virvar

This is anecdotal, but I had a positive experience with the lack of privacy recently. I bought a baby stroller, after doing the typical research and finding a used model, I ended up buying a new one from some babyshop. All the pictures had shown the thing with the stroller “hat/head/sunscreen thing” (sorry I don’t know the English word for kalche), anyway, it wasn’t included and that was why the brand new stroller had been priced the same as the used ones.

But it’s bought and it’s nice, so whatever I hit the manufacturer website and find the correct product and google it, and get a flash sale from one of our most prominent baby stores. It was 350 Danish kr including delivery. Without closing the tap I check a few baby shops and a price checker website and see it’s actually 600-700 Danish krs everywhere, including on from the company the flash sale on google is form. So I buy it.

Apparently I hit the right combination of search history, and store advertising/inventory at exactly the right time.

Being curious I called my local baby store to ask why they could flash sale me at half price, and after a bit back and forth they apparently do this thing where they’ll catch you early with a cheap item and then when you come back they to buy it the next day it’ll be priced higher, except by then you’ve made up your mind to buy it and will pay the extra and I was just lucky having already made up my mind when I got it because the other store has been cheeky.

Not really related to DDG, but it’s the first time selling my privacy has paid off.

I wonder what the author means when he says “ classical polymorphic OOP”. In my experience, subtyping is the absolute worst part of OOP. More so in an enterprise setting, where after two decades, you end up with some really mutated weird ass looking ducks (Animal).

As far as functions vs class go, both are terrible to maintain in the long run. Both lead you on a never ending path of go-to-definition, because the documentation is rotten and the tests aren’t right/even there. The only difference is whether or not you want to search a few large or a metric fuckton of single responsibility files.

Maybe it’s different if your code bases aren’t crap and you’re a better developer than me.

I live in Denmark, where we lift a lot of the burden of civilisation together, to give everyone access to education, health/elderly/child care as well as a solid security system for those who get unemployed.

And here society is hard enough these days, pressing more and more people beyond their limits. I really wonder how you all do it in America.

I work in the public sector of Europe. One of the primary reasons that we prefer Azure and AWS to google cloud is support.

When things go really wrong on our office365 platform or any part of Azure, Seattle will call us on the the hour with updates until it’s fixed. We have programs within Microsoft support where our developers and sysops can suggest changes, and if the suggestions gather enough popularity and fit within whatever criteria Microsoft have internally they’ll happen.

AWS didn’t always have the great support they do now, but as far as cloud operations (the nerdy bits) go, I think they’re actually better at it than even Microsoft. It build up gradually along with GDPR, but they were the first of the major three to offer things like support for AWS services that’s actually located within the European Union. I’m not updated on Microsoft, but AWS may still be the only company to do that.

Compare that to Google, where we get to talk with an automated system, the same as though we weren’t a 3,3 billion a year budget organisation. I’ve had better personal support for my free google account than I have for our company google cloud account.

Don’t get me wrong, we would probably have a lot of GDPR related reasons to prefer Azure or AWS even if google had better support, but the lack of support means we’ve never gotten beyond that step in our risk assessments.

I think there has been a steady reduction in the required IT personal needed to do a lot of things. Need a web-page/web-store? You buy a standard product for almost no money, and you don’t really need anyone to run it for you. 25 years ago that was a several month project that involves a dozen of engineers and had a costly fee attached to after launch support.

At the same time we’ve come up with a bunch of new stuff which gave those engineers new jobs.

I do see some reduction in office workers by automation. We still haven’t succeeded with getting non coders to do RPA development for their repetitive tasks, but the tools are getting better and better and our workers are getting more and more tech savvy. In a decade every new hire will have had programming in school, like they have had math today. They may not be experts, but they’ll be able to do a lot of the things we still need developers to do, while primary being there to do whatever business logic they do.

But I’m not too worried, we moved all of our service to virtual a decade ago and are now moving more and more into places like Azure, and it hasn’t reduced the need for sysops engineers. If anything it’s only increased the requirements for them. In the late 90ies you could hire any computer nerdy kid to operate your servers, and you’d probably be alright, today you’ll want someone who really knows what they are doing within whatever complex setup you have.

The same will be true for developers to some extend, but I do think we’ll continue the trend where you’ll need to be actually specialised at something to be really useful. If virtual reality becomes the new smartphone, you’ll have two decades of gold rush there, and that’s not likely to be the last thing that changes our lives with entirely new tech.

When do you need to drop a column in a production DB? Maybe my anecdotal bubble is about to burst, but I work in the public sector, and have for a while and on our 200 different production DBs behind around 300 systems we’ve never dropped a column.

I really wish a lot of things started with the conclusion or TLDR. I have ADHD and I have issues reading to the end of an email without skipping and quitting before the end.

I mean, I know there is a certain way to write research articles and that they aren’t exactly meant for people with attention problems, but without people like you I’d never see the conclusion. Hell I might even look for it and then not find it and forget all about it.

I kind of knew exercise was good for me though. I even like doing it. The real issue is to begin to exercising instead of just thinking about starting it for a whole day without actually getting started.

We don’t censor fiction.

Well, what would stop them from doing that anyway? Look at Poland or Turkey, it’s not like a constitution is going to save a democracy.

I always found America’s grips on these things a tad weird. In my country you’re accountable to print the truth, and if you don’t, it comes with fines or even prison time. Because lying to the public is dangerous.

That hasn’t stopped opinion pieces, but it has stopped media outlets from printing things like “the earth is flat” or “drinking bleach cures covid”. Unfortunately this is yet to apply to social media stars, but when they have audiences larger than news papers I think they should frankly be under the same laws.

Yet in America you seem to put that sort of thing in the same box as Chinese censorship. Which is really just so strange to me. Do you really think you can have a functioning democracy when people live in completely different bubbles of subjective truth?

Not necessarily, but if you can justify one thing for yourself then it should help you understand why other people behave similarly.

Whether buying hardware or working for google is worse is another debate, but you should be able to see why people can work at google and not necessarily feel guilty about it.

How do you buy hardware? I’m genuinely asking because where I live it’s impossible to buy stuff that wasn’t made in China.

It’s almost impossible to lead en ethical life in this day and age if you do anything related to tech.

I think they are choosing react native because they genuinely like react.

I don’t remember which video it was exactly, but one of the higher ups talked about future technologies within Microsoft and how they were doing more and more GUI-based thing with react. And if you look at it, they’ve done pretty amazing things within the JavaScript eco-system in general. Office 365 is amazing, Visual Studio Code is amazing and it just wouldn’t make sense for them to go from typescript to dart.

Especially when you consider how unfinished flutter is. We’re a C#/power shell with a little Python shop with a lot of Enterprise Microsoft techs. We still considered Flutter because Xamarin wasn’t working out for us and we’re not big on JS or big enough to do native, but flutter just doesn’t fill our needs either. That’s anecdotal, but the difference is that react and react native are proven techs and flutter still isn’t.

I work for a city, I think you can be pretty certain that they are doing both. Hell, the team that’s working on unemployment benefits probably didn’t hear about this project before they read about it here on HN.

We’ve gone from using four or five different team/project management SaaS tools to using what’s coming with our already purchased office365 for business subscriptions.

I know it’s anecdotal, and while it’s certainly great for us, it’s also quite a lot of money that isn’t entering the market because things like teams and planner are now standard products.

I think the next few decades will be increasingly hard for the SaaS market, because big tech will simply implement the best ideas out there into their current subscriptions.

Really? I really like it. I almost solely use Facebook to organise blood bowl matches, so it’s a lot of group chats and events, and it’s so much better than the old design.

I haven’t noticed it being slower either, it’s certainly not fast, but it’s not really something I notice either.

This was my thoughts going into it, unfortunately a static ip turned out to cost around the same where I live. :(

This is the issue. The “no-code” + “no real oversight” tools don’t really work for us, but we wish they did. ;)

I’m Danish and I work in the public sector, so factor that into my anecdotal experience. We would take it serious, some people get into high positions quickly. We would ask you about it out of interest and we would also ask you about why you stepped down/took a lower position, but I don’t think anyone would go into an interview not believing you.

That’s not my experience at least. Sometimes you’ll get a candidate where it turns out that they aren’t as good at something as they made it sound, but I can’t recall a single time someone ever doubted a candidate before the person made us have a reason to doubt them.

I’d probably pick the new iPhone SE. Unless you have something personal against using Apple products it seems like the perfect fit for what you want at a decent price point.

We operate 300ish IT systems of various size, from handling vacation time between leaders/employees to full fledged SAP solutions. We have 10,000 employees but only 5 developers of which 2 are also operations engineers developers. If an employee needs a little bit to automate some small workflow, to save them a few hours a week, that’s way below the scope of where we would get involved to do an RPA process. But that doesn’t mean we don’t want people to automate those tasks. In the ideal world we wouldn’t need RPA, because much of what it does is things that should work smarter in our current systems. But the enterprise world is far from ideal.

We didn’t use one of the big consultant houses like EY. We didn’t because we have plenty of business process people, project managers and so on ourselves. And that’s typically what the big consultants mainly offer, they offer it along with tech consultants that are often from some partner. We started by gathering info on what was available, as well as what we thought we needed and we drew on experiences from other cities. Many places had gone with the big consultant agencies and gotten this big package on the business end, and one or two processes build with the tech consultant, and then their project stranded because the business part doesn’t actually build RPA processes.

We decided to go with a small local startup, where we bought hours and “open” consulting. We did brainstorms with them, but then we build things ourselves and had them review it, and we put a much larger focus on learning the technical parts - and well - we are now the leading city on this area if you compare the 96 cities that aren’t our two largest cities. So from my anecdotal view, that is far better than using the big consultant agencies.

I named EY, and that may give them bad publicity here, but EY was actually the best of the big package offers that we didn’t decide to go with. Which is why their name stuck with me, so it’s a little unfair if this makes them look bad.

Yes, as an example we can run docker (for windows) on our own VMs or (all) in our Azure setup.

If they actually worked they might not be so bad. I’ve never gotten my otherwise beloved mx3s to do one single thing I wanted them to do while using the touch controls, but I can see how pausing a song, adjusting volume or forwarding might be nice if it actually worked.

I work in the digitalisation department of a danish city. We have a couple of running processes.

Mainly for paying already approved bills and benefits through different systems. Which aren’t only web based.

But we had/have an intention of letting people use personal automation tools like this project when/if the right setup becomes available.

As someone who implemented and runs RPA in the public sector I would be interested if you made a couple of things come true.

No one offers an easy way to let employees build and share “personal” bots. Part of this has to do with non-programmers having a much harder time understanding things like loops than we imagined they would. Another problem is maintaining business process logic and knowledge as employees come and go. And lastly there is the security thing. In an enterprise setting you probably won’t want to run this in someone else’s cloud, you want to run it through your IT operations in your own onsite/cloud/whatever to both utilise your local accessing rights but also to make sure data never leaves you.

Maybe we’re not who you are targeting, but we’ve yet to find a product that actually lets us let employees build small bots in a way that fits into our IT operations, and this is quite a big market in my country.

Of course you’ll be late to the table, and not be what the big consultant agencies like EY are partnered with. But what they are currently selling isn’t actually what we need.

So good luck, I’ll certainly add you to our “keep a look out” list.

I think the resale value is Apples real strength. When I upgraded my 2016 13” mbp to the new airbook, Apple offered 60-70% of the airbook cost in return for the mbp. Because tech-wise there are just so many hood options. I ended up selling it to a local third party reseller that I’ve used in the past for 80% of the cost of the air. I can’t remember the original price for the mbp, but it was around what the air cost me.

Compare that to the surface pro my wife has, which essentially lost all its value the moment she walked out the store. It’s an excellent machine by all means, and Linux subsystem is great, but it’s not actually cheaper than a Mac when you factor in the resale value.

I do live in Denmark, and things may be different elsewhere, but the only hardware that has any resale value around here is Apple.

Why do you think it’s a silly reason? I don’t want to spend a lot of hours every day working with something I genuinely dislike.

Don’t get me wrong, I know I’m fortunate enough since I get to pick and chose, but the time we spend on project management, even as developers, isn’t exactly insignificant.

I’ve turned down job offers I was interested in from companies because I found out they use the atlassian stuff, that’s how much I dislike it.

I wonder if I’m the only one.

Doesn’t the react tutorial end after what’s basically a hello world project? Some people prefer a lot more guidance than that.

Denmark has a long term plan, which requires a sharp lockdown at first to make sure hospitals weren’t overrun, and to buy time to get our own production of protection gear and testing kits going.

We’re currently entering stage two of the plan which involves mass testing, quarantine for positives and a gradual opening of society while social gatherings of 10+ remain “illegal”. This stage will last until there is a vaccine.

I think most European countries aside from the UK has had pretty decent plans and responses because Italy showed everyone it was necessary. At the same time those plans are incredibly adoptive and agile because new information is made available all the time.

It’s hard to say though, I have access to the crisis group in the municipality where I work, and things coming from the top has been extremely coordinated throughout the whole thing, but at the same time, no one really knows what goes on inside the command bunker as we’re all just receiving instructions and sending data back.