A large fraction of code I write at work is either network protocol reverse engineering or interfacing with physical devices. Peeling stuff open layer by layer is often the only way to approach a problem and if I had to document everything beforehand, I would end up writing the same program twenty times.

Kubernetes is great. Legacy bash and cron is hip and cool again just because you can wrap stuff in a k8s cronjob.

We started measuring progress this month by measuring how many percent of last week's planned tasks were completed, and it's already showing.

Everyone is reporting 100 % which means they're probably doing three days worth of work in one work week to keep the number up.

One product owner showed 12 tasks out of 57 being completed and still gave out a 100 per cent completion rate because he retroactively rated those 12 as critical and the rest as unimportant.

Diffused bright light from a white wall behind you is not any better. Learned this the hard way when I started WFH in Anno Covidi 1.

So... one more reason to not buy the content and pirate it instead.

Their defence is always that they do not follow semver.

I remember some undocumented edge cases in string match patterns breaking between 5.1 and 5.2. Imagine Python changing how regexes worked between two minor releases.

> Their defence is always that they do not follow semver.

"Defence"? Seems like the correct answer and a fact, Lua doesn't do semver, so when there are major changes between 5.3 and 5.4, it's not illogical or actually breaking semver, as they don't follow it.

Plenty of projects don't follow semver, and that's perfectly fine.

Don't fret. The IT systems in Finland's top polytechnic grad school have always been shit.

Both Doom and Bad Apple in top four articles on the HN front page. This week is off to a good start.

I've said this before, but once you start sharing a synced Keepass vault with others you will start getting conflicts even with small teams.

Basically yet another proof that we have managed to perfectly recreate human stupidity :-)

Good students are immune to variations that are discussed in the paper. But most academic tests may not differentiate between them and the crammers.

> Good students are immune to variations

I don't believe that. I'd put some good money that if an excellent student is given an exact question from a previous year, they'll do better (faster & more accurate) on it, than when they're given a variation of it.

I don't think you are betting on the same thing the parent comment is talking about.

The assumptions aren't the same to begin with.

What's the difference between benefitting from seeing previous problems and being worse off when not having a previous problem to go from?

The point is that the “good student” will still do well on the variations, not suffer a 30% decrease in grade.

I'm not following, why would you assume that a good student taking an exam at the edge of their ability not do significantly better if they trained on the exact same questions (with the same solutions), as opposed to ones that are slightly different? I for one have absolutely struggled as a student when faced with questions that seemed similar to ones from previous exams, but actually had a crucial difference, and by looking at the examples on pages 9&10 in the article, I'm pretty sure I would have been likely to be confused too.

Because good students don’t cram. It is not optimal. Understanding the underlying structure is much easier than surface-level cramming.