creamytaco

Typical zero substance self-help opinion piece masquerading as something better. Complete waste of time.

Thse are all not only solved problems, but solved extremely well. Rust is a bad solution to this problem.

You should be using dynasm https://luajit.org/dynasm.html instead of plain C.

Not very wise to export your (assumed) copyright-infringing activity over to a third party that has complete records of who you are. Folks have been sued for less.

It's called "commoditization". Since programming is now a commodity, the barrier to entry had to be lowered in order to pump up the numbers. Growth at all costs!

There is still rock-solid engineering to be found, usually in domains where the stakes are high (for example, fintech), but anything web-related is best kept away from if one is allergic to bullshit.

His web3 skepticism did not stop him from getting involved with "MobileCoin" some time ago, or was that conveniently forgotten?

https://www.wired.com/story/mobilecoin-cryptocurrency/

I don't see how this is in any way competitive with the current options. It would't be competitive at sub-$500 pricing, nevermind $2000+.

And then there's the platform bit which is the final nail on the coffin. Let's not kid ourselves here, VR at this point in time is all about the ecosystem rather than hardware and if there is no ecosystem [or backing from the heavyweights], odds are one is going to end up with a very expensive paperweight.

Start with:

Varela / Maturana - The Tree of Knowledge

Miller - Living Systems

Prepare to have your mind blown apart.

alias

.. but exa is not backwards compatible with ls OOPS

Which is why I stick with ls (and grep instead of rg and coreutils instead of shiny rust equivalent), I can't deal with the cognitive dissonance that arises from these differences.

"I've never read anything that wasn't a bad regurgitation of ideas better presented elsewhere from this guy, and I have to wonder why he has amassed such a following."

I wrote this 2 months ago, my opinion hasn't changed. I guess there are worse charlatans out there (ribbonfarm springs to mind) but why should one waste his/her time reading chewed takes by someone who doesn't seem to have a single original thought-idea streak in him.

Having lived in SF for more than a decade, I couldn't agree more. When I left, years ago, the guilt syndrome was so prevalent among well-compensated young tech workers that one could talk about mass-psychosis. I'm told it's gotten a lot worse...

that have basis on European ways of handling these sort of issues

I suggest you try shoplifting in any European country and see what happens.

The world doesn't run on "well-meaning" but realpolitik (look it up). The sort of discriminatory policies you espouse besides being corrosive poison to the unifying forces that create a nation state, fail to account for competition among nations.

The USA is free to teach CRT to kids, "decolonize mathematics", destroy meritocracy in public schools, lower the standards and burden young minds with race guilt and a feeling of entitlement (instead of striving for excellence) but one shouldn't be surprised if other countries that have maintained their connection with reality leave us in the dust.

If you're not convinced, history is full of examples of ideology-driven politics leading to disaster : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism

- Designing Data Driven Applications - Kleppmann

OK

- The Art of Unix Programming - Raymond

Waste of time

Pretty much any of the programming books published by No Starch Press

Waste of time (mostly)

1) Learn SQL

OK

2) Absorb everything you possibly can by Rich Hickey and Stu Halloway. "Simple Made Easy"

Disagree. The Clojure ecosystem is a silo and a lot of their edicts do not translate.

ribbonfarm

Waste of time, besides being able to write thousands of words about absolutely nothing, vgr is now pushing web3 / metaverse / cryptos. Charlatan.

You're going to learn most by immersion in an ecosystem

Wrong. You're going to learn most surrounded by people better than you. Find those people and teams and go work with them.

Background: Worked on multiple FAANGs, including Google and Amazon, also fintech, now retired.

You can keep rearranging words around trying to make reality fit your expectations, but I'd say this isn't a useful modeling strategy for going about life. This is what you're missing.

I guess that's how they make money and can afford great customer service, which is also something I'm fine with: I couldn't care less what their interest rate is since I'll never ever pay interest. If that's on the agenda, then I'd look somewhere else as you say.

What you wrote makes me view the Guardian take suspiciously rather than the OP and also fails to address in any way the argument since you -conveniently- ignore all but a tiny fraction that you found a Guardian opinion piece to seemingly not support.

An opinion piece that's also demonstrably false by the way, NZ does not have one of the highest incarceration rates in the developed world: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/incarcera...

I left SF and California years ago and started voting Republican at about the same time. The trigger was me reserving judgment and simply observing how the environment around me changed for the worst, while at the same time having to bring up two young children.

Looking at how things are today, I know I made the right decision.

Relying on libraries written in C is not an issue if the library doesn't make assumptions about / isn't tied to, a particular architecture. Some do but most (especially newer codebases written to C11 and beyond) don't.

I guess you found out you can't rely on Capital One. Never had a problem with AMEX.

Every engineering-driven fintech company I know of (having myself worked there or having friends who work there) is doubling down on every single one of the processes I mentioned.

I worked at engineers-call-the-shots fintech and later SV shops for many years. No, their in-house code is not worse than open-source.

In fact one can safely say that top companies that attract top talent also have methodologies in place that lead to better than average code quality.

Reviewing code is the elephant in the room. Filosotile -perhaps out of ignorance or disconnect- fails to mention that the vast majority of open source projects (log4j being a great recent example) are absolute shit. Nobody should be building anything on top, nevermind giving the maintainers more money.

In-house development, software BOMs, rising of standards and multiple rounds of code review are the processes that the industry is shifting towards and for good reason.

Engineering is not about whether someone "can code", but whether someone can _engineer solutions to problems_. Has this person demonstrated that through the projects he chooses to put on display (and advertise as signal for his ability) on Github?

This is also what a lot of those engineering interviews are trying to ascertain, in a quantitative manner. I couldn't care less about someone's degrees or ivy league schools or Github projects (in isolation). These are all secondary -if that- considerations, problem solving ability being primary.

Your post ought to be ample proof that subjective opinions (like the one you display here) are not solid grounds for hiring decisions.

When looking at this person's Github page, I -unlike you- see a vast number of trivial projects that can best be described as regurgitations of other people's work. Even worse, if you actually look at his first pinned project (https://github.com/kevinburke/nacl), you'll see that it is nothing but a wrapper with trivial changes/updates... an anti-project.

In the end, I see code that provides the illusion of competence but, when actually inspected, is actually telling me not to hire this person. The fact that pretty much anyone can declare oneself "a software engineer" today and easily present a veneer of competence together with powerful financial incentives, makes it absolutely necessary for any serious engineering team to have objective measures in place in order to evaluate candidates.

There are so many terrible engineers out there (and some even slip through the cracks and land at places like FAANG) that doing anything less is irresponsible.

You're being disingenuous. With Manifest v3, it is not possible any more to block requests dynamically which has huge implications for the efficacy of ad blocking (example: forget blocking youtube ads). Additionally, you're limited in how many static rules you can have.

Therefore, it's not just about changing the mechanism, the end result is clearly a lot worse. One can say, they crippled ad-blocking which this change. Hopefully, once the millions of people using ublock origin start noticing what's happening, they will move away from Chrome. I already did, ublock origin is worth more to me than any feature Google puts in Chrome.

Python is terrible at juggling files, setting up pipelines and working with processes. The resulting code is more complicated than the equivalent bash, not to mention longer, and hidden gotchas abound (subprocess deadlocks anyone?). I'll take 50 lines of bash instead of 200+ lines of Python.

For most uses, I consider all of these unwanted at best and potential disasters at worst. If you use them, make sure you understand exactly what each of these do. If you just follow a dictum you found on HN blindly and just copy-paste them, you're in for a world of hurt.

Example for set -e: https://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/105

There's one problem with rants such as these, it's too easy for someone to be exposed as clueless and broadcast his lack of knowledge and assumption-heavy development process to the world. How is that as an advertisement for one's employer?

This is either outright bullshit or a clumsy attempt at historical revisionism. Web2 didn't introduce technology that wasn't existing before. It was the unwashed masses flooding what had previously been a space of high SNR AND the big corporations seizing control (and terms like "web2" were used to that effect) in order to exploit the herd.

This is happening again now with the web3 fad. A new generation of gullible idiots and sociopaths to take them for a ride.

The Mister ecosystem is based on open hardware / software, besides the FPGA which is a necessary evil (and can be replaced in the future).

The "mister multisystem" (which is a proprietary design) comes across like a slap in the face. Don't support blatant opportunistic profiteering.