crdoconnor

Google spent decades selecting for these "moralizers" and is now reaping what it sowed; "don't be evil" was a cultural slogan that carries consequences if it attracts a particular kind of mindset.

And apparently that mindset drove an enormous amount of profit and, at least in the beginning, gave the company some sort of social conscience.

It's amazing that you can be so against these things

One cannot publicly criticize a company while enjoying cushy paychecks

Why is it that you think that the people who see the sausage being made are exactly the ones most unqualified to criticize it?

I'd probably read an article by a ex member of mensa that wrote that.

Arguing vociferously about how that "wasn't such a big deal" would make me wonder what ax you had to grind with people who talk shit about mensa.

To be fair Google did downgrade their "do not evil" value to "it is possible to conduct business without being evil" but it's fair to be reminded of all the evil they do do that led them to downgrade themselves in their own estimation.

A lot of people on hacker news get threatened by collective action. This is understandable, given the number of employers, wannabe employers and people with large portfolios who frequent this site.

This is kind of why I expected some people to make a big deal out of how this isn't a big deal. Tech unionisation is genuinely threatening to many here and this Google walkout stuff is a potential sign of things to come in this industry.

Yes, I remember it was a problem with Django. It wasn't just the application server, you might need to run some scripts, after the database is up, before kicking off the webserver. Any workflow like this is explicitly unaccommodated.

100% of the solutions ive seen to address this problem have been hacky - either polling bash scripts or explicit waits.

docker compose is a piece of shit.

in those instances I'm almost always glad I went afterwards even if I wasn't feeling "hot to trot" before.

https://docs.docker.com/compose/startup-order/

The problem of waiting for a database (for example) to be ready is really just a subset of a much larger problem of distributed systems. In production, your database could become unavailable or move hosts at any time. Your application needs to be resilient to these types of failures.

absolute bullshit. docker compose thinks that it can excuse its bugs by dint of the fact that we're supposed to build "more resilient" applications to accommodate them.

and, their proposed workaround with "wait for" is disgusting. their tool should be able to handle readiness detection. it's so fucking basic.

it's not only this but this is an example of the bullshit in this shitty tool excused with shitty reasons.

docker compose is the tool that winds me up the most.

Racists don't use the term racist to describe what they do either.

Language policing is still big in dem circles.

Nuclear has shown no particular inclination to come down in price whereas renewables have.

It's just not cost effective without both massive implicit and explicit government subsidies.

Renewables are cost effective now and will only become more so.

Reliable and predictable at 2x the cost.

Saving 50% on generation gives you a lot of options in terms of demand shaping and storage.

It's also far, far less capital intensive and doesn't require an uncapped disaster insurance subsidy from the taxpayer.

Curl to shell is usually indicative of a package manager that could be doing a better job.

The point, however, is that the customer/regulator dictates quality standards, not the person assembling the burger.

Whereas apparently many software engineers do not take their cue from customers since they strive for some impossible "no bug policy" (or some other such rubbish).

Correct, it aims for mediocrity. If the customer requested 50 McDonald's hamburger, is it a cultural problem that you're not delivering one steak?

IME that culture, where it exists, varies from organisation to organisation and is driven from the top.

I think a lot of companies don't care about bugs as much as their developers do though, and that isn't necessarily irrational behaviour.

Some kinds of customer facing bugs really are ok to just let happen.

I'm inferring that you believe that the regulators were wrong to ground it.

China's approach with its 737MAX competitor, has, ironically been the exact opposite of this. Their fear wasn't getting the price low enough to satisfy shareholders but not getting the airline approved by US and European regulators.

I was dubious before the crashes but after Boeing's reaction to the crashes I'm fairly sure I'd feel safer on their planes than Boeing's.

It's also a business endeavour that's done a lot of bragging about the number of people it will render jobless. It's not going to be an easy political sell to erect lots of additional road furniture unless it's cheap and unobtrusive.

Luddites complained about the automated loom as well, saying the cost to society was too great despite its benefits

They actually didn't. They just broke them because they (rightly) saw that as an effective means of raising the price of their artisanship.

The luddites are more akin to the Paris Uber strikers - who also weren't anti technology.

The truly damning part was "I wouldn't let my family fly on a plane where the pilot was trained on MAX simulator".

If there is an opportunity to not over-pay, you should be able to start your own firm and put overpaying ones out of business.

Sure, but first lend me a few hundred million in capital would ya?

I realize not every business requires that much but I work for an oil supermajor... so, little hard to do what you're suggesting without your help. The "capital" in "capitalism" keeps getting in the way.

Why not? Wind is a ~50% cheaper source of energy per kWh than nuclear.

Edit : apparently the answer to this question is "downvote" :)

The point is that Chernobyl could have turned Ukraine into an unlivable country. Badly although it was managed, it could have been even worse.

Hard skills are surprisingly small percentage of the overall picture of the person from employment perspective.

This is true outside of tech hubs and in companies with non technical management. What is true in Oklahoma City and Paris isn't necessarily true in SF/NYC

Lots of people who employ developers and wannabe entrepreneurs on hacker news.

Employers tend to be a lot more hostile to unions in the US. This manifests with deliberately spread FUD about unions (e.g. the ridiculous Walmart video), covert attempts to sabotage, depiction of schoolteachers as terrorists (by the Kentucky governor) and, in one rather extreme case, aerial bombardment of striking workers.

Most of the guis are crap because everybody who builds them thinks that a GUI should just be a more or less a visual representation of the command line.

If you look at the Google trends for ruby on rails (where the hype is clear) it looks markedly different to python (steady trend).

I remember that comic - I think it coincided not with anything special happening in the python world, it was just when Randall Munroe learned python.

Eschewing newer technologies in general is clearly a terrible idea but it's not such a bad idea to eschew hyped technologies (particularly corporate driven hype).

Python is an example of a technology that grew relatively slowly and without a hype cycle.

IME hype in this industry correlates pretty strongly with crap.