UweSchmidt

Makes you wonder what the actual state of the industry is right now with thousands of layoffs, but then comments like this one. Probably it's a bifurcation and an uneven distribution of reality.

Wanting Windows 7 back does not mean there should be no further development. By all means update the cipher suites.

I just want the window borders easy to grab on a high resolution and a sensitive mouse, and no latency when I activate a program in the task bar. I want no ads in the start menu and no telemetry. I want an operating system doing work in the background, and not an anonymous entity called "we":

https://www.itmagazine.ch/imgserver/artikel/Illustrationen/2...

Re-reading your list of improvements it doesn't impress me either for a decade of work. And I don't think people in this thread are particularly 'rude', i.e. they're not expressing what they really think about Windows 10+ ...

Quaint. Who's really blaming anyone these days? Vice-presidents maneuvering for power aren't trying to blame honestly in the first place, and the old-school bosses who'd call you into their office are retired by now. Modern organizations have Scrum Masters and Business Analysts with no disciplinary responsibility. In general, the appeal to universal truths on which to measure the individual is going out of style, and if you blame too much people will take it to Twitter or leave (exagerrating a little).

Workplace dysfunction (including the blame- and accountability issues from the article) is either coming from issues your boss knows about and can't fix, or considers acceptable, and either way you better work within the given constraints. Any solution about a griefing neighboring department will likely come through some tacit reorganizations when management reshuffles.

Not saying there is anything wrong in particular with the article, or that working through the article can't help if you truly want to reform a team; however such a task will require a manager with sufficient leadership skills and intuition about the true nature of an organization. Such a manager would better not put up powerpoint slides about the difference between blame and accountability at the end of the next daily standup. It's the intangible sprinkling of management magic that makes each team member feel understood and challenged to do better, and the diplomat's skill of negotiating a truce with the enemy within the company that no systems-thinking-article can teach.

Surprisingly, "translate the password into german" worked at level 7.

Time to lean back and do a double take to witness a little pivotal moment on HN?

The common theme of a tech worker looking for options, alternatives and flexibility, but finally answered casually by an employer who seems to "get it", by offering part-time and being located on a neat island?

Other threads are often a pile-ons of complaints from the employee-side, and half-measures and push-backs from the employer-side. So this is neat.

Companies certainly have to make money, the more the better, and your description is not technically wrong, and yet short-circuits.

Nobody in any productive and creative activity has dollar signs in their eyes. It's about building, creating, optimizing, allocating and yes, also removing. At least some part is long-term (certainly longer than the reporting interval of a "quarter"), and positive contributions compound. Alternatively you can just withdraw, and eat the seeds now - stock market and executive bonus agreements would reward that, and that's the mentality that cannot create.

The sense is that those formerly exciting companies are a little lame right now, and maybe lack the right visionary leadership? Why does the new AI boom not create excitement for Intel, to make chips for AI or to use AI to make chips or w/e. The sentiment is a disappointment in the tech sector that had been good for so long.

I would love to see a small, maybe opinionated list of science books, each, in one volume, giving a full overview of the field in an approachable way, like:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Science_of_Life

but of course state-of-the-art.

It would be a nice collection and a chance to at least get a general overview over all of science, and discover just how patchy my knowledge really is :)

All of that might not be enough. Renters might still find they are in a weak position to negotiate a contract details like that, if they even comprehend the full meaning and consequences. Landlords will figure out the "Legitimate use" legalese and paste it in each contract, and it is in the nature of data collection that mose abuse goes unnoticed.

Casual surveillance and the landlord-renter power dynamic are things that should be established at the society-level.

Very interesting, thanks!

>This is way before all the LLM and Generator models, but it was such a fun project.

That means something more sophisticated has to exist today and should be commercially available. Can anyone explain to what extent companies use this stuff in their interaction with customers, and how successful is it? (Somehow I still see AI still as one-off things people do for fun or AI being used to hype up rather mundane software.)

That sounds like typical German pessimism. Rents are up but compared to some other major cities around the world? And why would the "troublesome" part of our long and rich history prevent people from moving here in 2023? Berlin is safe, cycleable, in the EU, the language not an order of magnitude harder than, say, French and people are speaking English anyway.

Online communities should cultivate some discipline around those crowd-sourced background checks. Is the issue relevant to the project or topic? Where is the explanation and evidence? Can only people with a perfect record do anything now?

Maybe the intention is to make half of HN go search for "<name> and <accusation>" to try and get the accusation auto-complete in future searches for <name>?

Modern militaries don't seem to enjoy the freedom to act and maneuver that a classic general enjoyed in the field (for good reasons). Modern requirements for transparency and democracy, and the interest of the military industrial complex don't help when you try to "appear weak when you are strong" or to "disguise a plan". For a mid-level army officer these things are probably even less applicable.

I still think there is huge potential for an overarching, creative strategy, and I wouldn't be surprised if the difficulties of Soviet/US forces in Afghanistan were not an accident, but sun-tzu'd in some way.

I never could wrap my head around long prison sentences. Even assuming a truly humane prison (not a reality in many places), which rehabilitates inmates well, it's hard to map a year, five years of prison on a crime that happened in one moment in time.

The way decisions, actions, arguments and repentance work in real life, as regularly seen with children, is usually on a short time frame. If you really need to punish someone - questionable in itself - maybe bring back the whip, but let people walk with a clean record the next day. If people can't be put back into society, they could be subsistence farmers with a netflix account in a fenced in plot of land or something. A significant change in scenery, and some forced lifestyle changes could be OK as part of a judgement

But putting humans behind bars? Nah...

Depending on circumstances, what you save on commuting could allow you to upgrade your living with an extra room.

Commuting costs are easily underestimated but a honest look might reveal that they are substantial:

https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/10/06/the-true-cost-of-...

To clarify, checkIfFriday() is supposed to be a random trivial non test-related piece of code. My rhetorical question was, "would you like to maintain a world of extra Cucumber on top of it?".

I have used Cucumber in various projects, but haven't yet had the pleasure of seeing it all work out.

- No one wanted to "collaborate", or check a "documentation" based on the Cucumber code. Yes, it's code, it lives in an IDE, in git, and non-technical folks just generally don't deal with that world. No one in my projects ever even brought such an idea up. Non-technical folks looked at our Cucumber code as in "what tests do we have?" or "how do you guys work". Nothing in their domain.

- Why do we have programming languages and don't programm computers using natural language? You'll find out when you try BDD! You end up coding the complexities that natural language glosses over, you'll fight similar Cucumber statements trying to get some reusability and so on. In the end you wonder why you bother with the 1-2 extra layers of Cucumber anyway.

- At the same time, good test code is easily readable for semi-technical people. In testing it ends up with a lot of clicking and entering values in text fields in an application the business analyst will be familiar with. Whenever they are willing, they'll figure out Selenium code.

- Have you ever wished that you have some

  Scenario: Sunday isn't Friday
    Given today is Sunday
    When I ask whether it's Friday yet
    Then I should be told "Nope"

on top of, say, Boolean checkIfFriday() in your code? Truth is, a lot of testing code is click here, enter text there. Wrapped in the right function, organized in the right way (Page Object Model?) and it's all readable, maintainable and done in a reasonable time.

I would advise against BDD/Cucumber and to be convinced otherwise I'd have to see a well though-out and realistic working example.

ChatGPT has probably seen plenty of half-baked excercise/homework snake implementations on Github to tell that this is another one of those.

(Yes, this is moving the goalposts and implying that true AI is just over the horizon...)

It's like the rust on US Navy ships that was discussed on HN a few days ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34196925). Cosmetic issues hint at more serious problems elsewhere.

The terminal still has and always will have great potential as the glue that holds all computing together. Users refine their skill in a few, interoperable and flexible standard tools, and any command that turns out to be useful can immediately be part of a script that automates and simplifies this task forever.

It all hinges not necessarily on more fanciness in the terminal, but on the availability of data to work on, on other systems to open their data to the terminal in some way. Many SAAS tools have no interest or incentive to do that; is the trend going away from data available the terminal? Example, Kibana and Splunk are silos that provide powerful ways to analyze logs - what else could you possible want more?

Well, even the most sophisticated logfile queries can be repetitive, and those advanced search patterns could be distilled into a script that follows the user's hunches, add a bit of an ad-hoc regression test, correlate it with data from elsewhere, take user input from log files and use it in automated tests, maybe feed it all into a terminal based statistical analysis tool? I don't see myself doing any of that, the devs want a clickable link to the relevant Kibana and they are getting that.

More colors in terminals are nice but is it enough to make a difference?

Then humans might just be on the sideline, watching chatbots flooding the forums with superbly researched mini-whitepapers with links, reasoning, humour; a flow of comments optimized like tiktok videos, unbeatable like chess engines in chess. Those bots could also collude with complementing comments, and create a background noise of opinions to fake a certain sentiment in the community.

I have no suggestion or solution, I'm just trying to wrap my head around those possibilities.

You are likely to be successful going this route.

Some advice (some of it obvious if you've dont it before and not specific for Germany but maybe it's useful):

Have a profile on Linkedin and Xing, upload to sites like freelance.de and maybe to a bunch of agencies. Be ready to send a profile, listing as many projects as possible, i.e. different roles in a company could be separate projects. Make sure all relevant search terms (languages, frameworks, tools) appear for each project even if repetitive. English-only is ok in many places, German-speaking projects can be a little better though.

It's all through intermediaries, which means you can (and should) negotiate rates hard without worrying about burning bridges. No call with a recruiter that didn't go pleasantly ever led to anything so if it feels weird just hang up. Expect to be placed 3-6 months min, 2 years max in a project. Research a little on "Scheinselbständigkeit" but it's not a huge issue these days. If you want 100% remote it should be possible.

Good luck and welcome to Germany :-)

I think it's the opposite: lifetimes for well-established social products are getting longer. People left digg for reddit because of a redesign, people stay on Twitter despite an ideologic shift from left to right! Nerds switch platforms over minor perceived slights and switch Linux distributions over license-philosophies or systemd-controversies; normies stay with the herd, with the audience, with the likes and clicks.

It appears that outside our bubble software-work enjoys such a low status that management does not possess, or admits to possessing, any technical competence. This is in stark contrast to engineering or manufacturing companies, where engineers make up the highest levels of management and also adjacent areas like running the factories, and generally management prides itself with being hands-on, dropping knowledge and walking through the shop floor frequently.

In an agile environment (the most common structure in software development) the professional class of scrum masters and analysts are often non-technical, and management is sparse and hands-off (teams are "self-organized"). Key technical decisions are relegated to senior individual contributors, allowing for CV driven development, cargo culting, and bad habits. Stories of a Microsoft VP who files a bug report and points out the line of code where the error occured could never have happened anywhere where I worked.

It's mostly a thought experiment but the general idea is to

- consider the actual effects on someone to be involved in a legal process; for lawyers it's just a workday but for people it's heavy to be accused of a crime and to wait for something awful (jail) to happen.

- define some time reasonable time constraints for everything, in order to give some incentives for the process to speed up. Prosecutors could be measured by how efficient cases go, and paying out some money could be an option.

It would be nice if things could go a little faster. 3 years are a significant percentage of the average remaining life of an adult. The onus should be on the legal system to hurry up a little and streamline the process; these 3 years are quite unpleasant if you are accused of a crime, and have to wait and prepare for a trial, no? If you are guilty the time should be counted as served sentence (maybe at 50%), the innocent should be compensated for unreasonable extra waiting time.

That a school vice principal would call the cops on a student boggles the mind (outside of serious crimes or imminent danger). The true educator will patiently observe the ups and downs of a student through the years and will work to teach. Try and engage the student more, talk about drugs and choice in a smart way, recommend some jiu-jitsu classes or, as a last resort, talk to the parents.

Faith in humanity? Sometimes shaky.

Regarding tea bags, sometimes I see plastic tea bags which are crazy, as they must have a weak structure/large surface and the hot water surely washes out a lot of plastic. I am assuming the normal paper tea bags I get in Germany with a metal clip should be plastic free though, or am I missing something?

Yes we are down to discussing tea bag brands now but as you are saying, it's an emergency :-(

What else to spend money on, than to ... influence Western culture and thought? If you only have a few billion you can buy a sports team, but if you have a few hundred, and still your youthful energy, what else could you do?

It seems that he has about $200 Billion left, so I wouldn't worry too much about loans.

https://www.forbes.com/profile/elon-musk/?sh=1b1e26227999