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donw

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hn@123mail.org

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news.ycombinator.com 3y ago

Ask HN: Best upskilling courses for software engineers?

donw
1pts1
news.ycombinator.com 5y ago

Ask HN: How do you host your mailing lists?

donw
1pts1
youtu.be 5y ago

A self-designed prosthetic aluminum hand [video]

donw
2pts1
en.wikipedia.org 6y ago

Milgram Experiment

donw
2pts1
www.stopcovid19.jp 6y ago

Covid-19 Dashboard for Japan

donw
2pts0
medium.com 6y ago

How to Defend Yourself from Statistical Lies

donw
3pts0
vimeo.com 8y ago

The last day of linotype at the NYT (1978) [video]

donw
213pts65
ageofsail.wordpress.com 9y ago

Food in the Age of Sail

donw
1pts0
en.wikipedia.org 9y ago

Leap Second

donw
1pts0
vimeo.com 9y ago

The last day of linotype at the NYT (1978) [video]

donw
1pts0
www.youtube.com 10y ago

Why good leaders make you feel safe

donw
3pts0
werve.net 11y ago

Running Effective Retrospectives

donw
39pts2
news.ycombinator.com 11y ago

Ask HN: Managing copy and site content?

donw
1pts4
news.ycombinator.com 11y ago

Ask HN: How do you deal with users on your machines?

donw
3pts4
werve.net 11y ago

Untangling the God Object

donw
44pts27
werve.net 11y ago

How to write readable code

donw
3pts0
en.wikipedia.org 12y ago

Nixie Tubes: The first electronic displays.

donw
1pts1
www.chesnok.com 12y ago

Tuning a new Postgres server in ten minutes.

donw
3pts0
www.datagenetics.com 14y ago

Some suprising facts from Big Data.

donw
2pts0
news.ycombinator.com 14y ago

Ask HN: Sites like HN in other languages?

donw
2pts1
blog.jruby.org 14y ago

Massive Ruby speed boost with JRuby and Java 7.

donw
147pts78
matadon.tumblr.com 15y ago

Ten things you should know about radiation.

donw
6pts0
www.wepay.com 15y ago

Donations for Japan's Earthquake Victims

donw
1pts1
news.ycombinator.com 15y ago

Tell HN: Tokyo de Hacker boshuuchuu

donw
21pts15
pipeline.corante.com 16y ago

The joys of delicious Nickel Carbonyl

donw
14pts3
james-iry.blogspot.com 16y ago

A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages

donw
163pts13
steve-yegge.blogspot.com 16y ago

Want to torpedo your project? Write lots of code.

donw
4pts0
patterico.com 16y ago

How to use time travel to improve your life.

donw
84pts14
jruby.org 16y ago

Yay, Shiny JRuby 1.5.0RC1

donw
1pts0
www.jwz.org 16y ago

Ask yourself: Will this get my users laid?

donw
37pts12

We need to start teaching everything in Anglo-Saxon:

"Some of the higher samesteads are splitly. That is, when a neitherbit strikes the kernel of one, as for a showdeal ymirstuff-235, it bursts into lesser kernels and free neitherbits; the latter can then split more ymirstuff-235. When this happens, weight shifts into work. It is not much of the whole, but nevertheless it is awesome."

With me on the older side of things, believe it when I tell you that things actually used to, for the most part, Just Work.

"Simple mistakes" and "process breakdowns" were uncommon, notable, and dealt with quickly. Even the cheap stuff tended to last for quite some time, and was often repairable when it failed.

Enshittification is not only real, it is accelerating.

A substantial portion of software engineering -- and the fundamental jobs of a proper Product Owner and UX Designer -- is to turn "vague ideas about what we need to do" into "this widget, on this page, it should work like this"

It's not a pipeline, it's an ongoing conversation within any functional team, but this requires buy-in from management, who is often selected for "line must go up this quarter no matter the cost" over "hey, wouldn't it be cool if this company was still a going concern in twenty years?"

Honestly, that is just bad management. It can make sense if it's your company, but even then, the risk profile is just off the charts. What happens if your only developer leaves or gets sick?

Real engineers think about handling things when stuff goes wrong, not "everything will be on the happy path forever".

Yes, there are constraints, but to me this sounds like an unacceptable level of exposure.

As a manager, I will quite literally ding people for working when they are supposed to be off.

Work during work time, don't work during not-work time. Good practices mean that everyone is important, but nobody is irreplaceable, the team and the work will move along a little slower, but that's fine.

You’ve also had to flip the disk halfway through a movie, it couldn’t do two hours of continuous video, unlike a VHS tape.

The lack of recording was also a killer, if you went with VHS you could record and watch home movies if you had a camera, read videos at the video store, record from broadcast TV, it was much more versatile.

Layoff Thinking 3 months ago

My first job-job got hit by the dotcom crash, but was fortunately a real business with actual revenue, and the CEO was an absolute class act.

He reduced pay, the higher on the food chain you were, the bigger your cut. His cut was the biggest of all, and thanks to him, pretty much everybody at the company kept their jobs, and the company made it through while competitors folded.

That's what leadership looks like, and I can't tell you the kind of loyalty people had to him afterwards.

We collectively decided nothing.

Our political/ruling class wanted more of the pie for themselves, dropped the trade barriers protecting American industry, and gorged themselves on the arbitrage as manufacturing flowed to our chief geopolitcal rival, who was quite happy to accept such a generous gift.

I mentioned this to Claude and this was the response:

Ha! The irony is not lost on anyone.

"We've built the world's most advanced AI coding assistant. It can refactor entire codebases, debug complex issues, and ship production features autonomously. Anyway, here's a terminal bug that makes your screen look like a slot machine. We'll get to it eventually."

I can think of a couple of factors.

One, there's a big urban/non-urban split in American culture. The former are far less likely to know anything about working on cars, nor are they likely to have a friend or uncle that can help.

That cohort is very over-represented on HN.

Second, there's a lot of shady stuff happening in the used car market, and you really do need to be on top of things to not get scammed. We're talking that's absolutely illegal, but also difficult and expensive to enforce, so if you get stuck on the wrong end of a deal, you're just going to eat those costs.