UweSchmidt

My current car has endless knobs:

If I set the volume to 0 the software pauses a recording so I can no longer skip unwanted parts without messing with fast-forward while driving. These smart knobs invite designers to mess with basic functionality that has worked for decades (play, pause, rewind, fast forward)

Occasionally, due to a bug, on cold winter mornings when I set the heating to max, I won't get warm air even after I've driven for a while and the engine is already hot. I then have to move the knob to cold and hot again for the software to register and finally give me some warmth.

I'd like chickenhead knobs that are connected to the functionality as direct as possible, please!

And "feature flags"...

I'd suspect it should be possible to test those 100 microservices. If you can do something, then you can do it twice, especially if your automation is good. If you can't, then maybe some of the systems came together in a non-reproducible or undocumented way and it's time to clean up a little. If you know your traffic you can build load tests that simulate production use.

People objecting to the idea that someone might have pressed the dislike button for whatever reason, unable to handle the mild cognitive dissonance of divergent opinions always stood in stark contrast to the old mantra that graced the signatures of slashdot and other forum comments:

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

Good one!

I was also curious if he taught his kids Haskell but it turns out they just played with Linux.

Reporting inflation is complex and the natural bias is to report it too low, so that more money can be "printed".

The idea of the "Big Mac index" suggests the need for alternative metrics. Consumer organizations should get to work on this and have their index published in the media along with the official numbers.

By now every piece of software and hardware that is in use, every abstraction layer in that computing tower of bable has been thoroughly hacked. Anywhere from plaintext passwords on a server to insane exploits like Rowhammer, those security websites and podcasts have long weekly litanies of tragedy. Additionally there is all-knowing Google, chinese phones phoning home, undocumented functions in intel processors, ISPs sabotaging user encryption, small-time browser plugin writers that get offered high sums for their plugin to get a front row seat to users' browsers, programmers pulling who-knows-what from npm and are probably pwned by time they write 'hello world', phishing, billions of smart devices constantly listening and often filming and we probably only know 10% of what's going on until a Snowden 2.0 comes along.

Yes, all of it is 'fundamentally flawed', and it would take a herculean effort to start over with a clean slate, yes, to figuratively burn it all down and make simple provably correct and safe hardware and a small and minimal OS that has browsing and communications built in.

Anyone?

I think the reason for today's troubles is that we've lost the separation between the public and private space. The public space used to be the world where people dress up and politely navigate crowds of strangers, tolerate free speech and handle confrontations, but then retreat to a private space that's free of cognitive dissonants. For exhaustive coverage of this topic see https://www.ribbonfarm.com/series/domestic-cozy/.

Today's generation grew up sheltered, stayed at home more and was much less exposed to random groups of kids like we did back in the day, having to deal with a general population on playgrounds, soccer fields, sports clubs and mandatory military service. At the same time conflicts can reach you at home if you only look at your phone.

Therefore, everything that happens is always private and personal, and can therefore be objectively harmful. I too experience the cringe, but this generation will reshape society to their needs, however arduous the process may be.

Not what I expected, a gaming PC and some MacBooks in a clean appartment and a live-in girlfriend.

I would have expected a sweet homelab with lots nd lots of hardware to try the ransomware on, in a more "bachelor" environment.

Some merchants can deposit their cash through certain ATMs. Maybe they scan cash confiscated from criminals.

Getting insight from someone's cash transaction over time, in aggregate, is an excercise in statistics and probably yields many interesting and surprising results.

The downfall of Firefox is very convenient for many big players. Google obviously, as they have paid Firefox billions. In the bigger picture, an open, standards-based internet which Mozilla/Firefox stood for, competes with app-stores, data-silos, walled gardens and proprietary solutions of all sorts. Follow the money?

It took a lot of effort by the slashdot intelligentsia to preach the virtues of open source and internet freedom and to riot against violations of those principles. These times are long gone, and today's tech scene would rather like to build one of those closed solutions themselves than keep the old faith alive.

I once got a package in less than 24 hours from a normal online store and still remember the delivery person rushing up and down my stairs. I felt a little embarrassed and would gladly wait a day or two if people in logistics could work at a normal pace without stress.

It's not possible to burn a bridge with a recruiter, these are 'salespeople' who get many no's per day and have pressure to perform.

A recruiter call doesn't mean a company has interest in a candidate. It just means the Amazon job description and your resume both included the word JAVA.

Shoutout to everyone who keeps reading about the woes of home office, but has to work in hospitals, factories, warehouses, or drive a truck.

I enjoy my home office tremendously, but it's still kinda surreal to me how we can all sit at home with our laptops and that somehow keeps the economy going - as if our jobs hadn't been abstract and hyper-specialized already, now some people don't even leave their bed to work.

That's the pre-2016 MBP life. Still very happy with mine from 2013. The new M1-based ones are probably going to be good again, just in time for an upgrade, but we'll see.

I agree that the walkman got very little credit in historical importance. But even the walkman wasn't that widespread; on a train in the 80s or 90s really only a small number of people was using one, as far as I remember. Actual significant changes would have been if, say, an important musical genre was born out of it, or a social movement was enabled by walkmen which is not the case I think.

That's why I said "broad adaptation". These days there are situations where everone in a room is looking into the smartphone. So, the iPhone as a coincidental almaganation of already existing, maturing technologies happened to be in the right place at the right time to be considered as a historic turningpoint, without taking anything away from the pre-existing feature phones wiht J2EE app support.

The cultural change you describe seems to be minor: enjoy music privately, (minor) decline in social interaction.

The iPhone doesn't get credit to be the first, as you said, but triggered the broad adaptation and therefore has the bigger cultural impact across many dimensions.

Mindblowing - no doubt. Changing social culture though? What change did the walkman bring about?

The iPhone expanded the reach of the internet on everyone's lifes and revolutionized social culture and brought an enormous individualism:

- the narcistic selfie with an attractive filter replaced the group picture and changed how people view themselves

- expanded instant messaging, dating apps etc. enabled a lot of interaction but among highly selected individuals or groups

- navigation apps, review apps, spotify etc. enabled an individualistic movement through the world, individually entertained and shielded from strangers and random encounters

These changes, unless superceded by even crazier things in the future, will probably stand out to historians in the far future.

Things are probably not quite there yet, but...

How about a real-time analysis of all security camera footage and everyone's photos and videos, using face recognition and other techniques (movement, clothes associated with a person etc.). Cars are tracked via license plate, if they are not online now anyway. You pay cash but "they" know the serial number of the bill the ATM gave to you and which shop owner gave it back to the bank a little later.

There are probably many patterns that are only known to people who do this kind of thing full time. Maybe there is a very small number of people who buy the very same two items at a gas station. If Amazon knows who's pregnant early, some will know who's trying to go private and why before they know it...

Looks good, thanks.

I'd be glad to check out any examples of software that come close to this ideal.

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- Test Tools: Selenium, Cucumber, Ranorex and others - Loadtesting using Gatling, JMeter - Monitoring using Zabbix - Test Management using JIRA XRay, TestBench and others - advice and consulting on the entire Test Process

Email: uweschmidt@korrektesoftware.de

I like the idea of making a life-changing decision based on a fundamental revelation about life, and catching that "Third Wave" would certainly have been good in the general case, particular regrets about how the details played out in your situation nonwithstanding!?

Boycotting products to change a company's mind won't work because:

- not enough people even know about this issue, understand the consequences or remember to act on it the next time a new phone is due - not enough alternatives on the market, and we're probably already boycotting them for other reasons - even with lower sales a company might not see the cause-and-effect

There is a general trend in the industry to take all kinds of liberties with user data. There is pressure on companies to do something about bad things happening in their clouds. Machine learning folks want to apply their tools to big data and the corpus of everyone's photos is probably nice to work with.

So we would have to tackle these issues on a larger scale.

Ideally debugging any issue should include an improvement of the relevant loging. Then, over time, the system can perform relevant self-checks and cross-references, and spit out a list of potential causes, while retaining detailed logs nested deeper to the right or to the bottom.

On the contrary, I for one am amazed how often no intervention is necessary on automatic merges, given how finnicky compilers are in general! If the teams are not ridiculously large and people mostly work on their own stuff and coordinate work on the "common" part, isn't it mostly good?

There are certainly usability issues with git but I wouldn't literally use Google docs with colored squiggly lines for the changes from Anne and Bob...

I tried to present the arguments around here in a nuanced way. I don't think that there is much of a closed mind or a simplistic binary rejection, or a taboo, on technical topics here on HN.

The onus is on crypto boosters (who are usually invested and would benefit from more hype) to present better arguments and demonstrate the general benefit/feasability of crypto.

Let's see:

- Google: monopolistic tendencies, decline of their search engine, copyright troubles for youtubers, overall bad execution with their projects recently.

- iot: really bad security and privacy, otherwise it would be neat.

- modern websites: gauntlet of cookie banners and modals, ads and surveillance are criticized, page weight often silly, but the capabilities of modern websites are generally appreciated here.

- crypto: enables ransomware and other crime, insane energy use, bad track record of ponzi schemes and hacked services, speculation vehicle with few winners, not generally used/usable for real payments; blockchain-based services not feasible (oracle problem, if possible then killer apps would have appeared, a Hello World program requires mining and melts your CPU, etc.)

Did I sum up HN's sentiment correctly? Could you point out where the lack of self awareness lies?

You clearly have important and valuable software and engineering skills that our industry's recruiting ability has a hard time activating; I hope that you get healthy soon and, if you chose to, are able to find a job that uses, and rewards these skills appropriately.

There is a wide distribution of wealth in capitalist societies, and a lot of it is hidden from sight. Financing a relatively low-budget formative and educational gap year is something thrifty and financially conservative people would do for their kids.

I had my moments, worrying about a friend's finances and professional decisions, only to learn later that, well, there was clearly nothing to worry about.

Reminds me of "Unauthorized Bread" by Cory Doctorow

https://craphound.com/unauthorized-bread/