No no, look, it’s so much more than that—he’s using stegonography! You just have to know the key, and then what he’s saying becomes very clever.
I hope.
No no, look, it’s so much more than that—he’s using stegonography! You just have to know the key, and then what he’s saying becomes very clever.
I hope.
@DOA said:
Just be glad you can veto a hire. Some of use have to work with whoever the boss had a drink with last night.Well, I haven’t talked about the consultants that the company has used since before I was hired (and are still used, despite me and another person telling the owner in no uncertain terms that she should not be using them). I probably should; there’s an endless supply of WTF there. The only reason I haven’t had to do much work with them is because their complete lack of maturity early on made it so that I was entirely justified in refusing to work with them.
The first incident was about a month after I was hired. One of them sent me an email asking me to call them for a “quick 5 min call”—at 8:30pm on a Friday. I replied back that I didn’t provide phone consultations during the weekend, but that I could schedule a call on Monday if he let me know what time was good for him, or alternatively that he could email his request directly and I’d be able to respond to it more quickly that way. He took my email and forwarded it to the person that recommended me for the job as well as the owner of the company and called me “an arrogant asshole”.
The second was about a month after that, after I prepared a report showing a myriad of security vulnerabilities in their codebase. Instead of copping to the fact that these issues existed, they decided to deny everything—and then disabled my access to make changes to the codebase, claiming that I was a security risk, and that before I would be allowed to work on anything again, the company would need to pay them an (exorbitant) fee for a new dedicated server. (Yes, the consultants were hosting the site on their own server, and the company I worked for, that paid for the work, was never actually in control of the entire codebase up to that point.)
Despite this, and the fact that a second person just the other day said that he couldn’t stand working with them anymore because they are incapable of following very simple instructions (like, “go to this Web page with nothing on it except for a link that says ‘Download files’, click the link, and deploy those files to your Web server”), the owner has continued to send them work. In response to this person’s complaint, the owner said “i don't think that [contractor name] is terrible. i just think he doesn't listen or pay attention often”. Which is, of course, a ridiculous thing for someone with no technical prowess to say when she’s being told by two different qualified entities to stop using them. Funnn.
So, we’re trying to hire a second Web developer at a company where I work. I’ve spent the last several weeks going through résumés, code samples, and interviews to try to find someone qualified for the position, and am absolutely blown away by the complete vacuum of competence that seems to exist in this field.
For example, the developer that didn’t write HTML because “the designers do that”. He also thought front-end development was “writing actions [in PHP] and JavaScript that connect the back-end parts together” and that back-end development was “things like forums”. His favourite feature of Postgres was the EXPLAIN function, and for his code test he essentially spent 3 days editing some Symfony configuration files to present a final product that missed about half the required functionality.
Or, the
programmer with 17 years of experience on their résumé that sent along something that
looked like it was based on an “introduction to PHP” tutorial from
2001, complete with AJAX functionality
ripped from anyexample.com, a very novel attempt to use $_SESSION as a function passing an undefined constant ($user_id = $_SESSION(USER_ID);
), attempts to concatenate strings using an addition operator, and—the coup de grâce—SQL statements that were passed back to the server and executed directly from JavaScript.
TL;DR, I am curious to know if any of you have had actual experience with a process that manages to somehow filter away bad code into an acceptable end-product. (Also if you know PHP, have experience with Web apps, don’t suck at it, and want a new job, please get in touch.)
@morbiuswilters said:
@blakeyrat said:
The worst part is that the $ variable is reserved for the interpreter. Well... was. Now through years of mis-use, no interpreter could actually use it without breaking everything.[citation needed] Not that I don't believe you, but I would just like to learn more.
ECMAScript 3.0 § 7.6 (Identifiers): “This standard specifies one departure from the grammar given in the Unicode standard: The dollar sign ($) and the underscore (_) are permitted anywhere in an identifier. The dollar sign is intended for use only in mechanically generated code.”
This was removed in ECMAScript 3.1 and subsequent versions of the standard allow $ in any identifier.
@Sutherlands said:
@codefanatic said:In our system some users (read all) can have several "hundred thousand" records in the database even after filtering down.Why is hundred thousand in quotes?
A devout believer in the “blog” of “unnecessary” quotation marks, I imagine.
@captainpants said:
So a particular government which will not be named
https://www.rtbo.rus.mto.gov.on.ca/scripts/english/index.asp
There’s really very little point to not just call out the responsible party when it’s a public site.
@Sutherlands said:
@pjt33 said:It’s bad enough that a huge cabal of front-end developers created http://w3fools.com to warn people away from it around this time last year. They’ve improved, somewhat, but the quality of the information on the site is still not very good.@blakeyrat said:Do you have something to back up this claim, or is it just more elitist propaganda?3) The overflow: hidden option is documented (by W3Schools at least)Using W3Schools as a reference for anything makes you TRWTF. There are various non-WTF reference sites for HTML and CSS: the one I use is http://www.htmldog.com/reference/
This is a CSS behaviour called “margin collapsing” (dhromed got close). Here is the relevant part of the spec. You aren’t “adding” pixels on the screen. The first screenshot has the margin of the inner <p> drawn outside the light grey container because it has been collapsed into the next element on the page. Forcing a padding at the bottom of the grey container prevents the two margins from being collapsed into one. Yes, this is incredibly dumb, but that shouldn’t really come as a surprise, since, well, it’s CSS, land of “form element behaviour is undefined”, “positioning behaviour inside table cells is undefined”, and “variables are harmful” (from one of the designers of CSS!). Though it won’t help you here, WebKit has some proprietary CSS properties to control whether or not margins are allowed to collapse. Incidentally, if you have ever seen a Web page where something animates, and then at the end of the animation the content “pops” into place, that ugliness is margin collapsing in action. Here’s more reading about it, including these ironic sentences: “Why is this? Because it's what authors would tend to expect.” Enjoy.
@PSWorx said:
Not only that, but IJG JPEGs encoded at q=75 are not actually very good quality at all, and people would complain about how terrible their photos look if they actually used such a low quality value.Even if WebP was a clear winner in compression, large image hosts don't seem to care that much about image size. Flickr compresses their images at libjpeg quality of 96 and Facebook at 85: both quite a bit higher than the recommended 75 for "very good quality".No, I don't think webP makes any sense either, but I still find his logic in that part fascinating. Obviously, because two companies with some of the most powerful hardware on the internet and virtually unlimited bandwidth don't have much use for image compression, no one else will. Way to go!
@morbiuswilters said:
How the hell do you not have that font? I have it, on fucking Linux, no less.You do? All I have is Lucida Sans Typewriter, and that’s only because I installed sun-java6-fonts.
@cfgauss said:
But hey, at least we have your years of expertise of that one time you were at the hospital.
Ooh, sarcastic ad hominems. Aren’t you an expert debater.
@cfgauss said:
let me reply to your single point of data with my single point of data; […] My state has for-profit hospitals and neither I, nor my family, have had trouble reducing costs for procedures or figuring out how much things would cost in advance!
That’s not a data point. That’s not even an anecdote.
You want evidence that our current system doesn’t work as well as a single-payer system could? I’m not going to bother repeating what other people have already said; PNHP is an organisation of over 17,000 medical professionals in the United States that support single-payer health care, so read what they have to say and research their citations if you think I’m not qualified enough to state some basic facts.
@morbiuswilters said:
It is in their best interests to price things as accurately and competitively as possible, within the bounds of what customers are willing to accept.
Accurate? Competitive?! I hope you aren’t talking about the status quo, because things are nothing like that.
Part of the problem right now is that the customers have no fucking clue what the price is. “Oh, my insurance will pay for it” is what everyone says as they go and have that unnecessary test done for them. Since I am self-employed and have a high-deductable personal insurance plan, I recently tried to figure out how much a particular blood test was going to cost before I committed to it, since it would all be out-of-pocket for me. This is what it took to get the answer:
First, I call my primary care provider. They are the ones that take the blood and give me the results but don’t actually perform the test; that gets farmed out to some big diagnostics corporation. The diagnostics corporation is supposed to provide them with a book of prices, but it’s not complete and they can’t find all the prices. So they tell me to call the diagnostics company to figure it out.
I call the diagnostics company, but they don’t have any clear option on their phone system as to where I should go to get pricing information (though they have at least two options for people that already have bills). So, I pick some random option related to billing since I figure they all will have access to pricing information. “No, sorry, this is patient billing, you need client billing.” So I get to client billing. They say that unless I have test codes they can’t look up the prices for me because they don’t have access to that information, so I get directed to billing department #3 to find out the test codes (I only have the names of the tests). Billing department #3 looks up the test codes for me and gives me some prices. I ask them if they can tell me what the insurance company’s allowed amount on those prices is. No, they can’t, but maybe client billing can. So I get sent back to client billing. They say they can’t get that information until they file a claim with the insurance company. I ask if the codes that I have are codes that I can use to ask the insurance company how much it will cost, and they say no, you need CPT codes. So then this woman spends 5 minutes reading out all seven CPT codes associated with this single test, so that I might be able to get information from the insurance company instead.
Next, I call the insurance company to ask them if they can tell me what the allowed amount for this is. No, they can’t provide that information over the phone, but if I want they can mail me a Cost Estimate Form that I can send to the provider, who can fill it out and submit it to the insurance company, and then they will mail me an estimate of how much they will allow the provider to charge for the procedure. (Helpfully, they completely neglect to mention that I can just download the form from their Web site—I learned this when I got the form in the mail and it came with a letter that said “You can also ask your provider to download forms from [site]”. Glad my premium dollars are being spent on superfluous printing, postage, and handling.)
Anyway, I get the form and send it to the provider, and they fill it out and send it to the insurance company. A week later, I get a letter in the mail. On a test that the provider wanted to charge $2,002.00, they will allow a charge of $720.27. I can’t think of any other industry where a company says “this costs $x” and the people responsible for paying for it can come back and say “we are only going to pay 36% of that” and no lawsuits get filed. Basically, the prices that the providers come up with are completely fake, because nobody pays them. There is no “what the market will bear”, there is no “what patients can afford”. It is all fake.
The thing that scares me the most about this experience is that, in my state, insurance companies and hospitals are required by law to be non-profit organisations. Yet, all these sorts of shenanigans still occur. I can’t even imagine what it must be like in states where for-profit health insurance companies are allowed, and the more people they deny and the less they pay the more money they make. In contrast, imagine a single payer system where all prices are set and managed so that you always know how much something is going to cost, where you don’t need 3 billing departments and cost estimate forms and provider allowed amounts. All the single-payer opponents talk so much about how they don’t want government bureaucrats meddling and deciding what they can and can’t have covered by insurance—but it already happens, the bureaucrats are just part of the insurance companies!
@morbiuswilters said:
Yes, but Mozilla has one too. And it's technically a JIT compiler, although I think at least Mozilla's is a tracing JIT compiler which would make me hard because it is super rad.The current version is a tracing JIT engine, yes; the next version of the Mozilla JavaScript engine (JaegerMonkey) combines that with method-based JIT too, which is what V8 and Nitro use.