throwaway66666

There are many forms of tyrants, but there are none so terrible as those stifling their own people in the name of freedom and safety.

Then sadly they probably know who you are already.

I agree with your statement (not with the virtue signaling part, but I will ignore it for now). To me, it reminds me like one of those "I gave $100 to a stranger" youtube videos. That end up making $10k from views.

There is nothing wrong with giving $100 to a person in need, while looking all smug and dressed up, and then... the world congratulates you by giving you a lot more than you gave. Rather than... I don't know, donate the $10k to several people in need to begin with? There is a disgusting fakeness associated with all of these things. A pretense of "Look at me! We are the good guys", while we are filthy narcissistic greedy people under the skin instead. Using somebody else's misery to feed our messiah complex.

Or like those shitty "SOCIAL EXPERIMENTS", will people enjoy being around a hot mom breastfeed in public, but look down on a non-attractive mom breastfeeding in public? Facebook is littered with crap, staged, cheap money-grab, "experiments" like this.

It's like, an action that is acted on seemingly selflessly but contains hidden catches and motives.

It's not bad... just.. icky. I call this the Valentines-day-complex. It pretends to be a celebration of love, but under the hood it's all about chocolates and flowers and spending. It doesn't have to be about spending... but about spending it will be!

Pass.

Didn't facebook try "Is this your friend Bob?" (showing you a picture of some random people) as their forgot password captcha, in the past?

Now that was evil!

I had an imaginary friend. It was a dog. My parents wouldn't get me a puppy, so I just imagined having one.

It was a lot of work because I imagined having to take it for walks (so I would walk around the block), or try to train it. In the end my imaginary dog bit someone (but it was self defense!) and I had to put it to sleep. No wonder I 'm now a depressive adult.

I was asked if I have taken polygraph tests, and if I am willing to take one. They didn't follow up with it, but they seemed serious about it.

That was for a contractor position, not regular employment.

PS. Also drug testing.

Some jobs require it. Not even super-secret top-hacker men-behind-the-curtain type of operations.

If you wanna be a senior sys admin for bed bath and beyond, you 'll be probably getting one.

Do not hire people who do this. Most of them will say "over 200m downloads of npm packages". Go and take a look. If you see things like 'is-not-foo, checks if a given string is not equal to the string "foo"', and 0 meaningful contributions, either pay no attention to these claims or pass.

Cool! Did you have fun and learn a lot? Nice, thanks for sharing.

I am going to be downvoted, but this needs to be said.

The problem with the indie developers is that many of them are driven by greed and only greed. But that is hidden behind a veil of "we are the underdogs, passionate people, like you!". In reality, it's just a job like any other, and the "we are passionate", is the equivalent of "we are changing the world by... uhh disrupting!" that startup kool-aid drinkers say.

Let me give you an example. I dated a twitter semi-famous indie dev a while ago. She has a day job but makes games on the side. I have a day job and I make music on the side. I remember I was in a room with her, and was looking in ordering Aztec death whistles (it's a whistle that sounds like a human scream), to use into my music. She asked me "oh and how many people will like that?" To which I answered, "Right now I have 10 listeners. After the death whistles maybe I will have 5" and grinned. I make music for me, not for anyone else. If somebody happens to like it, that's fine. It's a hobby and a form of self-expression, like people cook for themselves or practice archery for themselves. I am not looking into becoming famous. In a sense, I am free to create what i want, and I am limited only but my skills and what I can do, not by what I must do.

She looked troubled... So I stopped and observed. She was looking at how many copies a game sold, and was chatting on FB with another on-twitter-all-day indie dev, about how many copies his game sold. Then she proclaimed that the next title would be different, way more appealing to the masses. I put my guitar down, stopped trying to sing "love will tear us apart" but in tuvan throat singing! And proclaimed, wait you 're selling out? How can you be selling out, the game doesn't even exist yet!!

She replied "So what? There is no same in wanting to make a good living from your art. Not everybody is like you and is happy with just... playing. Never advancing to the next stage. Never making something meaningful.".

I WAS SHOCKED. I still am. No wonder it didn't work out in the end. But... she told me, she had started making games because the game industry was full of stereotypes. Boys are the space marine, and girls play barbie's mini games, barbie pets her horse, barbie goes on a date with Ken, bullshit. That she wanted to make a difference, it was her passion, she wanted to prove that there can be fun games that are not gender-biased and that everyone can enjoy. I thought it was a noble, experimentation, passion project, like music is for me.

No. No, making games is not the end itself. Making games is means to an end. Indie devs are greed-driven. Not passion driven.

I hanged out with a few of them in GDC this year. They all care about money. I felt like I was at a dinner with C* level people that just like gossiping about IPOs and how much money some friends, or friends of friends of friends raised. All about money. "This game sold 700k copies!!! It uses unity assets". "That guy from romania made X million dollars!?!?".

There was a guy, who put a game on early access, then delayed the game's release for 10 years, because he made enough money to buy a house in San Francisco, and just did... nothing afterwards. Just talks to people with a "holier than thou" attitude. Meanwhile the game aged so bad, it went from a 7/10 to a 3/10 when it finally got out 9 years late!!!! How dare you! All these people who paid you because they believed in you, and you just shit on them when you hit a certain $$$ in your savings account. But I guess... why wouldn't he. He already accomplished his end goal of MONEY.

Early access, what a shitty thing. No self-respecting musician would say; Here are the first 2 tracks of the album. And some drum tracks from the 3rd and 4th piece. Maybe in 5 years you will get the bass track for the 3rd piece too! No movie director would say; we released the green screen version, and when we raise enough money you will get to see the dragons and the elves. Only game devs do that.

The inherent problem I see with indie devs, is that they lie to their audience as much as themselves as well. When I see the new GTA V game, I know what I am getting into. I will pay $60 to run over some people. But with indie devs I am being schooled about the exploration and experimentation. About feelings, about difficult subjects that noone dared to mention in game medium before. I am intrigued, I am captivated, I am in love! And then... you find out that that indie-game, scooby-do-esque pulling the mask off it was Michael Bay, and Michael Bay's 30th transfomers film all along! All about money, all about making investors happy!

Music has forever changed. We musicians accepted that we won't be rich from our music, so we are liberated to scavenge for a few bucks to rent a van and go touring playing in 20-people shows. Usually when I hang out with musicians, we end up smoking weed and committing to jam sessions that may never happen. And then everyone gets really really excited when I pull the death whistle out.

Well, the fact that one of the biggest phone OS supports QR codes natively in the camera, severely reduces the friction that comes from "what's that weird thing, oh it's called a QR code, here's download this app on the appstore. No, not that one, it has a bitcoin miner in it. Yes the free one". Just point your phone to it and it works! Now whether the world outside caught on, or not... where I am from definitely not, however the biggest barrier was the problem I described above.

Nobody has the resources for that. Some companies make OSes, and some companies send rockets to space. Those feats are also powered by thin wrappers over electron. /s

People seem to forget that C++ and opengl is cross-platform. And there are projects far bigger than slack, like ffmpeg and OpenCV that have existed for decades, always had very fast development cycles, with only a subset of the funding and money that Slack has, and stayed native and close to the metal forever.

A better answer would be, that Slack has deemed the benefits that would result from this as not that important. Or that the current team's expertise cannot handle the task. But they always looking into ways of improving the core product and experience.

iOS camera reads QR codes by default. Just point your phone with the default camera app ON. No special mode required. I have a qr code printed on my living room (made to look like andy warhold art, with multiple colored panels etc) so that guests can use the wifi. Pretty convenient.

http://www.youtube.com/index.php

I didn't know youtube's first version was written in php.

Problem with alphanumeric, is you have people from foreign countries who do not even have an english keyboard installed on their phone. Default is probably their native language and they do not care to add a secondary or switch.

Numeric values solve that problem.

edit: drunk typing

But what if you have a total of 3000 engineers. What will all of them do? Perhaps a handful of them can investigate and try new things?

But... will mozilla or the people behind haveibeenpwned know I am using a pwned password? Basically, by checking if you are under risk, do you leak info to 3rd parties that can be used against you, before having the opportunity to protect yourself? Is there any info aobut the near-zero knowledge protocol somewhere? It's a fascinating topic for sure.

Because it comes off as snarky and provides little value I would guess.

I would say that due to jQuery's explosion, framework writers went from geeky technical people to being looked at as heroes. Back in 2007 there was actually a big javascript framework war between jQuery and MooTools. Technical blogs left and right on why jquery is bad, or why mootools ecosystem sucks. It was weird to behold. I don't think I have seen in any other community such rivalry. Even later, when angular vs react vs ember became a thing, people had overly heated arguments about them. That's so odd. In the non-js world, people usually welcome the new approaches provided by new frameworks or question the usefulness of yet another new framework - and it stops there. I suppose framework writers are not rockstars in those communities :)

Javascript framework makers are the new rockstars. People want to be rockstars.

Considering that some astronauts turned youtubers, or netflix documentary actors, the famous once at least. Can you blame them?

Well, I am not doing heavy weight editing or making movies. Most of the time I need to remove audio, resize and re-compress for web, cut the first and last seconds, or splice together 2 videos. Generate thumbs. etc.

I have also fully replaced image editors with imagemagick on the cli and some bash scripts.

From 2014. ( http://adamcadre.ac/14lyttle.html )

"Obama chuckled. “You mean the Chaos Emeralds?”"

For my use I have replaced all GUI video editors, with a bunch of ffmpeg scripts (no irony).

I am wondering why you are being downvoted. This outage could have been prevented with better deployment procedures too.

For example my company (nowhere near the scale of Cloudflare) does progressive deployments. New code is deployed only to a handful machines first, and then as the hours pass and checks remain green it propagates to the rest of the server fleet. Full deployment takes 24 hours. We never had code breaking changes in production in the past 3 years. And before that, us breaking things was the most common occurence for production issues. Of course that's not the only thing we do, good test practices, code reviews etc.

The second thing, is separation of monitoring and production. If production going down takes down the monitoring systems too, you will have a very hard time figuring out what's wrong. Cloudflare says "We had difficulty accessing our own systems because of the outage". That sounds very bad.

I 'd wager there are many wrong things at play here other than "regex is hard". But I guess HN loves cloudflare way too much to ask the hard questions.

I hope everyone in the story recovers. I have tried LSD a few times, and the thing that surprises me the most, is how bad his friends in the story are.

First of all, the rule is, when you get a new batch. 1 person tries a small dose to judge the potency and effects. You never give your friends drugs you have not sampled them first. You can poison yourself, but you may not poison others. Now, assuming this was not LSD they would have caught it early. But assuming that it is...

With inexperienced people you need a trip sitter. Someone who is sober (or is much more experienced) and lays out a plan for the trip. Things that you will watch, music to listen to, when it is time to snack. etc. A good trip sitter can change a bad trip to a good trip very easily. And the preparation for this starts even before taking the drug, by telling you some of the bad things you might experience (thought loops, very strong deja-vu, thinking you are trapped in that moment for eternity) and how to deal with the illusion of each one.

Also since LSD lasts to max 12 hours, it is good to amp the dosage slowly and not all at once. Secondly you need to feel comfortable. If you are in an unfamiliar house, and there is let's say a basement that creeps you out while sober. Oh boy... you 're going to have such a bad time thinking about that basement and all the spooky stuff in it when tripping! You must be comfortable and relaxed. Noone told him that? Noone was there to see he was acting strange? They were cool with him downing 4 doses?

Bad trips can turn good very easily. And feel-good moments quickly take a short dark turn when something unexpected happens (like a random ring of the doorbell - no one was expecting). Yes something that small can cause terror. You need somebody to guide you and take your mind of the bad stuff. I think the best explanation I can give is... remember when you were a kid and you were eating your favorite candy. Do you remember how much better it tasted back then than it does today? Also, imagine that as a kid you watched something that really scared you, but today you 'd laugh at non-scary it actually is. That's pretty much how your perception changes + color hallucinations.

Also... the USA is the only country that has used nuclear weapons against another country. And they dared do it twice!

We think of them as barbarians. They think of us as barbarians. And the cycle of finger pointing goes on. Such a dangerous mindset to have.

Some places (my company included), invite people from client organizations on slack. You can have cross-org accounts and limited access to another org's slack.

We are sadly utilizing this heavily. Disabling notifications in those channels is not permitted as essentially you are required to reply as soon as possible. They exist for the sole reason of instant communication, which I find counter productive but product-xxx people LOVE.

Those guests will not play by your rules. Those guests will play by their bosses rules, who might err on the side of yelling at you at first chance. Things like "QA didn't catch bug X" people pinging on a friday afternoon, rather than going in the process of opening a ticket.

Again you cannot ignore them, and you cannot change this, because these people are paying you. Usually it's team leads that are present in those rooms, so they get all the shit thrown at them at random times, and can only tell themselves "hey I 'm paid better than average so it's part of the job right?". No, no it's not part of the job. Whoever made this decision is dumb, and Slack unfortunately catered to the wrong feature requests and made this too easy to happen too.

Since I am seeing how trigger happy our product managers are to invite the client org's PMs to our Slack, I can only dream that in an ironic twist of fate when Slack's product people reviewed this feature request they immediately loved it too and on a friday evening pinged the slack team leads to hop on it :p

Worse. When and if you post something that facebook guidelines do not like, instead of getting a "we removed your post" message, you will get fined! And that fine, will be instantly covered and subtracted from your account's balance!

New avenues for monetization!

Damn! My current CEO wants to do the same. But he wants people to vote across teams. EG, backend engineer nominates machine learning researcher. Machine learning nominates HR. For a $1000 bonus, or a new ipad previous generation. Reasoning is that the manager cannot approve because that would reward favoritism, so random people nominating random people it is. Bad ideas coming from a good place I guess, but people are going to feel demoralized for sure in the end.

My only complaint for Slack (and any instant messaging app), is the sense of urgency it creates. It has been discussed on HN a lot, but I 've never seen someone complaint about the fact that you can invite to your organization people from other orgs. This feature is beloved by product managers. And hated by everyone else.

See. Before 'Slack', we had 3 channels of communication. 1. Email (usually expectation of getting a reply within hours) 2. Phonecall (reserved for urgent situations, expecting a reply within... seconds) 3. Ticket system that had a little drop-down where you could select urgency. And you would expect a reply based on the urgency.

If you abused the urgency, we had a way to track that, and let you know.

Today however, Slack's "multiple organizations" feature pretty much shadowed the above. Now product manager from client org X, will require that you make a channel called "X-feature Commandos/dream team" then invite everyone involved on the project. Then they will ALWAYS end up wasting everyone's time for no reason. "Hey @here, X page is slow can you check it out?". "Sorry guys my bad. I was under the bay sea riding the Bart! Forgot LTE connections can be finnicky 100m under water. heh (ultra fast parrot emoji)"