B brandongalbraith

In Praise Of Idleness

Like most of my generation, I was brought up on the saying: 'Satan finds some mischief for idle hands to do.' Being a highly virtuous child, I believed all that I was told, and acquired a conscience which has kept me working hard down to the present moment. But although my conscience has controlled my actions, my opinions have undergone a revolution. I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached. Everyone knows the story of the traveler in Naples who saw twelve beggars lying in the sun (it was before the days of Mussolini), and offered a lira to the laziest of them. Eleven of them jumped up to claim it, so he gave it to the twelfth. this traveler was on the right lines. But in countries which do not enjoy Mediterranean sunshine idleness is more difficult, and a great public propaganda wil

Attributions:

Edward O'Campo-Gooding's list of questions.

Julia Evans' blog post "Questions I'm asking in interviews".

Thanks to @bmastenbrook, @marcprecipice, @danluu, @kelseyinnis, @zmagg, @graue, and @ircolle for awesome question suggestions (per Julia).

"Useless" questions vs concrete questions

Courtesy of /u/bane on HackerNews: http://web.archive.org/web/20141017022007/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7373301

It seems that they go a few directions:

The most common seems to be to try and generalize, because relearning most of your job skills every few years starts to get annoying the 20th time you've had to do it. It's different when you are younger and everything is new, you just chalk up a major tooling change as just something else to learn. But when the next hot platform or architecture or whatever comes out you get tired of running in exactly the same place. You also start to get a long view on things, where all these new things coming out don't really seem to offer any advantage to you that keeps development fun. It's just more and more layers of abstraction and you start to see the nth demo of WebGL maxing out a 4 core modern GPU system doing exactly what you did 20 years ago with a single 32-bit core, 1/5th the transistor count and all in so

	#!/bin/bash

	# Replace this with your domain
	DOMAIN=your-domain.com

	USER_DATA=`/usr/bin/curl -s http://169.254.169.254/latest/user-data`
	HOSTNAME=`echo $USER_DATA`
	IPV4=`/usr/bin/curl -s http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/public-ipv4`

	# Set the host name

	'''
	@author Bommarito Consulting, LLC
	@date 2012-12-23

	Generate .ssh/config lines from EC2 instance information.
	'''

	# Imports
	import boto
	import os

	#!/usr/bin/env perl
	# findswappers --- A script that identifies swapped processes
	# Copyright (C) 2013 Eric MSP Veith <[email protected]>
	#
	# All rights reserved.
	#
	# Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or
	# without modification, are permitted provided that the following
	# conditions are met:
	#

	rds-modify-db-parameter-group {param-group-name} \
	--parameters="name=character_set_server, value=utf8, method=pending-reboot" \
	--parameters="name=collation_server, value=utf8_general_ci, method=pending-reboot" \
	--parameters="name=tmp_table_size, value={DBInstanceClassMemory/16}, method=pending-reboot" \
	--parameters="name=max_heap_table_size, value={DBInstanceClassMemory/16}, method=pending-reboot" \
	--parameters="name=query_cache_type, value=1, method=pending-reboot" \
	--parameters="name=query_cache_size, value=131072, method=pending-reboot" \
	--parameters="name=table_open_cache, value=2500, method=pending-reboot" \
	--parameters="name=join_buffer_size, value={DBInstanceClassMemory/64}, method=pending-reboot" \
	--parameters="name=thread_cache_size, value={DBInstanceClassMemory/12582880}, method=pending-reboot" \

	"""
	This script assumes an s3 hierarchy like:
	* bucket
	/uploads
	/pending # all unprocessed ('raw') files live here. these files are moved to `processed` after they have been transcoded
	/processed # the raw file is moved here after it has been sent to the transcoder
	/web # each transcoded 'web' file is sent here
	/mobile # each transcoded 'mobile' file is sent here

	"""

	You appear to be advocating a new:

	[ ] cloud-hosted [ ] locally installable [ ] web-based [ ] browser-based [ ] language-agnostic
	[ ] language-specific IDE. Your IDE will not succeed. Here is why it will not succeed.

	You appear to believe that:
	[ ] Syntax highlighting is what makes programming difficult
	[ ] Garbage collection is free
	[ ] Computers have infinite memory
	[ ] Nobody really needs:

	User-agent: *
	Disallow: /