Tag: programming

New Yorker got trolled

What a mess of an article, about alleged “rock star” engineers, and how they have “agents” now. Blech. Lowers my respect for the New Yorker.

Bradley asked about 10x’s talent pool: did it really include “the top developers in the world,” as Solomon claimed? Solomon dropped technological achievements the way one might talk about album sales or duets with Lady Gaga. One of his clients had overseen user-experience design for Apple’s iCloud. “Have you heard of Django? The guy who co-created Django is a client.”

Underhanded C contest

The goal of the contest is to write code that is as readable, clear, innocent and straightforward as possible, and yet it must fail to perform at its apparent function. [..] write surveil() in such a way that the act of surveillance is subtly leaked to the user or to the outside world. The leakage should be subtle enough that it is not easily noticed.

vi Moria

vi: Moria
Like Fangorn, ancient and deep, with hints of the long labor of a great people. There is, supposedly, a monumental city of stone down here somewhere but it’s so dark I can’t see a damn thing. No, wait! A shaft of light illuminates some runes! They read as follows:

^C^C^X^X^X^Xquit
qQ!qdammit[esc]qwertyuiopasdfghjkl;
:xwhat

Fake it till you make it

Okay that entire paragraph was a lie. Did you believe me? If so, why? Was it because I looked like a kid programming whiz? When that photo was taken, I didn’t even know how to touch-type. My parents were just like, “Quick, pose in front of our new computer!” (Look closely. My fingers aren’t even in the right position.) My parents were both humanities majors, and there wasn’t a single programming book in my house.

This is fascinating. Asian kid uses his history of “looking like he knows what he is doing” to explain how he was able to fake it till he made it.