A super creepy webcrawler I built with a friend in Haskell. It uses social media, various reverse image searches from images and strategically picked video/gif frames, image EXIF data, user names, location data, etc to cross reference everything there is to know about someone. It builds weighted graphs in a database over time, trying to verify information through multiple pathways — although most searches are completed in seconds.

I originally built it for two reasons: Manager walks into the office for a meeting, and during the meeting I could ask him how his ski holiday with his wife and kids was, or casually mention how much I would like to learn his favorite hobby.

The other reason was porn of course.

I put further development in the freezer because it's already too creepy. I'd run it on some porn gif, and after a long search it had built a graph pointing to a residence in rural Russia with pictures of a local volleyball club.

To imagine that intelligence agencies probably have much better gathering tools is so insane to think about.

After listening to two of our senior devs play ping pong with a new member of our team for TWO DAYS!
DevA: "Try this.."
Junior: "Didn't work"
DevB: "Try that .."
Junior: "Still not working"

I ask..
Me:"What is the problem?"
Few ums...uhs..awkward seconds of silence

Junior: "App is really slow. Takes several seconds to launch and searching either crashes or takes a really long time."
DevA: "We've isolated the issue with Entity Framework. That application was written back when we used VS2010. Since that application isn't used very often, no one has had to update it since."
DevB: "Weird part is the app takes up over 3 gigs of ram. Its obviously a caching issue. We might have to open up a ticket with Microsoft."
Me: "Or remove EF and use ADO."
DevB: "That would be way too much work. The app is supposed to be fully deprecated and replaced this year."
Me: "Three of you for the past two days seems like a lot of work. If EF is the problem, you remove EF."
DevA: "The solution is way too complicated for that. There are 5 projects and 3 of those have circular dependencies. Its a mess."
DevB: "No fracking kidding...if it were written correctly the first time. There aren't even any fracking tests."
Me:"Pretty sure there are only two tables involved, maybe 3 stored procedures. A simple CRUD app like this should be fairly straight forward."
DevB: "Can't re-write the application, company won't allow it. A redesign of this magnitute could take months. If we can't fix the LINQ query, we'll going to have the DBAs change the structures to make the application faster. I don't see any other way."

Holy frack...he didn't just say that.

Over my lunch hour, I strip down the WPF application to the basics (too much to write about, but the included projects only had one or two files), and created an integration test for refactoring the data access to use ADO. After all the tests and EF removed, the app starts up instantly and searches are also instant. Didn't click through all the UI, but the basics worked.

Sat with Junior, pointed out my changes (the 'why' behind the 'what') ...and he how he could write unit tests around the ViewModel behavior in the UI (and making any changes to the data access as needed).

Today's standup:
Junior: "Employee app is fixed. Had some help removing Entity Framework and how it starts up fast and and searches are instant. Going to write unit tests today to verify the UI behaivor. I'll be able to deploy the application tomorrow."
DevA: "What?! No way! You did all that yesterday?"
Me: "I removed the Entity Framework over my lunch hour. Like I said, its basic CRUD and mostly in stored procedures. All the data points are covered by integration tests, but didn't have time for the unit tests. It's likely I broke some UI behavior, but the unit tests should catch those."
DevB: "I was going to do that today. I knew taking out Entity Framework wouldn't be a big deal."

Holy fracking frack. You fracking lying SOB. Deeeep breath...ahhh...thanks devRant. Flame thrower event diverted.

* Google announces a prize for hacking it *
* Searches google - how to hack google - *

click click...

*reload*
_________________
| |
| This will be wra|
| |
|_________________|

hm.....

ah...

*hits ctrl+s*
*smiling*
*reloads*

_________________
| |
| This will be wra|
| |
|_________________|

what the f..
..
..
hm....
hm....

aha
ctrl+alt+t
*confidentiality*
sudo sublime /opt/htdocs/learning_css/wrapping_text.html

********
o.O but my code ....it's here.....but why wasn't it showing....

*just to be safe*
ctrl+s
*reload*

_________________
| |
| This will be wra|
| |
|_________________|

meh..... what was I thinking

*wastes time restarting xampp*
*searches CSS everywhere*
*steals working code*
*eyes red as hell*
*it's 3 am*
*after 1hr*

*accidentally reloads*

_________________
| |
| This will be |
| wrapped |
|_________________|

o.O
*blinking in confusion*
what the .... how did it work....
I changed nothing.....

*realises*

So I got a notification that my LinkedIn profile showed up in several searches this week. Not sure I should be too happy about it though...

//Le me
*Wants to open IntelliJ Idea*

*Searches 'Int'*

*Hits Enter*

Internet Explorer to the rescue

Internet Explorer: Finally, somebody remembered me!

*Internet Explorer opens*

Internet Explorer: *opens a bajillion new windows*

Internet Explorer:
Make me your default browser plz..

Internet Explorer: *freezes*

Me: Shit

People in my office sing me praises for what I can do with Linux even though I joke with them that “I have no idea how to do that - but give me half an hour and an internet connection and I’ll figure something out for you.” I even once specifically said in response to my boss commenting on my skills, “You do realize that I just like…google stuff when you ask me to do something with Linux that I don’t know how to do, right?”

But his praise didn’t change at all. There was no “Wait, that’s all it is?”

Instead, he said “Yes, but the fact that you think to do that - and that you know exactly how to phrase your searches and how to sift through the results to get the right answer, and you then integrate what you’ve learned and use it going forward - is still so much more than any of the rest of us can do. To you, it’s “just googling stuff,” but it’s still a unique and valuable skill you bring, so don’t shrug off the compliments so cavalierly, okay?“

And this was coming from an executive with an MBA. Don’t undervalue your googling skills, kids. It’s not lying if you know you can figure it out.

Spaces Vs Tabs - A real world case.

So one of the menial tasks I was given here was to take a pretty mock and turn it into an HTML email template. Needless to say, I hate emails and HTML.

After many weeks of trial and error, rejection and tweaks, we're doing our final tests when someone noticed that Google's clients are chopping off the footer and saying "View Full Email".

A few searches yield that Google has a 102KB cut off for email size. We did some checks and found that we were at 104KB. I immediately thought it was my CSS inliner being a little too verbose, but as I went in to edit things, I noticed that the file was intended with spaces!

Now I'm a fan of Silicon Valley, and I recalled an episode from this past season where Richard mentioned something about saving file size by using tabs. I had never really considered that point.

So I went back into VSCode and told it to convert all of the individual templates that make up this giant email to indent with tabs...

The file size dropped from 104kb to 82kb.

I wasn't very polarized on the Tabs vs Spaces debate, but this here has given me a nice real world example as to why tabs rule.

Google searches resulting in Github issues instead of StackOverflow questions is how you know you are really screwed.

A Geologist and an engineer are sitting next to each other on a long flight from LA to NY. The Geologist leans over to the Engineer and asks if he would like to play a fun game. The Engineer just wants to take a nap, so he politely declines and rolls over to the window to catch a few winks. The Geologist persists and explains that the game is real easy and a lotta fun. He explains, "I ask you a question, and if you don't know the answer, you pay me $5. Then you ask me a question, and if I don't know the answer, I'll pay you $5." Again, the Engineer politely declines and tries to get to sleep. The Geologist now somewhat agitated, says, "OK, if you don't know the answer you pay me $5, and if I don't know the answer, I'll pay you $50!"

This catches the Engineer's attention, and he sees no end to this torment unless he plays, so he agrees to the game. The Geologist asks the first question. "What's the distance from the Earth to the moon?"

The Engineer doesn't say a word, but reaches into his wallet, pulls out a five dollar bill and hands it to the Geologist.

Now, it's the Engineer's turn. He asks the Geologist, "What goes up a hill with three legs, and comes down on four?" The Geologist looks up at him with a puzzled look. He takes out his laptop computer and searches all of his references. He taps into the Airphone with his modem and searches the net and the Library of Congress. Frustrated, he sends e-mail to his co-workers -- all to no avail.

After about an hour, he wakes the Engineer and hands him $50. The Engineer politely takes the $50 and turns away to try to get back to sleep.

The Geologist is more than a little miffed, shakes the Engineer and asks, "Well, so what's the answer?"

Without a word, the Engineer reaches into his wallet, hands the Geologist $5, and turns away to get back to sleep.

When I was 14, I was bad at many things. I sucked at sports cause I was weak and small. School was boring so I did not study. I mostly played games.
During a summer break, I wanted to change shit in WarCraft 3, as I heard from a friend that heard it from a friend, that you can do that. Many internet searches later I realised that you kind of just tell to the game what you want it to do, just simplified. If (target is enemy) do damage, for (every human player) make sparkly stuff...
After months of "playing" games, the new school year started and I got, for the first time, a proper computer class. Imagine my surprise when we started doing the shit I did all summer. That year I had 100% on all tests.
Many years later programming gave me friends, made my inner nerd and geek come out, gave me a free trip to the USA to represent my country, two TEDx talks, and finally a job that I like with the pay I can live with.

School principal : P / Me : M / Interviewer over Skype : S

P. I recently heard you run a software club in our school.
M. Yes. (started from March)
P. Well, one software community seems that he found you somewhere, and asked me if we can do a quick interview.
M. Sure. What is it?
P. So he will connect to skype.
M. Let's start then...

*A few moments later...*
M. Wwwwhhhhaaaaattttttt?
P. Calm down! What's the problem?
M. How can I have more than 5 years of android development?
S. Ok. Recorded. Next question.
M. (uhhh)
*A few moments later...*
M. What? Why in the heck do I use subversion?........
Yes... Ah... Ummm....
No! Why should i make a gui client for subversion?
*A few moments later...*
S. Do you have hacking experience?
M. Of what? I know hacking is illegal here..
S. Like... Anything!
M. Do YOU have an experience?
S. Yup.
M. What?
S. Google.
M. How?
S. (silence) Ok. Let's move on.
M. (wtf is this guy)
*A few moments later...*
S. Okay. We were about to hire you but you didnt met our job requirements.
M. ......What? What was the job?
S. Web developer Intern
M. I got no questions regarding "web".
S. I know devs should be great at all things.
M. Shut the hell up. What company are you?
S. (says something)
M. (Searches in google) Doesnt come in search results.
S. Where did you searched it? (trembling voice)
M. (Searches in naver, search engine of korea) Nothing. Are you sure you are a company?
S. (ends call)

Hate these fake interviews. And i have no idea how they found my school
I never wrote my school anywhere.

Fucking wix advertisements! Getting real tired of the "want a website? Why not make it yourself?" ads. You're already logging all my fucking google searches to display relevant ad info so maybe wrap your head around the fact that I'm a web dev and make my own fucking sites??

I’m surrounded by idiots.

I’m continually reminded of that fact, but today I found something that really drives that point home.

Gather ‘round, everybody, it’s story time!

While working on a slow query ticket, I perused the code, finding several causes, and decided to run git blame on the files to see what dummy authored the mental diarrhea currently befouling my screen. As it turns out, the entire feature was written by mister legendary Apple golden boy “Finder’s Keeper” dev himself.

To give you the full scope of this mess, let me start at the frontend and work my way backward.

He wrote a javascript method that tracks whatever row was/is under the mouse in a table and dynamically removes/adds a “.row_selected” class on it. At least the js uses events (jQuery…) instead of a `setTimeout()` so it could be worse. But still, has he never heard of :hover? The function literally does nothing else, and the `selectedRow` var he stores the element reference in isn’t used elsewhere.

This function allows the user to better see the rows in the API Calls table, for which there is a also search feature — the very thing I’m tasked with fixing.

It’s worth noting that above the search feature are two inputs for a date range, with some helpful links like “last week” and “last month” … and “All”. It’s also worth noting that this table is for displaying search results of all the API requests and their responses for a given merchant… this table is enormous.

This search field for this table queries the backend on every character the user types. There’s no debouncing, no submit event, etc., so it triggers on every keystroke. The actual request runs through a layer of abstraction to parse out and log the user-entered date range, figure out where the request came from, and to map out some column names or add additional ones. It also does some hard to follow (and amazingly not injectable) orm condition building. It’s a mess of functional ugly.

The important columns in the table this query ultimately searches are not indexed, despite it only looking for “create_order” records — the largest of twenty-some types in the table. It also uses partial text matching (again: on. every. single. keystroke.) across two varchar(255)s that only ever hold <16 chars — and of which users only ever care about one at a time. After all of this, it filters the results based on some uncommented regexes, and worst of all: instead of fetching only one page’s worth of results like you’d expect, it fetches all of them at once and then discards what isn’t included by the paginator. So not only is this a guaranteed full table scan with partial text matching for every query (over millions to hundreds of millions of records), it’s that same full table scan for every single keystroke while the user types, and all but 25 records (user-selectable) get discarded — and then requeried when the user looks at the next page of results.

What the bloody fucking hell? I’d swear this idiot is an intern, but his code does (amazingly) actually work.

No wonder this search field nearly crashed one of the servers when someone actually tried using it.

Asdfajsdfk.

Google: “Your websites must load the first byte in under 500ms and be fully loaded with no render blocking and local caching of all external site callouts to even begin to rank in Google searches.”

Me: “Ok, Google. Your wish is my command.”

*Looks at Chrome’s memory usage to load a blank page*

!(short rant)

Look I understand online privacy is a concern and we should really be very much aware about what data we are giving to whom. But when does it turn from being aware to just being paranoid and a maniac about it.? I mean okay, I know facebook has access to your data including your whatsapp chat (presumably), google listens to your conversations and snoops on your mail and shit, amazon advertises that you must have their spy system (read alexa) install in your homes and numerous other cases. But in the end it really boils down to "everyone wants your data but who do you trust your data with?"

For me, facebook and the so-called social media sites are a strict no-no but I use whatsapp as my primary chating application. I like to use google for my searches because yaa it gives me more accurate search results as compared to ddg because it has my search history. I use gmail as my primary as well as work email because it is convinient and an adv here and there doesnt bother me. Their spam filters, the easy accessibility options, the storage they offer everything is much more convinient for me. I use linux for my work related stuff (obviously) but I play my games on windows. Alexa and such type of products are again a big no-no for me but I regularly shop from amazon and unless I am searching for some weird ass shit (which if you want to, do it in some incognito mode) I am fine with coming across some advs about things I searched for. Sometimes it reminds me of things I need to buy which I might have put off and later on forgot. I have an amazon prime account because prime video has some good shows in there. My primary web browser is chrome because I simply love its developer tools and I now have gotten used to it. So unless chrome is very much hogging on my ram, in which case I switch over to firefox for some of my tabs, I am okay with using chrome. I have a motorola phone with stock android which means all google apps pre-installed. I use hangouts, google keep, google map(cannot live without it now), heck even google photos, but I also deny certain accesses to apps which I find fishy like if you are a game, you should not have access to my gps. I live in India where we have aadhar cards(like the social securtiy number in the USA) where the government has our fingerprints and all our data because every damn thing now needs to be linked with your aadhar otherwise your service will be terminated. Like your mobile number, your investment policies, your income tax, heck even your marraige certificates need to be linked with your aadhar card. Here, I dont have any option but to give in because somehow "its in the interest of the nation". Not surprisingly, this thing recently came to light where you can get your hands on anyone's aadhar details including their fingerprints for just ₹50($1). Fuck that shit.

tl;dr
There are and should be always exceptions when it comes to privacy because when you give the other person your data, it sometimes makes your life much easier. On the other hand, people/services asking for your data with the sole purpose of infilterating into your private life and not providing any usefulness should just be boycotted. It all boils down to till what extent you wish to share your data(ranging from literally installing a spying device in your house to them knowing that I want to understand how spring security works) and how much do you trust the service with your data. Example being, I just shared most of my private data in this rant with a group of unknown people and I am okay with it, because I know I can trust dev rant with my posts(unlike facebook).

Me: Well, it's time to make a new app!
* opens up VS Code *
* opens folder selection dialog *
* creates a new folder called "notes app" *
* yarn inits that folder *
* installs react and react-dom *
* installs webpack, webpack-cli, babel-core, babel-loader, babel-preset-env, babel-preset-react, style-loader, css-loader, file-loader, html-webpack-plugin and clean-webpack-plugin as a dev dependency (install is pending) *
* copies a webpack config from some other project *
* creates a babelrc file *
* copies a yarn script called "build:dev" which would launch webpack *
* dev dependencies installed *
* tries to save *
* vscode doesn't save because files differ *
* tries to copy dev dependencies *
* fail *
* tries again *
* saves *
* writes bare-bones index.jsx *
* yarn build:dev *
* opens build/index.html in firefox *
* gets satisfaction *
* writes bare-bones App.jsx which is a react component but it's an entire app *
* yarn build:dev *
* opens build/index.html in firefox *
* gets satisfaction *
-- trim --
* walks out of his room to his mom's room where's sbc is located *
* grandma plays solitare on laptop *
* i ask grandma for a laptop *
* grandma gives me laptop *
* glues all components into App.jsx *
* yarn start:dev (magic of webpack-dev-server) *
* opens localhost:8080 in firefox *
* searches how to update a component prop *
* nothing found *
* registers on devrant and verifies his email *
* writes this rant *

That moment when you finally solve your problem and you can close your browser with 20+ tabs of searches for your error message. Feels damn good.

After countless Google searches for the past 3 years, I've written a small script to get my internal & external IP addresses with one command!

Our website once had it’s config file (“old” .cgi app) open and available if you knew the file name. It was ‘obfuscated’ with the file name “Name of the cgi executable”.txt. So browsing, browsing.cgi, config file was browsing.txt.
After discovering the sql server admin password in plain text and reporting it to the VP, he called a meeting.
VP: “I have a report that you are storing the server admin password in plain text.”
WebMgr: “No, that is not correct.”
Me: “Um, yes it is, or we wouldn’t be here.”
WebMgr: “It’s not a network server administrator, it’s SQL Server’s SA account. Completely secure since that login has no access to the network.”
<VP looks over at me>
VP: “Oh..I was not told *that* detail.”
Me: “Um, that doesn’t matter, we shouldn’t have any login password in plain text, anywhere. Besides, the SA account has full access to the entire database. Someone could drop tables, get customer data, even access credit card data.”
WebMgr: “You are blowing all this out of proportion. There is no way anyone could do that.”
Me: “Uh, two weeks ago I discovered the catalog page was sending raw SQL from javascript. All anyone had to do was inject a semicolon and add whatever they wanted.”
WebMgr: “Who would do that? They would have to know a lot about our systems in order to do any real damage.”
VP: “Yes, it would have to be someone in our department looking to do some damage.”
<both the VP and WebMgr look at me>
Me: “Open your browser and search on SQL Injection.”
<VP searches on SQL Injection..few seconds pass>
VP: “Oh my, this is disturbing. I did not know SQL injection was such a problem. I want all SQL removed from javascript and passwords removed from the text files.”
WebMgr: “Our team is already removing the SQL, but our apps need to read the SQL server login and password from a config file. I don’t know why this is such a big deal. The file is read-only and protected by IIS. You can’t even read it from a browser.”
VP: “Well, if it’s secured, I suppose it is OK.”
Me: “Open your browser and navigate to … browse.txt”
VP: “Oh my, there it is.”
WebMgr: “You can only see it because your laptop had administrative privileges. Anyone outside our network cannot access the file.”
VP: “OK, that makes sense. As long as IIS is securing the file …”
Me: “No..no..no.. I can’t believe this. The screen shot I sent yesterday was from my home laptop showing the file is publicly available.”
WebMgr: “But you are probably an admin on the laptop.”
<couple of awkward seconds of silence…then the light comes on>
VP: “OK, I’m stopping this meeting. I want all admin users and passwords removed from the site by the end of the day.”

Took a little longer than a day, but after reviewing what the web team changed:
- They did remove the SQL Server SA account, but replaced it with another account with full admin privileges.
- Replaced the “App Name”.txt with centrally located config file at C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\config.txt (hard-coded in the app)
When I brought this up again with my manager..
Mgr: “Yea, I know, it sucks. WebMgr showed the VP the config file was not accessible by the web site and it wasn’t using the SA password. He was satisfied by that. Web site is looking to beat projections again by 15%, so WebMgr told the other VPs that another disruption from a developer could jeopardize the quarterly numbers. I’d keep my head down for a while.”

Protip: appending ", dammit" to your Google searches tells their NLP algorithms that you need more relevant results

Me: So here's the completed website.

Client: *goes to Google and searches for media agencies india* What the hell is this ? I was told that my name would come on the first page in Google.

Me: Sir, we had quoted to build SEO friendly pages and not for doing SEO.

Client: This is fraud. How the hell could you cheat me by using these technical words. I want my name on the first page in Google.

Me: *types companyname.com in Google* Here Sir, your website is on the first page in Google.

Client: I very well know fraudsters like you. If I wouldn't have checked it then you'd have charged me for this later on. Here's your cheque.

Worst part of being a dev is handling less techy people than you 😫

*searches on Stackoverflow on how to push and pull to an array of size 2*

I was a little startled when I saw posts with images of google searches with "programmers are..."

So I tried it for myself.. nothing to worry about

DEVRANT CRASHED AND MY RANT IS GONE! I'M NOT A HAPPY MISH.

To be brief, I just remembered how my father used to smash my phone to the ground when he was angry about it.

Everytime he sees me using it. Smash!

I once made a Facebook to make more friends since I didn't have much, and still don't. (I didn't use the app btw.) He saw my search history and was furious. (My parents don't permit me to have social media. They think devRant is a school thing.)

He smashed it to the ground saying I can never use Facebook again.

He did that to 3 phones.

Fortunately, he doesn't do that anymore. Mainly because I'm the one who helps him with computer stuff and searches for the emails he needs.

A Geologist and a developer are sitting next to each other on a long flight from LA to NY. The Geologist leans over to the developer and asks if he would like to play a fun game. The Developer just wants to take a nap, so he politely declines and rolls over to the window to catch a few winks. The Geologist persists and explains that the game is real easy and a lotta fun. He explains, "I ask you a question, and if you don't know the answer, you pay me $5. Then you ask me a question, and if I don't know the answer, I'll pay you $5." Again, the Developer politely declines and tries to get to sleep. The Geologist now somewhat agitated, says, "OK, if you don't know the answer you pay me $5, and if I don't know the answer, I'll pay you $50!"

This catches the Developer's attention, and he sees no end to this torment unless he plays, so he agrees to the game. The Geologist asks the first question. "What's the distance from the Earth to the moon?"

The Developer doesn't say a word, but reaches into his wallet, pulls out a five dollar bill and hands it to the Geologist.

Now, it's the developer's turn. He asks the Geologist, "What goes up a hill with three legs, and comes down on four?" The Geologist looks up at him with a puzzled look. He takes out his laptop computer and searches all of his references. He taps into the Airphone with his modem and searches the net and the Library of Congress. Frustrated, he sends e-mail to his co-workers -- all to no avail.

After about an hour, he wakes the Engineer and hands him $50. The developer politely takes the $50 and turns away to try to get back to sleep.

The Geologist is more than a little miffed, shakes the developer and asks, "Well, so what's the answer?"

Without a word, the developer reaches into his wallet, hands the Geologist $5, and turns away to get back to sleep.

*Opens devRant*
*sees everybody saying how great Linux is*
*Tries deepin OS*
*Keyboard backlight not working *
*Searches YouTube for a fix*
*Fixes the Backlight*
*Screen resolution set to 800*600 by defualt (monitor 1920*1080)*
*Grub decides there is no need for a windows entry*
*plugs in Windows USB*
*Opens cmd*
*diskpart*
*list disk*
*sel disk 0*
*list vol*
*sel vol 3*
*clean*
*boots into windows*
*Follows a guide to remove grub*
*Learns the lesson*
*Ooh OS X seems nice*
FML

*dad's w10 computer running super slow*

*checks task manager*

100% disk usage

*checks whatever-the-advanced-system-monitor-is-called*

*Compattelrunner.exe is at the top of the list in disk usage*

*searches online to find what the hell that is*

"Compattelrunner.exe collects program telemetry information if opted in to the Microsoft EatASackOfDicks Customer Experience Fuckup"

Telemetry is supposed to be disabled on this computer.

What the fuck Microsoft, if you want to straight out lie to my face as a customer at least try to not be so obvious that you basically lock down my computer with your telemetry shit.

Let the student use their own laptops. Even buy them one instead of having computers on site that no one uses for coding but only for some multiple choice tests and to browse Facebook.

Teach them 10 finger typing. (Don't be too strict and allow for personal preferences.)

Teach them text navigation and editing shortcuts. They should be able to scroll per page, jump to the beginning or end of the line or jump word by word. (I am not talking vi bindings or emacs magic.) And no, key repeat is an antifeature.

Teach them VCS before their first group assignment. Let's be honest, VCS means git nowadays. Yet teach them git != GitHub.

Teach git through the command line. They are allowed to use a gui once they aren't afraid to resolve a merge conflict or to rebase their feature branch against master. Just committing and pushing is not enough.

Teach them test-driven development ASAP. You can even give them assignments with a codebase of failing tests and their job is to make them pass in the beginning. Later require them to write tests themselves.

Don't teach the language, teach concepts. (No, if else and for loops aren't concepts you god-damn amateur! That's just syntax!)

When teaching object oriented programming, I'd smack you if do inane examples with vehicles, cars, bikes and a Mercedes Benz. Or animal, cat and dog for that matter. (I came from a self-taught imperative background. Those examples obfuscate more than they help.) Also, inheritance is overrated in oop teachings.

Functional programming concepts should be taught earlier as its concepts of avoiding side effects and pure functions can benefit even oop code bases. (Also great way to introduce testing, as pure functions take certain inputs and produce one output.)

Focus on one language in the beginning, it need not be Java, but don't confuse students with Java, Python and Ruby in their first year. (Bonus point if the language supports both oop and functional programming.)

And for the love of gawd: let them have a strictly typed language. Why would you teach with JavaScript!?

Use industry standards. Notepad, atom and eclipse might be open source and free; yet JetBrains community editions still best them.

For grades, don't your dare demand for them to write code on paper. (Pseudocode is fine.)

Don't let your students play compiler in their heads. It's not their job to know exactly what exception will be thrown by your contrived example. That's the compilers job to complain about. Rather teach them how to find solutions to these errors.

Teach them advanced google searches.

Teach them how to write a issue for a library on GitHub and similar sites.

Teach them how to ask a good stackoverflow question :>

"Why does the search take so long?" maybe because it searches through2 dbs with 20 tables with 5.000.000 objects on an 6 year old server with hdds and apparently there is no budget for a new server, but there is money for an 40.000€ art piece.

programming should be called "making searches in StackOverflow"

Had a "Fatal error stack overflow"

All google searches lead to irrelevant links in stackoverflow.com

Now I can add this error to my "special errors I had" list. #onceinalifetime

I absolutely hate Quora.com - how they are always ranked high for tech searches is beyond me

The closest I’ve been to a diet this year is erasing food searches from my browser history.

Opening The first 7-8 searches on google in separate tabs so as to not go back many times.

My University distributes all worksheets over an online system. To access the files one has to download them each time first. So to get rid of all this annoying clicking in the browser, I just programmed a service, which logs onto the website ,crawls trough every folder, searches for new files and downloads them if they do not exist on my computer. Kind of proud as this is pretty much the first really useful program I developed lol

Ok so a very quick background: I didn't get a job until I needed one after my phone broke and I didn't have the money to buy another one. (I'm a student still for those who don't know lol.)

>> Phone randomly breaks.
>> Don't have the money for a new one
>> Searches for low skill jobs (ie cashier) that would work with me in terms of how many hours I work and whenever those hours are.
>> Apply to like 15 (not even exaggerating either lol) jobs
>> Wait for responses
>> One day goes by. Nothing
>> Two days go by. Nothing
>> Three days go by. Nothing
>> Fourth day rolls around and I get a call about one. I answer, tell him I'm available starting that Monday.
>> (Keep in mind I'm on an old temporary phone)
>> Next day I buy a new phone (didn't have to pay anything up front aside from the taxes on it, as it's on a payment plan)
>> Reset old phone after usage
>> Monday rolls around and I drive to the location of the job, and walk in the door asking for x.
>> "I'm sorry sir, who? We don't have anyone here by that name."
>> I panic and hop in my car, and try to find the address of the store I applied to. I find out it's different than where I went.
>> Start driving there and call that phone number. I ask to speak to x.
>> "I'm sorry sir, there's nobody here by that name."
>> Call literally every other location in the city and ask for x, but nothing.
>> Since I'm already on the way, I drive to the location of the store I had applied to. Whenever I get there, the manager spends half an hour on the phone trying to figure out where I belong. Nothing.
>> By this point, it's well over an hour past whenever I was supposed to show up, so I gave up because I figured they probably wouldn't have hired me anyways.
>> I get home determined af to figure out who the hell called me.
>> I remembered that Verizon has call logs you can look at online.
>> I go back through it and find the number. Google it.

Here's where the story gets a lil funny now.

>> Number shows up for a store that I applied to who's name sounds a LOT like the first store.
>> Called them and explained what happened, and told them I'd be there asap if they still wanted me.
>> That was like 6 months ago and I'm still here lol

Friend: 'I have an idea you could totally do: a search engine for travellers that searches hostels, hotels, flights and resteraunts'
Me: 'yeahh I'm currently working on an e-commerse website. Should keep me.busy for a while'
Friend: 'integrate it into your website, it'd be silly not to'

Do people think we just click 'integrate idea' button for a living??!
Seriously the fux

The guy who was apparently teaching me. "Do you Google? Use Google, it's the best way to learn new tricks"

Opens browser, types google.com in the browser (firefox) searchbar and then opens Google homepage and then searches for content.

*decides to make a new os*

*remembers aosp*

*goes to their website*

*searches for sources*

*downloads*

*c/c++ based*

........

I ain't know a single stuff in C/C++ except that printing a string in C is printf and cout something in C++

AHHHHHHHH

>Barely ever written python before
>Gets added to a python group project
>Codes the part I'm associated with
>Runs fine after about 19 tries
>Puts it together with other people's code
>Syntax error
>Searches for the error for 2 and a half hours
>tfw other people use 4 spaces instead of a tab like I do and pythong can't handle it :(

That feeling of getting something to work in Linux after a thousand Google searches and trying a hundred commands

TL;DR age != competence

My boss is a fucking computer illiterate self taught programmer.

Don't get me wrong, he can do shit, pretty shitty but it gets done...

But the dude has 38 fucking years old and somehow still searches for keys on the fucking keyboard and struggles to touch type anything...

I sometimes crying the fuck out when I have to help him with something...

I'm having a mini fucking panic attack right now just thinking of it... Fuck

He is our "manager" but doesn't even have the fucking balls to confront his own subordinates when they need to be confronted... Everyone is aware of this and everyone is fucking around... And no one sees any consequences... I wonder why deadlines are always missed...

He is so passive that every fucking thing someone asks he goes and says it is OK...

I was studying same psychology about ignorance and I think he lacks the understanding that shit is hard to do...

We literary had a conversation the other day something like that:

Boss: so, what do you think? One call to the api for it to return all data or multiple calls to return smaller ones?

Me: well... It takes ~180ms just for latency to the server for one call, if you have 10 calls it will take 180*10ms, it is better if we have one call and cache it if necessary on the backend.

( he has no fucking clue wtf caching is, besides browser cache)

Boss: (looking confuse AS FUCK!!) Well, I don't get it... Maybe I'll test it later.

Me thinking: test how you dumb motherfucker? On you fucking workstation with no fucking latency?
There is no fucking test. I'm stating it. IT IS A FUCKING FACT!

Me: well, it takes that for the call to go to the api and come back , its simple math. 1 == 180, 10 == 1800.
Suit yourself.

The new guy:

- I'm a big fan of effectiveness and efficiency. The faster can you do the task - the better.

- naah, typing in the terminal is soo inefficient. Typing, remembering commands, parameters, paths... That's such a drag! Such a lag! Having a button I could click to do the job is far better!

- OSS is the root of all the evil!

- I'd like to try linux once again. I like it, hopefully I won't need to spend another couple of weeks setting up dual-gpu power management and searches for an Intel wifi's dual-antennae driver.

- I need a bluetooth mouse for my laptop. Using trackpoint or a touchpad is a nonsense [I agree abt the trackpoint]. Using a keyboard/typing for navigation?!? That's utter nonsense!

- I'd like to try i3wm, it looks effective and efficient

it's happened within the last month and I'm still trying to compile all this input into his preferences. So far I'm getting too many conflicting errors

*Daily standup*

"What did you do yesterday?"

"Errr.... I appeared in 16 LinkedIn searches."

Average Joe:
1.searches how to save money for child college education.
2. Creates a bank account and starts to save , small amount of money from his income.
3. After 18 years, after all the hardwork finally pays the tuition fees to his child.

Dev:
1. Creates a website"Child Savings 101"
2. Monetize it
3. After 18 years, pays the tuition fees.

Opens pycharm
import time;
print(time.
*hits Ctrl+space*
>Auto complete not working
>Searches SO no answer
>Realized file saved as time.py
> Proceeds to contemplate career choice

Hey guys, I'm looking for small and cheap vibrators. One that you can use in an IOT project, the size of the ones in smart phones.
My searches on goggle are getting !work friendly results. Any ideas of a shop I can order some? Small miniature motors too.

Caffeine? Nah. I transform Google searches into code.

Helping a random junior out with an ML project on an online tutor site.

Her: So what is the syntax for implementing xyz function

Me: *opens Google* *opens pandas docs* *searches the function* *tell her the syntax*

She: Woah thanks a lot!

I collected my tutor fees feeling good about myself.

- Seaches "How to get Google
- Play Developer account"
- Clicks on first link
- Enters details
- Sees Price -$25
- Searches " How to get Google play developer account for free"

"Time to listen to some music"
* Puts on headphones and searches my favorite death metal *
* No sound *
"Silly me, I muted it"
* Unmute *
* 108% death metal brainfucking me from both ears *

I think I lost 5 years worth of hearing this instant

* Searches google for some code and wants the results on stackoverflow *
* doesn't want to use stackoverflow search *

I dive in head first.

Some existing program annoys me, so I get this itch to write a selfhosted Spotify in Go, or a conky with 3D graphics in Rust.

I check the homepage of the language, download the tools, check which IDE is great for it.

Then I just start writing code, following the error corrections thrown by the IDE, doing web searches for all errors. Then when I run into a wall, I might check the reference docs or a udemy course.

Often I don't finish the project, because time is limited and I still have 4 million other things to do and learn, but at least I've learned a new language/tech.

Con: For tech which uses unique paradigms like Rust's memory management or Go's Goroutines, it can be frustrating to bash away at a problem using old assumptions.

Pro: By having a real demand for a product with requirements instead of a hello world or todo app, it's much easier to stay motivated, and you learn beyond what courses would teach you.

Not exactly dev stuff, but LaTeX low-key makes me nervous.

In writing my thesis it seems that through some keyboard-fuckery I managed to slip in some weird unicode bullshit character somewhere, so that it doesn't compile. Alright, I just do \DeclareUnicodeCharacter{0301}{ASDF} so that it gets replaced by ASDF. Searching for ASDF in the output pdf file does not yield results, so I can't even find the location of the fuckery in the text. It seems that unicode character is somewhere in my .bib-file and I guess my citation style doesn't even render the part of the data that character is in after all. So the above hack works, but still there is some weird-ass character in my bibliography file that I can't find.

On another note: I get that modularity is cool and all, but who thought that it is a good idea to give people zero transparency over what macro stems from which included package? No namespaces etc. I end up including a whole lot of packages that are needed for exactly one macro. That bloats up the file and you have no way to trace back which macro came from which of the quazillion included packages.

...then again maybe I'm just a lazy piece of shit whose google searches end before success and all of the above has some easy fix.

What the fuck is a sticker computer??

I'm researching DNA computers for school and there's a potential cryptosystem called a sticker model, based on a sticker computer. Searches across various engines show me results for laptop stickers.

There are 2 kinds of programmers.

people who searches Google and CAN find the solution.

people who searches Google and still CANNOT find the solution.

#Confession :
Searches something on DuckDuckGo.
Just to be sure that I got best result, searched on Google and checked :/

I'm not one for filtered searches (hence Safe Search off), though search results like this happen often enough for me to inevitably end up clicking around co-workers.

The moment when even Google show no realted searches, is the moment when you realise you are in some real shit !!!
#stuckupcode #noclue

Have to write a 1,000-1,300 word paper on the top trends of my chosen industry. I am therefore researching crimes using computers and other technology. I'm loving the research.

However, I have no idea how to tone my research down so I don't end up (back) on a list for odd Internet searches, and I don't think I want to be on a international list.

Tips for researching the hell out of this topic without flagging Big Brother and ending up with suits at my door (again)?

"org.apache.spark.mllib.linalg.densevector"

In firefox entering this term in the searchbar tries to open a website.

In Chrome, it searches the term.

A few web service related searches and Google thinks you're a bot 😂

me: *goes to stack overflow to get some points*
*searches for questions I only know*
*scrolls down to find unanswered questions*
*keeps scrolling*
*finds a question I can answer*
*types in my answer*
*finds out that someone has answered
the question with better explanation*
*decides not to submit my answer*
*looks for other questions to answer*
*keeps scrolling*
*scrolls some more*
*scrolls for the last time*
*realizes I'm Jon Snow*
*exits stack overflow*

That moment you've been dreading for a week, when you've exhausted every single resource you can in finding a solution and you've put it off way longer than you ever should have.

When you might have to ask on ...StackOverflow...

So you spend an hour agonizing over your post. You double check your google searches in case there is some info out there that you may have missed. You include code samples. You check your spelling and grammar and you any 'fluff' from your post.

Finally you hit submit and watch as nobody responds, but the downvotes just keep piling up... and damnit you have no idea why.

Mom: my photos are gone. Can you find them?
Me: *searches the phone an finds nothing.*
Me: i cant find them.
Me: *Tries to copy 5GB of random Data*
Phone: Copy Error
------------------
Its a noname china phone my Father bought. I warned him about it, because they stole the Samsung design and it said that it was Version 8.1, but didnt had the features 8.1 has
------------------
Me: The Phone deleted it.
Mom: why would a Phone delete my Photos?
Me: because the manufacturer wanted to maximize the money he can get and made an device with higher specs on the paper than it has and manipulated the internal tools to hide this.
------------------
My father asked me why she is so furious. I said to him: because you got screwed so easily.

I am beginning to hate the relationship between email and my clients. I never thought it would come to the point where email is the worst communication platform I've ever used because some of my clients simply don't know how to use it properly.

I have one client who never uses the subject header in his emails. This makes conversational threads very difficult to follow, and I can't just scan the inbox I have for him. I have to actually do searches on my emails just to find recent conversations.

For some reason nobody knows how to start a new email thread. I have multiple clients that will just take the last email that I sent them, regardless of what it's about, and start a new conversation completely unrelated to the other email by hitting"reply". I end up with email threads that are 60 to 100 emails long and contain many different subjects, which again makes it hard to find anything. Never mind that they've usually put two or three important attachments, or username password combinations, or other valuable information in there amongst all the noise.

Worst of all, I have a few clients and co-workers who insist on starting a new email thread whenever anything about a particular issue comes up. This means that just today I have five separate email threads about the same goddamn issue from the same damn person. Am I supposed to respond to each thread with the same damned information? One of these people is supposed to be both a media consultant and an SEO expert and really should know better. Also, if you do actually send me an email with a subject like "the robot.txt error", please don't give me one sentence about that and five paragraphs about what color you'd like the background to be. That's ridiculous. How the hell am I supposed to find that later? Especially since we already discussed this in the other email that sitting in my inbox.

I swear I am setting up a bug tracking system simply so that my clients can log in and leave me bug reports, and feature requests, and will stop filling up my poor email boxes with what amounts to piles and piles threads that I have to sort through.

For a person who suffers with a form of ADD this is extremely frustrating. Why is it so difficult for my colleagues and clients to write good emails with good subject lines, and reply to the right damn emails?

Am I just being too anal, or does this bother others as well?

A few weeks ago a client came to us asking for edits on their site. They had a developer in their office but they fired him a few days prior. After some looking at the piece of garbage they called a website I told my supervisors that it was built in Adobe Muse and from what I could find in a few quick searches it's shit and I didn't want to learn to use a shit tool. Apparently as a company we decided to hire a freelancer to handle this despite the fact that we didn't build the site and the client isn't paying for maintenance so I'm not sure why it's our fault.

Fast forward to today:
I've been in the office for 19 hours straight trying to learn how to use Muse and fix the client's site because somehow the freelancer managed to delete the mobile version of the site. When I ask my supervisors why I'm fixing and supporting a site we didn't build and don't have experience working in and the response is: we're presenting the client with a $50k proposal and we need all the good graces we can get.

Unless I'm gonna see some of the commission it doesn't really matter what we charge for the site, I make the same whether it's a free site or a $100k site.

When I need help with JavaScript, I google 'JS (insert query here)...'

When I need help with Go, I have to google 'Go programming (insert query here)...'

The extra term 'programming' is so search engines recognise I'm looking for answers related to the Go language.

Ironic, but Go is the least 'search engine friendly' language. Sites like O'Reilly and Packtpub return searches with uneven results.

I made a New Year's Resolution to take more of an interest in my Internet privacy. Feel like it's something I should have done a long time ago. I've stopped using Google search (DuckDuckGo instead), moved away from my Gmail account (Tutanota instead) and stopped using Chrome (Firefox/Firefox Focus instead). I've had my Gmail account since they first announced it and you could only sign up if someone invited you. It felt good to delete 7000 emails and what I estimate must have been 13-14 years of Google/YouTube searches. Currently experimenting with VPNs, considering paying for ProtonVPN soon.

!rant
I saw a devrant user posting something about "the cockroach" that survives in the company no matter what so I knew I had to rant about something similar. I worked with a guy and his ability to talk shit is in direct proportion to his salary. The guy watches youtube all day, searches for things to buy, goes to vacations and no one knows what he does. :)) plot twist: he just forwards ( not sends ) emails from the business to a software provider. Did I mention that he has the highest salary( don't ask how I found out ).
Anyhow, the guy is winning at life, no one gives two shits about him, he is always hiding and running from work. While writing this I'm actually amazed by his skill, how do you end up like this? He reminds me of Wally from Dilbert!

I just realized how weird my searches would seem to an outsider

"python twisted vs falcon celery"

"python hug vs falcon"

I do like naming stuff as animals though. Maybe we should sort all of the python web servers by speed and name them accordingly.

Falcon is obviously the fastest, we can name twisted cheetah, and all the way at the end Django becomes elephant. Big and powerful but soooooooooo slow.

My search history can show you my how calm or angry I am.

When I get angry the words "fuck" and "shit" begin to appear in my searches.

Well create a Googleing machine and infuse it with code words which it automatically searches till the Google AI thinks I am a ( ) programmer and gives me a job offer.this was my last night's dream . How Hard Can it Be?!!!

!rant

This is a major part of my workflow, and I wanted people to see it. So I went an inch-deep on quicktime screen recording and ffmpeg flags to produce this low-quality gif.

I pop open the alfred text window with cmd-space, and have it set to use DDG as my default search provider fallback. In this way, I'm able to execute bang-searches without having to load any urls, or even move the pointer.

What kinds of productivity/workflow tricks do you use?

Simulating a couple million elastic search searches and aggregations in 2h instead of 3 months ... :)

kinda long but please read (skip to the bullets if you're lazy):

hey dR. I stumpled across a search engine that aims to help the environment. it's called "Ecosia" and it will plant a tree for every ~45 searches you make. just think, one stubborn bug could make you the reason for a new forest! I'm not sure if it's legitimate or not, but apparently it uses 80% of its profits to plant trees, and makes that profit from ads. is it safe to use? I'm not sure.

here is what you should know (some are based on claims by ecosia and aren't proved, but probably true):
- they plant a tree for about every 45 searches you make
- they are able to plant trees by using money from ads
- they "respect privacy"
- they're "fully transparent"
- they're a "social buisness"
- [I hope this isn't a turnoff] the search results are powered by bing
- since 1.9, vivaldi has included ecosia as one of the preset search engines (I'm not sure if it's the default)
- it has opera, firefox, and chrome extensions

thanks!

I started using duckduckgo about ten years ago and have evangelized it ever since, including on devrant, but I think I've just about had it with it. Let me explain.

I was more than happy to accept the less-than-google results for standard searches, because I could force the site to only show me results that matched an exact string if I put quotes around it, or force the results to include or exclude results with words with minus or plus characters before them.

But that's all gone now. Now, plus just means, "show me more results with this word," and minus means, "show me fewer results with this word." Wrapping a string in quotes doesn't mean you require anything exact anymore. The name of the game with DDG now is the same as Google: engagement. Narrowed results or fewer results means less chance of clickthroughs, and you can't sell ads that way.

For normal searches, I'm off duckduckgo. It makes me sad.

Let me clarify though that DDG's bang searches are still fully functional, and are still an absolutely indispensable part of my workflow. I use them well over a hundred times a day, every day. I updated my rofi script for web searches to use qwant, but still go to DDG if the search string begins with a bang.

I'm tracking your searches on devRant-Stats! hehe 😈

Stuff is so rapidly depricated in javascript that you always have to add current year in Google searches to find something relevant.

"Dammit, this answer is from 2016, probly no good today".

Trying to debug why there's NaN% instead of 15% (project in JS).
Later realises isNaN(Val) literally checks for NaN datatype rather than Val is a number or not.
*shit*
Ctrl Shift F - isNaN in Atom (searches entire project), rethinks logic, refactors code
Looks around *no ones there*
Silently pushes the changes along with another major commit.

someone just asked me what's lmgtfy and i sent them a lmgtfy that searches "what's lmgtfy"

I was experimenting with a load test suite called 'Siege' to build and scale increasingly complex searches against our new site search engine. I assumed that an old iMac couldn't have generated a crushing load against the beta servers and I learned two things the day I wrote and started that script before heading to lunch:

1) Beta and Production shared MSSQL instances
2) That single iMac was more than enough to take the whole production site down...

Mom: hey I can't get into the phone, the PIN and PUK aren't working. See if you can fix it otherwise you'll have to go to the communications company to ask for a new card (my mom is working and can't do it)
Me: //gives it another try. Doesn't work. Searches online. Yep, can't do anything, it needs a new card
Me: sorry mom, you have to get a new card, there's nothing I can do.
Mom: OK
Me: why did you ask me for help, again?
Mom: well because you can do things and fix things and so, and I thought that maybe you could fix it
Me: 😑

Google searches need to be more specific...

1. Use browser for a few minutes and creating tabs with 'ctrl + t'
2. Switch over to vscode to open a new tab with 'ctrl + t'
3. Random wild search popup thing appears
4. Confused. Searches for keybindings
10 minutes passed till I remembered the keybinding was 'ctrl + n'. Thought my vscode was broken.

Why am I here? How did I got this job?

This might be a long post. I need some serious advice.

For the past 6-7 months, My friend and I have been working with these two guys "Managers" on their startup idea. He managed the backend and I was managing the 2 frontend systems for them. The Managers are non-technical.

For the longest time, the Managers were very stubborn on how they wanted things to be implemented in my code or how they wanted something to look. Initially, this was not a bother as we thought that their experience bought some insight that we lacked, but after changing dozens of things back to how we originally made them, we started feeling unhappy. I specifically was more affected by this as most of their changes were related to the front end.

This caused a lot of rifts between us and sometimes led to heated conversations. I won't say that it's all on them. I do have an attitude issue. But then, it's the same with them.

Other than that, one of the Managers is very condescending. He used to talk badly, discredit my work and even say things like "Ohh, so you can't do it" for things that I said will take too much time to implement. This was seriously affecting my mental health.

Nevertheless, we completed the system, which was originally supposed to be just an MVP, over the course of these months and now have our sites up and running with almost 100-200 daily hits. But because it's an e-commerce site, that too with a very different model, the revenue has not started yet.

Yesterday, one of the Managers called me and in so many words told me that I should exit, because of my attitude, with my current equity which is just 3% which amounts to nothing as the company has no value right now. On top of that, I, an idiot, had not taken any remuneration for the first 4 months.

Although I too want to leave, now that I have seen their real face and also because of my mental health. I feel that the system I have made is worth more than 3% equity, way more than that. One of them is a multi-featured seller dashboard to manage products, finances, orders, and a ton of complex features like bulk uploads using excel, image cropping for products, and region selection. The other is a highly optimized dynamic site using Nuxt which is used as the store, with SEO good enough to often list it as one of the top results of various google searches. I'll drop the dev links in the comments if you are interested.

But I don't know how to go about it. I do have complete control over my code and have not signed any formal contract with them, but I feel bad about jeopardizing the company at this stage. Not to mention all that work will just go to waste as well.

It’s actually been quite a fun day, after some ranting on one of our slack communities flutter channel, myself and my team realized we were in a really good place to give back.

We have been working on a large scale flutter application for about a year, phase 1 is about done and we at 11k LOC.

We have been doing a big push for testing over the last 2 months and are at about 50% coverage. The thing we realized is that is the 1 place flutter has fallen short with documentation.

Very little about what we learned for testing our code came out of a google search, or it came out of cobbling bits together from numerous searches and sources.

So we decided we are going to plan and host a virtual meetup to discuss what we have learned and hopefully teach a few people some useful things and hopefully also learn a few new things too.

In addition, and as it has a longer shelf life, we going to setup a medium publication for the company and start a series to cover small specific topics, specific use cases or scenarios that we had trouble with and solved.

Today I had my first thing to type out, had worked out how to test that a function that was passed into a widget was called. So the parent passes the child and onTap function but you are testing the child not the parent as the child is reusable...

Anyway, so with that idea I got hold of marketing for some assets, setup the publication and proceeded to type out 3 articles today, all nice short ones under 2 min reading time.

It really is nice to give back, it’s not like I am Remi smart and can go and write BLoC, but I am smart enough to figure shit out and type it up so that the next guy hopefully benefits from my brain bashing.

"I don't need these auto generated comments by the template"

5 minutes later...

* Searches how to human perform basic human actions *

That moment when you realize your keyboard searches are proudly brought to you by this guy..? It makes sense for Bing to be used in Wordflow but here?! Well, guess whose visits are gonna skyrocket soon...😂

Just had a very "OMG WTF!" kind of mini conversation with my co-founder, of a web dev startup.

Him: So what's LastPass then?
Me: It's a secure password management system.
Him: So let's use LastPass instead of Dropbox then. :-)

** quickly searches dropbox for passwords **

A little knowledge can be extremely dangerous if left unsupervised.

Dear web devs,

PLEASE learn how to (or teach/inform your clients) correctly target ads.

Thank You

Also, WTF??? and even WZF?!?! Who created this? Furthermore who the hell paid for this to be an ad, what are they trying to achieve and how tf do they think this will achieve that???

PS-
In case you're wondering what i was looking up on thesaurus.com, or would like to assume/blame this ad on my browsing history, cookies and/or something like google listening in the background through my mic... nope. Looked up "adage" and im waaay too adept at cybersecurity and easily annoyed by anything doing something i didnt explicitly tell it to.

if you're ignorant of the google listening thing:
yes this is totally a real thing that the vast majority of Smartphone users have no clue is happening despite it being in t&c. Try a few, somewhat relevant to this topic, google searches and youll find suggested searches like "can my phone read my mind?".
I tend to explicitly ban shit like that on everything (even devices of anyone on my property that never logged into my internet... im not paranoid, just not a fan of tech doing things i didnt tell it to)... but when i needed to enable/allow it on a dev for 30min, the next time i went to look for a book, one of the top suggestions (before typing anything) was "Burmese Pythons"... i looked back at my activity for that 30min days ago... I had been explaining some basic python code to a kid from myanmar... so it was pretty amusing.

Pentesting for undisclosed company. Let's call them X as to not get us into trouble.
We are students and are doing our first pentest at an actual company instead of assignments at school. So we're very anxious. But today was a good day.
We found some servers with open ports so we checked a few of them out. I had a set of them with a bunch of open ports like ftp and... 8080. Time to check this out.
"please install flash player"... Security risk 1 found!

System seemed to be some monitoring system. Trying to log in using admin admin... Fucking works. Group loses it cause the company was being all high and mighty about being secure af. Other shit is pretty tight though.

Able to see logs, change password, add new superuser, do some searches for USERS_LOGGEDIN_TODAY! I shit you not, the system even had SUGGESTIONS for usernames to search for. One of which had something to do with sftp and auth keys. Unfortunatly every search gave a SQL syntax error. Used sniffing tools to maybe intercept message so we could do some queries of our own but nothing. Query is probably not issued from the local machine.

Tried to decompile the flash file but no luck. Only for some weird lines and a few function names I presume. But decompressing it and opening it in a text editor allowed me to see and search text. No GET or POST found. No SQL queries or name checks or anything we could think of.

That's all I could do for today. So we'll have to think of stuff for next week. We've already planned xss so maybe we can do that on this server as well.

We also found some older network printers with open telnet. Servers with a specific SQL variant with a potential exploit to execute terminal commands and some ftp and smb servers we need to check out next week.

Hella excited about this!

If you guys have any suggestions let us know. We are utter noobs when it comes to this.

I just gave a simple API which fetches recent searches by pinging an index on elasticsearch to the UI developer.
She had just one job. And ended up calling the server every time it loads on every screen thereby reaching max limit of calls per second and giving 429.

QA are not even required to break your code. UI developers are more than enough :)

Me : Opens Microsoft Edge after installing Windows and searches Download Google Chrome.

Edge : Am I a joke to you ????

Chrome : Yes !!!! LOL

Google announced the alternative search engines it will show to new Android users in the EU, with DuckDuckGo the most frequently offered choice and Bing tied for last place.

According to the report of The Verge : EU citizens setting up Android devices from March 1 will given a choice of four search engines to use as their default, including Google. Whichever provider they chose will become the default for searches made in Chrome and through Android's home screen search box.

When a Linux programmer Bing searches what Cinnamon Muffin is, this is what the results are!

So, we (I'm the backend guy and work with a UI dev) are building this product portfolio management tool for our client and they have a set of 250 users. The team has two point of contacts for the 250 users who maintain the master data, help users with data quality, tool guidance, reporting and other stuff. So one day one of these two support users come to me and say : Hey I'm not able to add new transactions coz a customer is missing.

We have the provision to create / maintain customers.

I check the production DB, application code, try creating the customer and then the transaction, everything works perfectly fine.

I ask the user for a screen sharing session, the user starts reproducing the error like this :

We have a 3 system landscape - Dev / Test and Prod

U : Logs into the test system url, creates the customer.

U : Points out the toast saying customer creation is successful.

U : opens a new tab, opens the production system, tries creating the transaction, searches for the customer and says " see !! cant find the customer here ! the master data management apps never work !! "

FML?.

OH MAH GAWD, FUCK ECLIPSE.

Just thank you so much Eclipse, for executing the entire build pipeline instead of running the last configuration.

Thank you so so much for considerately forcing me to clean upon every change to the codebase, also obliterating reliable hot code replace.

Special thanks for letting me clean once more, after the pipeline finished.

And thank you for the search bug, where all CTRL+H searches result in an error message, even though the search is being conducted.

Just go fucking die, you tremendous piece of garbage.

I fucking hate Google, but made the decision to use it as my primary search engine once again.

Reality dictates that I have already adopted it for well over a decade via searches since AllTheWeb existed along with owning enough Android devices to choke a twelve headed dragon whore.

But, here's the main reason: You.com and DuckDuckGo are so dumb as fuck, they might as well be Ron Jeremy's MySpace page.

You.com, for instance, is "completely customizable" by adding un-customizable "apps" without any control over the content it spews into your SERPS.

Neither seems to have interest in no longer padding results with shit you'd take a knife to. At least Google allows me to block those pages or sites from being seen again.

If you happen to live on Planet Earth (which currently seems to exclude 86.8% of the human population) you've been tracked before you even knew what "Big Brother" meant.

If you're looking to safeguard your security, buy a goddamn sword and time travel to remove the Zuckerberg timeline from existence.

Guys, why does every idea project I get are already made!

"
Hey I have an idea, I could create a linux distro to replace those 🤬 windows 7 that have office 2003 and all that crap and that always update at my brother’s school.

I should base it on Ubuntu, as it is the most popular distro with the most support on the Internet (for those teachers that can’t enter a 🤬 ‘ , yes an apostrophe).

It should have all those sweet open source softwares to show the kids the open source world.

It should have a centralized restriction thingy.

How could I name it? Oh maybe Edubuntu, yeah that’s a cool name.

*searches it*

🤬 you!

I guess I could contribute to it, but I think it’s dead

What are some of your Linux desktop preferences and workflow improvements?

I use Mutate for app launching, DDG searches, and a dozen or so scripts I wrote myself.

I like different URLs to open in specific browsers, so I wrote a script called xhttp that determines which browser to open with URL regexes, and used freedesktop to register it as a browser, and set it as my default.

Anything fun you've done?

Spent my sunday coding AMZ Hot Searches, a visualizer for trending Amazon search queries, inspired by Google Hot Searches. Will host it on a server soon. Feels good :)

And there's always this one answer on stack overflow, that one guy,
Who searches for the same on google, copies and pastes it on stack overflow :D

I've recently moved from google to duckduckgo for my searches, Having in mind the growing concern of user privacy, what do you guys suggest for search engines, browsers, os, recommended addons, apps, vpns etc?

I thought I had a decent handle on CSS. I can use flexbox and grid to make some decent and responsive webpages, and I'm at least familiar with most of CSS's more common gotchas

But no.

Even in 2021, with years of improvement in the language and browser compatibility, CSS can still fuck you over

I was adding some margin to a div element, and I noticed that the div element's margin seemed to force it's parent to move down too, as if the margin was applied to the parent as well

It took far too many nearly nonsensical google searches to discover that CSS has a nasty little trick called 'margin collapse'

And in true CSS fashion, the way to fix it is a hacky workaround. In this case, if you add a padding of 1px to the parent, the margin collapse doesn't apply.

Fuck CSS. From its weird implementation to its hundreds of gotchas to its hacky workarounds to said gotchas.

Fuck CSS

Short contract job, helping a solo dev.
Me: what's these "200" everywhere?
Him: the max number of sensors we support. I know it should be a define, but it just became that way.
Me: <shrugs. Well, I'm only staying here a couple of weeks. Goes on working on my own branch>

A week later, manager says: "now we need to support 400 sensors!"

Solo dev: <searches and replaces all occurrences of 200 with 400. The program breaks>
Me: what happened?
Him: I only changed the max number of sensors!
Me: Mmm. <searches for 199 as well... Bingo. Creates a define, searches for 198 and 201 for good measure. Gives him no comment about my change>

Not specifially one but a couple of minor mentoring moments.

I started out at a rather small company (<10 people) with a completely new language to me (Perl).
I had some trouble following along some tasks since I wasn't familiar with Perl or generally backend stuffs at all.
So the person that was supposed to "mentor" me was just giving me tasks without any hints of how to do things, this is where my "true" mentor came in to play.
I asked him a couple of things after a few unsuccesful searches on the internet and he always seemed to have the answer to it right away! It seemed like he knew everything and I really appreciated his patience and help. He did point me in the right directions when I needed it.

He left the company about 3 months ago and I still somewhat miss his mentoring existance, as he wasn't only a code but also a life mentor.

I really hope that one day I can be just like that guy, helpful, patient and be a mentor for someone else. :)

Job searches suck. No, I don't have random bits of Java trivia memorized with perfect recall for your shitty little quiz.

my issues with self learning .

Me : hmm so i want to make X. how can I make X?
*searches Internet. finds 15 min video title "Building X tutorial" *
tutorial guy : "Hey guys today we are going to make X. let's start. so here is this code a.b.c(d) . This will make X for you. Ok Bye "

Me: *tries his code* Hmm cool, it works. I got X . So let's guess what his code does ..
hmm so i think 'a' does this_thing. let me check. oh yeah my guess was right.
so let's go with 'b' .. hmm ok this does this_another_thing i guess . oh yeah it works.
...
"Yes i know how to make X, yay!"

----------------------------------------------
But this approach of finding the correct code and then guessing what it does does not always help me . i make presumptions based on a limited number of tests and they might not cover all the functions of a particular code.

thus there are chances that what *i* think a particular code does is completely different from what the code is supposed to do, under different circumstances. I constantly need someone to validate my assumptions and definitions.

So any other approach to learning that you devs could suggest?

One responsibility of our team is general code QA for the entire dev department, DevMgr walks in our area yesterday…
DevMgr: “Has anyone reviewed the new WPF threaded model execution code?”
- everyone on the team responds “no”
DevMgr: “Can we get a review on that code ASAP? If it works as well as the developer said, it’s going to solve the lock up problems users are experiencing and automatic logging of errors.”
DevA: “Well, no amount of code is going to stop users from performing bad searches locking up the user-interface. That code is just a band-aid around the real problem. If the developers would write unit tests first …”
- rant about 5 minutes on unit testing that had nothing to do with why the DevMgr was here
DevB: “Yea, the code probably isn’t written to handle threads correctly. All the threading they’ve done so far is –bleep-”
DevMgr: “Oh, I wasn’t aware of that. Get me the results of the code review and if they don’t have unit tests, delete it from source control and let the developer know it’s not up to our standards.”
OMFG!! You have not even seen the code!
OK, DevA ..what the –bleep- does unit testing have anything to do with the user interface! You know the DevMgr is too dim to understand the separation of concerns. Shut your pompous ‘know-it-all’ mouth.
DevB…what the –bleep- have ever done in WPF? You manage the source control and haven’t written any C# in two years and never, ever written code for any significant project. Take that “handle threads correctly” and shove it up your –bleep-. Pompous –bleep-hole. Go back and watch youtube and read your twitter while the grown-ups get the work done.

Where to begin learning about blockchain? (Google searches return way too much information.)

This has been in the back of my head for years now. And with all the attention that crypto currency has been getting lately, reminded me to look into this again.

Note: I don't actually care for cryto currencies, I'm just really curious about blockchain technology.

The next step for improving large language models (if not diffusion) is hot-encoding.

The idea is pretty straightforward:
Generate many prompts, or take many prompts as a training and validation set. Do partial inference, and find the intersection of best overall performance with least computation.

Then save the state of the network during partial inference, and use that for all subsequent inferences. Sort of like LoRa, but for inference, instead of fine-tuning.

Inference, after-all, is what matters. And there has to be some subset of prompt-based initializations of a network, that perform, regardless of the prompt, (generally) as well as a full inference step.

Likewise with diffusion, there likely exists some priors (based on the training data) that speed up reconstruction or lower the network loss, allowing us to substitute a 'snapshot' that has the correct distribution, without necessarily performing a full generation.

Another idea I had was 'semantic centering' instead of regional image labelling. The idea is to find some patch of an object within an image, and ask, for all such patches that belong to an object, what best describes the object? if it were a dog, what patch of the image is "most dog-like" etc. I could see it as being much closer to how the human brain quickly identifies objects by short-cuts. The size of such patches could be adjusted to minimize the cross-entropy of classification relative to the tested size of each patch (pixel-sized patches for example might lead to too high a training loss). Of course it might allow us to do a scattershot 'at a glance' type lookup of potential image contents, even if you get multiple categories for a single pixel, it greatly narrows the total span of categories you need to do subsequent searches for.

In other news I'm starting a new ML blackbook for various ideas. Old one is mostly outdated now, and I think I scanned it (and since buried it somewhere amongst my ten thousand other files like a digital hoarder) and lost it.

I have some other 'low-hanging fruit' type ideas for improving existing and emerging models but I'll save those for another time.

Week 1 Day 5 - Week 2 Day 5

"It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop" - Confucius

He had a lot of great quotes but I think that's one every dev who's ever worked on a personal project can get behind. It's been about a week since my last rant so I've got a lot to cover, I got a little busy so my progress has been lacking but I have two days off coming up and I plan on making all my meals ahead of time and turning my phone off to limit distractions.

So far I've worked my way through the first lesion on layouts and getting/editing views by the id. This seems pretty basic once you get comfortable with the topic. I'd like to think this will become second nature once I start to get into the guts of the course. The second lesson started working with internet connectivity and I've just started working through it. A lot doesn't make sense but at the start of the lesson one nothing made sense so I assume it'll all wrap up nicely.

I wanted to publish this two days ago (January 23) but I closed my laptop and forgot all about the rant so now it's two days later and I've made some progress, things are getting easier to understand and I'm liking it. I've also decided to start making something I've always wanted to while I work on android development. I'm going to start making an RPG I've been working on since my sophomore year of high school. I haven't written any code for my game yet but I've got the world development and story air tight. So as an ending statement, I'd like to ask anyone on devRant with game making experience how I should go about structuring my project, and some of the things that aren't going to be easy to find with google searches. I plan on, to the dismay of many other game dev's I've talked to, write it in Java because it's familiar to me and I would probably make a worse game in C++ even though that is the go to language. I'd also like to thank some of you repeat readers for silently encouraging me to keep going just by ++ing my rants every time, JoshBent and Dfox. It's been really nice seeing names pop up every single time.

Suggesting a way to save each end user having to ask the staff to do tens (up to hundreds) of manual searches.

Answer "we don't need a button like that. It can be done manually"

Sometimes I wonder why I try.

So, in "learning" programming I took some classes in school and got a start in the academic sense. But, as professors would assign projects above the position of the class I would have to learn elsewhere. So I attribute my learning to code to Stack Overflow and Google searches.

You know your day isn't going to end well when Google searches for the topic your implementing only return research gate links

I just started a new job last week. Old-school sysadmin role for a pretty old-school company, but the pay is nice and the kids've gotta eat.

They gave me a windows laptop. I haven't used windows for work or as a daily driver since 2016, and now, a week into trying to make this machine work for me, I have the following observations to report.

WSL is nice. It's nice to have it installed(though actually installing it was an adventure unto itself), and to set alacritty to open my default user prompt straight into that is very nice. As terminal emulators are by far my most used piece of software, that's nice to have.

Command-line software management through powershell, winget, and chocolatey are also very nice.

I like the accessibility offered by autohotkey, though there is something of a learning curve on it. Once I get better with it, I suspect that what follows will be largely mitigated.

The Bad:
In general, Windows is janky. It feels like it's all kinda taped together without any particular cohesion in mind. As a desktop, it feels decidedly amateur, compared to the feature-mountain polish of MacOS, and especially compared to the flexibility and infinite possibilities of Linux.

Lots of screen real estate is wasted, with window decorations, and fonts that look terrible at smaller sizes, because the antialiasing of fonts is just terrible. Almost all the features I depend on in other desktops: ad-hoc searches and launches(alfred, rofi) are-- again --janky. They work, but they typically require more typing than alfred or rofi. I admit I haven't spent weeks on this problem yet, but I haven't found a workable solution yet with wox, hain, and keypirinha. Quick searches like what you get with alfred, alfred workflows, and the swiss army knife that is rofi, just aren't possible or reliable with the tools I've used so far, and most require some kind of indexing agent to fully function.

It beggars imagination that a desktop in which users are subjected to "default apps" that is purported to be acceptable for enterprise, professional use, does not have a default entry for text editor. I installed nvim-qt, and I want to use it to edit anything and everything I ever edit with text, but all too often, apps have hard-coded instructions to open text files with notepad.

I want to open certain URLs with firefox, certain ones with firefox developer edition, and others with vivaldi, and yet there is not an app available that I have seen yet in my searches that allows me to set this kind of configuration. I found one that's supposed to, but it just ignores everything I put into its config, and just opens MS Edge for everything. Jank.

Simple things take too long. Like the delay between when I laboriously hit ctrl-alt-del to bring up the login and when the actual text field appears, and the delay between that and when I want to start using the computer.

Changing some settings requires a reboot. Updating some software requires a reboot. Updating permissions on something sometimes requires a reboot. And those are all on top of the frequent requests to reboot for updates.

I would have thought Windows would have overcome most of the issues that create these problems, but it's just, as I said, amateur.

Control your searches like an ADULT damn it!!!

So we have records that can have any of a bazillion different reference numbers associated with them. No big deal. Everyone does right?

Our customer's love to run reports and so we have this one option for "just look at a hell of a lot of reference numbers". I call it the 'fuck all' search.

Really it is just there to find something that you don't know where a rando string or number might be in the record and just want to do a "fuck all" search across a number of likely fields to find it... and then presumably you'd be an adult and refine your search from there. LOL yeah right...

Customers get lazy and include that stupid option in their reports and we get a lot of.

Customer: "I always run this report (that includes the fuck all search) and now it isn't working. I want records that have ID 2222."

Me: "Yeah well that was only working because you were rando typing '2222' in like several fields and it would find those .... but now you quit doing that so it won't find them. If you want ID 2222, click the drop down and search by 'ID'. That will find it right away."

Customer: "But I want to just search by 'fuck all search' to find it..."

Me: "But then you get all these other records too right?"

Customer: "Yeah but I just delete them out of the spreadsheet ... "

Me: "Look watch this <screen share> there, look all records with an ID of 2222 and no more extra records you need to delete!!! How great is that?"

Customer: "But why do I have to do it this way now, I want to do it the old way..."

ಠ_ಠ

(granted I could add their ID to the fuck all search but we try to avoid adding too much because it gets out of hand / stops being useful the more fuck all it gets)

I have found a DVD with a Windows XP backup file with my late mother's photos on it. However, nothing seems to open the file. I, of course, did a lot of Google searches on how to do this and what it seems to come down to is a need to run the restore on an XP, Windows 7, or Server 2008 machine. There are several legacy ntbackup restore programs out there, and Microsoft seems to still have a page for downloading that, but it relies on the long-deprecated Removable Storage Service that no longer exists on Windows 10. So, a) Microsoft are a bunch of jerks for not supporting restores of legacy backups and b) does anyone have a successful method you've used to get a BKF file to restore? All the things I've tried say the BKF file is corrupted, but how to know for sure when Removable Storage Service isn't present?

Soo I got a new keyboard called EVGA Z10.
Plug & Play is what I'd expect in 2021 amirite? Hell no.
This piece of shit arrived, got plugged in and the keys worked, that's cool and all but it got advertised with a display that.. stayed blank (or rather, it just showed "EVGA"). Installation guide says to install their crappy software.
So I install the software and so far so good. Now my display literally turns blank and displays nothing. I restart the pc to no avail, the software just shows an endless loading indicator when I try to set any settings to it. Great.

A few google searches later I found out I had to uninstall the current drivers, install drivers with version 54 and then to update to version 72, NOT 73 because.. that apparently breaks shit.
Now everything works as far as I can tell but what the fuck?

The hotly debated topic that anybody can learn to code is always seems to devolve into a definitional or even epistemological argument to the point of being valueless. But I like to think about it like this:

Anybody can learn to code in the same way anybody can learn to drive. The most rudimentary of searches for 'dash cam fails' should provide some valuable context for the practical implications of this.

Data wrangling is messy

I'm doing the vegetation maps for the game today, maybe rivers if it all goes smoothly.
I could probably do it by hand, but theres something like 60-70 ecoregions to chart,
each with their own species, both fauna and flora. And each has an elevation range its
found at in real life, so I want to use the heightmap to dictate that. Who has time for that? It's a lot of manual work.

And the night prior I'm thinking "oh this will be easy."

yeah, no.

(Also why does Devrant have to mangle my line breaks? -_-)

Laid out the requirements, how I could go about it, and the more I look the more involved
it gets.

So what I think I'll do is automate it. I already automated some of the map extraction, so
I don't see why I shouldn't just go the distance.
Also it means, later on, when I have access to better, higher resolution geographic data, updating it will be a smoother process. And even though I'm only interested in flora at the moment, theres no reason I can't reuse the same system to extract fauna information.
Of course in-game design there are some things you'll want to fudge. When the players are exploring outside the rockies in a mountainous area, maybe I still want to spawn the occasional mountain lion as a mid-tier enemy, even though our survivor might be outside the cats natural habitat. This could even be the prelude to a task you have to do, go take care of a dangerous
creature outside its normal hunting range. And who knows why it is there? Wild fire? Hunted by something *more* dangerous? Poaching? Maybe a nuke plant exploded and drove all the wildlife from an adjoining region?
who knows.

Having the extraction mostly automated goes a long way to updating those lists down the road.

But for now, flora.

For deciding plants and other features of the terrain what I can do is:

* rewrite pixeltile to take file names as input,
* along with a series of colors as a key (which are put into a SET to check each pixel against)
* input each region, one at a time, as the key, and the heightmap as the source image
* output only the region in the heightmap that corresponds to the ecoregion in the key.
* write a function to extract the palette from the outputted heightmap. (is this really needed?)
* arrange colors on the bottom or side of the image by hand, along with (in text) the elevation in feet for reference.

For automating this entire process I can go one step further:
* Do this entire process with the key colors I already snagged by hand, outputting region IDs as the file names.
* setup selenium
* selenium opens a link related to each elevation-map of a specific biome, and saves the text links
(so I dont have to hand-open them)
* I'll save the species and text by hand (assuming elevation data isn't listed)
* once I have a list of species and other details, to save them to csv, or json, or another format
* I save the list of species as csv or json or another format.
* then selenium opens this list, opens wikipedia for each, one at a time, and searches the text for elevation
* selenium saves out the species name (or an "unknown") for the species, and elevation, to a text file, along with the biome ID, and maybe the elevation code (from the heightmap) as a number or a color (probably a number, simplifies changing the heightmap later on)

Having done all this, I can start to assign species types, specific world tiles. The outputs for each region act as reference.

The only problem with the existing biome map (you can see it below, its ugly) is that it has a lot of "inbetween" colors. Theres a few things I can do here. I can treat those as a "mixing" between regions, dictating the chance of one biome's plants or the other's spawning. This seems a little complicated and dependent on a scraped together standard rather than actual data. So I'm thinking instead what I'll do is I'll implement biome transitions in code, which makes more sense, and decouples it from relying on the underlaying data. also prevents species and terrain from generating in say, towns on the borders of region, where certain plants or terrain features would be unnatural. Part of what makes an ecoregion unique is that geography has lead to relative isolation and evolutionary development of each region (usually thanks to mountains, rivers, and large impassible expanses like deserts).

Maybe I'll stuff it all into a giant bson file or maybe sqlite. Don't know yet.

As an entry level programmer I may not know what I'm doing, and I may be supposed to be looking for a job, but that won't stop me from procrastinating.

Data wrangling is fun.

I did some general searches in the actual project. The names of 22 variables and attributes I created contain the word 'shit', and 5 contain 'fuck'.

pandas can suck my balls.

N
I
H

I'd rather roll my own.

edit: but also xgboost can suck my balls.

Treating every OBVIOUSLY continuous-valued entry as a 'category'.
All searches for this problem turn up tutorials and documentation on how to CONVERT continuous and numeric values into classes or categories.

Not a single fucking document addresses the problem of when pandas or xgboost refuses to treat numeric inputs as numerics and insists on pushing an error that your data is categorical when every fucking inspection shows the type as numeric.

When you search for 'Microsoft startup program' and it only returns articles that show you how to add or remove startup programs from windows.

*sigh*

I was told recently by a recruiter that not having a LinkedIn profile in the modern age of job applications is like being invisible, as that’s the first place recruiters and HR managers look to research interesting applicants beyond their cover letters and resumes.

While I admit that I somewhat resent the notion that it’s a “must have,” I’ll also admit that my current job searches sans profile have proven to be somewhat less than fruitful. Though that could be for any number of other reasons as well.

Is there any legitimacy to her claim? Are people applying to jobs while not on LinkedIn essentially ghosts? I’d very much appreciate your insights.

This was sadly recent. I have git checkout aliased to ‘gco’.
I was on a dev branch with a load of uncommitted changes, and I accidentally ran ‘gco ..’ instead of ‘cd ..’ (I use them both quite often)

That was one of my more frantic google searches.....

Thankfully I was able to get all my changes back, but only thanks to IntelliJ’s local history feature allowing me to revert each file reload from disk.

Looking through a staffing website’s photos of recruiters. They all literally look the same from a distance. Like NPCs generated by the game’s AI. “Which character would you like to pick to ruin the next stage of your professional development?”

Can someone smarter than me make a game that actually hilariously simulates job searches? I’d play that for the mere catharsis and entertainment value.

Disclaimer: This is all theoretical. Neither me nor my friend (with whom I discussed this) are stupid enough to even try to pursue this, but as an idea, i believe it might generate cool/new ideas/ways for handling secure communications across social groups.

Let's do some role play. Let's design a delivery app for drug dealers, think Seamless or Uber Eats, but for drugs. Not for big deliveries, like kilograms of coke, but smaller stuff. Maybe a few grams of it or something. The clients could rate dealers, and vide-versa. This would build a level of trust within the system. There would be no names, just anonymous reviews, ratings, and prices. Only the info you'd need to know.

The biggest (only?) problem we found (besides legality) was that, how would you prove that you're a client and not a snitch (or cop). This would have to somehow be handled both on signup, as well as when ordering (let's imagine that all who are clients are pure and won't ever snitch).

One of the ways we found to combat this was to have the app invite-only. This would, in theory, do away with the problem of having snitches signing up. However, what if the phone got stolen/breached by a snitch, and they also got full access to the account. One way we thought we could combat this would be with a "dispose number" or something similar. Basically, you call a number, or send a text, or message a Signal bot etc, which would lead to the account's instant termination, no traces of that user left. Hence, a dispose number.

The flow of the app would be as follows:
A client wants some amount of heroin. He opens the app, searches for a dealer, sends the him the desired amount, and in return gets back a price from the dealer. If both parties agree on the amount and price, the deal would start.

The app would then select a random time (taken from the client's selected timeframe and the dealer's "open" time) and a location (within a certain radius of both them, somewhere in between them both for convenience). If both of them accept the time and place, they'll have to meet up at said time and place.

The actual delivery could also be done using two dead drops - the client drops the money at one of them, the dealer drops the goods at the other one. Yes, this might be subject to abuse, but it wouldn't be that bad. I doubt that clients would make huge orders to unknown/badly rated dealers, as well as dealers accepting offers from badly rated clients. My idea is that they would start small, just so if they do lose their money/goods, the actual loss wouldn't be as big for them, but for the other party, having bad ratings would mean less clients willing to buy or dealers willing to sell.

A third way would be to use crypto, but the reason I left this as the last one is because it's not that wide-spread yet, at least not in local drug dealing. With this method, the client would initiate the order, the crypto would be sent to either the dealer or an escrow account, the dealer would then drop the goods at a random place and let the client know where to go to get them. After the client has gotten the goods, they could both review/rate the quality as well as the overall experience with that dealer, which would either make or break the dealer's upcoming deals. This would be pretty much like other DNM's, but on a local scale, making deliveries faster.

So far, this would seem like something that would work. Are there any ideas that might improve this? Anything that might make things more secure/anonymous?

My reason for this post is to spark a conversation about security and anonymity, not to endorse drugs or other illegal stuff.

Cheers!

PS. Really loving the new PC design of devRant

*searches the project on github*

Computer vision engineers top trend searches on Google:

opencv [function name] doesn't work

Me: Searches youtube
“I asked her out and her response all the time is ‘No’, what should I do”

{{Premium ads popped up for the 1000th time}}

Would you like to subscribe for premium? You get free sandwich everyday, a back massage, free medicure and pedicure, unlimited everything.

Me: clicks “No”

Youtube:

!rant !!Story

I installed Truecaller and it naturally scraped my contacts information. I realized that anyone now who had not saved my number can search who I am. I didn't want that to happen so I uninstalled Truecaller. But people still saw the name and profile I had created. So I reinstalled Truecaller changed my name and surname to 'Call me to know who I am' and uninstalled Truecaller again. Now it overrides the information so anyone searches for my number and hasn't saved it that's what he'll see.

tfw your family sends you to alcohol rehabilitation because you had 3000 searches about Wine in your history

Me: "Ok, downloaded the (windows) iso, now I need to create a bootable usb"
* Pulls out 4Gb usb drive *
Father: "That iso won't fit on that one"
M: "Oh yeah right, do you have one for me"
F: "Sure"
* hands over 64Gb usb drive *
M: "thanks"
* Checks content *
* "Backups 15" directory and other old files *
"Guess I can use that"
* dds iso on usb drive *
dd: "done"
M: * Reboots *
Pc: "Nani the fuck is that supposed to be"
M: * searches online for solutions, tries out 2 different ones, one being provided by microsoft *
P: "lol no"
F: * comes in *
"Is it working?"
M: "Nah, windows a bitch"
F: "ok, can you copy me some files on the usb in the meantime?"
M: "Sure..."
{ How did he know that the drive is currently empty? }
* copies files onto stick *
F: * sees empty usb drive*
"Did you delete the contents on the usb?"
M: "Kinda, that happens when you create a bootable usb drive"
F: "..."
M: "Why do you ask, was the something important on the drive?"
F: "Idk, doesn't matter anyways now, since the contents are gone"

Btw, it still doesn't boot from the usb drive. Windows 10 iso is a bitch.

When you're trying to fix a bug in your project and realize the problem is a bug in the platform your project is built on.... FML
---
Searches mailing lists for the problem
-- Hours later --
Finds that bug might be fixed in the new unreleased build.
--
Installs release candidate of new build.
--
Still broken.... *Facepalm*

Now to try an old build and see if that works...

Needed to help a friend with her Bachelor Thesis. She writes in Javascript and needs to synchronously use the result of a postgresql query. The query call is asynchronous.
We did what any person that searches for a dirty solution would do.
We saved the result of a query in a file and load the file when we need it.
Why is Javascript a thing?

So one of our teacher gets a mail from her personal email id on her college id, saying, "Hi this is me". Goes to google and searches, " Hi this is me mail on gmail".
*face palm*
Fatuity is unreal.

I wonder if anyone has considered building a large language model, trained on consuming and generating token sequences that are themselves the actual weights or matrix values of other large language models?

Run Lora to tune it to find and generate plausible subgraphs for specific tasks (an optimal search for weights that are most likely to be initialized by chance to ideal values, i.e. the winning lottery ticket hypothesis).

The entire thing could even be used to prune existing LLM weights, in a generative-adversarial model.

Shit, theres enough embedding and weight data to train a Meta-LLM from scratch at this point.
The sum total of trillions of parameter in models floating around the internet to be used as training data.

If the models and weights are designed to predict the next token, there shouldn't be anything to prevent another model trained on this sort of distribution, from generating new plausible models.

You could even do task-prompt-to-model-task embeddings by training on the weights for task specific models, do vector searches to mix models, etc, and generate *new* models,
not new new text, not new imagery, but new *models*.

It'd be a model for training/inferring/optimizing/generating other models.

I recently met with a client (a UK-focused homewares company sold by the likes of Next etc) who were meeting with Amazon the next day . Amazon has told them that people search for their name every 6 mins on Amazon. This according to my calculation is c. 7200 searches a month. There are 8,100 searches monthly globally on Google for their brand name according to Google Keyword Planner - suggesting that Amazon is close to becoming the major search destination for shopping (if it isn't already!) in the UK.

Installing applications on Linux became more like Windows. It's not something new, something that went on for years. But I just realized right now, when I tried to go to the minicube website.

I go to the website, because I want to see which install methods they actively support and keep up to date.

Is it Snap? Flatpak? Do they have a private repository for deb? Maybe some rpm? An AppImage? Maybe they keep their nix version up-to-date.

I have gone with the integrated searches of all of those and have gotten Software that barely works, just to find out, it is horiffically outdated. And I just realized, going to the website and checking how they offer the newest software is now normal for me.

Soon, they will only offer AppImages and integrate updaters into their softwares. And we will have gone full Windows. Funnily in a time in which Windows Store and 3rd party tools like chocolatey finally become really viable.

Rant!
Beginner tutorials are great.

Personal project UE4 (Unreal Engine Game Dev)
I'm having this bug where I dynamically draw every tick into a Uncanvas. (C++) First I call .ClearChildern and after I create UserWidgets by calling blueprint to fill text.

Text is Invisible when drawn in native tick
I works. If I don't do it in the NativeTick

Search Online: "UE4 UMG text dissappears"
Result: How to create a Button in UMG
Me: No I'm creating a complex UI system

Search Online: UE4 Issue with UMG Text disappears when drawn in native tick
Result: How to create textfield UMG with blueprints
Me: No I have a weird bug and trying to figure out why that is!

50 Searches later
have seen 50 tutorials on how to do the basics.

My problem with certain applications that there are so many tutorials out there that Sirius shit is hidden behind a cloud of beginners content.

"DefiantJS enables you to perform lightning-fast searches on JSON using XPath expressions, and transform JSON using XSL."

True if lightning takes for ages. What a disappointment :(

So,I bought a new laptop (comes with windows preinstalled). I quite like macOS and (some) linux distro. "I'll triple boot, suffer to hackintosh it, install either Ubuntu GNOME or Elementary OS and leave Windows 10" I thought.
Upon further reflection "But why would I need win 10?"
// searches "Why use windows?"
// google "Why is windows so bad"
" Nah, I haven't used win in a long time, I'll give it a go. We were buddies when it was XP. It can't be that bad, it must be better now."

//A few days later it finally arrives
//proceeds to use win10
//unnecessarily complex registration
//makes a new 16gb i7 sluggish

"Let's see what's running on the background"

//downloads ubuntu GNOME, hastily

I was talking to a few people at my school while playing with the Chrome dev shell, one of them told me to trace the path for Pornhub, after a bit I learned that the bottom IP was from Amazon Tech. After some more interesting searches I found out the Amazon placed a 3.4 billion bid to buy Pornhub.
I found this interesting to say the least.
(I don't know when this happened, I couldn't find a date)

Internet searches never returning a usable result but have to be submitted nonetheless:
How to make Thunderbird beautiful

hey guys i need advise.
I currently got a job that i love with a lot of freedom. but the payment is not good and i am concerned that the company won't be there in the next 5 to 10 years.

I am a 25 years old, self taught programmer and my current employer is the only one I ever worked for. Recently I browsed xing and found a company which searches an employee with exactly my skillset (they need someone for a specific ERP system in which I am damn good at). The company is half an our away - my current job 20 minutes away. Also I think because the person they are looking for is rare because you need technical knowledge of windows and doors and you need to know how to administrate this erp system plus knowing some programming stuff.
There is also a very big company 10 minutes (walking) from home where I could apply. I think at this company i would start lower but could maybe study and working for them with higher expectations in long term (just google Hettich in germany here in the village this is big)

The problem I currently have is the following. If the company I work for is closing in lets say ten years, then I am 35 without a degree. I have a girlfriend - want to marry her and getting a child.

I have holiday now and i will apply for both companies. I feel very uncomfortable doing this because the company I work for is the company of my granddad. I don't have the balls to tell him that even if i get a raise that does not solve the 35 years issue.

Well, first of all I will just apply. Lets see how much value I have.

But I thought that asking you all may give me some other input to take into account. What are your thoughts on this?

PS: just a formal "sorry for my english" and thanks for reading

Why is it so difficult to tell the people to not use the same passwords everywhere? I thought of a service which searches all leaked databases and predicts a password based on that as a warning for the user... Having the program told you that your password the user is likely to enter would be XY, because the adobe OR MySpace OR Dropbox passwords for the email OR username entered was that password could be a bit more aggressive but useful to let the users at least think of secure passwords.

Just finished s meeting- change manager wants us to track searches in our apps, count and catalog words that are searched and who is doing the search. He must have read a blob about Google

Anyone has heard of "Google foobar challenges"?

I found out that it's a secret process of hiring developers and programmers all over the world.

Google triggers it when a user searches for some Programming related stuff.

Hi everyone well we quit gg scripting cause we figured out lua can be converted to cpp for memory searches! we all know lua and know how to convert it to cpp but for the gui
How do i learn java?

I'm growing tired of having to wait sometimes minutes to make searches in large text files (about 5 MB), especially with regex...

Any tips on good addon for Sublime Text or other text editor?

Do people have a favorite site for dev clothing? I want to get some sort of a python t-shirt for my younger sibling. Simple google searches aren’t doing the trick for me...

Question to the C pros.
Is there an ANSI/ISO/POSIX function that searches for an executable in PATH and returns the absolute path,
Like "which" on the CLI.
I already searched for a while and couldn't find anything.

Been deep diving LinkedIn search for a new project. Quickly hit the LI free monthly search cap that started in 2015 to encourage Premium LI subscriptions. May get it but in the meantime using x-ray google searching to LI and other techniques that don't count against LI monthly searches. If you have interest rant me and I will provide more details.

I think the biggest help I provide is not answering really simple stuff and saying “google it” and hanging up the phone.

In my belief if I am to help with trivial stuff she won’t remember it next time but if she searches it or tries most logical options(which means she has to read all options and the text on the screen) she will have higher chance of remembering it or googling it without my say so.

My searches aren’t great. What are some good pretrained neural network models you peoples like ?

These kind of scare me

Hip
Hip
Cucumber

@dfox Tag searches are too fuzzy. Someone tagged "cake" and I was curious how many other rants contained cake, but the search just had a bunch of results for "make," "cave," "wake," etc.

Personal Observation
=======
Today morning I was looking through different React UI frameworks for my next hobby project. MUI React has been my favorite but I wanted something informal for this project, so I opened up all the two dozen suggested ones by Google searches.

Since reversing on committing to a UI framework, later on, is a huge headache so I was going through the component demos to shortlist a handful for final consideration, and in that, I almost skipped out all the frameworks which weren't showing a preview of their component on the documentation page itself.
========
I wonder how many frameworks are genuinely good but are passed over due to others having better and more illustrative documentation. In a market with vast abundance, one cannot rely on the sincerity of the consumer to invest time and determine the best possible product, for there are plenty of 'good enough' products that the user does not really worry about false negatives.

Wifi used to be an issue in my incubator. Like I had mentioned in my earlier rant. There are many wifi's available now, but once when there was only one wifi available. That wifi network, was so terrible that it asks for human verification number of times even on google searches.

And the person responsible for wifi, is one of the most useless, undeserved person, I had ever seen

When a team from incubator talked to him about the issue, that this particular wifi's is pathetic, too many blocks and always asking for human verification, his reply was

"Just write 'S' after 'http', then it will work"

No doubt, everybody hates that guy.

But that guy cant be fired from job, because government. But he can be FIRED