First time I ever had Indian food was in Des Moines in the early 90s. So yeah maybe the MW cities are more caught up than I'm thinking.

Still though - I'd guess the number of options and the odds of your no-name local ethnic place being insanely good are a lot greater in a place like LA, SF, NYC, Houston, and maybe Austin than a lot of other midwestern cities.

Yeah, no doubt.

I went to New York last summer and had some of the best korean and thai I've had anywhere. My family does most of the tourist stuff, but really we travel to eat, and we basically never just eat whatever is closest or easiest, we're always trying to find something good.

A huge daydream fantasy of mine was sitting next to Tony Bourdain on a plane or something, and convincing him to do a Torrance episode like his Queens episode.

Torrance is like the suburban version of every [Asian country]-town in LA. There are some ridiculously good, cheap Korean/Japanese/Thai/Phiipino/Indonesian/Chinese/Vietnamese/Indian places just tucked away in unassuming strip malls. I had a whole tour of places I was going to take Tony to.

Also it's so far south that I'm almost sure the LA foodie hipsters can never ruin it.

Although my favorite restaurant Musha closed down. It was Japanese but not just Japanese food. It was food Japanese-Americans like to eat. One of their signature dishes was au-gratin rice where they carved the cheese out of a big block. Comfort food from their new merged culture basically. Possibly like what Red Lobster was to my family growing up.

That was a huge revelation for me - that food culture is an ever-evolving thing and always in the context of it's current home.

Oh yeah - this place by all accounts has the best mole outside Mexico: https://www.yelp.com/biz/guelaguetza...te-los-angeles

I've had it and had mole in Oaxaca and Puebla. All of them are insane. There's nothing like this in most other American cities.

I bet it's the same for a lot of regional delicacies.

Speaking of strip malls, my favorite taco place in LA is Socorro's in Northridge in a pretty crappy strip mall. My favorite taco place anywhere is in San Diego. It's Las Cuatro Milpas. I just happened in there, but I think it is relatively well known.

I haven't made a tremendously broad sampling. I did make a study at one point of Pastrami sandwiches around LA though. I'm not saying this is the best, but the most surprisingly up there is The New York Deli in a strip mall in Torrance.

I'll definitely check that out.

Pretty surprising given the average height of a Dutchman!

how can there be so many lost dogs on next door? are people stealing or randomly adopting dogs that show up at their house? don't most dogs have collars with their address/phone number? can't dogs smell their way home? how far can they really get?

Ive never understood it either

We've always had our phone numbers on our dog's collar, but no, most people do not. We also have our dogs chipped and any vet can read them and find us, but people who aren't dog owners don't often know this.

Do dogs know how to get home? I am not sure. Our current dog never escapes but we had one that used to and he never "came back", usually someone would find him first and call us. At the time we had the escape artist, he had a sister. So he'd get out, and she'd follow him. He'd take off, and she would usually just go to the front porch and wait for us to let her back in.

Our dog actually has a GPS tracker on her, but that's just how we roll.

I think most dogs would find their way home, but people often rescue them first.

I read a book a while back, I think maybe "The Hidden Life of Dogs", where this woman keeps a bunch of Huskies almost like a wild pack and she follows them around like a biologist (ethologist). They roam for miles every night and come back. Of course a Maltese might not behave exactly like a Husky.

My German Shepherd is not a super well behaved/trained dog in general, but is whatever combo of smart/obedient/territorial that she won't leave the yard even if the gate is wide open unless she's called or on a leash. I'm confident I could drop her off anywhere within a mile and she'd get home though if she didn't get hit by a car (which she might - she sometimes wants to go after cars).

We have a phone number on her collar. She doesn't bite, but unfortunately I don't see any strangers getting a hold of her collar to check unless it's animal control. Actually a small kid could do it. She barks at people who she considers threatening (not that she's a guard dog - that's just the way a lot of dogs are, they act tough toward things/people who scare/worry them) and not little kids.

Hmm....I'm blathering.....delete or save?....oh well

So I have an app used internally in our group which uses Google Sheets API. I tried to authorize myself to use it and the consent screen which used to pop up wasn't working. I went to dig through Cloud Console and found this ominous message:



Well OK, verification might be a pain, but how long can it possibly take?

Er, ok. Any other options?

Oh sweet, no problem then, I'll just go mark it internal.

A what now?

Um...

OK but what is....

OK....

But I don't have a goddamn domain! Is this seriously the easiest way that I can allow MYSELF to access an application that I AM AN OWNER OF?

Yeah google blows. Their APIs have always been a gigantic PITA. In the mid-2000s they had some awful SDK thing when Yahoo had nice clean straightforward REST for the same stuff.

I'd just do the verification thing. It will probably go quicker than you expect.

We ran into the same thing just trying to add our logo to the popup on google sign in. I haven't tried to verify yet though. We don't even have a privacy policy page or anything - and you need one to verify.

Interesting sort order from Outlook this morning.

I think I saw our own candybar post about a similar subject on HN and wanted to discuss.

What are the incremental expectations of senior, staff, and principal engineers at your company? And if those differ from what you think they should be, how so?

For example, at my company senior engineers are expected to have impact across the organization*. I think that this leads to a weird incentive structure where I see lots of senior engineers doing little in the way of feature or project work and instead putting a large portion of their time in to vanity refactors or initiatives with lowish value that don't require deep technical or organizational knowledge i.e. fixing intermittent test failures.

In my mind a senior engineer is someone that you can trust to deliver a well defined project without handholding. Engineer would be someone that can be trusted to deliver a feature without handholding. And Jr engineer would be someone that requires frequent guidance for feature work.

Staff would be where the cross organization impact stuff should factor in.

* This varies across the organization. In customer facing engineering groups this seems to be less an issue then it is for teams that work on internal services.

What does principal mean in your world?

It's funny to me that staff is higher than senior. I would have guessed the other way around. When I switched to the architecture group within my company my title changed from application architect to principal engineer. I actually thought the latter sounded pretty lame, so I didn't change my linkedin, resume, stuff. I guess principal is less lame than I thought.

Knowing nothing I would assume staff, then principal, then senior as the ascending ranks.

The Google Apps APIs (for running scripts, etc) permissioning is embarrassingly bad.

Everyone seems to use different hierarchies. At my company it goes
junior -> staff -> senior -> principal
principal is a director-level position

Most other places I've worked have been
junior -> senior -> staff -> principal

I don't think I've ever seen principal before senior before but I wouldn't be that surprised.

Engineer 1, Engineer 2, Senior, Staff, Senior Staff, Principal, Fellow (only a handful in the whole company).

Lol Senior Staff

Javascript baby!

innerText is a ****ing string of course you can't increment it...

The += is not the clown-shoes part of his example, the -= is.

I mean, I know why both of them happen but if you can't see why it's funny, I would suggest you're a bit too close to the forest.

Why? Is it just that they wanted += to concat strings so they made it work, but didn't want -= to do anything to strings so they made it treat it as a number?

Or is there a deeper, more structural reason?

No, there's not a deep structural reason. Javascript tries to cast values into something that makes sense when it can. If there's more than one way a casting could be done, then it has a preferred method and uses that.

Forget += and -= for now, because + and - have the same semantics in javascript, i.e.

"0" + 1 = "01"
"0" - -1 = 1
(and also "0" - "-1" = 1 and 0 - "-1" = 1)

In the plus case, there are 2 ways you could do conversions to make it work. They arbitrarily chose to convert the number to a string. This is true whether you do "0" + 1 or 0 + "1".

In the minus case, there's only one way to have the operation make sense because there isn't a valid JS expression that is "string - string". So the string gets converted to a number. If the conversion doesn't work you get NaN

Most languages that do automatic conversion have some version of this problem, unless they don't have any operators that have ambiguities like this. For example, if you couldn't use "+" to concatenate strings at all, this wouldn't happen, but using "+" to concatenate strings is nice.