Another VIC-20 alum here. At the age of 10, I remember trying to write a version of Donkey Kong in BASIC and was flabbergasted when I ran out of memory before I could even get barrels rolling! Ah, the good ol' days!
Speaking as someone who cut my teeth in the 80s and early 90s: I miss the elitism and exclusivity of it. Nowadays the internet has made it so any question can be answered within seconds, but back then you had to scrupulously acquire your information from magazines, Usenet discussions, and just plain experimenting with the code. As things currently stand, programming has become a commodity skill that anyone with a room temperature IQ can learn within a reasonably small time frame. Then, you get on StackExchange and start cobbling together your app from copypasta provided by other programmers.
Yeah. In the 90s I met almost no computer scientists. We all came from different backgrounds and got into programming because we were interested and liked it. Now we have a lot of people who chose it as a well-paying career. Nothing wrong with that but it's less fun.
I'm an applied mathematician that worked in those days with chemists, microbiologists, hydrologists, civil engineers, electronic engineers, physicists and almost every darn flavour of critter _except_ computer scientists.
Learnt a lot of interesting stuff.
Most of their code was utter shit to read and maintain... but then so is that from most recent comp sc graduates...
I learned that the startup dream of being acquired is bittersweet. Sweet that I got rich, bitter that my baby is now being eviscerated by the acquiring company to make it less bleeding edge and more mainstream. There are worse things in life I guess. But its akin to watching your child turn to prostitution - you wanted so much more for them.
I believe this to be true (embodiment as a precursor to cognition). So much of our early years learning is exploring how our various actions lead to a corresponding result. Touching a hot stove vs petting a soft cat, for example. And instead of just training 1 neural system at a time we're training all of our senses at once, which I think gives a significant boost to the brain's 'understanding' of the result of the action.
True. Except! The bone chilling winters and lake effect snow that accumulates into multiple feet. I remember one winter years ago where, when visiting my girlfriend, the wind-chill temp was 45 below zero and our cars were encased in ice an inch thick.
That being said, I'm from Detroit but if I had to live in Michigan again I'd be in GR.
I'm just wading into the HA waters with Postgres. I somewhat understand the tradeoffs between simplicity and robustness, but what would be your recommendation on how to proceed for someone who is a newbie?
This is going to sound cynical and self-serving (even though I'm not actually available for hire right now), but find someone who knows what they're doing and buy their time. It probably won't be cheap, but it will almost without doubt be cheaper than what you'll do to yourself if you try to hand-roll database HA.
Isn’t the major problem knowing that the expert actually know what they are doing and not just think they know what they are doing? Any tips on how you can separate the true experts from the deluded?
For someone who doesn't already have a background in and depth of understanding of this stuff, I'd first probably look for any relevant blog posts or articles written by the folks with whom you're considering a consulting arrangement. If they do exist, you can do some research on the things they're talking about and hopefully get at least a first-pass approximation of their full of shit factor.
Any consultant worth their day (let alone week) rate should be also able to refer you to previous clients, from whom you can hopefully get some sense of how satisfied people are with the candidate's work.
And, ultimately, there's an intuition factor at work here. It's been my consistent experience that if a candidate gives you some kind of hinky vibe, don't use them. When folks I've worked with haven't followed that, the results have pretty reliably been poor, at best.
Thanks for this. As you rightly point out setting up these systems can involve knowing all the rare edge cases. I am sure I could put together a system that functioned - that is until it ran straight into an edge case I have not thought of. Getting this right is not easy.
I'll second this. Getting your data store right is way too important to leave to the inexperienced (and I say that being, if I had to judge, the semi-experienced; I've refused gigs centered around HA data stores because I won't put my name on something I am not 100% sure will work for them without issues).
There are a lot of interviewer egos out there and kids being put in the position of Ultimate Power(tm) can really do a lot of damage to the self-worth of qualified candidates.
Just keep coding, studying algorithms, etc, and putting yourself out there. Eventually you'll get a job that you want and is well suited for you. You're fortunate to live in a time where it's a seller's market, employment-wise.
I disagree. What Snowden did was hugely important not just domestically but internationally. Without him we wouldn't have the current push to reform the surveillance state, so it would have grown unfettered into a cancer that really would affect all of us. I don't want to live in a fishbowl.
Many officials from the CIA and NSA (and FBI) have distorted the truth or outright lied to public. Snowden's actions have pushed back on that somewhat, rekindling a strong interest in what the watchers are doing. Stingrays, parallel construction, surveillance airplanes over urban areas, etc. You've got to keep that kind of power under strict control and keep the watchers accountable.
I gave Soylent a try when it first came out. The initial formulation gave me incredible gastro-intestinal distress, and it was so painful that I could barely sleep at night. Apparently they heard this sort of feedback from a bunch of people and changed their mixture so it wasn't as hard on the digestive tract. I haven't tried it though, so I don't know if it'd work for me. Honestly, I'm a bit scared to do so. Oh the pain!
