avg_dev

Thank you both for this note. It helps me remember to practice skepticism in all things.

I believe I still identify strongly with the article and I believe that it is easy for consumers like me to forget that my purchasing actions have many consequences like children and people getting sick because of the plastic waste burning as a result of a recycling program that is largely bs.

But that doesn’t mean I am right, and I feel that it is quite important for me to realize that my sources of information are largely imperfect, often with huge biases present in them.

But, but, all three people who look at my favorites will misunderstand me!

Thanks - I do!

This is a total tangent but I wonder if there is something like a bookmark on HN. I would like to save this link so I can read it later. I could upvote it which seems wrong as it has a social component but then I could see it in my upvotes later. I could favorite it but then it would appear to someone else looking at my favorites that I really loved the article when I haven’t even read it yet. I will take that option so I can see it later because it seems like the lesser of two evils. But I would love to see a reading list or something. (I am the kind of guy who was 500 browser tabs open at a time lol)

thanks for saying this. i believe it to be an important comment and it has helped me.

I really liked his other book The Design of Design as well. They go well together.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33854332 applies here too

oh i completely agree. i dont take issue with the content but the wording. i believe the poster said explicitly the developer was likely quite young. it bugged me. im old now, if anything i probably face the reverse kind of ageism. but i think that comment was ageist

edit: yeah, i looked it up, and i was right. i get the general feeling of a personal attack from the author's text in that paragraph, which irks me. i believe it is quite possible to argue against implementation or functionality without resorting to that sort of thing. its especially funny because the person clearly has no real idea of the situation and makes that clear. no need for that. i do agree with the content of the thoughts otherwise.

what do you use now?

no need to apologize. evergreen in this case means "perpetually self-updating".

i celebrate sharing this knowledge with you today :)

https://xkcd.com/1053/

hmm... https://snapcraft.io/docs/keeping-snaps-up-to-date

> Snaps update automatically, and by default, the snapd daemon checks for updates 4 times a day. Each update check is called a refresh.

i don't know when that line made it into the docs. i could be wrong but i actually thought that being evergreen was one of the selling points of snaps, and was advertised early on.

an edit: sorry upvoters - i went ahead and read the article now. i actually believe now that the article author has a point. to summarize: while it will display a notification to the user about two weeks ahead of time, announcing that an update is scheduled and that the user should close the app to avoid disruptions (the author has some valid complaints about this notification, i think), at the end of the period, the app will be killed - potentially causing unsaved data to be lost - and updated. i believe in many cases this behavior is undesirable. it probably should be discussed and a better alternative proposed.

i do take issue with the author's vehemence against (and manner of expressing such for) the notification, but i suspect i would be quite angry too if i were either an application maintainer fielding complaints about something that i didn't break, or a user who was angry to have lost some data.

thanks. i might try this

i believe that software design is really hard. it seems appropriate to mention "conceptual integrity" which is a term i believe was coined by the (recently) late great fred brooks. his book "the design of design" talks about it a lot and i really found the discussion helpful. here is a very brief summary from his earlier book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month#Concept...

sometimes saying no is the right thing to do.

as an aside, i find it a little distasteful that the author of this blog post chose to call projects out by name. these people are putting their efforts out for free and they are, to my eyes, taking flak for doing so.

very cool. i recall in one of my classes at unversity (i did a compsci degree) we used nachos (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_Another_Completely_Heurist...) and i have vague memories of implementing some kind of virtual memory system with a page table. i also did a microkernel message-passing rtos for the i386 in another class but if i recall correctly, that particular os didn't have to support dynamic allocation (or maybe i have forgotten - it was a long time ago). i am not sure how useful such a limited system would be in practice.

thanks for the information. i am a high level programmer by trade these days, but given enough free time, i think that it would be fun to learn about the internals of the linux kernel in some depth. frankly, it intimidates me a bit (perhaps it should, im not sure).

i enjoyed the article. i believe the gist of it is true in my life.

ive been partial to this poem since i discovered it: https://twitter.com/nktgill/status/1550429172786515968

i will reproduce it here.

Do Not Ask Your Children to Strive

Do not ask your children

to strive for extraordinary lives.

Such striving may seem admirable,

but it is the way of foolishness.

Help them instead to find the wonder

and the marvel of an ordinary life.

Show them the joy of tasting

tomatoes, apples and pears.

Show them how to cry

when pets and people die.

Show them the infinite pleasure

in the touch of a hand.

And make the ordinary come alive for them.

The extraordinary will take care of itself.

- William Martin

i enjoyed the article. i refuse to answer publicly whether i am working on a bullshit software project or not.

i believe in addition to bullshit software projects, there exist projects where the business case is good, but the implementation is very dysfunctional and has poor communication, bad or non-existent coding standards, code architecture and team boundaries that don't make sense, etc. you do talk briefly about this in the quote

> That job also taught me that tech and the business case for a business case are mostly independent. You can have a strong business case and be successful with garbage tech, and the reverse is also true. You should prefer a strong business case because customers are so important.

but i think it is perhaps worthy of it's own article. what to do when your company has thrown so many developers on a project that should have one? what to do when your "design" (term used extremely liberally) has no conceptual integrity? i wish i knew what fred brooks would do.

please go on... would enjoy hearing more.

i could not disagree more.

simply put: code is language. language in textual form is writing. writing is art.

code is art. that is all

I laughed.

By no means am I a religious person, but that certainly is a beautiful prayer.

That is impressive. A goal I will try to aspire to. I may not achieve it and I may not always ask questions - but remaining alert, active, aware, that is pretty badass, and I would like to be that way too.

You know, I was reading some of the comments here and I was thinking, “maybe it wouldn’t be so bad…” but your simple statement brought me back to self congruence. Thanks for that.

I know a lot of people like MMM - I too enjoyed it. “The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.” Still totally valid, IMO.

But I really enjoyed The Design of Design as well.

R.I.P. Mr. Brooks. I thank you for introducing to me the idea of conceptual integrity.

I don’t know you at all aside from this post, so I could be off the mark, but I suspect you need to find a better place of employment. Places where people exercise discretion and aim for quality and ship quality do exist. They are not the norm, but they absolutely exist.

Wow. Really crazy. I know it was not right to revoke the key, he touched into their system. He probably broke someone’s production.

But it was also absolutely the right thing to do. A god mode key floating around for over a year unrevoked, with real human beings’s medical data on the other side… I am glad the post author revoked the key. It is probably too little too late but they did close that door and maybe saved someone some pain: not the negligent development team, but a real patient and human being, perhaps many of them.

More like one of my favorites of all time shilled himself for a quick buck… disappointing.

thanks, i needed this today. also enjoyed the muppets link, thanks dsr_.

the world needs more people like prince, cynthia rose, and susannah melvoin. it would make life richer

i used my imagination and took that to be a very good outcome. can you confirm this is the case?

this is an interesting technique. it sounds a bit difficult, but i will give it a try.

Man, I remember when that was first posted. I just burned a lot of time going back and rereading some of the comments on HN. To be honest, I got tears in my eyes reading the original blog post.

People can be mean sometimes. I know a lot of people call out Twitter as particularly toxic or that it is hard to express yourself clearly in 140 chars. Personally I have a Twitter feed that is filled with positivity and reality and takes on life that educate and uplift me and give me hope for the future. (Threads, anyone?) (Sometimes the reality can be quite depressing. But I can guarantee you nobody is shitting on others like this in my feed. I know there are many problems with Twitter. But to all the people who made it possible for me to learn from so many diverse and brilliant people, a big fucking thank you for that. You have brought me immense joy and made me a more thoughtful and better educated person. I will do my best to remember that no matter what happens.)

I’m finding it hard to resist posting further negativity.

I think Kendrick Lamar said it best:

> In the land where hurt people hurt more people,

> Fuck callin’ it culture…