Hacker News Reader

area51orgon Fornicating Under Consent of King

It's amazing how many people still fall for the 'fuck-as-acronym' myths. I've literally argued with people convinced that FUCK stands for Fornication Under Consent of the King, or (as Van Halen apparently believed) For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge.

No, none of the above. Nope.

area51orgon Apple asks staff to return to office 3 days a week starting in early September

I did. The whole post is worded in a confrontational way, intending to piss people off and start arguments.

area51orgon Apple asks staff to return to office 3 days a week starting in early September

If it's good for you, that's fine. But most of your ideas here are dead wrong. Things like "oh yeah real innovation happens because of hallways conversations" come from pervasive myth, not actual reality. Oh BTW pair programming is much easier over a shared screen, remotely, than it is trying to squish people in front of a single monitor.

area51orgon Employees are quitting instead of giving up working from home

"Company culture" does not arise from physical presence. I've been at this for a long time, and have worked for all types of companies: mandated office presence, flexible WFH, and fully remote. All had company cultures, and the worst were the ones that forced people into an office. Being together in an office does not do anything productive. It does not create camaraderie or a culture, and the mythical hallways conversations that you hear about do not actually happen.

> it is a new challenge that doesn't have a lot of good understanding around how to make it work.

It's been going on for decades now. Time to catch up. Good WFH culture is matter of effective management. Skills required:

- good communication (knowing how to use the tools we have, like IM, video, and yes, even email)

- being responsive (this is a habit that must be cultivated in many cases)

- focus on goals and achievements instead of distractions like seeing someone in a hallway and assuming that if they seem to be working, they must be working

area51orgon Employees are quitting instead of giving up working from home

As someone who's now been in the workforce for decades: presence in an office is mostly a waste of time and money. In my experience, those who demand "facetime" do so because

- it's part of a political power/control game

- "this is the way we've always done it"

- they buy into the myth that "magic" happens in hallways conversations and nowhere else

There are plenty of large companies (and god knows how many startups and SMBs) who have recognized what a colossal waste it is to maintain permanent offices and mandatory facetime. It's time for the rest to stop pretending it's 1980.

area51orgon Launch HN: Curvenote (YC W21) – Collaborative writing tools for science

Somewhat ironically, this kind of thing was what Tim Berners-Lee originally created the Worldwide Web to do. Obviously Curvenote is much more advanced, and meanwhile the web has become something more than Tim had imagined.

area51orgon Freesound just reached 500K Creative Commons sounds

I half expected there to be a torrent for the entire collection. Slightly surprised there isn't one.

area51orgon The tree-based approach to organizing documentation sucks

It's all and none of these things. The single biggest problem with documentation is that it is written by people who are not imagining themselves as the USERS of the software. Typical docs are descriptions of the software, like you'd describe an elephant: here's the trunk, these are what the feet look like. Want to work with an elephant? You're on your own.

area51orgon California Exit Interview: Fleeing $17 salads and 'general lawlessness'

Yeah, my first reaction was: you're fleeing what? SF is not California. It's not even the Bay Area. It's one city. This is what a lot of incoming people never seem to grok, regardless of how much time they spend living in SF. CA is a huge state, the Bay Area is large, and it's not all exactly the same.

OTOH we have too many people anyway, so if they want to leave because of "$17 salads", that's fine. Maybe we can eventually drive places again, without traffic jams. A man can dream.

area51orgon MiniZork: A Functional Adventure

The Scott Adams adventure games were variations on the Colossal Cave adventure game, not really Zork. Crowther & Woods, man.

area51orgon The Virus Changed. Now We Must ‘Get to Zero’ or Face Catastrophe

None of the variants so far are any more lethal than the original. Isn't that right? I have heard nothing to the contrary, although this guy seems to think it's already happened.

area51orgon Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

Debian/Ubuntu are great. However, there are people and companies that prefer the Red Hat way. That's also great.

area51orgon CentOS 8 vs. Amazon Linux 2

... which makes Amazon Linux more relevant than ever. There's now OEL and Amazon Linux unless you want to live on the edge with CentOS Stream. (If there are others based on RHEL, I can't think of them. Yes, I'm well aware of Ubuntu and Debian. There's nothing wrong with them, but some folks need RHEL for various reasons.)

area51orgon It’s Time to Embrace Kubernetes Really?

Does that actually happen with GKE? If so: do not use GKE. Other vendors surely have better-supported k8s services.

area51orgon It’s Time to Embrace Kubernetes Really?

Setup = a k8s service? You should have support from the vendor, period.

Setup = rep groups, internal services, etc? You need k8s-savvy ops people, or really good devs who like ops stuff.

area51orgon It’s Time to Embrace Kubernetes Really?

It really depends on what your needs are and whether your provider's k8s service addresses them. AKS for example does work but, I'm told, is missing some fundamental stuff in regards to security etc. (Caveat: I only know this through others.)

OTOH if a service is available and would work for someone's use case, by all means, use the service. I've set up native k8s clusters just as exercises, and it's no picnic–and I didn't need to manage those clusters, later. Just doing build exercises alone was enough to scare me straight.

area51orgon It’s Time to Embrace Kubernetes Really?

And, not everything should be in a container. Just because you can does not necessarily mean you should. Containers are awesome but they are not a cure-all silver bullet.

area51orgon It’s Time to Embrace Kubernetes Really?

Thx for writing that. To me it seems mind-boggling that in the 21st century you still have to point out to people that you shouldn't just adopt a technology because it seems cool. Of course you should ask yourself what problem you're trying to solve. Apparently people still don't get this.

I'm not sure I agree about templating YAML files–why is templating JSON any better, really?–but YMMV.

area51orgon Docker Considered Harmful (2016)

I'll pile on: this is a bad article. It's considered harmful. It's also just a set of arbitrary opinions positioned as information. It is not information. It is just noise.

area51orgon Source: Microsoft mulled an $8B bid for Slack, will focus on Skype instead

Every feature you mention was available in the '90s. I'm not saying Slack is bad, just that it's nothing impressive or innovative. The only surprising thing about it is that someone didn't make it sooner.

area51orgon Source: Microsoft mulled an $8B bid for Slack, will focus on Skype instead

Adium has a plugin available (OCS) that lets you connect. No video or audio, but if you just need IM to work, this'll do the job.

area51orgon Source: Microsoft mulled an $8B bid for Slack, will focus on Skype instead

Between the two I'd pick Slack, hands-down. Lync is awful, and I have to use it—so I use the Adium with the OCS plugin instead. It doesn't do audio calls or video, but it is stable and fast. (For video, hangouts are much better anyway.)

Slack? I use it, but I don't see the attraction. It's just another chat client with a couple of cute features. I'm really not clear on why the world seems so enamored with something that's really not much of an improvement on something we had in 1995.

area51orgon 90% of the billion dollar unicorn startups are in trouble

What's missing from this guy's evaluation: whether or not any of these unicorns are close to or at profitability, and what their actual market potential is.

If the businesses are based on bullshit, then he's probably right. If the valuations truly are wildly out of control (and it does seem like it), then sure, they're due for a correction.

It's also worth keeping mind that if there are 144 of these startups, 90% of them is 129. That doesn't add up to that much money in SV terms. This seems like a tempest in a teapot. People love to make headlines, it seems, with "OMG bubble OMG!"

area51orgon CoreOS brings end-to-end trusted computing to containers

There are lots of companies doing a lot more with containers than just using them in a pipeline. Google, for instance, runs all of its apps (including search) in containers (using Google's own container framework, LMCTFY), managed by Kubernetes.

area51orgon Ask HN: What's your favorite online course?

Thanks for posting this.

area51orgon The O-Ring Theory of DevOps

It's a catch-all that's used far too often to mean too many things. I once came across a post (from Red Hat maybe?) insisting that "doing DevOps" meant that you "get management and the techies together and talk about the elephant in the room". There was no explanation of what this elephant might be, or how having a meeting was "doing DevOps".

area51orgon Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

Openshift user here: there is no downside. Bronze truly is $0/mo. It's just that you have to given them a CC number (while you do not need to do that for the "free" plan). Why the CC number? Bronze lets you pay for more features if you want them—but there's no obligation.

area51orgon Where did the principle of secrecy in correspondence go?

Privacy as a legal construct is relatively recent.

It's as old as the fourth amendment.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

area51orgon What's Lost When Most People Work from Home

I don't think anything is lost at all. Organizational habits are important here: if you don't have a good set of communication tools and people who know how to use them, you may very well think that you're missing something. Hallways conversations—at least in my own experience—rarely or never amount to much. But if I do get a sudden brainstorm, and I can jump onto a quick google hangout or otherwise run it by someone, then I haven't lost anything. Physical presence is a distraction; good communication is what's important.

area51orgon What Killed Smalltalk?

don’t perform very well (see CPython, Ruby)

Sigh. I really wish that smart people would stop spreading myths. Ruby, at least, performs quite well. The "Ruby is slow" days are years behind us.