blowski

Gerald Weinberg was a prolific author in the tech consultancy space, and most of his writing consists of anecdotes like this. He explains his theories by telling stories, the veracity of which isn’t the point.

On the specific note, I frequently make these mistakes, despite having read his books and knowing the problem to which he’s referring. I say “could you just…” and “we should really do x today”. In the abstract, we can all see the problem, yet it’s easy to forget in reality.

The winner in the “software with passionate users” has to be emacs.

I find this a vague, reductionist view. When I have dinner with my family today, there’s more than one nature, while my own nature has changed in the last 10 years. To say most people have had the same nature at least for the last 300 years is only true if you reduce “nature” to something so banal that it means nothing at all.

we just have phones now

That’s a huge understatement. We have electricity, refrigeration, medicine, mass transit (including international), human rights, enormous increases in population, fast media, internet, nuclear weapons, universal literacy, factory lines, spaceships, cities of many millions of people. Anyone that’s played Civilisation knows how far the tech tree goes once you hit the Enlightenment.

And you can see how much internet and social media have changed society, so imagine the impact of all those things combined on the human brain.

Do you have any specifics on examples of the design being inferior?

Fixed

If you want ChatGPT to say nice things about you (or bad things about your competitors), then you'll need to give it your version of information - at least that will be the line peddled to us.

I've already received emails from SEO snake oil sellers now advertising themselves as being able to influence ChatGPT output.

I'd say this is exactly what the interviewers wanted. They're interested in how you break down the problem, the types of solutions you consider, your understanding of the trade-offs involved. For example, I interviewed somebody who was adamant they could prevent double-booking by polling an end-point and storing the state in Redux. Fantastic JavaScript skills, terrible knowledge of databases.

Good question. I suppose an existing plugin that meets the requirements, or the skills to build one myself.

Doesn't that seem a bit passive aggressive? See what I did there?

Also, there are many UI challenges solved easily by React plugins - e.g. multi-select boxes, datepickers, colour pickers, file uploads, etc. Yes, this is using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. But I don't have a nutcracker, and I do already have a sledgehammer, so why not.

Don't we have that with Patreon, GitHub Sponsors?

I agree, it would be nice to make it easy to donate, and then the donations are spread to others within the ecosystem. But perhaps they're worried about a ruckus when they choose to make a donation someone doesn't agree with, so they'd need to have a layer of bureaucracy that they don't want to manage.

This is true of all famous essays. People remove the nuance included in the body and over-apply the title without really understanding it.

For example "Goto considered harmful". I remember working with a very good programmer who'd used a "goto", and a much less senior one[1] rejected their PR by linking to the article.

[1] I'm ashamed to say it was me, a long time ago.

Some good previous discussions on this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35053118

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21476261

outside EU

Way to kick a Brit when they're down!

Fortunately, we implemented the EU regulations back in 2013, and haven't yet repealed them so I can chargeback on a normal credit card.

I actually do have a right, very specifically my statutory right under the UK's "Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation, and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013" which requires that vendors provide clear and timely information about automatic renewals, which I assert educative.io failed to do in this case.

Startup or not, I expect vendors to be compliant with regulations.

One reason I didn't go back and check was that I always turn this off. Of course, I'm fallible and may have made a mistake here, and so I'll give them the benefit of the doubt on that one. Either way, I encourage people to check.

The other reason is that they didn't send me any kind of email telling me they were going to charge me.

In the UK at least, the vendor needs to show that their process was transparent and fair in order to fulfill their side of the contract. One of the examples specifically called out as unfair is "renewing without sufficient notice".

In this case, they didn't send any kind of email before or after payment.

Absolutely, I'm going through that process at the moment. I posted this in case it helps somebody who doesn't have that protection or has cashflow issues.

The closest I've come to being "blown away" by it was a project where I needed to clone the results of an Excel workbook onto the server, without installing Excel. I started with PHP as my normal language, but it ran into the ground when I had to deal with order of operations, new operators, and cell references.

I'd never really used a Lisp-based language before, but I decided to give Clojure a try, and it was the first time I grokked the value of "the program is the data is the program".

In PHP I had different "things" - operators, functions, scalar variables, class variables - and I needed to think about what was assigned and when. But in Clojure, everything was "data" that I could use to construct bigger pieces of data. Maybe that's obvious to better programmers than me, but my mind was blown.

So they benefit from the extra “regimentation”, although whether they like it or not is another matter.

Youth are happier with more regimentation

Are you saying young people like being given rules?

Yes, I'd be interested to hear that. From initial reports, it sounds like under-investment in QA because of over-confidence in automated QC.

It's an example of a "black swan" or Bertrand Russell's chicken - the same process has worked many times, leading people to make the false conclusion that the risk has become neglible. There's a successful trial period in which the beancounters reduce headcount with no negative consequences. So the trial becomes permanent, people become less careful. And then boom.

They miss that a 1 in 10000 occurence is going to happen eventually, and that "unnecessary expense" which was previously there to mitigate it has now been removed.

From the guidelines:

Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

If you think people shouldn't do this, I'd be interested in hearing why not, and what you'd consider a better alternative.

Yes, good point. Even within React, there's been a big change from class components to functional components and hooks. I imagine LLMs could help with some of that.

I've found it to be more common in organisations with an immature microservices culture, where developers seem to think there are awards for most number of languages used. At some point, sanity takes hold, and there is a process to standardise - involving lots of rewrites of small codebases.

From Wikipedia:

On April 21, 2010, beginning at approximately 14:00 UTC, millions of computers worldwide running Windows XP Service Pack 3 were affected by an erroneous virus definition file update by McAfee, resulting in the removal of a Windows system file (svchost.exe) on those machines, causing machines to lose network access and, in some cases, enter a reboot loop. McAfee rectified this by removing and replacing the faulty DAT file, version 5958, with an emergency DAT file, version 5959 and has posted a fix for the affected machines in their consumer knowledge base.

BBC article from the time: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8636985.stm

It’s hard to imagine “full CSS support” being a selling point for an email client. Even for a free email client, funded by advertising, compatibility with other email clients is necessary for the advertisers.

If they are consistently wrong within a given margin of error, then they are still very useful. I agree that we'd need to define our terms here to have a meaningful debate.