StaticRedux

Now do that for a month. Or even a week. You may be more productive bc you don't want to be seen as slacking off with someone watching, but maintaining that kind of pace is untenable. Did you ever get stuck and check your email or Facebook just to give your brain a little break? Did you ever sit, unsure of your next move? Or did you do the first thing you thought of, even if it was wrong, so you didn't look like you were wasting time?

Intense productivity with someone looking over your shoulder is great for a day. After a week you'll want to quit. After a month you'll want to kill yourself.

I was referring to Iceland/Norway more there.

Pretending Canada or Iceland or Norway are some kind of utopia where everyone is rich, in perfect health, eats pixie dust, and shits rainbows isn't doing anyone any favors.

Those countries have their own problems, even if they aren't the same as in the United States.

Different cultures, different economies, different priorities.

You can't solve a problem by saying "look how awesome this homogenous country with a population the size of a medium sized US city is!".

That argument will always fall flat on it's face. And on deaf ears.

Certainly we can and should learn from other countries. But it's getting really tiring to hear these empty arguments trying to hold some other country up as some kind of wonderous Paradise when it's simply not true.

Definitely a league of it's own in difficulty of refactoring

The entire point of the original article is that Google's constant killing of products makes everyone fear what will be next, bc even seemingly popular products get killed off for little to no reason. The entire point of this article is that Google's own actions are fanning the flames of this speculation.

Ruby on Rails - fastest from zero to working prototype, fastest from working prototype to unmaintainable nightmare.

No one should be surprised when the "language/framework for non-programmers" results in a codebase that was clearly made by non-programmers.

Microsoft, please make one for Ruby! C# vet and lover of VS and VS Code, now working on a legacy Ruby/Rails code base and hating a new life of lifecycle callbacks, fat controllers, fat models, magic methods, and un-upgradeable gems. Ugh.

Companies like Microsoft, Google, and Facebook are huge open source contributors specifically bc they can get a return on their investment. While your intentions may be noble, I think you'll find that more restrictive licenses will have the exact opposite effect and open source projects and contributions will be quickly whither and die.

Open source was never about preventing people from making money on the works they create, it is about preventing companies from telling people what they can and can't do with that code. It is about insuring forward progress and the ability to build on what other people do, making it better, and ensuring that that future is not meddled with. Or restricted.

And there are plenty of licenses that accomplish that, the GPL and it's offshoots chief among them.

Yes

Not everything requires imagination. Sometimes explanation is good too. While it may be obvious to you, other people find it enlightening and interesting.

For funsies.

Windows Shell for Linux (Kernel).

I've been wanting this for years. With .Net Core, PowerShell for Linux, MS SQL for Linux, and WSL, I feel like (hope) that that is where they are headed, and if so, it's going to be awesome. A Linux OS with Windows on top and full compatibility for DirectX, games, Office, etc.

Ugh, one can dream...

Not to be snarky, but this sounds like the viewpoint of a front end developer. One I disagree with. It would be like someone saying front end developers are unnecessary bc anyone can spin up a WordPress site and then go get a coffee.

Can you get a backend going for a thousand users fairly quickly and easily? Sure. But that's the WordPress equivalent of describing back end development. If you have any kind of process based workflow with varying parameters, integration with hardware, detailed reporting / analytics, hell, if you even deal with money or dates/ times / timezones, which is any non-trivial application, backend development gets real complex real fast.

It may be trivial to spin up a WordPress site, but it isn't too put together a solid, reliable React / Redux PWA with isomorphic rendering and offline support. It may be trivial to serve a few API endpoints straight out of the database, but it isn't when you have workflows and processes and states and have to deal with shit like GDPR.

> But there's not a ton of serious thinking involved.

Give a fucking break. The only way this could ever be true is if you only have experience working on extremely trivial applications with no complex functionality.

So the Apple philosophy is, "when things get hard, don't bother, just walk away and abandon your current customers"? Sounds like a real winner.

Holding tight to 'all that legacy crap' is what makes Windows the de facto standard for desktop.

Despite people trying to insist on it being business practices from twenty years ago, the simple fact is that Microsoft dominated, and still dominates, bc of backwards compatibility, a lesson that Apple has never learned (or never cared to learn) and why they will never have more than a few percent market share on the desktop.

And despite the gossip bloggers constant nonsense, the desktop market is still be much alive and thriving.

> Nothing I'm aware of comes close to Java in this,

C#. No Type Erasure. More powerful reflection with less code. Not to mention the unbelievable power of Roslyn and being able to programmatically generate code with little effort.

If you love Java reflection, your mind will be blown by C#'s.

Then you're lucky. I specialize in refactoring and reorganizing extremely messy and large / complex applications. And Rails is my fucking nightmare. Especially when untangling ActiveRecord callbacks, fat controllers, convention over configuration, magic method, and database changes.

I would give a kidney to have static compilation in rails when refactoring.

You're absolutely right, you're just completely ignoring context. Some things break down a lot sooner. Eating or drinking too much of anything can kill you, even water. But drinking acid will get you there a whole lot faster. Rails is the acid of the programming world.

Assuming you don't know something to be definitely false, and you really really hope it works, is that the same as lying? I'm seriously asking in the context of your comment. People raise investor money all the time on the promise of hope. Does that make these people criminals? (Obviously if you 100% know it to be false, it's a lie, but the context of your comment is not definitely knowing it's false, but instead really really hoping it works)

It's not about reading minds, it's about taking the initiative to make things better or get things done without specifically being told what to do.

And there is a big difference between people that can and people that can't.

If your significant other reminded you to go to the grocery store, would you get a general idea of what she wanted and go get a bunch of stuff you know y'all need, even if it isn't on the list? Or would you only get the exact things she wrote on the list and nothing else, even though if you applied some initiative you'd realize that she wanted to make pancakes and she forgot to put milk on the list so you go ahead and grab the milk also.

It seems obvious, but you'd be surprised how many people stick exactly to the list and don't take that initiative.

Not the Op but I hire the same way and there is some questions I like to ask to gauge people's interest in "getting things done".

I like to ask about their passions outside of work. Video games? Sports? Communities they may be a part of?

I am not looking for passions that align with the company, I am looking for passion itself. Does this person like to dig into the details and figure out how something works and how they can make it better or do they just like something and not show much deeper interest? Do they tinker or try to make things better on the things they are passionate about? Do they even have things they are passionate about? (You'd be surprised how many people can't really answer this question, even in casual conversation.)

It's not full proof, but I've found that people that go the extra mile, people that are passionate and inquisitive and not always happy with the status quo, are people that are more likely to take the initiative when working on a project for me. At that point, it's my job to spark their interest in the product so they will (hopefully) apply that passion in the same way.

"Actions have consequences"

Yep. And in today's world, those consequences seem to be all or nothing, death penalty forever with no forgiveness or forgetting, no matter what, or let them completely off the hook and pretend like you don't know anything at all.

The same people calling for everyone to always remember what Microsoft did 20 years ago log out of HN and go work on their Facebook React app with no apparent sense of irony.

So while you are reminding everyone of how terrible Microsoft was 20 years ago, you should probably be shutting down your Facebook, Instagram, and Google accounts, throwing away your Android phone, deleting any projects you have that use React.js, TypeScript, Angular, Go, Dart, and a lot more, and generally cleaning out everything that isn't completely FOSS from your life.

Bc if you aren't, then you really don't give a crap about Microsoft's behavior, you just care about looking cool by talking shit about Microsoft and everyone knowing how knowledgeable you are about their history from 20 years ago, even if you are willfully ignoring the same and worse behavior by many, many companies today.

I understand your point, and you aren't wrong, but you are short-sighted. You may only sell to big clients now, but you are also leaving a lot of money on the table for yourself, not your company, yourself.

You've been selling for 20 years? How many of your customers have you had for longer than 3?

Now I can hear your mind churning, 'but I'm at a different company now! I don't sell the same thing!'. It doesn't matter. Sales is sales. And the best sales people foster relationships for years before they really sell the big bucks. And can go back to those same clients and sell different products and it's easy because those clients know them and trust them.

Ever get that little pang of jealousy wondering why that guy you know in sales plays golf every day with clients and doesn't seem to do much else? It's not because he's just that good. He's not. He might even suck. It's most likely bc he has been building relationships with those clients for years and they would buy a cactus as a new pillow if he asked them to.

This attitude of telling the little guy to piss off bc he isn't your type of client might make for some ok sales now, maybe you even have a shiny BMW, but it doesn't make for long term relationships with people who trust you. Once those people at that big company move on to bigger and better things, you'll be stuck grinding it out with whoever they replace them with.

I take it you work hard. You're certainly passionate. But after 20 years in sales, you shouldn't have to be working hard. Whether you changed companies and products every six months or still work for the same company, you should have been building relationships.

Instead you are content writing off the little guy as a waste of your time. The same senior management you grind it out to sell to now who was a little guy 20 years ago. And the same little guys who will be senior management in 10 - 20 years.

I imagine you'll still be grinding it out every day then also, instead of playing golf like you should be.

The explosion propelled him through the Milky Way at 5 million miles an hour until he came back around to earth.

I may be wrong, but from what I remember, it didn't show add because Google refused to allow access to the official API in order to show ads. It kind of forced Microsoft's hand.

I would argue that the _only_ way you can come in to the phone market is through the high end.

In order to sell at the low end, you need to sell a lot. A new company doesn't have the market share to make a low end phone with almost no margin profitable in any reasonable amount of time.

On top of which, people with the money to buy high end phones are the ones with the money to throw away their perfectly fine phone in order to get the latest and greatest toys, and the ones that want to do so so they can brag that they have this cool phone that not that many people know about.

The main problem was not the price, it was the execution. False promises, late releases, poor support, general lack of transparency. The execution was abysmal, but people were willing to pay the price.

Why does attempting to do so mean they think it's easy?

This might be the funniest comment/reply I've ever seen on HN.

The attack that never happened and/or has never been proven?

From the line you yourself posted:

"Webb's series led to three federal investigations, none of which found evidence of any conspiracy by the CIA or its employees to bring drugs into the United States."

While I agree that ActiveRecord is really good in a lot of ways, the entire ecosystem around it is a giant clusterf* waiting to happen, and it always does. Fat models, callbacks, concerns, scopes... changing a model reliably without 100% test coverage is damn near impossible for any relatively complex application and knowing what your model is going to do on any given call is a nightmare when you have a dozen+ callbacks/concerns/scopes/whatever. That 'oh crap I need to deploy a big change, is it going to work right?' feeling never, ever goes away.

I've used both ActiveRecord and Entity Framework extensively. And while Entity Framework definitely has it's drawbacks, it doesn't get any better than Linq in combination with static compilation for a large and complex code base with a lot of moving parts.

And yes, "don't do that" is all well and good when it comes to the 'right' way to do things in Rails/ActiveRecord, but when DHH himself is driving the callback train at full speed and you take a project over from someone who jumped on the bandwagon and didn't actually know how to properly apply these tools to the code, it's going to be a pretty nasty wreck.

You can be damn sure I'd rather take over and refactor a large, messy C#/Linq/Entity Framework project than a large, messy Rails/ActiveRecord project.

Also I could never get over the fact that Rails developers for some reason treat foreign keys like it's ebola. "It's just not the Rails way" is not a good answer for not using foreign keys.