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I have never used nor worked at an organization that is built on top of Salesforce.

You probably do. Salesforce has all kinds of different products from Slack to Mulesoft and Tableau. Salesforce starts their pipeline by solving one problem, making that work well from a business ROI perspective, and then they pitch you on another and another and another with package pricing. This is basically the Oracle model and how Larry got his blood money.

I think a lot of these early companies have high ambitions in terms of serving various languages, then they find out how hard writing SDKs and tooling for each of them is.

If that TLDR is your own then you may be interested in this book: https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9781496205117/

If they continue push upstream per the license then it works. There's a lot of Linux desktop apps that work this way; it's hardly a broken model.

RMS did a really poor job of explaining why closed source firmware is problematic to free software, I agree, and I'll explain better below. I also have some critique of activist language.

First, activist language is pretty hard for any human to listen to. Anyone that's been tackling the "long fight" of what they view as oppression has this map in their head of things that add up to their main point in life and cannot help but continually extrapolate it for people. On some topics, people eat this kind of language up. On others, it's rather dull, especially if the person using the language can't quickly connect relatable points for people. RMS was good at long-form broad thinking that was dealing with the issues at the time. He was pretty fuck all when it came to really explaining them in a digestible, conversation style manner.

As for why proprietary headphone firmware hurts free software: take some Bose noise cancelling headphones and try to connect them to something like a mainstream Linux distribution like PopOS and use them on Zoom. They'll work, but only in a low quality mode, or the audio receiver will work but not the microphone. Now do the same with Airpods, or use Airpods on an Android phone. Airpods will work and you'll get high fidelity audio, but they're constantly exhibiting weird disconnection behaviors. On Linux you'll get incredibly low fidelity audio. Proprietary drivers are at the source of all of this.

RMS came from a day where the pioneers of Linux and alternative operating systems weren't building them for servers. They were building them for users because Windows was expensive and the machines to run it on were more expensive. Oppression to someone like him, and many others, were linked to this and many other circumstances at the time. The idea that the optimizations of computing were available only to a few was utterly disasterous.

To connect the two ideas, product x which is proprietary works best on product y which is also proprietary. It's a system that reinforces itself and excludes or marginalizes the rest, which eroded the original mission of building optimized software that is collectively free enough for anyone in the world to use.

Somewhat ironically, a lot of people in this thread are complaining about diversity when really that's what most of these initiatives were born in.

Azure is like if a raging tire fire had a baby with Windows UI

Reddit conversations are mostly memes at this point. I have two geographic subreddits for my city. One is owned by a dude in another city, I'm pretty sure Detroit, who just doesn't moderate anything. The other is owned by a group of people who will straight up ban people for even marginal dissent from their favored ideology. Most of the people active on those subreddits aren't even from Portland. They're conservatives, liberals, and leftists who view Portland as this gateway of cultural relevance. It's the internet equivalent of Ballmer and his wife buying political influence in Portland, a city they don't live in, much less the state.

The rot is root deep at this point if it's let things like this happen.

I'm guessing that is more of a Californian thing?

I live in Portland, but yes, it is more of a Portland thing. The visible things that create opposition to our homelessness policies are:

- Store looting, which is mostly driven by a scheme developed by gangs. Gangs are often enlisting the homeless to carry out these stunts.

- Open air drug use, which requires drugs facilitated by gangs

- Property crime, which is either done by gangs or is incentivized by gang-related activity

"Organized crime" is probably a better term than "gang" here. Gangs are generally recruiting in places where opportunity is low and costs are averagely above peoples means. My point is that there's some overlap with homelessness and we'd benefit by looking at them equally empathetically.

We really need to do both? The choices definitely need to be demonized, lest our kids think they are OK choices. My greatest fear would be my kid somehow makes these bad choices in the future because our schools taught him that these people were just victims of society rather than victims also of their choices.

What you've said here and what I've said are slightly different. Holding people accountable is important, yes. If they are unwilling to change their ways they should be held accountable. At the same time, when someone struggling with drugs or mental health says, "I want help" there's a short window of time where that help can be transformational. Once they've chosen to right their life, and demonstrated it, we need to provide them capacity to move on, which is where we fall short these days. If you've been convicted of a felony, regardless of whether you're homeless at the time or not, then it'll be difficult if not impossible for the person to gain and maintain meaningful employment that pays their bills in a capitalist society. This situation can put people right back into the cycle of drug use, homelessness, a mental health crisis, or all of the above. Mainly, what I'm saying is when someone has demonstrated reform we need to stop punishing them at some point.

We've found this to be problematic because cases will be misdiagnosed as mental health problems when they are really severe substance abuse problems (or the patient will say they don't have a substance abuse problem given the stigma associated with it), to predictable ineffectiveness.

I wouldn't call it problematic, I'd call it frustrating, because typically it's both. Again, addressing one problem ends up persisting both problems. I blame this, again, on policy that doesn't understand the systems it's up against.

You can ask my question about any city though: for every 1000 broken car windows, how many convictions (or even arrests) are there? I know that number is extremely low in Seattle as well.

There's two reasons this type of crime occurs: gang activity and homelessness. People turning to gangs represents a crisis in opportunity. Things like hate groups, gangs, etc do not generally occur in places where peoples needs are met and when opportunity to change your circumstances if desired are bountiful.

That’s been the cornerstone of policy in cities like Seattle for years and that’s why those cities have the biggest problem.

The problem is actually both. Progressive policies fail because progressives are allergic to enforcement, conservative policies fail because conservatives are allergic to addressing underlying causes. It's a tale as old as time.

If you want to improve things you need to address underlying causes like the housing and opportunity crisis. Enforcement can be used in a way that changes their circumstances rather than putting them in a box. You need both.

I don't normally comment on articles that I don't like, but this is just awful. It diverges so far away from ethics that it's practically someones moral musings. For instance:

So, for in-house batch jobs, they are started and stopped by operations personnel. Someone also has to explicitly schedule them to run at a frequency. Those people are the ones that ‘operate’ the software and provide it as a service for the users. They are on the hook for it, so they need to be able to control it.

I used to be one of these folks. I now write operational software that operates other software, but I was the guy pushing the button. For one, if you're the button pusher you probably know very little about what the code actually does. You're often more familiar with how it behaves on a system, some high level KTLO metrics, and some basic runbooks. To shove all of the responsibility for software outcomes on them is problematic to say the least. Historically, Ops folks are also some of the least paid people in tech, aside from analysts and the position is largely outsourced these days.

People like this should not write or participate in ethical codes. Ethical codes are high level frameworks that involve processes for reporting violations, not some rigid structure on how "everything needs to be done this way". They'll provide criteria to abide by that helps readers ensure they are following the system.

I work in a lot of highly regulated industries that involve governments; the code for how to treat government workers and adjacency is just that and necessarily that. The reason is that corruption is not black and white, you can't just name off familial relationships and hope you've covered everything. Instead you have to refer to things like undue influence. You also can't just name off "gifts"; for instance, if the company comps something due to a bad experience is that a "gift"? Of course not, but a sufficiently rigorous ethical code would make a world where refunds were controversial. All of these things also come with a responsibility to document your tracks and operate in the clear. The minute you stop operating in the clear you might not be charged with a crime, depending on what a reviewing committee can uncover, but you'll certainly be out of a job.

For this, I think something like the IEEE should be building a code of ethics for software. They have the acumen and are industry-aware enough to sort through various contexts and make sure the code is verbose yet light enough to stand the test of time without incurring prohibition style statements like, "let's bring back operators".

I guess I was surprised that they commented on political language reinvention at all. I've seen it happen a lot over the last decade and there seems to be an automatic adoption of the redefinition of words to fit political aims. Personally, I associate grooming with sexual predators and adolescents. If you're an adult, we say you were manipulated, deceived, or that you're dumb. That said, it was close enough that I could infer what she was talking about.

Both are privileges, but claiming that a remote worker can "just move close to a tech campus and get the same things" is a pitch from left field that requires at least four relays. That was the purpose in calling out that privilege, not to say that no one deserves privilege or that all privileges are the same.

Not so much smug, but annoyed at your meltdown, and I agree it wasn't helpful.

I do get that hearing about privilege, especially if you're exposed to those conversations a lot (or more than others) can be pretty annoying. I've found myself in that seat before and I've felt how, I think, you're feeling.

That said, I've also gotten used to realizing that not everyone hears that point of view every day or even often enough. The hybrid work conversations have been a glass house of just that. Nobody wants to hear how good they have it compared to new entrants, they just want to be getting what they've been getting and in order to do that everyone else needs to fall in line.

The other annoyance that I had was some of your invented strawmen about how I don't empathize for people that make less than I do. I certainly do, and members of my family are among those folks. Like others, I've had to make hard decisions on how to best support them, even if it means at times giving up things that this life could afford me. That's why I do my best to argue for a world where all or most people can succeed; the point of pointing out privilege isn't to say, "You shouldn't have that". It's to say, "Other people should be afforded what you have too, especially if the difference is just geography".

I did mean that I hope you have a better day.

You really tripped off a cliff in interpreting what I wrote.

The person I replied to said, "I got what you got working remotely by living close to where I work". Do you understand now why there's such a far degree of separation between those two things? Far more people can afford to work remotely than those that can afford to live near a tech campus.

Having privilege isn't shameful. Often privilege is gained along side accomplishments that were earned. Hybrid work is a relevant topic, and a lot of people readily eschew remote workers experience by saying, "You can have all that by living close to campus! Oh it's too expensive to buy? Just rent! Oh, rent is expensive and not nearly comparable to my 10 year old mortgage? Get room mates!" It gets old, and they're not proper analogs.

Anyway, sorry you raged hearing about why this wasn't an analog, have a better day.

But, it did take optimizing house location/commute, etc

To spell the quiet part out loud here, what you're describing is an extreme privilege in a world where homes near tech campuses often go for $1M+. New fathers aren't going to have a down payment for even $600k+. Tech at this point starts as a rich persons game which is why so many tech workers intermarry with other wealthy people. It takes two or a trust fund to do what you're talking about early on, unless you want to rent in a place where rents are highly inflated. At that point, you're choosing between a family and any shade of financial freedom.

Maintain 4:1 product engineer to infrastructure engineer ratio. This has been our ratio for the past several years, and it’s worked fairly well, so we intend to maintain it.

Really weird, as someone who works as a Software Engineer in systems. The number of infra programmers you have is not a ratio to be kept with product developers. It's dependent on the versatility, modularity, reliability, and performance of the platform you have internally. More plainly put, if you want only VM orchestration with very minimal features, that's a different head count that support virtual machines, FAAS, and container orchestration.

That nailed what I wanted to know. Thanks!

Despite executing well over the last eight quarters, sustaining high growth and dramatically improving operating margins, there is more to do to secure PagerDuty’s future.

This pattern of laying people off for short term gains is for the birds. It affects the entire industry when patterns like this become normalized. If you wonder why engineers don't stay around more than three years or have perceivably less loyalty, remember these events.

On my credit card I've reported fraud and been reimbursed immediately. On my debit card there's a lot more hassle. I can stop a transaction and I can report the fraud, but it takes a long time to resolve (usually weeks). They're two different systems entirely. For instance, I signed up for a single month of the LA Times as part of a charity drive. They continued billing me for over a year which is clearly fraud. The best I could do was stop the transaction that month and I'd have to contact them for reimbursement before my bank would step in. Basically, "try to do business with the fraudsters first, if they refuse we might help."

I mean, it's not unreasonable. If employees can't do it, why can Andy?

Will people forget about me if I am not on the internet?

I dropped off the internet while I was in the military and deployed, the answer is yes.

That said, I'd like to turn this on its head. It's normal for friends to go out of touch, reconnect in somewhat of a cycle. Some people stay constantly in touch, but not everyone. That isn't normal, and to be quite honest, would be super stressful for me. It's like juggling a dozen hot plates with pancakes being formed on them. You're eventually going to burn one or let it all burn spectacularly. My conclusion was that losing touch with a lot of my high school and college friends wasn't historically abnormal - staying in touch with them forever was.

It's also normal to have different depths of friendships. Not everyone needs to hear your deepest inner thoughts. This kind of summarizes what I think is wrong with social media.

Internet culture and it's subcultures are weird. That's to say, though, that any deeply entrenched culture is kinda weird. They have their own language, memes, attitudes, etc formed and influenced by the adjacency of it's members. That's to say, I look at sports people the way this person looks at the weird assortment they followed to a ketamine party. If you're going to a giant parking lot, ripping your shirt off, screaming, getting black out drunk, screaming at players, devoting precious memory to niche sports and player statistics - are you not mechanically the same as these folks? The difference being that your community is physical.

I’m just being realistic here: that is not possible. The human population dispersing from cities and suburbs doesn’t make physical sense. You wouldn’t live in a rural area anymore if Manhattan decided to move out and go out to towns like yours. Your town would turn into a city in its own right.

Good that you can read between the lines. That is the goal. Bring prosperity to these areas rather than extracting from them so regularly.

The fact that most people concentrate themselves into denser areas makes your rural lifestyle possible in the first place.

Again, another HN fallacy. Rural is not a "lifestyle". Most people don't just move to a place where there's no ambulance services out of a "lifestyle choice". That line of thinking on HN as a default needs a swift and sharp death. Usually it's economic situations. If you start to drift away from the federal definition of rural, which is incredibly specific and not accurate to the average Americans definition, it includes a lot of small towns and cities. There's a lot of overlap as to why people live in those places and, again, it's generally not lifestyle.

I am not sure what I’m supposed to have empathy for here. I never said that rural people are dumb or bad or that nobody should live in rural areas. I have plenty of empathy for humans in general. I personally don’t prefer rural life but I also don’t have any negative feelings toward anyone who wants to live that way.

Empathy isn't just a trait you have or don't have. Not only are there different kinds of empathy, but humans practice empathy selectively based on experience (largely). I'm saying it sounds like you lack perspective based on the things you've said, which often equates to a lack of empathy. Now, if you were raised in a city or suburb and have never left then that explains it. That doesn't make you awful or anything bad, at least in my view, if that's what you need to hear.

I’m just being realistic: concentrated areas where humans live in communities has been our reality since nomadic hunter-gathering was replaced by agriculture.

Those tribes were how big? Nowhere near the density of tech cities or any city with the appropriate concentration of jobs I referenced. My idea is to spread the population out more and make better use of land and resources.

In short, equity. In longer form, a lot of people don't have the chance to leave their towns and that is in part due to opportunity, another way of looking at it is that extracting people out of their communities and consolidating them in cities isn't very equitable. Historically we've relied on colleges to give people a ticket out of where they come from. In the long term that does real damage to those communities. Instead of building them up, using that newly found prosperity, that wealth gets consolidated in cities. If we let people stay near their families, or wherever they prefer to stay, it gives people choice and creates a much more sustainable economic environment.

CEOs will sit on several boards and run a company. I don't see what's so special about the engineer that does it. Is a CEO not an employee?

At what point are you just re-inventing what Ansible already does if you're going down the DSL path

For one, YAML can only emulate one kind of DSL: a declarative language. You have no advanced operations on top of YAML without using modern YAMLv3 syntax which is honestly mind boggling to read at times. Python is far more expressive and has tooling that can strengthen your operational resilience.

I'm honestly trying to understand whether this hating on Ansible is more of a bandwagon thing

I've heard this expression echoed commonly when ones favorite tooling is under critique. Nobody hates Ansible, people do have experience that's taught them not to use something. Whether you feel your case overlaps with theirs is an exercise that pithy internet opinions can't sort out for you.

What are you deploying where you would need static analysis?

Anything sufficiently dynamic. Static analysis is for making things less error prone. There's still all the same runtime problems, but at least there's an expressive path to fixing the runtime problems.

2. If you did end up writing your own DSL on top of Python at what point would you concede that it's probably better to use someone's else creation as opposed to forever iterating on your own thing for the sake of using your own thing?

That's a value judgement as to whether the person you're speaking to feels comfortable writing and maintaining a DSL. In my own experience, I've written things on my own that I had full control over that were sufficiently narrowly defined and I was able to move fast because of those things. I've also sat around waiting for features I'll never get or waiting for someone else's use case to become mine without avail because someone refused to "reinvent the wheel" without realizing the wheel they think exists isn't real.

Why would you want "custom arbitrary operations" and how custom are they that Ansible and Jinja2 can't do that for you in usage patterns that are far more common than your own creation would be?

The custom orchestrators I've written were compensating for software that is deeply entrenched in it's infra and vice versa. Jinja buys me nothing that writing in Python or Go can, and Ansible is providing facilities the languages already give me. Ansible, in this case, is very much there to serve Jinja.

Of course, that's not to say that either way is wrong. Sometimes it's appropriate to use Ansible. Other times it's appropriate to write your own. Even in the latter decision, by doing so, it affords learnings about what you'll need beneath the hood so you can make educated decisions if you roll back to the former.

Does SourceHut still have an aversion to Kubernetes and Docker? Last year I was trying to setup SourceHut on my home infra (which is Docker/SystemD based, but was Kubernetes based) and I was told I'd be banned if I asked about it, and that they don't support that kind of software. Super weird interaction from someone I otherwise used to admire.

I asked for links. I've never bought something like a drill or battery operated saw that didn't come with a battery. Did they come with drill bits or a blade? Not always, but I think a customer can expect a battery and a way to charge it.

The most troubling thing, that is somewhat observable in today's threads, is that ostracizing sex work is almost entirely normalized. People favor legal structures analogous to Don't Ask Don't Tell. This tees up a system of cascading effects:

- Sex workers must now navigate a very fluid monetary system. Sex workers must be paid in cash, Bitcoin, etc. Then they have to somehow represent this money to the federal government to pay their taxes.

- Everyone around sex workers are considered criminals. Unknowingly rent a property to a sex worker? You're a criminal. Date a sex worker? Suspected to be a criminal. Lend money to a sex worker? Criminal. Use sex work services? Definitely a criminal.

This system shoves sex workers into an intentional class system that prohibits them from owning property, prohibits their use of public services, prohibits their utilization of our monetary system. All of these things, when used, don't just benefit the sex workers - they benefit you.

One of the uncomfortable conversations that many people don't want to have is that sex work is heavily used by society and yet neglected constantly, thereby making it dangerous for both sex workers and the users, even making it more dangerous at times.

Being a senior engineer is weird when looking retrospectively. I remember being a junior and experiencing what the author is talking about with respect to puzzlingly staring at my seniors when they could answer obscure questions.

Now I do it and do the same things they did with me: facilitate my thought and troubleshooting process rather than give me answers. I think the people that are successful in Senior+ engineering are that way because of certain technical and character traits they've developed.

One is a willingness to be right in the long run. When I was a young engineer I would make my cases hard with data. As a senior engineer I sit back and let the machine mull for a while because I know that's what the engineering machine will do regardless of how technically right I may be. Another is knowing that right isn't always right. Sometimes the right answer is technically wrong, or the learnings of wrong need to be made before we collectively can be right. Another is a lot of patience; patience for myself, patience for others. I recently admitted I was behind on work because my power was out for three straight days. Young me would've found a coffee shop and worked those days with a single monitor down to the bone. Senior me took my dog to the park.

Not everyone makes it to senior, had I not forked my path in certain places I don't think I would have. My advice, relish your time as non-senior and ask lots of non-technical questions. The technical stuff comes over time and by necessity.

I would call it vigilantism which is a type of definitional terrorism. People in the US don't like that word, but there's a good many things that are terrorism that we don't call such. At the end of the day, violence with political aims is terrorism.