better it come from a company that's innovating with a better tech stack. I am confused about why they decided to get off a membership model, though...