world32

I design and build technology in Vancouver. I spend most of my time working on Slack, a paradigm-shifting tool for team communication. In my work I strive for usefulness, beauty, and positive impact on the lives of others.

From this chap's tag line on his home page it seems like he still identifies strongly with his work and over emphasises the importance of it.

I like how you managed to turn a question about VPC networking on AWS into an advertisement for MongoDB!

The fundamental concepts haven't changed but the applications certainly have. The amount of things you can "do" with technology these days is far more vast than it was 25 years ago.

It seems to me like you expect that coding itself should provide you with interest and excitement. Maybe you should try focusing less on the skill itself but what the skill can be used to build? Do you think that an engineer would look at a drone for the first time and think "boring - its just a bunch of propellers provide lift for the device, I've seen this all before.."? Similarly, do you think that a programmer would learn about RSA crypography and think "boring - its just modular arithmetic and prime factorisation, I've seen all this before"?

All knowledge is built upon that which came before it, so in that sense I dont see how anything could be considered "a new challenge" by your standards?

Asking him to change his personality and what he "enjoys" just so that he can fit in is so absurd to me because it hints at the idea that you should surrender your individuality in order to fit in with the group.

I think you are completely misinterpreting the comment your responding to. That's really not what he said at all. You are essentially take what is a thoughtful suggestion to try and see beyond your prejudices/preconceived notions and turning it into a dumbed down "Just be like normal like everybody else" kind of statement.

But perhaps you do not like the post because maybe you are also one of these "I am smart and interesting and clever and everybody else is a dull, dumb, zombie" types? I might be wrong but I would guess that thats the case.

Sure but now there are two separate codebases for the same API. A lot of code will be duplicated between the two codebases, you'll have to maintain two sets of issues on github etc.

If it were me I would aim to merge the firefox puppeteer into chrome puppeteer but fair enough if they want to keep them separate.

EDIT: I guess it depends on how much of the code in the puppeteer chrome codebase is tightly coupled to chrome dev tools. Like if 25% of specific to chrome, then that would mean that 75% of the code can be shared between the chrome implementation and the firefox one, in that case I think merging and hiding the 25% chrome/firefox specific stuff behind an abstraction layer is the best option.

Its possible. More likely is that this attitude is a defense mechanism for this person to feel better about their lack of emotional and social intelligence.

A stereotypical jock/lad will look down on guys who are not athletic or can't get girls and make fun of the nerd who prefers reading books and contemplating philosophy.

A stereotypical nerd (like the commenter here) will look down on guys who only talk about sports and girls and will write posts like this on hacker news about how dull these people are.

The reality is that all of these aspects of life are important. Knowledge is important for reasons which will be obvious to most HN readers. But so is sport - all humans need physical exercise, the body and mind do not function well without it. So are attractions to the opposite sex - do I need to explain how new humans come to being?

So to say that somebody is dull for wanting to talk about sports or kids is as narrow-minded as it is to say that your dull for wanting to read books.

Yeah, that doesn't answer my question though ;)

It says its based on the mozilla remote protocol: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Remote

"The Firefox Remote Protocol is a low-level debugging interface based on the CDP protocol."

Nice work, I have been using puppeteer with chrome recently and it is a great piece of kit. If the prototype is successful will you keep the chrome and firefox packages separate or merge them and have an abstraction layer so puppeteer can issue commands regardless of chrome/firefox being used for the browser?

Consider that you might not be as intelligent as you think you are. I'm sure you are aware that there is more than one kind of intelligence right? Although you might have a PhD and be very knowledgeable in many subjects, you sound like you are severely lacking in many other kinds of intelligence. So maybe you are not so different from the "dull" people you speak so poorly of?

Absolutely, you are right about that. My point was more to argue against the idea that in eastern europe, kids can run free on the streets because its a mostly white society. More likely is that the kids run free because the parents are not infected with american-style parenting and media-induced fear of everything. Literally nothing to do with race at all.

Ok fair enough, but then why is Romania such a sh*t-hole? (Sorry Romanians). Surely the racial homogeneity there should mean that things are better over there?

No they don't. Gypsies are a large ethnic minority in many eastern european countries. Also, although a religious minority instead of racial, there are a large percentage of Muslims in many of those countries too. Don't forget that the last european genocide over ethnic and religious lines happened in eastern europe too.

Also don't forget their is currently an ONGOING war in the Ukraine over divisions between those who are ethnically Russian and those are ethnically Ukranian.

I'm not preaching diversity as a virtue in itself but the idea that places like Eastern Europe are some kind of ethnic utopia where you can leave your doors unlocked and kids play on the streets just because everybody is white is just absurd.

You know what else has a carbon footprint? The computer that your're using to post on hackernews. How about instead of wasting electricity you go volunteer in your community?

I love dogs and have one myself, but I don't think this is always a good idea. Maybe bring your dog in once a week or something like that but every day is too much. Some people have allergies, some dogs are poorly trained etc.

In my experience people like this think in terms of tools they can use. They read an article about some shiny new thing and watch a conference talk about it and think "wow thats cool, what can I use it for?". Often times their shiny new tech will actually solve a problem, but it might be far from the best solution and it might bring a whole host of other problems.

IMO the key to reason about things like this is to ask "What problem are we solving?", clearly identify it, then brainstorm a list of potential solutions (including whatever shiny new toys this dev wants to use), then run through each solution and list the pros and cons.

Also, try not to start out hostile to the shiny new tech, let the proponent of it do all the talking, just ask questions but don't argue against it, save that for the very last minute. Otherwise it could go a bit sour if you are both clearly on opposing "teams". Finally, try asking the question "what are the downsides of this new technology?".

There was an excellent article published here in the last 6 months about developing in the "problem space" it was about exactly this kind of situation. I just wish I could find a link for it but I can't. Maybe somebody else remembers the title of this article?

"outrage outrage outrage".

No its not normal to speak four languages in Europe.

I'm not saying this kind of situation is the norm, but it happens often enough for it to be "a thing".

EDIT: Academic qualifications are also only a small part of what I'm talking about.

Its a buzzword that essentially means "is the candidate similar to me?".

It can be a cover for clear racism/sexism/agesim etc. but can also be used to discriminate on less clear terms - i.e. maybe all the co-founders at a startup went to Yale, Harvard, MIT etc. but the candidate is a self taught programmer who comes from a poor background in the Midwest. If the candidate shows that he is just like the co-founders (i.e. has the same interests, outlook on life etc.) then he will be a culture fit. But if the candidate has four kids at the age of 29, goes to church every sunday, hunting on the weekends etc. he will not be a culture fit.

In essence, "culture fit" is the result of a company hiring candidates based on aspects of them that should not even be considered at all. It shouldn't matter if the candidate has a large family or no family at all, if they candidate is religious or not, what the candidate political beliefs are - these are all things that should really be kept out of the workplace.

Horrible advice. Deadlifts are a great exercise but can go horribly horribly wrong if you try too hard to lift an amount of weight that is too heavy for you. Instead you should focus on maintaining perfect form on every lift and incrementally add weight the more you progress. If you try and "ego-lift" a huge amount of weight you are risking serious injuries to your back, dont do it.

Also as to what is a heavy amount of what is a light amount - its irrelevant to an individual. You should lift the an amount that pushes you beyond what your comfortable with, but not so much that your risk injury.

However - excercising these quitting fantasies have actually lead to a lot of personal growth, as I was able to test myself and to get to know myself better, not to mention branch out into different areas of life (my projects weren't only in software). And also somehow, after each flop, I've landed a job with similar or better pay than the one I've left.

This is exactly my experience of quitting jobs to do something else. The grass was never as green as I imagined it to be before quitting, but the amount of new skills I learned and experiences I had were 10x what I would have gained from staying in the same job.

"camera in bathroom"

Hmmm, a £150k salary seems much harder thing to achieve than a £750 day rate, I can see quite a few DevOps contract jobs at £750 / day but no permanent ones at £150k! As you say though, it depends on how you look at it..

Really? Thats not my experience at all that contracting earns roughly the same as permanent. Why would anybody do contracting if that was the case?

Maybe earning double is an exaggeration on my part though. For myself I earn 50% more as a contractor than as permanent (this is the net amount after taxes, holidays, accountant fees etc.)

Being snarky and name calling against site guidelines.

Ha, OK.

Has this always been the case with Java? With C? With C++?

Its funny to see all the logical fallacies being used to try and counter a perfectly valid argument! What does this have to do with Java, C or C++? But since you asked, there were always open source compilers for C and C++ (GCC and G++ for example). Java - I don't know, I suspect not, but is Java popular with startups anyway? Why mention it?

It has been open standard since 2001 and the current compiler open source since 2014.

Not sure exactly what Open standard entails?

Essentially, the original argument said that the software ecosystem for .NET has mostly been non-free and non-opensource until very recently (2014 - 2016 as you mentioned), which has meant that for at least a decade startups have avoided it in favour of open source frameworks, so even though it is NOW open source, the damage has already been done. None of these counter-examples actually contradict that original statement. By 2016 open source frameworks like Django, Rails, Symfony had been around for more than a decade and were no longer the "shiny new toy" but generally accepted as mature, stable frameworks on which to build applications. So I think its fair to say that Microsoft's approach to open source has been too little and far far too late.

Fair point but do we have any actual data around the correlation between years of experience and value to a company? Admittedly its probably a hard thing to measure..

Because I can also tell you another anecdotal example of some developers who each had 20+ years experience each and we're quite high ranking they company they worked at:

- They would re-invent the wheel constantly: the framework provided lots of functionality which had been developed and battle tested by thousands of other developers but they couldn't be bothered to learn what was available to them so wrote a lot of functionality from scratch which was usually far more buggy than the open source code available.

- classes which had literally 10,000+ lines of code in them.

- of course the idea of following SOLID principles was never ever going to happen

- a general view that they were the experienced ones who "just made it work and got on with the job" while the younger programmers or those who followed more modern practices were seen by them as being "airy-fairy" and worried about things that didn't matter. that argument might have held weight if the application they built wasn't so awfully riddled with bugs and so poorly architected that mainting it and building new features took ages.

- They had all been working at the same company for at least 15 years, so they were able to ignore the advances made in software development in that time and carry on with their old ways. Of course they could still code new features and fix bugs but they didn't realise that what they were doing could be done in a much much better way.

I'm not saying all old developers are like this. But if somebody is able to tell me that older developers are better because X, then they should be able to accept somebody else disagreeing and saying that older developers are worse because Y. You can't have it both ways.

This mentality is an issue across all age ranges in the UK. For some odd reason employers seem to have a fixed idea of how much an employee should earn for a certain job - and if they can't find any good people for it they usually end up paying more than double to hire contractors. Its quite baffling really. And its not just in IT, I've heard of this same thing happening in social work, medicine, recruitment etc.

You are clearly very bitter about this.

The C# compiler is free and OSS.

Has this always been the case?

.Net Core is available for Linux and MacOS.

A quick wikipedia search shows that .Net core was first released in June 2016, that only supports the view that microsoft has been very late to the game when it comes to open source languages and frameworks.

The original comment that you disagreed with says "Yes, MS later radically changed strategy by making their tools open source and more compatible on Linux.", but despite your hostility nothing in your post actually disagrees with that comment does it?

I think this is a very good point and is definitely part of the reason why we have apparent ageism. This aspect is also compounded by the fact that technologies and paradigms are changing so fast - yes I know software re-invents the wheel a lot, but the fact that you were coding GUIs in the 90s, before some of today's 20-something developers were even born, really doesn't make you that much better of a React.js developer.

I'm not saying the kind of ageism thats being discussed here doesn't exist - the "brogrammer", "culture fit" kind of discrimination. But I think its probably blown out of proportion. Especially for non-bay area companies, it seems like whenever somebody talks about "tech companies" they are referring to a very specific kind of tech company that is really only a relatively small portion of the industry.