HN user

spoonsort

16 karma
Posts1
Comments14
View on HN

Well said. The company is actually more focused on earth moving, but the same arguments you make apply there, if not even more. Earth moving is a very exhausting job that most would be glad to have automated. A little known fact is that you actually get boiled no matter what machinery you use in there on the black dirt mid day, and it's not totally safe; your machine could roll over if you aren't at the height of your awareness.

Tunnel-visioned article, honestly. I mean, why does he gloss over the fact that scalpers don't care about captchas - they can just outsource solving them to other humans. Giving your driver's license or passport to some entertainment company's security-unaware sysadmins doesn't seem like a good idea either. Maybe just accept the fact that you gotta be lucky to see most famous band in the world in person. There are only x hundred seats for 10 million people...

That just reminded me of original 128MB MP3 players, loaded straight from Napster. Ironically, I still struggle to fill an average sized modern equivalent with 512GB, even with FLAC.

Why is nobody talking about the standards development? They (OS, image formats) could just say all stuff by default assumes SDR and if a media file explicitly calls for HDR even then it cannot have sharp transitions except in special cases, and the software just blocks or truncates any non conforming images. The OS should have had something like this for sound, about 25-30 years ago. For example a brightness aware OS/monitor combo could just outright disallow anything about x nits. And disallow certain contrast levels, in the majority of content.

Yes, this is the whole issue with these kinds of systems. The message gets lost in translation to the user. An OG java applet would say "this app is signed, do you want to continue", and the engineer at the bottom is the only one that knows what that even really means, which is that the applet gets to run outside the sandbox if the user runs it. Windows UAC is similar, as are most Linux desktop security mechanisms.

Not going to lie, that's a pretty out of touch opinion in the current decade, where most software feels an order of magnitude slower and less reactive than a mechanical device made 120 years ago.

Be wary of building a website without a framework to abstract stuff like DOM usage and page generation. Raw webdev is hard, due to lots of compatibility issues at every level (CSS, HTML, JS) and are moving targets. You shouldn't even try it until you understand protocol design and have implemented some medium complexity standards like IRC and a basic DNS client or server.

Ah, I love when I'm a software engineer sitting for coffee in the morning, and I open up my tech newspaper to read some extremely overly verbose way of explaining to me like I was just born that yelling at floor staff doesn't change anything (this is actually not a product of modern society, you could yell at a soldier fighting against you and that also won't change anything). Had to stop after that second massive quote. Seriously, what? I thought this was going to be about managing the 1000 compliance settings in Azure and how that sucks.

Having a @Stable annotation which the standard library can use to signal things to the compiler like that is very smart. I wonder how many standard libraries are missing out on optimizations like this.

That's right up my alley. I've been thinking about writing something in this style but with a jazz biome twist (kind of like steampunk but with a jazz-centric world instead of steam power). Do you use a specific text editor or git workflow to manage your work?

Nah, I'm young and even to me the author's just on the extreme side of "digital native". The first thing I saw in the article was this and knew it was fake, too: "Considering the storage constraints back then" (he's just repeating it, he doesn't know if it's actually applicable). And now you know why random blogs, while insightful, shouldn't be treated as gold truth.