user123456780

I have an old metal break in the garage I have been meaning to make a laptop chassis out of copper or brass. I think it would be dope to have a unique looking steam-punkish designed laptop

I really like this interface. If this had a 'fast' version it would replace the landing page of hacker news for me

Would you prefer to hit a "Check for Notifications" button or would you prefer to just get a notification. The latter option has a million times better UX.

I would a love a button for every action. Particularly for things like check for notifications. The current problem is that someone else believes they know what a better UX is, any by better they mean better for the company for whatever reason.

one where you don't trust the server

And you can't trust the server here because its publishing 3rd party content in the way of search results.

The risk reward ratio of mentioned above is to far in the risk for my liking

I'm in this tweet and I'm not sure I like it. But I have to say my veggie patch is pretty dope at the moment

You start by making your first sale, then you're a company.

The questions are how do you make your first sale? What are you selling? How will anyone know that you're selling something?

Nearly every aspect of game development is challenging and transferrable

I think thats if you dive into engine development alongside game development.

What I have found is a lot of newer game developers don't know the fundamentals because unity just takes care of it. Instead of spending time learning about data structures and the complexity of building a large interconnected codebase they memorise the unity api and learn how to make 'free floating' scripts that don't have to solve the hard problems.

I used to prioritise game developers when hiring for my corporate job. But I am finding this is less of marker of a good developer. Game development is still hard because it requires a huge amount of knowledge across many disciplines. Games programming has become significantly easier since the rise of unity and unreal.

You can see a correlation between healthy and unhealthy games in their icons.

Ungealthy games are mostly high quality 'renders' for lack of a better term. The healthy games have a much less attention grabbing 'lower quality' icon.

I used to work for a government organisation and it was the same. Once I got disillusioned with what I was doing I would put in bare minimum effort which was, show up for standup every day, filibuster a bit then checkout. I was still one of the highest out-putters in the department.

When there are consequences for you being wrong

Being masterfully either technically, socially, or politically have a lot to do with it too, it seems.

I don't think you need to be a master to get more money. What I have noticed as a hiring manager/tech lead is candidates/team members fall into either asking for more money or not.

I have guys on my team who if they asked for money I could easily add 20 - 50k to their salary. But they don't, they also don't shop themselves about. They're low risk of jumping ship and if they do, I can offer them a huge amount to stay or with the savings I have made over the years I can replace them at market rates, suffer the disruption of introducing a new team member and still be ahead.

I luckily learnt early on the best thing to do for your career is just ask for more money. Every 6 months I ask for a pay rise. I don't always get it and if I don't I ask 'what do I need to do get more money'. Your boss should be able to tell you what you need to do to justify another 10 - 20k to your salary

My experience on the acquirer side is that startup engineers like to just build stuff and deploy it

This has been my experience exactly. Automation has a high upfront cost where that payoff is in the long term. As a startup the priority is on income now. Not cost saving that pays off over the next year.

As a former middle manager I completely agree with this. It can be a very difficult role. I called it the the A-symmetry of knowledge. As a tech person on tools you have such a small view of the company at large and all of the other issues that are going on. Most of which you as a manager cannot/should not share with your team.

I have had tech leads come to me with solid solutions for their little slice of the world except it would be detrimental to another team or project that you can't talk about yet.

So you have to delicately tip to about your tech team with out upsetting them. Which is difficult because they largely see you as useless middle management. All this while doing the dance with the senior managers/execs justifying why your team deserves bonuses and pay rises, or taking their half baked ideas and 180 flips in directions and trying to calm them and figure out what problem it is they actually want solved.

your self reward mechanism changes, as well as the problems youre solving in your 20s are generally new problems to you.

Once you have been coding for 10+, 20+ years you'll come to realise that there is a repeating set of problems you're solving. I haven't seen a truely new problem in a long time. Granted the predominate code I write is for corporate web apps.

But starting out in my 20s everything was new and fun. The reward for solving a thing, or shipping a feature felt great. Now its just one of many features I have shipped that are all more or less the same.

Also another big factor I think is I am significantly more productive now than when I was in my 20s. I would have had to work 80+ hours back then to keep up with myself now

The QLD ones suffer the same issue. I imagine not as bad. But anecdotally the plain paper codes scan as fast as you want. The laminated ones you have to move the camera about to make sure there is no glare interfering with the image

Most people don't care, some people care but won't do anything about it, and some people think that "If i'm not doing anything wrong I have nothing to worry about". Most Australians trust the government will do the right thing.

I think that is because of media portraying these laws as a positive thing. Almost exactly the line you're talking about. I'm pretty sure I have heard politicians saying exactly: "If i'm not doing anything wrong I have nothing to worry about"

Its a sad but true fact that 99% of Australians (probably rest of the western world) only gets their ongoing education (beyond high school/bachelors in a specific industry) from the mainstream media. And we have close enough to dictator level of media diversity pushing a single narrative. Its not wonder people dont care about their privacy being eroded.

I don't know why but I really thought Australia was the most stable continent in the world (I guess thanks Education Queensland).

I have lived here my whole life and never experienced an Earthquake.

Unfortunately our politicians are controlled by Rupert Murdoch and funded by BHP/Coal...

Even though people may not be engaged in politics mandatory voting is important. It reduces extremist politics and the constant need to be increasingly divisive. It forces regression to the mean.

In non mandatory voting systems the politicians need to motivate people to the polls. The default of the population is apathy so to generate action you appeal to the extremes who are the most likely to act. The more people you can make act the more you can get to vote for you.

But with mandatory voting the apathetic mass (who are most likely to be moderates as they don't really care but generally are reasonable educated people and don't agree with the extremist views) cast almost random votes which smoothes out the skew to the extremes non mandatory voting causes.

I'd like this to be honest (from an infrastructure point of view). If the time is known for an influx of traffic I can prepare for that.

I currently look after a system which gets random spikes of traffic thats critical to serve. Which means I more or less need to run a huge amount of redundant servers 24 hours a day incase there is a spike at 2am.

We have horizontal scaling but our traffic has little lead time.

Gameboy-lookalike devices

Most of these are too hard to deal with. Also developing for these devices is a huge pain the ass.

Im excited for this device because its taken game dev as a first citizen. This toy looks to be more about game dev than it is about game play. While play is important part of the eco system that market is soo saturated from AAA billion dollar companies all the way to obscure Gameboy-lookalike devices.

But game dev, and particularly game dev for a device is still a difficult and underserved (I hope for the success of this company) market.

This was me for 10+ years from leaving home through uni to early career. I lived 2km outside of the Brisbane CBD in a really nice neighbourhood on less than 1000AUD a month. It was enough money that I could eat well, afford beer and go out on the town every now an again.

The cost of share housing hasn't gone up by a huge amount either. I am currently renting out the down stairs of my house (its dual living) for $150 a week per room (2 rooms). Each room gets a 2nd study room as well. Again this is in a nice neighbourhood about 2.5km from the CBD.

Yay another non sql fearing js dev. I feel as though we're rare

Wow my dyslexia sure did skip the word Audio in the title. Not listened to them as an audio book sorry!

Clean Code - Robert Martin. <-- this is without a doubt the number one book to read in my opinion

Working With Legacy Code - Michael Feathers

Hi fellow successful dev!

You have more or less exactly the same story I had at the start of my career. Im just about 5 years a head of you. So I am hoping this advice can help save some of my 'wasted' years.

I went through a period about 4-5 years ago of similar depression and for me it was real burn out induced depression. Though at the time i would never had thought i was anywhere near burnout. I was getting accolades at work, promotions and more money, had a beautiful girlfriend who was very supportive. Life should have been good. It was truely the worst time in my life.

I only began the process of finding out what was wrong with me because i couldn't sleep and got so exhausted I was physically struggling to get out of bed. Like the signal from my brain was not reaching my legs when i wanted to swing out of bed. I thought I had cancer or something along those lines. I was 6'4" and 136 pounds. Went to the GP, did all sorts of tests, I think the GP was humouring me and building up the idea it was burn out induced anxiety and depression.

Went to a psychiatrist (best choice I ever made). She helped deal with the anxiety and the immediate acute suffering, also helped me regulate life so I wasn't destroying myself. I opted to not take any drugs to help, she taught me breathing techniques and thought patterns to build up some mental resilience/mindfulness. But the most important thing she told me was this. Your mind and your body are soo intrinsically connected. She told me I should start exorcising for 45mins a day of vigorous exorcise.

I definitely had never really considered the mind body connection in any more depth than a pass comment at a party or something. But it's very true, they're the same thing. It took me at least a year and a few false starts after that to really get going properly. But go to the gym and work yourself into the ground. At first it will feel shit, you wont really see any improvements for a few weeks to a few months.

But push through that and it more or less fixed everything for me. I swear in the first year of working out I gained like 10-20 IQ points. My mind is sooo much more clear, I can hold so many more variables in my head at once. Programming is fun again, literally colours are brighter, life is fun again. I don't have any neck, shoulder or back pain everything feels great. I now go to the gym minimum 4 days a week and I am so certain its this that has helped me, because if I miss even a week I start to slip into depression again. My sleeping pattern gets fucked, I eat bad (shitty food at shitty times), things start to get increasingly bad. I then go back to the gym and almost overnight things start getting better.

The last piece of advice I can give is get a PT when you start out. Signup for a minimum of two sessions a week for 3 months. I don't need a PT to help me with technique or to show me how to use the equipment properly any more (I definitely did for the first 6 months). But despite me knowing how important working out is, I almost never want to do it. Having a PT is really important for my motivation. During harder weeks having an external motivator of 'I have paid for the session I have to go', or 'Roger is waiting for me I can't cancel now' is really helpful.

Sorry for the wall of text and I hope that helps

"The infrastructure" to share cat pictures cost peanuts

lol at this. Go setup that infrastructure and see how far you get for peanuts.

I completely agree with this. I went through the process of learning/attempting to learn haxe earlier in the year. (I was on a nostalgia 'I want to build flash games again' journey)

There is lots of information. But not a lot of direction. I thought about writing some stuff on 'here is how to get started building a game'. But I started running out of steam when I hit some bugs with heaps and the newest version of haxe.

This is the way. I did this for a few months to burn through some of my leave budget. It was great Wednesday became my chores day. Get the house in order, go to the bank whatever. Then the weekend was entirely spent on luxury and entertainment.

My overall output was reasonably similar to that of a 5 day week because I came at work with a waay better attitude. It also made it easier to plan 2 days of work instead of 5. I also spent a chunk of my Wednesday thinking about work and how to tackle the next two days.

That meant I could without guilt take the weekend entirely off and not even think about work at all.