Blockchain voting system downsides:

- Creates a market for selling votes
- Government can cheat easily by just casting lots of made up votes, no one would know

Verification of your vote could be catastrophic. People could be coerced in one of millions of ways into giving their vote to someone. Votes need to be unverifiable so that voters can vote without fear and so that coercion isn't possible.

IMO this really is one aspect of society where computers have no business.

An electronic voting system would have to be tamper-proof and quantum resistant, which blockchains are neither.

Valid emails are basically [random-string]@[random-string].[random-tld]

d@v3\\[email protected] is a valid email format, for example, assuming feathers is a valid tld. [email protected] is totally valid as well, if the email owner owns the gmai.com domain.

https://haacked.com/archive/2007/08/...-until-i.aspx/

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3696

I found this entire list of falsehoods here. The names and addresses are an absolute must-read for every programmer, IMO.

https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood

Engineer commits suicide after working for 5 mo at Uber:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/...ide/100938330/

Wife is suing.

I'm sorry to be callous, but if you commit suicide after working for a company for 5 months (that didn't literally torture you), that means you had a pre-existing mental problem. I can't fathom how the company could be liable for his suicide.

And not to add insult to injury, but what exactly is a "self taught engineer?" I have an MSc in comp sci and I don't call myself an engineer. I'm a programmer.

Meh. We'll see if anything else comes out of the investigation but I've got no reason to think Uber couldn't come up with a way to drive someone to suicide. Particularly if they made him feel like he could never work again and lose his house and yadda yadda yadda.

someone that was rejecting jobs left and right from linkedIn and apple suddenly felt like they would never work again and lose their house?

He left linkedin for Uber over Apple, I'm just saying Uber gets zero benefits of the doubts because of their past actions.

Nearly every job I had was sexist, racist, cloak-and-dagger, toxic, long hours, low play, verbally abusive, etc. I've never had a coworker that committed suicide, but I've had a few coworkers that died on the job, and had a few with missing limbs or severely injured. Not aware of a successful court case for much of anything. Succeeding on worker's comp, suing an employer, and so on, is a huge uphill battle. There's a reason people write blog posts over going to court.

I hardly believe that the entire Uber company is a toxic dump. I'd expect any large company with more than a thousand employees to have a handful of jerks running a few departments.

I feel sorry for the guy who committed suicide, but wolfram is right: it's unlikely he just woke up and randomly did it with no history of mental illness, prior attempts, and so on.

What if one of those jerks is the CEO and he espouses those very jerk values to everyone who works underneath him?

It's legitimately hard to keep up with all the douchebag things you can read about Uber doing in the news lately, and companies having their own unique culture (which for Uber seems to be "doing everything possible, beyond any ethical or legal standards, to win and have some good bro fun while doing it") is a thing. I totally believe Uber is a toxic dump.

I agree with you in one hand, but I guess I struggle with the idea. He was earning $170k / year. I've seen morality set aside for much less.

This guy would have to have known about some of the Uber stuff before going in. If you believe he was a great guy driven to suicide over a terrible company, then you have to believe that his ethics, despite the information, did not align with the company before walking in, and he was well aware of this fact.

It would also stand to reason that he wasn't the only decent human being that ever worked at Uber, and I guess it comes down to how many "good" or "bad" people get hired and stick around at Uber. It would be harder to step down to a lower pay scale, and well.... Uber's 'hustle-oriented' culture becomes a black mark on employees' résumés

I don't know why he'd choose Uber over Apple. I wouldn't choose Uber over Apple, but money doesn't drive me. As a younger person, a paycheck was a paycheck: the bigger, the better. I suppose that young people, with social pressure, would be more inclined to think about money above ethics.

damn dude. you must have run pretty bad on jobs. I mean, even the worst company I worked for wasnt close to that bad.

Yeah daveT has terrible luck.

I think DaveT works for the mob.

A pre-existing mental problem is likely and it's quite unlikely that Uber is anything more than a straw that broke the camel's back but I don't see why they shouldn't sue here. Uber has a deep pocket and probably a lot to hide. Settling this won't create any copycat claims so Uber may be incentivized to settle.

Titles given to programmers at most top technology companies are typically some variations of "Software Engineer" or "Software Development Engineer" and this has been the case for some time. At tech companies, the work programmers do is called engineering, software development teams are called engineering teams and so on. Words evolve and that's what the word means today in the US - the connotation of "Engineer" meaning a specifically-credentialed person in a specific field is also not the original meaning and was probably never really that common in the US.

Don't pull that **** in Oregon, they'll sue you for claiming you're an engineer when you aren't one.

Somehow I got a demotion from architect to engineer when my company was bought by a bigger company. I still list architect on everything and no one has said anything yet.

I don't believe so - we have developers in Oregon and they are also called engineers. Lost of other tech companies also have operations in Oregon and the titles apply the same.

Also, is this like true anywhere? I've heard people (usually from Canada) claiming that you'll get in legal trouble for calling yourself an engineer if you don't have specific credentials but it always seemed like an urban legend or some misinterpretation of relevant statute or case. If you claim specific professional designations or do business while strongly implying that you have credentials that you don't, which leads employers/customers to believe that you're something you're not, but calling yourself a software engineer doesn't really fit into that at all.

I wouldn't be able to design and build an outhouse without the entire structure falling into the pit, much less build a stable bridge. A construction worker can work on building a bridge, but he's not an engineer.

Some programmers can design and build systems that run airplanes, where the result of failure is catastrophic. That's much closer to engineering. Someone building your average website is doing something closer to construction.

The education, testing, and apprentice time it takes to become a licensed engineer is quite shocking to me, so out of respect, I don't call myself that term.

I may have missed something previously in the conversation, but I think I disagree with almost all of this post. The risk or magnitude of a project is absolutely nothing to do with whether you'd call it "engineering."

If building a software system to run airplanes is engineering, then building a software system to support sending dick pics across the internet is also most certainly engineering.

The difference between engineering and construction is the physical processes of designing something under a fixed set of constraints vs physically building something given a design.

Using the term "licensed" engineer or something like "certified professional engineer" - usually in the context of civil engineering - is a whole different subject. But you can definitely colloquially say you engineered something without being a professional engineer just like I can tell my wife I'm cooking dinner even though I'm not a professional chef.

What 99% of software developers do is much more akin to craftsmanship than engineering. I think calling all devs engineers is massive concept creep, and something people like to do to make themselves look more important. We have perfectly good words to describe what we do. There's no need to dilute others.

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/...itique-n751371

Just make sure not to talk about anything but code...

ya, like I worked for a pretty terrible company for a bit. it was a big company and it had all kinds of problems. but at least my immediate coworkers were cool and easygoing even tho everyone was absoutely petrified that their would be layoffs at any minute.

the corporate bigwigs totally effed up one of the big products and it was proven fraudulent but due to laws the govt was forced to keep the product. lol.

then they hired the ceo or (some c-level guy I cant remember) from our rival and he came up with a great plan that we would remake all of our products and they would be 50% better and 50% cheaper. ya, that plan did not work out (I was gone by when it failed.)

but its pretty amazing that this dude gets hired for a ton of money and then that is his plan. I mean, thats a great plan if it works. but I think the chance of it working when you just pull the numbers out of thin air is pretty much nil.

so ya, it sucked bc lol upper management and everyone knew the sword was gonna fall any minute.

still not near as bad as daveT tho.

I have mechanical eng degree and I worked in that field for like 2 years out of college. dev work is the same. the tools are obv different but its fundamentally the same.

so, like, I dont disagree with bolded, but I think that its is true for at least mechanical engineers who design and build products as well. engineers are craftsman.

and I would say that devs are much closer to engineers than to-what I perceive you meant as-craftsman positions such as carpenters, mechanics and electricians.

There are few shops that use the rigor required by actual engineers to use the term "software engineering" truthfully. None of the shops I've worked at have been close. It's too expensive, the industry is time driven more than quality driven. There aren't best practices yet because Software Engineering is still a young discipline seen more as "art" than "science." As that changes, as processes mature and every program isn't seen as something completely new it may change but I doubt it will happen soon.