ThePadawan

The probabilities in Germany are around 12.5% and around 40% in Switzerland itself [0].

To live anywhere where to quote OP "it [would be] unusual not to have snow for Christmas and New Year" would basically mean living in a skiable country itself, so I did do a lot of assuming there.

But then I don't ski. I wouldn't know if skiers take vacations around the world to see different snow.

[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wei%C3%9Fe_Weihnachten_(Wetter...

> 20 years ago it was unusual not to have snow for Christmas and New Year.

This is one of those widely spread Mandela effect-style misconceptions.

The chances of a white Christmas in the UK are around 10%, and depending where you are in the US [0], especially if you consider the population density not pictured in that chart, even lower.

Humans generally hugely overestimate how often a white Christmas actually happens due to selection bias.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Christmas_(weather)#/med...

Ah I beg your pardon. I read the comment in completely the wrong tone of voice.

To me it seemed like the comment was attacking its parent for investigating state management frameworks in the first place - when it in fact called out "no framework" as a valid alternative to any number of frameworks.

(I hope that made sense)

This relates in no way to any statement from the comment you replied to.

Did you mean to reply to a different comment?

> I have come across this sentiment often but there is no point in creating new artifacts just to record a meeting. What if the meeting was useless and nothing came out of it?

I might be a huge cynic, but that seems to me to be the #1 reason to create a post-mortem document to explore how to avoid another meeting that was a waste of time like that.

If the meeting was useless because the participants weren't prepared, make a note to hand out preparatory notes beforehand. If the meeting was useless because everybody shouted over each other, make a note for more moderation. If the meeting was useless because no one had political power to follow up on any decisions, cancel the meeting altogether.

Having a meeting that goes nowhere and then taking no time to publicly settle on actions as a consequence seems incredibly neglectful to me.

> What's the advantage of invariants over unit testing?

I studied Eiffel in university under Bertrand Meyer, and here's his (probably unique) point of view.

If someone hands you their library code and their unit tests, you have to understand their unit tests - which involves understanding why they chose the values that they did. There's also nothing stopping someone from testing the internals of their library as opposed to the publicly exposed behavior.

With contracts, imagine that to understand their library, you only see the method declarations with accompanying contracts. You don't see how HashSet.Add(x) is implemented, but you do see "if this.Contains(x) old(this.Count) == this.Count".

You don't have to see a test where this is tested with 5 example values, on an empty set, on a large set, whatever. You can rid yourself of that cognitive load by thinking, as sibling points out really well, declaratively over imperatively.

I do want to mention how we're now in Phase 3 of online recipes.

Phase 1 was just putting up a recipe online without a giant preamble.

Phase 2 was adding a giant preamble to get that SEO.

Phase 3 is now having a "jump to recipe" button at the top of the page (I assume because, once again, it uses microdata or something and helps SEO)... but making that button incredibly unobvious. It's literally the opposite problem of those 2005 era sketchy "find the correct download button" sites.

I am at the point in my life where I have a shitty broken printer that I'm still not getting rid of, because at least I am aware of all the ways it is broken and shitty and how to fix them or work around them.

The NHS is the National Health Service of the UK.

There might be licensing/taxation/legal reasons for the region lock, or maybe no one thought anyone outside the UK would care.

Very much in the same boat here - 60 lbs down, still running.

Congrats!

Thank you for the well wishes and a happy new year!

For the reverse of the reverse - no one in Germany actually cares about David Hasselhoff.

I find it amazing but frustrating to no end that this much thought went into good design all that years ago, and it hasn't become absolutely standard to do so, like with the three-point seatbelt.

In my (rented) kitchen, the dishwasher is next to the refrigerator, which both manufacturers advise you against.

The cupboard panels are glossy and face South, so during most sunshine hours, you are slightly blinded by reflections, and can see every single speck of dirt and grease on them.

Some of the cupboards don't have handles, instead open by spring when pressing one corner of their door - which only works reliably within an area of around 2cm x 2cm, otherwise they just jiggle in place.

You're bang on - I was asked in the very first call for two references.

Also in this case I really don't mind disclosing - I was laid off because my position was made redundant entirely.

I've honestly made enough of a positive experience to recommend doing it.

Sometimes people just genuinely tell you things like "there wasn't enough detail about X on your CV, but we took a chance and called you anyway" - that tells me that I can improve my chances for a callback in the future by adding more detail (if I get that same feedback 2-3 times).

You're right though in that a looooooooot of hiring people also have no clue what they want to see.

I'm in similar shoes to the author here, and am glad to hear you show some understanding for this.

I interviewed with a quite promising company beginning of December, only to immediately get the written feedback (after the first call) of

"Well I know a lot of SWE in this town and none of them are struggling to find a job - so if you've been looking for X months, surely there's something wrong with you - and anyway, we've already signed a contract with someone else in the 5 days since we last spoke."

(To be fair to them - I had mentioned how frustrating it was to simply get "no" as negative hiring feedback and asked them to elaborate if at all possible)

I take it as a "well, bullet dodged" moment, but I am not going to lie and say it didn't sting.

I was interviewing for a job in the middle and towards the end of 2020, and regardless of my chances of success or interest, I asked the interviewers how work from home had gone for them so far.

I encountered this sentiment most of all - 40 year old dads who were suddenly stuck at home with the wife and kids, working from an improvised home office.

When I asked about returning to the office, most of them were clearly looking forward to it, with a sentiment of "Of course working from home is less efficient and comfortable, what do you mean?".

It was quite a surprise for me, who had finally gotten away from the noisy open-plan offices and meetings where everyone shouted at each other until the loudest person "won".

> Wait till they find out you can pay money for expedited passport renewal

Can you? Not in my country of residence.

> and for Group 1 boarding of the aircraft

That's not a monopoly - you're free to choose any airline you want if you want to pay them for extra service.

> and for an Uber to pick you up 5 minutes early on the way to the airport.

Once again, you as the consumer have a choice of supplier.

Have you compared and contrasted Java and C# (especially with regards to let's say larger frameworks)?

Both of those put a strong emphasis on types, but only one of those (it's Java) is the sort of language that really attracts developers that love types like AbstractWidgetBoundaryFactoryWrapperFactory.

I can definitely understand the "Citizen Kane" effect of looking at a modern Java framework and going "yeah looks just like any other language, except with types and IDE support". Java didn't get there from nowhere. It got there after 20 years of being overly verbose and frustrating to work with.

That's the UK you're thinking of, not Germany.

To everyone saying "well it doesn't sound that bad", let me just point out:

For a standard that supposedly started out as "we need a short code to refer to an airport", there is now a IATA code (QYG) that represents the concept of any railway station in Germany.

It's a common thing to miss. There's a reason SQL injections are (unless things have changed recently) among the most prevalent classes of web exploits.

The realization that database procedures are code, not data, even though they reside on the database (where the data lives) is the difficult part.

You joke, but I have literally never had as great of a success at work as that one time my team didn't end up building the software.

We had great ideas about scheduling and caching and task priorities...

...and then we asked the customer what they wanted, and they wanted none of it.

So we built none of it, and produced a solution that just did the stupidest thing, and did it without any edge cases, without ever crashing, reliably, as a cronjob, once on Sunday night.

Some people would be disappointed that they couldn't put this on their CV because it didn't involve FancyTech #413, but damn it, I am still proud of that stupid thing.

10k doesn't even buy you 2 Barcelona chairs.

And those aren't even comfortable.

> It's for drivers making the same 80-100 mile or so trip from port to warehouse every day.

So this truck is bad as a truck...except for the use case where it should have been a train in the first place?

It's really funny how culture can shape perceptions.

I grew up in the 90s in Germany, so every single child between 6 and 12 had these - before you became "too cool" for them and started using anything else to rebel against the system (tm).

So while I believe you that it's a good product, and I see that there is nothing obviously childlike about the design, I still can't separate it from that image in my mind.

Not really. The whole thing was kept together with tape and silly string anyway, and I bet it still is now, more than 5 years on.

I mean, no problem ever occurred. Things just accidentally worked even though they shouldn't, and that isn't a bug.

The introduction of the additional types everywhere did turn into massive headaches based around dependency management and versioning.

So overall, I was personally disappointed in the results, but nevertheless happy to work with less "icky" feeling code.

I recently started tracking the books I read on GoodReads and their rating system struck me as the most American one yet:

5 stars: "it was amazing"

4 stars: "really liked it"

3 stars: "liked it"

2 stars: "it was OK"

1 star: "did not like it"

I wonder how many people, without any other context, would interpret "I'd rate this book 2 out of 5 stars" as "yeah, it was OK".