govolckurself

I go to concerts to see bands, not talk to music managers. There's a reason why nobody stays after to chitchat with the head of marketing.

The way to avoid this is for Amazon to hold itself accountable, or, if it is unable to do so, a government. You're telling me the trillion-dollar logistics company can't figure out how to make sure people get the correct items?

If you mean cryptocurrency, then that's wrong, because its primary purpose is to facilitate illegal activity, or grifting. It isn't even good as money, and I still can't buy groceries with Bitcoin, which is like... one of the things money needs to do (buy food).

No, it really won't. You can't replace software developers with linear algebra that writes essays at a sixth-grade level. Or, perhaps the bar really is that low, although high interest rates should help filter out most of the nonsense.

An admission essay is hardly education, it's a pro forma hoop to jump through to get into college (especially now that more and more are ignoring test scores). So you have to invent eight hobbies and convince a bunch of bored administrators that playing the cello since you were four has really helped you overcome adversity, but it's also made you disciplined and ready to take on the world.

I'm very pro-education, and anti-college admissions essay.

The biggest bottleneck in web applications was, is, and ever shall be, roundtrip time to the database, especially now that nobody bothers to install MySQL on the same box anymore, so every query has to go over the network. Of course, that's in a sane web application. Trendier approaches also try to shovel 10 MB of JavaScript over the wire first, so you can then call your API (which is slow for other reasons), and then render the result (which is also slow because you've shoveled 10 MB of JavaScript into the user's browser).

The language you choose matters relatively little.

This is the weirdest gotcha. Nobody said it wasn't source anymore, they implied that it wouldn't be readable or conducive to sharing because it's unreadable.

I expect better from Hacker News. Oh well.

Having been, myself, relentlessly bullied by closed-minded bigots, I can confidently say that getting away from environments like that is priceless.

What? No, there simply isn't enough housing. Prices don't always go up simply because of an increase in the money supply (which is also something you can measure).

You can't host something like Imgur for free. No technological advancement can get over the fact that even electricity still costs money. And at their volume, they have nontrivial expenses. I have no idea how or where they're hosted, but my hobbyist hosting budget tops out around $20 a month. Beyond that, either pay me or leave.

No, but it makes it fairly likely that they were exposed to the fundamentals, like a lack of a degree makes it likely they weren't. "Well, actually, not EVERY CS major knows their fundamentals!" is not nearly as strong of an argument as people seem to think.

graphviz on a dot file to PNG, and then slap that bad boy in the README. Boom. Done.

Pretty sure this is equivalent to solving the Halting Problem, which is... difficult, to say the least. But why should the OS try to stop you from making logic errors? Test your state machines. Test every transition you're interested in. In practice, it's not that big of an issue, and programs hang for more mundane reasons.

Tale as old as time.

1. "We need a better image host!"

2. Makes new image host.

3. Uh oh, hosting costs money.

4. Ads.

5. Lawsuits because illegal stuff. Uh oh, lawyers cost money.

6. "We need a better image host!"

Vegetables aren't as great as ice cream, but you need vegetables, even if they aren't "palatable". Let's end the notion that everything in computer science is easy and hip and fun. No, recurrence relations probably aren't the most exciting, but they're important fundamentals. I expect developers to be adults and learn difficult things, even if they're not "palatable".

Agreed, though. We need to stop pretending 12 weeks of JavaScript is at all equivalent to four years of rigorous theory and practice.

It's not their size that's an issue. But astronomers have already voiced their concerns in great detail. It might be worth exploring the specifics.

Except in the US, the government is... us. Show up to a local city council meeting sometime and tell me how many oligarchs show up to shout down new development, and then tell me how many of your own neighbors show up to do the same. You might be incredibly surprised by whom you see.

It's moot anyway. You shouldn't be able to veto a building you neither own nor live in simply because it doesn't suit your aesthetic tastes (ostensibly. I'm not convinced the accusations of "it's ugly!" aren't just another convenient excuse to shout down new structures).

Are our expectations so low now that developers can't be expected to put in a little effort to learn a text editor? Look, I promise I'm not the smartest guy, but I ground out a few weeks of memorizing key bindings like ten years ago, and that was basically it. M-x apropos and Google fill in the rest of the gaps. I truly don't understand why stuff like this seems to be so hard for people. My hunch is that they just don't want to put in the effort. Which is fine! But please just be honest about it.

Same. Like a moron, apparently, I just use my text editor to get work done.

But how many ads did your Windows 95 start menu have?

Whoa now. Don't go after the cash cow! It's so much harder to rent-seek when people just run regular programs that don't require 10 gigs of RAM and internet access. But where's the career promotion in that?

Depends on whose theory you're talking about. I never understood why budget cuts were the Republican rallying cry, because they're almost entirely meaningless when you mint your own reserve currency. If I could impart one thing and one thing only to every American, it would be that the federal budget does not work like a household budget, and the federal deficit is not a credit card. All of these appeals to overspending are just trying to gin up a very specific flavor of fear.

I would rather solve fun problems than doing endless maintenance tasks.

Not everything in your career will be fun and exciting, and what you consider to be maintenance that you can ignore, some of us consider fundamentals that one ought to know to be considered a serious professional. Food for thought.

Edit: the real lesson is to avoid doing mission-critical, production work for customers without the requisite knowledge. This is hard to hear, but if people don't, they'll overestimate their abilities and get into trouble. It's fine to be junior, it's not fine to oversell your skills.

When all you have is a Heroku, everything starts to look like a nail.

What about those things? They're just glittering generalities, and an appeal to them is frequently used to justify adding ever more complexity to software.

The vast majority of startup web apps don't need anything more than a decent MVC framework (seriously, just use the web as designed) and a fast database. Keep a warm spare of your application running if a box goes down and you need to cut over or something. No, it's not sexy. No, they probably won't invite you to speak at Re:Invent. But your shit will work and it'll be cheap and FAST.

I've seen way too many basic CRUD apps, written by developers who mean well, needlessly overcomplicated in the name of things like "scalability" and "reliability". And guess what? They were some of the least scalable, least reliable applications. I'm talking applications where low double-digit requests per second for basic web pages caused the entire thing to shit itself.

So no, you don't actually need your own mini cloud provider to run a solid service. You just need to know what the hell you're doing.

Docker is difficult to understand in-depth, and, at least in my career, I haven't met too many people who do more than just skim a blog post and then think they know everything about Docker. This is how you get Docker punching holes in your firewall[1] and everyone acting surprised, because they a) didn't read the docs and b) have no idea how firewalls work.

Docker's interface might seem simple, but it adds an entirely new layer of complexity, with semantics only superficially understood by the vast majority of its users, and nobody ever seems to talk about Docker's negatives. A good rule of thumb might be: if you can't accurately explain how Docker works under the hood, or if you don't understand the OS components Docker itself uses, you shouldn't use it.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29576522

But nobody was writing trendy Medium posts about PHP.

Why is "learn more about how to properly host something" never an option for people? And in 2018! Suck it up and learn how to secure a VM, folks, especially if you're turning tutorials into production services. Most of those issues don't just go away when someone builds yet another expensive abstraction on top of a server, I promise.