I totally agree. The npm ecosystem and the generally accepted practices in js these days come close to the bash style of composing & chaining a bunch of solid, specific little programs together to solve problems trivially that would have been a bear to do in many other platforms like java, C++, etc. I cringe at the idea that you should find yourself implementing l-pad in 2016, at least for the vast majority of projects that a typical engineer will encounter in their career. A similar case can be made for something as small as "is positive integer".
While I agree, there are two counter arguments:
1) As noted in other comments, this is a reflection of the core libs of javascript not covering enough of the basics. This is a subjective thing when it comes to where to draw the line, but wherever the border lies between "core" and "community" libs, on the other side you start running into things like "L-pad" and "Lib-L-Pad" and "L-pad2". If there's a great enough fundamental need, you experience a lot of crowding where lots of people offer up their solution to this, and reconciling that across larger dep. chains that disagree on which one to use can become a real burden.
2) Have you ever had the conversation with an auditor (PCI, HIPAA, etc) that your application is actually built on top of a huge substrate of software written by unaffiliated 3rd parties? And that between your own iterations you could easily have different versions for any/all of them? It's a difficult conversation. Much less the explanations to QA about why a build failed because lib X was updated to a new hotfix version in the 14 hours since yesterday's build, after a couple hours of wasted time of initially suspecting your own diffs, and trying to navigate through all the indirection between the actual stack trace and what actually caused the blow-up...
You can't reliably beat the market. People who say they can are saying so out of some combination of:
1) lying (to others and/or themselves as well)
2) cheating (insider trading, boiler rooms, etc)
3) drawing conclusions from too small of a sample size
Also I also disagree with the statement to not buy individual stocks because others know more than you. It might be true even, it doesn't matter, because it's not the reasons not to buy individual stocks for retirement.
You don't buy individual stocks for retirement because your risk exposure is a lot higher compared to indexes and just riding the market (x10 for every dollar spent like this before taking maximum advantage of tax deferred retirement options).
If you have enough money that you are able and willing to lose some % of it for the chance of better gains, then buy individual stocks with that money (or play in derivatives if you're into stronger risk-seeking behavior). If you are trying to avoid living off of cat food in your winter years, it is far smarter to surrender the marginal chance for larger gains for a very highly likely chance at modest gains. If you don't have a retirement planned out, then every dollar you get towards it needs to be spent with the retirement goal in mind, and for that goal, the risk profile of individual stocks, historically, is prohibitively high.
In addition to what others are saying (location spoofing, etc) another factor to consider is this was in Littleton, CO. Specifically, about 5 miles away from Columbine.
That's Pynchon. You're describing Pynchon. At least some of the time, and FWIW the reviewer definitely seems to get him & his style.
The 8th paragraph in there is an excerpt from the new book, you'll notice it is 3 sentences, and the 3rd sentence begins about 10-15% of the way in and the 2nd sentence is a mere 8 words. This is typical and there are times where you will stop and take 5+ minutes to review and unpack and digest a single sentence of his when he's really digging his heels in. The payoff however can be absolutely immense.
"They're not important" as a rationale for being selectively discourteous and/or unprofessional will put you under the adage of "Beware the person who is nice to you but rude to the waiter" in the eyes of those who you deem are worth keeping an in-tact relationship. Would you want to work with or for someone who you know will only treat you fairly and respectfully while you remain valuable to them?
"They're not important" as a rationale for being selectively discourteous and/or unprofessional will put you under the adage of "Beware the person who is nice to you but rude to the waiter" in the eyes of those who you deem are worth keeping an in-tact relationship
No doubt, but that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying "treat people the way you feel is appropriate, based on your standards, principles, etc., and don't go out of your way to kiss ass or bend over backwards to appease people, just because they might be valuable to you someday because, among other reasons, that probably won't happen anyway."
I ran into the same problem. I started a pet project that involved scraping reddit (though for a different purpose than AMAs). Their robots.txt and an admin writeup from somewhere on their site made me realize that I'd probably just have to take it down and/or my scraper would just get blacklisted. It's a bummer because there's 1001 great ideas out there for filtering, categorizing, and viewing reddit's data in different ways. And it seems like they encourage 3rd party interaction to some extent with their API and all, yet scraping is kind of needed in most cases.
I do like the format for sure. The only thing I would consider is maybe nesting the Q/A divs (.qitem) for threads because a lot of times the Q/A content is contextual to past Q/As. You already order them that way and that helps a lot but on one of the ones I was reading it got confusing on whether they were speaking in the context of a thread or if it was a fresh Q/A. Maybe set it as a view option to toggle or something (maybe have it be a carousel where each frame contains all the Q/A divs in a thread starting with the root level, and keep it displayed flat like they are now).
I made sure to be nice to reddit. The scrapper is set to crawl reddit once every 12 hours for new "top monthly iamas".
Very good suggestion for nested threads. A good example of a reply to a question is on the westboro-baptist-church thread. I think it's possible to implement this suggestion. Will fool around with it on localhost and see what I come up with.
Yeah, I had a limiter put in mine as well so that it only made a request every 6 or 8 seconds.
No worries on the suggestion. Those threaded comments can be tricky sometimes.
Hey, if you do hear back from them about their stance on this sort of thing, I'd really appreciate if you could let me know what they say. I sort of halted my project after a certain point because I had the fear I'd just have to take it down as soon as I completed it.
User comments, but going by users rather than threads. That way you could get a profile where someone posts, or turn it around and see what prolific posters existed in a given subreddit.
The thing is it wouldn't sweep everything. Instead a user would only get scraped if a request was made to my app, and I had a tool that would go through a request queue (storing to my own DB) in a metered way so that reddit only experienced a handful of requests from me per minute.
Nonetheless it still breaks robots.txt and if I could dig it up admins have said in the past that don't want automated/batched requests hitting their site.
That's all well and good but we're a far cry away from concluding there's a lack of sufficient power to effect change. We're not counseling someone who's just become paraplegic about their hopes of running a triathlon, this is a situation with room to improve. And just because we may not be able to improve it 100% doesn't mean we don't try. Criminal behavior will always exist as long as society exists but that doesn't mean you disband the police.
If they think a question that gets at "What are your main priorities in looking for new employment?" is bullshit, I hope they do walk out of the interview so I don't waste anymore time on them.
If they ask for your input and then move on to the next question, absolutely. But at that point you're blaming the tool and not the user. The conclusion to draw is the interviewer is lazy / doesn't know what they're doing if they ask a question like that and move right on without inviting 2-way discussion over it.
The article clearly intends this to be a jumping off point to talk about what you're looking for in an employer and work environment in more detail. And it gets the ball rolling a little faster rather than just saying, "talk about what you're looking for in an employer and work environment in more detail".
I really don't see how this is manipulative, who exactly are they trying to fool? The "tapping into something deeper" isn't some tricksy ploy to reveal more than you want, it just means the question is crafted to address several layers of discussion about what you're looking for, all at once.
Unless you're trying to dig into their compensation priorities so you can lowball them in the right areas, this is just a question aimed at seeing how well they'd fit in to the company in terms of their own career/strategic goals, working environment, QA/testing standards, etc. I'd rather get those things out there in the interview and find out "Oh, yeah we have source control, and staging/dev servers, but I'd say our devs push about half their code changes straight to production via scp right off of their workstations. Saves time that way.", rather than on my second week when I've made X number of changes and commitments in my lifestyle & career for this job.
While I agree, there are two counter arguments:
1) As noted in other comments, this is a reflection of the core libs of javascript not covering enough of the basics. This is a subjective thing when it comes to where to draw the line, but wherever the border lies between "core" and "community" libs, on the other side you start running into things like "L-pad" and "Lib-L-Pad" and "L-pad2". If there's a great enough fundamental need, you experience a lot of crowding where lots of people offer up their solution to this, and reconciling that across larger dep. chains that disagree on which one to use can become a real burden.
2) Have you ever had the conversation with an auditor (PCI, HIPAA, etc) that your application is actually built on top of a huge substrate of software written by unaffiliated 3rd parties? And that between your own iterations you could easily have different versions for any/all of them? It's a difficult conversation. Much less the explanations to QA about why a build failed because lib X was updated to a new hotfix version in the 14 hours since yesterday's build, after a couple hours of wasted time of initially suspecting your own diffs, and trying to navigate through all the indirection between the actual stack trace and what actually caused the blow-up...