I work at a company that does embedded development and our engineers are very age-diverse. The team I am on consists of people directly out of college, people with over 30 years of experience in the industry, and everywhere in between. The last few programmers that we hired were 55+, and they were able to breeze through our interview process and quickly become invaluable members to our team.
I think that older engineers definitely have an advantage when it comes to embedded and other low-level systems development. The Javascript framework that you worked on 5 years ago is now obsolete, but the experience you got writing kernel drivers 25 years ago is still very useful today.
What is Facebook thinking?? Shouldn’t a company which is already getting bad PR for its handling of private data be extra careful about how much personal data it gathers and what it does with it?
The funny part is you always have those people that show up and say that we are "too hard" on Facebook, and that the NYTimes is just pushing too much and that it's just bad PR, not really bad actions.
And yet, after all this bad PR, Facebook keeps being a shitty company.
I mean Facebook does deserve the negative PR it's receiving, don't get me wrong. I finally deleted my account, too, since it's become too much. It does seem to me like it's very much in their interest of the media to keep attacking Facebook now that it's socially acceptable (Cambridge Analytica stuff and all), since Facebook's one of the companies that greatly influenced and interfered with their possibility to generate an income.
I'm emphatically not defending them here, but it may make sense from their perspective. They live and die by ad targeting and maintaining their monopoly power over social networks, both which requires large amounts of personal data. Knowing what apps teenagers have installed and how often those apps are used is instrumental in detecting an up and coming social media rival.
Further, their only major competitor in the ads space is Google, which has access to this information via Android and its control over the Play Store.
Plus, what are the teenagers going to do about it? Facebook also owns Instagram. I guess they could use Snapchat...
Yeah it makes sense, but the problem for their shareholders is their business model will constantly turn them into a huge boogeyman and they'll never recover goodwill that keeps their users stuck to the platform when competitors appear. Mass user migrations happen, and they can happen VERY fast. Wait until a whole country goes off of Facebook.
Why should Zuckerberg care? You know on the plane ride home from his visit to Congress, he was laughing about the old people who are so out of date they just don't get it. You know he was... He got a finger-waggin' from people he doesn't respect. He's not going to change.
Generation Z and even some millennials are starting to ditch Facebook. The company is desperate to know what the kids are into now. This is what growth-at-all-costs gets you.
When you have enough personal data to blackmail anyone who disagrees, you can go pretty damn far.
Eventually they'll encounter a hero, someone important enough who says "fuck it"
Its just speculation, that they're blackmailing anyone to make things happen, but anyone can see the incentive is there. Hard to imagine blackmail isn't just waiting to happen with that kinda data.
It doesn't hurt to ask! The last time I got my eyes examined was at some cheap lenscrafters-type store which had a promotion for 2 pairs of glasses and an eye exam for ~$60. The PD wasn't on the prescription, but the doctor made the measurement after I asked about it.
There was a very limited selection of glasses that were available for the 2-for-$60 promotion, and they really tried to upsell me to more expensive frames and lenses. Luckily I was able to resist their sales attempts and bought a nice frame and lenses from Zenni Optical. I keep one pair of the cheap glasses at my office and the other in my car.
As an aside, being able to get inexpensive glasses online has been a huge improvement on my life. I remember growing up when I only had a single pair of glasses (and a "backup" which were with my previous prescription). I had to be very protective of my glasses, and getting a scratch on the lens meant that I was stuck with it until my prescription changed. Now I can get my favorite glasses from Zenni for $25, so I have backups if the lenses get scratched or the frame get bent. I also have prescription sunglasses for the first time! No more dorky clip-on shades!
Another satisfied Zenni customer. The lenses are not always perfect and the frames are not always the best. Sizing is hit or miss.
What I do is buy the frame with cheap lenses to check fit, then I buy it with nice lenses if I like it. They are so cheap there is no reason not to do it this way.
Even ordering multiples it ends up being inexpensive.
I want to like Zenni, and I have ordered from them, but I am frustrated every time. I have a very, very large head. I need glasses at least 155mm wide, if not 165mm wide to fit around my temples. Yet finding data on the width of their frames is next to impossible. Even their sales people I reach via chat do not have the data. Sometimes I will see frames with some measurements, but not all, and its just inconsistent. I basically gave up, and buy from 'fatheadz' that specialize in wider frames, but they are much more expensive. For an internet only company, they sure seem to limit how you can search.
I just wanted to chime in here because while I don't have a wide head, I have a long distance between my ears and my nose (i.e., narrow but long from front to back). It literally took me 40 years to figure out that if the arms of the glasses are not long enough, the glasses will tilt down, because the curve of the arm will sit on your ears. This results in really poor vision (as you can imagine). It sounds stupid that I never realised it, but hopefully I can spare someone else in a similar situation -- make sure the arms of the glasses are long enough!
Also might want to check out straight-armed glasses. Typically they'll have some roughness or rubber where they meet your ears to help stay on your head like some fancy sunglasses.
BTW - These acetate frame arms can usually be heated carefully with a torch, and bent to straighten them up. Thus making them much longer. Sometimes you can even rebend them farther back. Though straighter arms are somewhat more prone to fall from your face.
Don't your glasses shops make sure to adjust the arms to your size? Mine does, they have a special device that heats up the arms so they can bend it carefully, and pliers to adjust the nose thingies.
A bowl of hot water will usually work to bend acetate frames, but not plastic frames (which cannot be adjusted). Be sure to keep heat away from the lens/coating to avoid crazing.
This data is not difficult to find at all. It's listed in the details section for every frame. You can also use it as a filter when browsing. Their stock at this size is really limited, however.
You should look at Shuron. They don't have a fancy website but they do have great customer service and offer their frames in various measurements, and if you have a large head they have frames that will fit. You can order according to the eye size, bridge size, and TPL (temple size).
There’s nothing wrong with going slightly upscale to Warby Parker with accurate measurements and some QC, especially if you have a more “demanding” Rx.
I think the overall experience is just okay. But since getting equvilent glasses (selection, coatings) can cost several hundred dollars it is worth it.
Relative to other things like travel, commuting, home energy usage, electronics, etc, I'm guessing the environmental cost of a pair of glasses is very, very low.
It is important to focus on effective actions. For example, a lot of people think that somehow recycling affects climate change, which (AFAIK) is not true in any meaningful sense. That isn't to say one shouldn't recycle -- there are plenty of reasons to do so in many cases.
Post-consumer paper can be recycled in to some forms of low-density card that doesn't require high quality pulp. Egg cartons come to mind, and as a percentage in some packaging, newsprint and sanitary papers. Post-consumer paper cannot easily be recycled in to anything resembling printer paper due to the contaminants. Pre-consumer paper is recycled heavily as it's of known quality.
I'm not aware of any plastics that are recycled in to the same form. I know that PET (1) and HDPE (2) are recycled in to fibres.
It's a similar story to glass, certainly where I live a large amount of glass is recycled in to crushed aggregate rather than new bottles. The energy costs of cleaning don't make it worthwhile.
I don't throw away my old glasses. I keep them in various places as backups, such as in car gloveboxes, in the home emergency kit, in a bag while traveling and so on.
When I was younger I used to tease my Mom & Dad for essentially treating their reading glasses like pens or pencils, and letting them diffuse around the house as the acquired new pairs.
Now that I'm in my mid-40's, I take it all back. Having a pair, even if it isn't the exact right one, always with reach is a godsend.
Me too. I have around 10 pairs, so I never find myself in a room/place without them. I like Dr. Dean Edell’s for their combination of style/comfort/build quality/light weight. $9.99/pair
Me too. Even though my eyesight continues to deteriorate, a pair of old prescription glasses is many times better than no glasses at all in an emergency!
Around here the store has some cheap frames they use for advertizing. The problem is they look like something a crazy old aunt would wear, with wild coloring. If you want anything like normal glasses you have to pay for the expensive brands. It’s really sad seeing institutionalized and less fortunate people wearing those cheap glasses...
I actually really miss the old basic NHS frames because of this. Perfectly fine to wear every day, even if you're Michael Caine, and simply not bother with anything more expensive. They were also great for ordering a cheap second pair for manual dirty work, decorating, spare for the car, and to tide you over when the expensive pair inevitably breaks (funny that) etc. A HUGE thanks to Thatcher for removing opticians from proper NHS coverage in the mid 80s. After the demise of NHS frames, even cheap glasses were expensive.
Decades later those NHS 524 frames became all the hipster (and Morrisey) rage. For hundreds a pair. Sometimes using original repolished frames as apparently they were well enough made to last forever.
If you want a good, practical, well made modern replacement for the NHS 524, check out the Shuron Freeway. They're very sturdy and have barrel hinges. Ironically, they're much better made than designer frames but they're not as expensive!
> Around here the store has some cheap frames they use for advertizing. The problem is they look like something a crazy old aunt would wear, with wild coloring.
That would make you all the rage in a hipster circles.
I'm pretty happy with my $8-a-pair glasses at Zenni...due to my tendency to lose glasses, I was happy buying 7 sets from them and have them scattered around most of my common places in my life (e.g. my bedroom, living room, desk at work, etc)...If I lose one, I don't have to feel guilty about it.
Last time I had an eye exam (UK, Boots) they of course gave me the prescription because they are obliged to, but under no circumstances would they give me a PD. I forget their exact reason but it was something about needing to relate it to the choice of glasses. Sounded like horse-shit designed to make me buy their overpriced frames to me. I do not expect to have any better luck this year.
Another ditto -- I now have one pair of regular glasses and four pairs of computer/reading glasses, all prescription (one for each computer I sit at!). The last 3 computer glasses cost $27 for all three. At those prices, I can trivially "just get" spares for vacations and hiking.
dittos. Another very pleased Zenni Optical customer here.
I bought three complete pairs of eyeglasses for $105 total, delivered. If you can be patient, about once a year, they'll run a buy-two-get-one-free sale. I now have prescription sunglasses, distance-only, and a set of hidden-line ("transition") bifocals. All with low-reflection coating, and high refraction index plastic. All three are holding up well after three years.
The linked cookbook doesn’t have any oven temperatures, which surprised me. It is hard to get consistent baked goods when you are guessing at the temperature. When did oven thermometers become widely available?
> By the 1920s, new models of gas and electric ovens gave cooks slightly more control over their hot boxes, but the dials still typically only offered low, medium, and high settings [...] Around the end of World War II, manufacturers started including temperatures on their dials, featuring hash marks indicating 10- or 25-degree increments.
This cookbook is from the 20s; we're talking about gas ranges, and the temp control was done by metered flow to the pilot. Low/medium/high settings from the manufacturer did offer consistency, and the gas mark settings on English ovens better specificity... but the state of the art in retail hasn't really advanced hugely over the past century. The thermostats in home ovens are terrible; variance of 50degF or more across time and volume is common. Hence the continued prevalence of mitigating techniques like water baths, covering in foil or parchment, rotating/shuffling baking sheets, etc.
Teams with more than 3 people will still need to buy a subscription:
>Private repositories on free accounts are limited to three collaborators apiece. So, while this might work for a small project (like, for example, a team competing in a hackathon), it isn’t particularly well-suited for actual commercial usage.
>Scaling a single VCS to hundreds of developers, hundreds of millions lines of code...
Maybe I am way out of my element here, but is this a common problem? Do companies with only “hundreds of engineers” really have “hundreds of millions of lines of code”?
From personal experience, it can happen. At one point, I was personally responsible for about 2 million lines of code. Over several years, I was able to reduce it to about 500k through generous use of code generation for ORM type work. The generated code never ended up in VCS, but the generator and model did. Certainly helped checkout/update times as there was several thousand fewer files to deal with.
I was one of about 900 engineers at a financial company of about 1500 employees at the time.
I don't honestly know how many lines of code there were across the company, but I imagine it easily exceeded 100M. It took us a full week to do a full recompile of everything. We had no CI... Was always a problem approaching release time.
Hulu does have autoplay, at least on the Android TV app, which is why we use it much more than we do Netflix. If there weren’t a few Netflix original shows which my wife and I really enjoy, we’d cancel our subscription.
Seconded. I like controlling things myself and hosting them myself. Nobody (um, but AWS, our ISP, our DNS registrar, ARIN, oh and heck tons of others) can shut me down now.
> Nobody (um, but AWS, our ISP, our DNS registrar, ARIN, oh and heck tons of others) can shut me down now.
But in theory all of those can be replaced, a site that was recently in the news for being kicked off Godaddy, Google, tucows, Cloudflare, the Russian media watchdog, namecheap, DreamHost and a ton of others. Today its online using a Chinese based provider.
But yeah, if SV takes a disliking to you, it can be a right PITA to find some where to get back online.
But you are right, Someone somewhere has to host you and/or provide you with services (even if you self host) you are still dependant on to be able to stay online.
I think that older engineers definitely have an advantage when it comes to embedded and other low-level systems development. The Javascript framework that you worked on 5 years ago is now obsolete, but the experience you got writing kernel drivers 25 years ago is still very useful today.