Hacker News Reader

Finsteron The Dunning-Kruger effect may just be a data artefact (2020)

I think it's mostly misapplied. The best example of Dunning-Kruger is an intelligent, competent, Ph.D. in physics thinking 9/11 was faked because "jet fuel can't melt steel", not realizing that steel loses significant tensile strength as it heats up without necessarily melting, which I think most engineers would be aware of. His great knowledge in one area blinds him to his woeful lack of knowledge in another.

Finsteron Broadcom to discontinue free Bitnami Helm charts

crickets

Finsteron Motion Sickness Accessibility in Video Games

Depends on the game, but usually turning up the FOV to much higher than most defaults will help a lot. But screen size, etc. will have an impact as well.

Finsteron Piracy Is Back: Piracy Statistics for 2023

https://slate.com/technology/2011/07/netflix-streaming-is-ki...

> It’s convenient, it’s not that expensive, and the selection is just good enough.

Welp, netflix (and others) are 3 for 3 on eroding those advantages.

Finsteron Stream Compression in NATS

Not sure that it makes sense to compare NATS to gRPC. Maybe the thinking is because gRPC supports bi-directional streaming? The integrations are wildly different, though.

Finsteron Is Software Engineering Real Engineering?

I didn't realize it was time to drag this old chestnut out of storage. Nothing like dusting off a decades long flame war. I'm sure everyone will come to an agreement this time.

Finsteron Slack System Status

Looks like github is down, and aws is having issues, too.

https://downdetector.com/

I should've stayed in bed

Finsteron Web Scrapers Claim to Sell Personal Data on Facebook Users on a Hacker Forum

Is this why facebook is down?

Finsteron UPI: India's Unified Payments Interface

The big concern I have here is that the address resolution seems similar to DNS... Which is very bad, IMHO. Are they taking necessary steps to mitigate ddos and Man in the middle attacks? If they're not, they're seeing themselves up for major disaster.

Finsteron New.css – A classless CSS framework to write modern websites using only HTML

There's already a PR to fix this, looks like there's a missing space after one of the minus signs.

Finsteron Slack Security Incident

From the slack post:

> In other words, if you’re one of the approximately 99% who joined Slack after March 2015 or changed your password since then, this announcement does not apply to you.

Hackers compromising plaintext password would seem to apply to everyone using Slack, whether their account was compromised or not??

Finsteron Fixed – Fixed-place decimal math library for Go

And in the cryptocurrency space, we need way more than 7 decimal places.

Finsteron Google is down

Works on my machine

Finsteron A Parable by Dijkstra (1973)

This seems like it has potential for being the core of an interesting interview question. Maybe something along the lines of "You are hired as the Chief Shunter (lol) of a new rail company and the CEO, to cut costs, has stated that only half of all cars will have toilets. What instructions will you give the shunters? What complications could arise? What is the optimal solution and how would it impact UX?" etc. etc.

Finsteron Microplastics found in 93% of bottled water tested in global study

Couldn't the microplastics just come from the plastic bottles the water is bottled in?

Finsteron Putting the I back in IDE

"Every branch of every repo gets its own sandboxed directory. Your revision history in each branch, including uncommitted stuff, is persisted, as are build artifacts. When you switch contexts, each project is just as you left it."

Isn't that just svn? Why force a git-shaped peg into an svn-shaped hole?

Finsteron Getting Started with Graph Databases

Personally, I don't need to be shown how simple a graph database can be. I need to know how it will interact with real world data.

Finsteron Why we're leaving Heroku

I need a browser plugin or something to let me know when I'm visiting the website of a company that has thrown in with gov't surveillance.

Finsteron The Cold War nuke that fried satellites

Except not, because satellites are now hardened against this kind of radiation as a side effect of hardening against cosmic rays, etc.

source: the article

Finsteron GitFlow considered harmful

I can count on zero hands the number of times I've needed to solve a problem by navigating the branch tree.

I've lost count of the number of times that two eternal branches and feature branches with pull requests (+ code review) has saved major flaws from getting to production.

The develop branch is perfect for automatically deploying our bleeding edge to our test server.

Although, if we move to a more continuous deployment approach, we may transition away from two eternal branches. But when GitFlow was first written about, continuous deployment really wasn't the trend that it is now.

Methods will continue to evolve...

Finsteron The Story of Microsoft's Minecraft Buyout

Who cares? I love reading some of these book exceprts. Got me to buy and read the history of Marvel. This stuff is pretty interesting.

Finsteron FIFA 2014 World Cup live stream architecture

It feels like they reinvented the wheel on a lot of things (especially on the monitoring side). I also wish there was some more detail about the caching/endpoint side of things. We rely heavily on Akamai's services for their edge servers, caching, and site acceleration. I don't see anything like that here, but maybe they're just not mentioning it?

Finsteron Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

They don't have to ban other app stores. All they have to do is require that apps that run on your device be signed by Apple's certificates... which requires the App Store ecosystem.

If you jailbreak device to be able to run unsigned code, of course this restriction goes away and you can use whatever app store you want... like Cydia, for instance.

Finsteron Android’s 10 Millisecond Problem explained

Does this cause audio de-sync issues on Android?

Finsteron The daily stand-up is an anti-pattern

As a lead developer, if my developers are only motivated to do something each day because of being held accountable the next day, then I hired the wrong people. I want people to be self-starters. I shouldn't have to babysit and micromanage what they're doing each day.

We use stand-ups as opportunities to discuss obstacles that people are encountering and discuss opportunities for pair programming. I use them as an option in my training toolkit. If we're working on fairly routine things (like setting up unit tests, database layers, etc.) then I don't bother with stand-ups at all unless I sense a need (like someone hitting a wall).

Finsteron Unreal Engine 4 is now available to everyone for free

Why would breach-of-contract have anything to do with the DMCA?

Finsteron Four ways to a Practical Code Review (2007)

I guess we're already doing these. We use a pull request workflow and I get an email when a developer creates the pull request. I inspect the changes in the request and approve and/or merge the changes into our main development branch. EZPZ

Finsteron Hands-On with Microsoft's New Holographic Goggles

There will still be room for full VR and its applications with a mature AR device like HoloLens.

Finsteron Hands-On with Microsoft's New Holographic Goggles

After seeing that Autodesk is finally iterating on some of their software to support the rapid protoyping/3D printing community in major ways, I'd like to see what kinds of tools Autodesk could come up with. I see Holo Studio as the MS Paint of "Holographic computing" or whatever we're calling it now.

Is that a killer app, I guess not, but if this HoloLens device is really running Windows 10, and the API's are baked into the OS, that puts it MILES ahead of where Google Glass was, and developers will be able to do something more interesting than take photos and share them on Google+.

Finsteron Enclosing the public domain: The restriction of public domain books

I suspect he's referring to all the litigation surrounding Google Book Search.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books#Copyright_infringe...

But as far as I know, there has been no ruling, yet, as everything is either still pending, or settled out of court.