muddyrivers

I grew up in China. Line cutting has always been annoying, even infuriating, for me. The last few times I visited back, I noticed the young generations are much better in this aspect. There are rarely any improvements in this regard among my generation and older ones. So I guess we have to wait for nature taking its time.

Gawking is common in places that are not culturally diverse. I drove to many small towns in Midwest. I got stared at when I was walking around the town. Especially so when I entered local stores, diners, and pubs where everybody else was white. I could tell many store owners, waitresses, etc. were not comfortable when talking to me. I hope it is getting better.

I have similar experiences in both systems. Growing up in China, it is easy for me to navigate in US cities. Beijing is primarily of grid system.

The first time I went to Europe, I got quite lost in the city (Madrid). The second time was in Paris. I got some free time. So I walked around aimlessly in some neighborhoods, away from the popular tourist sites, appreciating the beauty, the history and the local people I ran across. It brought back the feeling I walked around the Hutongs in Beijing, which I enjoyed so much. Since then, I have been feeling very comfortable in navigating European cities with organic layout. In my case, it does seems there are two navigation systems, and I make subconscious switches based on the layouts.

The table corruption bugs were triggered when the load was very high, as far as I know. It happened twice to me. In both cases, the corruption couldn't be corrected.

The worse part was the corruption was propagated into replica, which brought up much more serious issue with Postgres's replication model. So the only solution was to install the latest good backup.

I think the media tend to use "depression" as a general term to describe mental illness. The persons who committed suicide may suffer other forms of mental illnesses. There are a great number of different types of mental illnesses, like there are a great number of different types of cancers, neurodegenerative diseases, etc. Instead of using accurate and specific diagnosis like lymphoma, we use a generic term "depression" in these cases. I think it shows both how little we understand the physiological basis of mental illnesses, and the lack of education in society in this regards.

Pollution is indeed a big problem. I think it is closely related to both economy and national psychology. The economy has to develop to a point that the government decides that it is preferable to slow down economy and allocate more resources to deal with pollution. One example is the recent ban of importing garbages. It will take years to clean the pollution.

Smoking/smokers problem has been improving. (Anecdotal evidence) Most men in my hometown were smokers when I grew up. So were my friends/classmates when they turned 20s. It was a norm in social meetings. The last few years when I visited them, most quit smoking. Based on my nephews, there are much less smokers in the young generation.

Diet might be another important factor. Asian tend to have balanced meals that include significant amounts of vegetables, fish, seafood, etc.

I think the condition is improving. More and more people realize the importance of balanced meals. It shows in grocery stores. They stock more variety of vegetables and fish than before.

As a molecular and cellular biologist in my previous life, I would say it is coincidence, although it is exceedingly rare, as you said. I don't see the possibility to acquire it, based on my understanding and training.

I want to provide some background, which is not typical, but pretty representative. In my 5~6 years as a biologists, I got my hands dirty extensively on 8~10 genes. It means I manipulated the genes in different ways via gene tools to try to figure out their properties. I knew every regions of these genes, even many single nucleotides, and what would happen if mutations occur at these nucleotides/regions. Other than that, I knew 50~60 genes very well. To this day, I can still remember most things about the genes. It is very sad that the random mutation happened to the lovely girl. If we only talk about statistics, the probability of the coincidence may be higher than we first thought.

You can have very messy code with an excellent language. You can also have beautiful code with a poorly designed language. Let's do a thought experiments. Have a pool of SWEs fresh out of school. Divide them into groups. Each group is given a language they are not familiar with. The pool of languages will include both commonly regarded good ones, OK ones, and bad ones. Ask the groups to do a middle-sized project for 3~6 months independently. Then we compile the projects, analyze their code quality. If the pool of SWEs are big enough, it will give us some insights.

This is true. However, it is more important to evaluate both the quantity and the "quality" of advantages and disadvantages.

For disadvantages, how serious are they, how easy are they to be abused, to creep into the codebase, to be prevented from happening again, etc.

It also depends on the team. If it is a small team of 5 people and they are all excellent engineers, I think whatever languages are fine. The 5 engineers will discuss and decide what features to NOT use, etc. and abide to them. If it is a team of 500 engineers, it will take much more efforts and eductions and much longer to achieve that.

You miss the point. I learned all these tricks in school as well. I loved them. I felt "smart". After working for so many years, I only remember the basic ones. If you ask me the "smart" tricks, I can't get them right out of my head. I can sit down with a piece of paper and may get them after trials and errors after a while. Guess what, the important thing is I know these "smart" tricks exist. If I need them in real work, I can google them out easily. Why need I remember them? In my real work, what I need to get right out of my mind are how our systems work, how MySQL/Postgres/Hadoop/HBase/Kafka/Spark/Linux/AWS/... work, etc.

I agree. On the other hand, we engineers need to look at ourselves in the mirror. After all, we engineers conduct the technical interview.

I was involved in hundreds of tech interviews in the past several years. So many times in discussing a candidate's performance, I found some of the interviewers' questions and comments were unrealistic, even preposterous. In one case, an interviewer gave a hard dynamic programming question. We were a tech company and had very good engineers. Our products and our technologies, however, rarely need dynamic programming skills of this difficult level. I couldn't bear it. So I asked, "who think he can solve this problem on the whiteboard in 40 minutes right now?" Dead silence.

I had a very similar experience many years ago. It was an start-up. The interviewer was the ex-CTO of a widely used open source project/product, and led the engineering team in the start-up. Although I regarded myself a good engineer, I was pretty nervous.

After several questions that he was sure I knew the regular stuffs and was qualified for the job, he said he was going to ask some really hard questions to see how much I really knew and what was my thought process. The questions had no simple answers. Each of them required knowledge and experiences from a few technical fields. I didn't know much then. He guided me how to solve the problems, discussed the pros and cons of each approach. Then he told me how they did it, how other products in the same category did it, etc.

The half-hour interview was prolonged to one and a half. At the end, he said, "You have a very intuition on what are the right directions to go when facing unknown complex issues", and gave me an offer. It is my best interview experience. (I didn't join the start-up due to other reasons.)

The technologies have been advanced in a blazing fast speed i the last 10 plus years. Technical interviews, on the contrary, regress in a similar speed.

No projects are budgeted to 45 minutes. The real world scenario for such limited time is debugging in production issues. It is a completely different scenario. The people who jump in are mostly those who are familiar with the services or application that are showing issues, those who have a clear understand of the architecture of the company, those who have skills on their tech stacks and know where to look at and how to analyze, etc.

As someone in a similar situation as the author, I actually agree with you.

It is perfectly normal that people who are not in similar situations don't know how to interact with such children and their parents, initiate, respond, or continue a topic. So I am fine with most remarks people made that the author may find uncomfortable or offensive, unless the remarks are bluntly inappropriate or offensive even to the ears of parents of normal children. For example, since I am not religious, it is really annoying to bring God into the topic, "there must be a purpose", etc.

I agree with the author that please invite our child to your party, to have a playdate, etc. We understand it means the hosts will put in extra efforts to accommodate our child. We greatly appreciate it. We will do our best to make it a less burden. For example, it is OK to invite our child for a swimming party, although he won't swim. He would be very happy to watch other kids play in the water.

See @schoen's good explanation to solve the issue with a computer.

It can be solved with a dictionary as well, by looking up the character from its pronunciation.

With neither computer nor dictionary at hand, it would mostly fall into three scenarios. First, you vaguely remember the character, but can't produce the correct one. Then you can make up a character that look closely to it, like an approximation ("entrepenor") in your example. People will get what you mean from the context.

Some people will substitute with another character of the same sound. Usually it is a character of much simpler form. This is actually an evolving process naturally occurred in history (I don't know what is the correct term in linguistics.) Many very complicated characters had been gradually replaced by simple ones of the same sound in Chinese's >2000 years' history. That is one of the reasons why one character may have multiple meanings.

Some other people will substitute with pinyin. It mostly happens in children's writing. Many children start writing diary at very early age (Chinese is indeed a difficult written language, so we have to start early :) Children like to try new words, especially the "big" words they hear from adults. But it is tiring and frustrating to keep looking up dictionary. Pinyin comes to the rescue. I find it cute, even aesthetic visually, that a child's writing has occasionally pinyin mixed with characters.

嚔 is indeed hard to produce, even for Chinese native speakers. It is an example of an exception, though, like entrepreneur in English (I know it is from French, so the spelling is "unusual").

First, people don't write 喷嚔 often, although they use it in spoken Chinese regularly. It seems people are reluctant to write down words that describe certain body functions.

For 嚔, the difficulty is that its "sound" component is extremely rare in Chinese characters. The majority of Chinese characters are 形声字. Each of such character has a "sound" component and a "meaning" component. Many characters can share the same "sound" component. The "sound" components are usually the "harder" component in writing, in that they have more strokes. (For 嚔, the rectangle at the left is the "meaning" component. The complicated looking part at the right is the "sound" component.) As a result, if one remembers how to write one character, one can simply remember many other characters with the same "sound" component. If one of these characters is commonly used, it is an easy task to remember all the others.

I only know two other characters who share the same "sound" component with 嚔, and I don't think people use them now. They only appear in ancient books.

So 嚔 is a character you don't often write down, and there are no other commonly used characters who shared the same "sound" component. Then you get a character who is hard for native Chinese speakers as well.

I don't understand that it was voted down. I think it is a fair argument.

I agree the reporting has been getting better.