avg_dev

I try to never post about downvotes, but I am breaking my rule: everyone who downvoted you is suffering from Stockholm syndrome.

I just flat out disagree with

> Taste and skill are totally independent.

As my facility with code has grown, so has my sense of taste. I see beauty in code much more clearly than early in my journey. This is true of other things in my life as well.

I have a lot of respect for both Linus Torvalds and Junio Hamano. I think git has been very important, Linux even moreso. But why didn’t darcs or hg win instead? I will never know.

This ultimately sums up my thoughts: https://twitter.com/markrussinovich/status/15784512452490526...

Nice, thanks for the tips and the thoughts!

Thanks for creating and releasing this. I started getting into walking after the pandemic. There is a nice suburban trail near my house and I have walked several hundred miles on it. This app is inspiring me to take my newfound love of nature and trails for a day trip or even a multi-day trip. I am grateful for your advice to do my homework including learning to use and carry a compass and a map. To wit:

> You should always research your trip ahead of time, plan training hikes, become familiar with the terrain, carry a physical compass and map and know how to use them.

Have you any additional advice for someone who has not really done a multi-day trip before? I have never heard of AllTrails; I will check it out.

You’re welcome. :)

i believe that is a fair question and i believe that ethics are personal and each individual must find/define their own ethics based on their own values and life experiences.

here is where i am coming from:

1. the end user is on a google search engine results page (SERP) and sees the blog post author's website as one of the search results

2. the end user clicks the link to the blog post author's website

3. the end user is now on the blog post author's website

4. the end user hits the back button

   - i believe the end user has a reasonable expectation that they will be back on the google search engine results page... but *they are not*. they are on a mockup that looks like the google SERP but is in fact controlled by the blog post author.

5. the end user clicks on a "link" to a competitor's website - but the "link" is actually yet another mockup created and hosted by the blog post author.

i believe this is highly unethical! they are fooling an unsuspecting end-user into thinking they are visiting a brand new site, but they most definitely are not doing so. ultimately, i think that google and other browser authors should remove the possibility for this sort of trickery. i do admire the blog post author for posting the social engineering/programming trickery while still viewing it as unethical.

edit: at the bottom of the blog post the author links this previous HN comment which i find interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17826106 - and this one is as well https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17823886#17826206

I’m usually not interested in social engineering which I think is boring stuff, but I think that (1) this is a weakness on my part as a developer with something of a security focus, and (2) this is perhaps the perfect sweet spot of social engineering and programming.

It is an utterly fascinating takedown of the back button hijack. Totally unethical but also very eye-opening for me.

Is this kind of back button hijack and history rewriting still possible in modern browsers? Edit: this link leads me to believe this may still be possible: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/History - would love a confirmation.

I would be shocked if a lot of people did that.

Appreciate the clarification.

one thing i love about twitter is the brevity. https://twitter.com/riverguardian/status/1556381516564922376

ah - i see. thank you!

god, how i love this article. i understand the criticisms; i see forbiddenvoid discussing that people want to get paid and be able to live comfortably. -[i recall luu writing an essay about how to get better at things quickly (im probably quite poorly and incorrectly paraphrasing him here).]- (edit: shit, after a quick search of danluu.com, i believe i may have fabricated that entirely) i believe they are approaching the discussion at cross-purposes.

this is not about being comfortable paying your bills. this is not saying not to learn quickly or that you should avoid shortcuts. it's about mastery... it's about understanding the craft, weighing the tradeoffs that come with each decision, and repeating that process week-in and week-out for years... decades... a lifetime.

i did learn to program from one of those "for dummies" books. that was (checks calendar) 25 years ago. it didn't teach me everything. i still don't fucking know everything!!! and that's fine. i wake up eager to learn. i enjoy code reviews, and learning from my peers. as norvig mentions: i enjoy being the best programmer on the team, i enjoy being the worst programmer on the team; hell, i enjoy being in-between.

if this post is about anything, it is about the joy of learning, and how deep and long that arc can be. it never ends. maybe when i go senile.

I never zoom out on GitHub, but this one time it was kind of neat.

One of the new Kendrick Lamar videos (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAPUkgeiFVY - The Heart Part 5) has some deep fakes in there. He looks like a variety of different people. In the YouTube video description the deep fakes are credited to DEEP VOODOO. Here is an article about DEEP VOODOO: https://www.thefocus.news/tech/deep-voodoo/

And from Wikipedia:

> The music video for "The Heart Part 5", directed by Lamar and Dave Free, was released alongside the song on May 8, 2022.[13] In the video, Lamar performs the song against a red wall, while using deepfake technology to transform himself into six modern Black American figures: in order, they are former football player and convicted felon O. J. Simpson, rapper Kanye West, actors Jussie Smollett, Martin Lawrence and Will Smith, former basketball player Kobe Bryant, and rapper Nipsey Hussle. The deepfakes were made by South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone's studio Deep Voodoo.[14]

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heart_Part_5

The song is also really good. I believe it is quite timely.

that is amazing

Anyone care to explain the significance of this? Ideally by stating your biases upfront :)

Thanks very much for the reply and the links and comments. I hadn’t read Beyond Smart before and I just gave it a read. I too disagree with many of the things in that essay. Almost everything, it seems, from the premise (which seems to be that having good new ideas is “the thing most to be desired”) to the importance of new ideas to the point you made which includes the words “dominance hierarchy” which taken at face value seem incredibly short-sighted. Has he heard of cooperation? Life is far from a zero-sum game. We as a species are capable of much, much more.

Nonetheless, I couched my language in my original post:

> I believe that on this subject, pg knows more than I likely ever will. His users are early stage startups…

I stand by my original words. I just probably won’t bother reading anything pg writes unless it is on the topic of startups.

This is a heartwarming post and I enjoyed all of the comments.

As an aside I would recommend using U2F over OTP. This article explains some of the benefits: https://www.yubico.com/blog/otp-vs-u2f-strong-to-stronger/

I tend to see a lot more negativity than positivity as the default response so I like this thread.

I could be wrong but I got the feeling that was by design. They are meant as supplements and not to distract or detract from the core message.

I’ve read a few of pg’s articles over the years. I believe it was one about nerdy kids and their relationships and worldviews that first brought me to this site. At some point, I read the article “Hackers and Painters” and I felt like pg’s essays didn’t resonate with me anymore. I even read a response called “Dabblers and Blowhards” that I resonated strongly with. I thought to myself, pg is distanced from reality, and that perhaps I was or had been as well.

Over the past year or so I’ve been trying to make sure that my opinions are mindfully and consciously held. I’ve worked on debugging them: I test and evaluate my beliefs when the opportunity arises. I try to make sure I still feel what I think I feel and that I understand what is going on in my head and my heart, and that they act congruently.

For instance, I know now that I dislike many, many things that Amazon has done and how it treats its workers. But I think that the people who worked on my Kindle Oasis have the utmost respect for their users. It makes me somewhat comfortable with the ambivalence that for me goes along with using it. For I surely love my Kindle and I surely am happy to purchase books on the Kindle store while I simultaneously am disgusted by the treatment of factory workers, delivery drivers, software developers, and other real human beings who work for Amazon. I could say the same about my iPhone. Sometimes I think hard about the slave labor that went into the manufacturing of the device that I am typing this message into. Should I stop using it? Maybe so. Maybe not. At the moment, I consciously choose to continue using it. It is quite possible that history will judge me quite harshly for this. But I believe that there is empathy and soul (and blood and inhumanity) in these things.

This morning I had a feeling of revulsion when I saw that pg had written another article and that it was on the front page of one of my favorite websites. I readily see the hypocrisy in this. But as I mentioned at the outset, I wanted to determine if I felt the way I most recently felt about reading his essays. So I read it with as close to an open mind as I could.

I believe that on this subject, pg knows more than I likely ever will. His users are early stage startups and he has clearly identified wide classes of issues and the ability to suss them out in the course of a brief conversation. He is able to envision founder habits changing, and recidivism of said changes. He is able to approach each situation with the mindfulness and presence that it deserves by understanding that as much as these issues fall into buckets, the circumstances surrounding them are unique, and the people involved are individuals. He is able to relate these and understand them in the context of one of the most near and dear things to my heart: cutting edge software development. He is able to see when a founder is incorrectly assessing their own situation, and he is able to guide them to a course correction. He is able to ask the founders key questions that they themselves can evaluate to understand their predicament. He is able to understand their humanity.

And he has built a whole team of partners with this ability.

Going against the grain of my prejudices and my expectations, I thought this was a fine article. I have considerably more respect for YC and pg than I did before I read it. I am more comfortable browsing this site as a result.

Haha, this is a great story. For quick reference, it has nothing to do with MLK.

Once again, I’m grateful for your message. (I did end up getting my refund. I hope you remember me.)

On a completely unrelated note, I was looking at a somewhat complicated Wikipedia page yesterday and noticed a piece of text I would like to edit. It had some stuff (citations and references) I felt I didn’t understand how to edit without being sure I wouldn’t break anything. Is there a good forum or place where I could ask for help with my edit?

Respectfully, I believe that your premise is flawed. The symptom may be qualified, good employees quitting and leaving the company unable to fulfill its obligations, but the root cause is the poor leadership that caused them to leave in the first place.

He got a new start.

I think of this every once in a while. We trust, a lot. Things would be different if we didn’t. I believe laws generally protect us after the fact, not before.

I believe your point is valid.

Perhaps I’ve had bad luck but I’ve never had options that would have been worth anything.

I am sure this says more about me than anything but if a company lays me off there is zero chance of me exercising options in that company.

Edit: I read the link and it appears to apply to RSUs as well. What I said about options is true but RSUs, different story. I’d sell those for sure.