Suppose we allow, with no controversy, that the Snapchat hack is the fault of third-parties apps. Snapchat claims they are aggressive about removing these apps from the stores. This doesn't matter because after the app is downloaded, all the removals in the world won't help much because said app is on the user's phone already.

I don't know how these apps work, but wouldn't it be possible for Snapchat to block these apps from working with Snapchat? If I'm understanding this correctly, Snapchat has an API that was exploited, right? This is sort of like Twitter not actively encouraging bots but with the API allowing you to send tweets, Twitter isn't doing much to stop bots either.

http://www.wired.com/2014/10/snapchat-parasite-apps/

This seems like a difficult place to be in. Is there really a point of having a Snapchat API at all, considering any use of it causes implicit privacy concerns, dealing with photos or not?

A quick fix is to tell them your CV has already been forwarded by another recruiter. And that is when you are interested in a new job/position.

If not, I won't bother spending more time than it takes to say "No thanks, I'm not looking. Cheers."

Is there a new technology I'm not yet aware of that displays caller ID info alongside the caller's work title?

If you work in this industry, have ever looked for a job, and are regularly answering the phone when it rings and you don't know the number, you're doing it very very wrong. I have a "recruiter" contact that contains ~100 numbers, still get at least 1 a week, and have been at my job for almost a year.

http://www.wired.com/2014/10/dell-4k-ultrahd-monitor

Getting closer to my target price of $500 at which point I plan on purchasing 3. Would be awesome coding on these.

I have an "offer" of sorts. Basically it is a try before you buy deal. They're giving me a take-home assignment that presumably will take a week to finish. I have to decide how long it will take and how much to charge.

What's my play?

Interesting. I've heard of this type of thing but never heard of you picking the rate and usually you work in house during the trial phase.

I'd pick a reasonable contracting rate for the position and seniority level. As for deciding how long it will take, it's pretty tough to gauge unless the project is really simple or the project requirements are very well laid out and accurate

Messing around with some html parsing and found an opportunity to use lambdas for the first time (I'm prob forcing it a little cause I wanted to). Using the Gumbo library (C interface) to parse, I wrote these functions to help me search for specific nodes in an HTML file with a known format:

the idea being that I can call GumboHasAttributeWhere() and pass a lambda that it tests the attributes of the given node for a particular condition, or call GumboFindNodeWhere() that searches through the node tree for a node satisfying the given lambda. Then I can combine the two by passing a lambda to GumboFindNodeWhere() that calls GumboHasAttributeWhere() and thus do a search for a node that has a given attribute.

Draft 1 of this:



The part that I don't like about this is in the first lambda - I'm checking a few conditions and then check specifically against the string "Visitor", so I'll have to duplicate the logic of this lambda a second time when I do it again for "Home", which sucks. So, to keep from duplicating, draft 2 is (I was mostly curious if this even works):



Since I haven't worked with lambdas before, I'm curious if this is like, yeah awesome I'm unleashing the power of C++11, or if it's like holy **** trying way too hard and people who read this code will hate me. (this is for fun btw not work or anything, but if I actually take this small project to completion then it's possible people will find it useful and I'll release it open source)

(can't edit but yes, I figured out quickly after running that I forgot you want to compare the strcmp() functions to 0 and not treat them as booleans)

It seems quite reasonable to me. However, depending on what your expected use case is, I'd still be pretty tempted to do something like FindNodeWithTagAndAttribute(node, tagType, attrID, attrValue) with the ability to pass an empty tagType, attrID, or attrValue. Obviously you pass up a lot of flexibility, but you gain it back in simplicity. As is, I'd generalize FindVisitorTable so you have FindTagWithAttribute(node, tagType, attrLambda) instead and I don't think I like how FindAttributeGenerator is captured. Presumably, it would make sense to add the ability to pass the type of attribute to the FindAttributeGenerator as well.

Can you elaborate on that? Being new at using lambdas I'm not really sure why the way something is captured might be a negative.

I'm with you. I don't know a lot about Snapchat but I was pretty confused when I learned they seem to have an open API that allows 3rd party apps.

The only thing I could think of that might make sense is that they decided to try to be a bigger social media platform and focus less on the privacy part of the business.

It's like a 15-20 second call to realize its a recruiter, politely say you're not interested and they should stop calling you, and then hang up without listening to their response.

Engaging just encourages them and ensures they're going to keep hassling you.

I actually misread it. I thought you had defined 2 non-local lambdas for reuse and your last line was an example of how to use it. Depending on a reference to a global variable didn't seem a great idea.

That generally requires answering the phone to get that far in,me high was the original objection.

Does anybody use Flask? I've found that as you want to reference your app object and include view functions in different modules it starts to get persnickety. Their website gives an example where you do a circular import thingy but that made me queasy. So I decided to abandon decorators and do it this way. Is there something wrong with this?

In app.py:
Then in view1.py something like this:

Then something similar in view2.py, view3.py, etc.

I use flask for a project that's essentially a cloud API for sensor data. There's plenty of good examples out there -- the one I went to as to a guide on flask structure was https://github.com/miguelgrinberg/flasky and his corresponding book and web tutorials at http://blog.miguelgrinberg.com/

My version ended up departing significantly in fucntionality as well as adding celery/redis for taskqueues and elasticsearch/logstash/kibana for logging -- but for the skeleton of the project I found his examples to have a good structure. BTW not sure what db you're planning on using -- but I'm actually really glad I used sqlalchemy as it can paired with alembic for automated db migrations (which is a huge timesaver down the road). I also used regular db libraries for more custom queries but am really glad I made that transition early in the project.

Another work ethics question.

I've been working on a FOSS project, and it's been getting considerable attention from people and prospective employers. It has many parts and goals.

When employers call me, they always bring up this project (though they all bring up a different facet of it). They are interested in hearing about it and I'm more than happy to chat about it.

How do I balance the idea of my project with the needs of the employer?

The obvious answer is to work on my own stuff at home and do work at work, but the main issue is that the project and prospective jobs often overlap (why would they call me if not, right?). I'm concerned that if a code piece shows up in my own project that is very close to what I'm working on at work, then there is bound to be questions about who owns what regardless which item was worked on first. Some things I learn from home would be used in the workplace and I'd have zero problems rewriting code there, but the reverse is likely skating a thin line. I'm not saying in any way that I would take code home or intentionally rewrite code that I used at work for my own use without explicit permission, however concepts are concepts and I'd want to use my knowledge outside of work. Even if there was nothing new gained from working somewhere, it could happen that I was working on something at home at the same time as I was working on something at work. Even if I went out of my way to change everything, there would be no way to make it utterly unrecognizable, assuming I am doing everything correctly.

I was thinking about this because the people I talked to the other day wouldn't mind if I did some work from home, and honestly, they actively encouraged it. I'm hesitant to work from home because it could raise even more questions about how I was spending my time, especially when there is no way to prove that I clocked work at x time then worked on my own stuff at y time. This is further compounded because I would have their code on my computer, and that can't be good.

Do they not give you a computer? Seems like that makes it pretty clear cut. Work done on your computer at home is yours. Work done on their computer is theirs

+ to what blackize5 said. If they expect you to work from home, they better give you a computer/laptop. Otherwise there would be no clear line of "when is it work or is it not?"

As for the FOSS project, how are people getting your info? Is your contact info on those FOSS projects? As a beginner, how do you find a project to work on? All the ones I looked at on Github are intimidating to say the least.

Also, you better a new job soon. From the sound of it, you hate the current one but fortunately you are getting a lot of prospective calls. So good luck with that.

I would have never thought of getting a free computer to use. Huh.

My email is on my github account and my github is in my resume. In general, they see that one and are like "woah." If they'd look at the actual code, they'd see a very small percentage of the idea has been implemented.

Others see my Clojure work and make all sorts of silly assumptions about me. I've probably written too much on this already.

Most of my outside recruiter emails are about the Clojure work. I do get some cold-calls but I'm not sure where that information comes from. Probably from applying to a job that ended up being a recruiter portal without me knowing about it. Personally, I don't mind getting contacted for jobs by recruiters.

Not sure what is meant by beginner in this context. I'm sort of a beginner but sort of not. Basically, I have a slew of problems I ran into many times during my working career and I'd like to solve it for myself and for others in my position.

I've written a lot of proxy programs to the trashy software various companies use and this is not an uncommon issue. Most people use a bunch of Excel sheets for this purpose, which I have, but I've also used Python and SQL for this purpose.

I'm also very interested in data, marketing analysis, statistics, probability, and online selling. It wasn't hard to come up with the idea, as I had this idea for a few years, but it was, and still is, hard to get moving. Just a lot of ideas to organize.

All of the good ones are intimidating. 99% of github is a programmer mind-dump of abandoned programs, which I'm also guilty of. I'm also using "programs" liberally. Much of github isn't really programs.

I'm working on it. It is much harder than one would think.

Dave? You might need to check your employment agreement. My contract says work I do on company time or on company projects belongs to the company.

That includes work I do on a related but different software program. So if I were working on something at work, came home and built my own personal features for it, the company would still own the work I did at home.

jjshabado, that sucks to read, but it does encapsulate my fears.

A careful read of what you wrote...

if I were working on something at work, came home and built my own personal features for it, the company would still own the work I did at home

... suggests a slightly different situation. I would have no desire to add features to a work project on my own time. If I did, I'd have no issues with giving it to the employer.

I would be working on my own project that already began before working for said company (that likely wouldn't call me in the first place without said project, no less). What I would be working on at home would be independent of what I would be working on at work, although it may be in the same domain, which is looking more and more likely. In no way would I be adding features to my own stuff with the intent to help any company I am working for. If I reuse ideas from home to work or vice versa, that is a consequence of me learning or using my prior knowledge by coincidence, which is where the gray area, or at least possible misinterpretation, seems to start.

If they decided to use parts of the engine, then they would be benefactors of my free work, but that is still independent of my job and I certainly wouldn't feel like they owed me for my time, nor would I be tempted to enter into some agreement.

Are there any good developer forums similar to twoplustwo for programming?

I'm aware of sites like slashdot for news and stack overflow for specific questions, I'm looking for a more forum based site for general discussion. Alternatively, any pod casts that may provide this same discussion?

Dave, if you were working for a pure software company or on something that was the secret sauce for your company, and not just middle ware you would have more of an issue. If you are concerned about it talk to someone at your work. It's not going to be news that gets better the farther along you get.