mchaynes

Does watching people program help you become a better programmer?

Same thing with travel

Gen Z here. I grew up on YouTube. I’m 25 now, so technically a cusper but had an iPod touch and YouTube since third grade.

Videos of travel have a lot of value. I was stuck behind a desk for 4 years at my programming job. The last 7 months of travel has done so much for the rest of my entire human experience that I could never get from a textbook. Plus it’s fun to see people explore the world. We’ve been fascinated by this stuff since the beginning of humanity.

Reality videos and reality TV all show elements of how relationship dynamics work. They often are fraught with bad narratives, but they model conflict and resolution between people. This can be helpful as a guide to understanding human interaction.

I’m not saying that it is all bringing value to their lives, but there is something inherently interesting about the content they’re consuming. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be.

The challenge for you is to go into their world and understand what they value. You might even change your definition of the word “value”

would it be possible to install an extension like postgis into this? if so, you might have saved me countless hours attempting to port gdal to wasm…

seems like an inherent limitation of an emergent conscious self coming about through evolution

tmux is my main reason. i love having sessions and being able to have the same setup regardless of whether i’m in an ec2 instance or my macbook

basically yes. kinesis -> firehose -> s3

watch johnny nerd out on youtube. he does tons of conversions.

tmux?

“especially if the business isn’t doing well financially” seems like a thought terminating cliché tbh

I’ve had this exact idea before. How do you imagine the QR code would be shared?

Toxic just means not sustainable essentially. You can’t last for very long when it’s toxic, unless you become toxic yourself

Jump ship. Happiness > Money any day. You always have the opportunity to make more later on in life.

When you see your money start to drain it’ll be a lot easier to start cutting the fat out of your lifestyle.

Geodatadownloader[1][2] solves the problem of "how do I download data from this ArcGIS rest endpoint?" It operates completely in the browser, besides the CDN for the javascript, as well as the ArcGIS online map used to visualize the data you're about to download.

Long term, I'd love to add support for download of multiple file formats. I believe I'll be able to use an emscripten port of GDAL (specifically ogr2ogr) to do this.

[1] https://geodatadownloader.com [2] https://github.com/mchaynes/geodatadownloader

If you have the oculus quest, put on the silicon/rubber piece over the foam. I’m pretty sure that’s how they intended people to use it.

I just had the foam for a while as well and it was disgusting.

I don’t disagree, but fundamentally we need to remove the concept of complete “private ownership” in order to truly transfer power from the ultra powerful to the common people. If Mark Zuckerberg can still influence billions of people on a whim, then we haven’t fixed the fundamental problem. I don’t see a way to keep our system going and also give the people back the power they deserve. If there is a way, then sure let’s do it.

Those other governments had high concentrations of power at the top. They also stifled freedom of speech and freedom of assembly.

Too much power concentrated in one place is what causes horrible stuff. Serfs and Kings, Bureaucrats and common people, 1%’ers and poor people, etc.

It all comes down to concentrations of power.

Your idea is that without getting paid, people will just provide public health work for free, because they .... ?

Because it’s the right thing to do, and people like helping each other and doing the right thing. There are other motivating factors for most people over money. Human beings are generally good and generally do the right thing.

We can build amazing products and not be terrible to other people/companies. Companies rely on public funding and public technologies and therefore are accountable to do right by the public. We always make this false dichotomy of “good products or good companies” and it’s just not true

The profit motive corrupts all. We need to kill capitalism in its current form for these companies to stop being terrible and evil.

There are constant articles on HN about why <insert big company> is doing <terrible monopolistic thing>, and we inevitably talk about how these companies are doing horrible things, while others then go on to say “well look at all the value they’re bringing”. As if both can’t be true at once. It’s an embarrassingly reductive back and forth.

These companies have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to maximize the stock price. This inevitably leads to this behavior.

Of course, everyone on this site secretly wants to build the “next big thing” so they can get famous and incredibly wealthy. You can only become that rich under the current system, so instead of just understanding the fundamental reasons why we see this behavior again and again and again, we bicker about the finer points of governance of these corporations. It’s like arguing about what size bandaid to put over a gaping chest wound.

This site is full of smart people, but our collective greed makes us seem pretty damn stupid

Could not agree more. The movement is about changing our expectations to let us live the lives we want to, not that we need to sit down, shut up and say “thank you” for not starving us

I left amazon after just under 2 years and I agree with everything you wrote here.

You’re asked to move fast but constantly delayed by every team or system you have to interact with. Duct tape abounds and that duct tape is usually “go file a ticket and wait 3 days”. This made scoping your project really difficult. Add 2 weeks of back and forth for each team you had to talk with.

On a more positive note, the reason I stayed was because of my incredible manager and team. My manager was of the best people I’ve ever worked with

Fundamentally the profit motive ruins true innovation

Considering they’re the supplier for amazons electric delivery vehicle fleet, I doubt they’ll run out of money

Your experience allows you to become a force multiplier by teaching/coaching others. Which requires learning that as a skill. Might not be a skill you want, but it’s a skill

And measure. Always measure. Without data it’s all posturing

For very simple programs, sure.

Type checkers do not verify behavior. Unit tests verify behavior

I think it’s probably just a matter of looking at people’s/organization’s incentive structures. If incentives are aligned, things are _probably_ ok.

“The media” is incentivized to either have the largest amount of traffic (ad revenue) or the most amount of money coming in from subscriptions.

Both those incentive models encourage sensationalized media, since that causes people to feel they “need to keep tabs on what’s going on”