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bit_logic

2,343 karma · joined October 8, 2016

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bit_logic··on CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs
Does anyone know if this was yet another React website disaster? This is exactly the kind of website that should be built with reliable technologies. You don't need fancy animations or whatever junk the SPA style sites have. Just old style server side frameworks, minimal Javascript, standards supported HTML and CSS. The article mentioned Internet Explorer as an issue? Cross browser support is no issue if you stick to the old standard HTML and CSS and minimize use of Javascript. Mobile support? That's just loading the right CSS library. The goal here isn't "engagement" and all the other shit SPA style sites optimize for with their heavy JS tracking and advertisement code that makes the laptop fan run. The goal here is a simple reliable CRUD website for scheduling appointments, the previous generation of web development tech stack is perfect for this.
bit_logic··on Zoom improvements requested by music schools
I was thinking recently on how bad modern voice calls are. It's all highly compressed and basically unidirectional, forcing the participants to take turns talking.

The old analog POTS phone system wasn't like this. It had that feeling of almost being in the same room, no latency, true birectional conversation.

I was wondering if there's anything that tries to get close to this old POTS level of quality, at the cost of higher bandwidth and processing power.

Can some of the software mentioned in this thread achieve this?

bit_logic··on Show HN: I made a job board that doesn't allow HackerRank tests
To the senior engineers who are already happily employed and hate leetcode interviews: An effective way to fight against this is to start saying no to these interviews. Senior engineers have the power to change this if it becomes a trend to say no to these interviews. Anytime a recruiter contacts you on Linkedin, ask them does your interview process include leetcode style whiteboard interviews? If they say yes, then politely decline and make it clear that's the reason for the decline.

All the leverage is on the happily employed senior engineer side. If they're not happy or unemployed, then it's different. But for the happily employed, it's the recruiter/company trying to convince them to leave. And it's very reasonable to reject these interviews. An employed senior engineer already has a demanding job that requires at least 40 hours a week. And since they're older, they're likely to have other responsibilities like family. There's simply no time to grind for months on pointless leetcode problems.

If more senior engineers start immediately rejecting any recruiter messages with a simple "No, I don't do leetcode", the signal will be sent. Recruiters will start getting frustrated and tell hiring managers, hey many of the great engineers I contact keep saying no because of this leetcode thing, can you change that part of the interview? I can't find any good candidates because of this. That will force hiring managers to really evaluate if this leetcode interview is a good idea.

Don't be fooled if they say it's not about getting the problem right or they just want to see how you think about a problem. That was somewhat true a long long time ago when these types of interviews started and leetcode didn't even exist. And it's what they still say to make it seem reasonable. But the reality today is that the interviewer only cares that you can write out the optimal solution within the interview time. That's it, that's all the interviewer will care about. If you don't have the right answer, it's an immediate zero. They might care about other factors (like are you friendly, code quality, etc.) after you successfully write the optimal answer on the board. But writing out the optimal answer is the baseline, they don't care to evaluate any other factor until that baseline is satisfied.

There might be a few interviewers who still try to stick to the old way of these interviews, the original intent. But statistically the odds are against you. These interviewers are generally older and becoming fewer and fewer. The new generation of junior engineers are becoming senior and they only know the leetcode grind. In a typical interview loop, it will become more and more probable that there's more and more of these interviewers who expect the candidates to have done the leetcode grind and base their evaluation from that assumption.

bit_logic··on Can developer productivity be measured?
One of the most powerful benefits from being there since the start is the complete confidence in ripping out and deleting obsolete code later. Even good developers new to the project are afraid to do this, and they should be since it's very risky without the full context.

The natural trajectory for a project is to keep adding features until it collapses from its own weight. Only the long tenure developer can fight this and revitalize a project by removing the useless excess.

bit_logic··on The Future of Clojure
I'm a bit surprised to hear this, I thought Clojure shops would be better than this. It was must hard to find any candidates and they're still doing the stupid leetcode interview style? Are these companies putting any thought into their hiring process?

That process was created by FANG because they can abuse their candidates and still get a lot of applicants (although I think this is less true than it used to be)

But to use that same hazing ritual at a smaller company with the hiring funnel further reduced by a niche language? Really stupid.

bit_logic··on “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”
The leetcode is so bad now that serious arguments are made that even someone like Guido van Rossum should have to do it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25072061
bit_logic··on “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”
This is a good strategy for senior engineers to avoid the leetcode interviews. And to any recruiters and hiring managers reading this, there’s the other side of this. If you want responses from high quality senior engineers, then start your LinkedIn email with “NO Leetcode”. Response rates will likely increase by a lot.
bit_logic··on Is carbon capture a viable solution?
Everything currently requires fossil fuel sourced energy to create it. So the question is, over the expected lifespan of the object, will it create more energy than was required to produce it? Solar panels expected lifespan is about 30 years. Installation, transport, etc. are all a fixed initial carbon cost. Studies and analysis have already been done (google search for studies from NREL) and the initial carbon cost payback is about 3-4 years of a typical 30 year solar panel lifespan. So 27 years of effectively carbon negative power generation.

But also consider the downstream effects. Once you have a carbon negative power source like solar in place, the carbon cost to create other things drops as well (since they use less and less power from fossil fuel sourced power).

bit_logic··on Is carbon capture a viable solution?
What you described can be the path to fast action on climate change. Only a few more steps are required:

* Cover every rooftop, every parking lot, every desert with solar panels as much as we can. Cover every windy plain with wind turbines. Take all the excess power and instead of building expensive batteries, use it to power this CO2 -> synthetic liquid fuel process.

* Carbon tax on any "fossil" fuel sources (anything from the ground). Make it expensive so the synthetic fuel is competitive. There's other ways too (like requiring X% mix of carbon neutral synthetic fuel, just like they do now with ethanol). Slowly increase the percent over time.

* All the old infrastructure (existing cars, gas power plants, ships, trains, buses, airplanes, etc.) becomes more and more carbon neutral as the fuel becomes more synthetic.

Even with the most optimistic EV car adoption projections, there will still be millions of gas cars out there. Other old carbon fuel based infrastructure (such as power plants) are hard to replace because solar/wind are not steady sources of power.

This path addressees the weaknesses of solar/wind (how to store excess energy) and how to quickly transition existing infrastructure to carbon neutral.

bit_logic··on Guido van Rossum joins Microsoft
Next time there's a tech interview discussion and someone defends it, linking this thread will be very useful.

Almost 30 years of BDFL of Python, sorry don't care, go do 200 leetcode before talking to us. And if you don't spit out the answer a few seconds faster than that fresh graduate, clearly you're a lesser engineer and should be rejected.

bit_logic··on Guido van Rossum joins Microsoft
Wow, the replies to this actually saying Guido van Rossum should do an algorithm/DS leetcode interview.

It's so ridiculous to see these replies. So Microsoft should've sent Guido van Rossum a note saying, hey study algorithm/DS for at least a month and do 100 leetcode before you come talk to us or it's a waste of time, thanks, bye.

Discussions of the industry tech interview process are now poisoned by these factors:

* There is an entire industry built around tech interview prep now (books, websites, practice/mock interviews). Many would defend this practice because their paycheck directly depends on it.

* Many see this as a hazing ritual that protects their high compensation and often their egos as well. These people are often young and will eventually see how harmful these interviews are when they get older and need to switch jobs. But by then there will be a new generation of young engineers defending the practice.

bit_logic··on DigitalOcean App Platform
I looked at the page and FAQ but can't find a clear answer for this: does this have billing limits? That's the main reason why I don't use AWS or any major cloud for personal projects because there's potential for unlimited cost if something goes wrong. I would rather have a hard billing limit that just shuts down everything if it reaches the limit.
bit_logic··on Cities Experiment with Remedy for Poverty: Cash, No Strings Attached
These UBI experiments all have a flaw, they are time limited and the participants know it. Just try imagining it. Someone tells you will receive $500 per month for a year. So that's a reliable income you can make a year long plan for.

Then someone tells you that you will get it for life. Suddenly the difference in behavior is immense. You can move somewhere with cheaper rent. You can go to college. You can start making real plans depending on that income.

It's like the difference between a pension or social security and getting a fixed lump sum.

bit_logic··on Amazon One – Palm recognition for Amazon Go
This is why we need laws like the California CCPA and GDPR to be in more places. Regulation with high penalties for not complying is the solution here.
bit_logic··on Are we living at the 'hinge of history'?
The next few decades can be claimed as the hinge of history due to two reasons, climate change and genetic engineering. There have been many wars and changes in the past, but now is the first time that our technology has basically reached worldwide geoengineering scale. We are fundamentally changing the climate of the entire world, that has never happened before in human history.

Throughout all of human history, the human has not changed. If you somehow time traveled a human baby from 10k BC to present day, they would grow up and fit in with no issues. Now the very nature of what is human could change due to genetic engineering. Again, this has never happened before in human history.

bit_logic··on Firefox 81.0
Firefox may have to eventually switch to Chromium, just like Microsoft did for Edge. I've noticed more and more sites not working or breaking with Firefox. It's bad enough now that I switch to Chrome when doing anything important. It's a sign that companies and developers are starting to accept that testing on Firefox is optional.
bit_logic··on Tables: Tracking work for teams
A small example of this I noticed recently: the Google Weather app (the one that's default in Android, at least for Pixel phones).

A few years ago it used to have air quality index. Then, it just disappeared one day for unknown reasons. According to this article, it disappeared in 2018 https://9to5google.com/2018/11/11/google-weather-missing-air...

So this bug fix or feature regression is probably sitting in their backlog somewhere. Now the past few weeks, the skies in the Bay Area have turned orange and there's extreme unhealthy air quality for weeks. And not a single Google developer thought, hey we really should prioritize fixing that air quality bug now? Does anyone at Google even use Android? How can the skies be orange and it's so dark during daytime from smoke that headlights are on, but no one noticed the Weather app doesn't have air quality index?

bit_logic··on How Big Oil Misled the Public into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled
Thinking about this more, wasn't there a time, maybe late 90s early 2000s when the message was that plastic is more environmental than paper? Something like at the supermarket checkout you should pick plastic over paper bags to save rain forest trees? Is my memory wrong or was this a widespread message at the time?
bit_logic··on How Big Oil Misled the Public into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled
The whole recycling scam makes me upset. For decades the message was to recycle for the environment. But it was all just shipped to China and then dumped into the oceans. It actually would've been better if it went to landfills, at least then it's safely contained. Another lie was that we're running out of landfill space, there's so much land out there.

Like most environmental issues, the focus should've been on producers not consumers. Tax plastic usage and producers will use less of it.

bit_logic··on New case studies about Google’s use of Go
async/await colored functions is a disaster: https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2015/02/01/what-color-is-... And so many languages and ecosystems have fallen to this. Even C#, which is surprising since I expected them to know better. There was so much hype about async/await (nodejs was a big factor for this hype), that many languages adopted this without fully considering the long term maintenance nightmare it will create.

Because of this, I'm mostly interested in only Go and Java. Go obviously avoids the async/await trap with its core feature, goroutines. Java managed to resist this trap and has Project Loom coming which will give it the same feature as goroutines, but in a backwards compatible way.

Go is criticized for not having generics, but I appreciate the slower and more thoughtful way both languages add new features. Javascript, C#, etc. these languages seem to add whatever FOMO driven new hyped language feature is popular at the moment. Many complain about Go taking so long to add generics, just like many complained about lambdas in Java. But evolving a language should not be done quickly and recklessly.

My focus is still on Java, but I'm occasionally looking at Go to see what they're doing. It's interesting watching these two languages become more like each other (generics in Go and fibers in Java).

bit_logic··on Hiring Without Whiteboards
These are not good reasons and again shows that the company really doesn't care. IT gives a bad laptop? That's fine it doesn't have to be good, it just needs a text editor open. Get a USB drive with a linux distro and boot to it and open nano. Or bring your laptop and stick the USB drive linux distro in there and let them use it. Again there is zero excuse for a company to not have a laptop ready for an onsite interview.

All these companies expect you to write code using a site like hackerrank during the phone screen. And yet they can't have a chromebook open to the exact same site during the onsite? If that's too much, they can't even get a cheap laptop, stick in a USB drive linux distro, open nano and give that during the onsite?

bit_logic··on Hiring Without Whiteboards
Another tech interview thread. For the side that supports these types of interviews, I've never gotten a good answer to a simple question: in the year 2020, why are we expecting people to write compilable code on a whiteboard? It's just stupid at this point. Even a laptop that boots into some micro linux distro and has nothing but nano open would be better. Or just a fresh install windows laptop with nothing but notepad.exe open. Or a chromebook that is open to a HTML page that has nothing but a textarea element.

I'm not including a compiler or having build tools or an IDE. Just a basic simple text editing area that allows the basic functions of typing in text and editing it.

I'm against these leetcode interviews. But if you did nothing else but change this one thing, just stop expecting people to write code on a whiteboard or paper/pencil and allow them to write code the way it's actually done (a computing device with a keyboard and text edit area), that would be such a huge improvement. Writing code on a whiteboard or paper doesn't test anything. Think about how limited it is and how different it is (for example, you can't just press an up arrow and add a newline, have to find an eraser and start over).

It's yet another useless skill to learn just for interviews (writing compilable code on a whiteboard/paper) which also encourages rote memorization (because you have to get it right on the first try since editing the text is so painful and difficult).

I hope people start pushing back on this. The reaction should be, wow you care so little about your interview process that you can't get a $200 chromebook in here?

bit_logic··on Engineers find neat way to turn waste carbon dioxide into useful material
Too often have environmentalists let the perfect be the enemy of good. I understand why they feel that way, for so long have they fought against fossil fuel companies and other interests. They feel like if they give an inch, they will take a mile and climate change is too urgent. And so they oppose any transitional technology. They want to push for only perfect solutions like EVs and batteries.

But I want those environmentalists to sit down and think. Yes, climate change is urgent, and that urgency should make you stop asking for perfection. There are 1.4 billion cars in the world. Even a 100% ban today on ICE car production is not going to change that. Cars have an average usable span measured in decades. The projections for 2050 are catastrophic if carbon emissions don't go down.

Green tech has one big overwhelming victory right now, solar/wind. It's annihilating coal and will eventually defeat natural gas as well. We can take that victory and use it to make the existing cars and airplanes carbon neutral. If you care about climate change, why is this not more exciting than EVs?

bit_logic··on Engineers find neat way to turn waste carbon dioxide into useful material
Solar produces only during the day, but wind is at any hour. And these days, the idea of massive over-provisioning is being discussed to overcome the intermittent problem since solar/wind keeps getting cheaper and cheaper. The idea is simple, how to overcome the cloudy winter day issue? Simply overbuild a lot of solar/wind so it can still provide enough on a winter day. Then during summer, shutoff the excess power generation.

But what a waste of potential to do that! All that overbuilt power generation, simply turned off during summer. Batteries don't help here, it would store it, but then the question of what to do with it is still here.

If society goes the route of massive overbuilding solar/wind, then there's an opportunity to do something with effectively free power during summer. But it's ONLY during summer, so it needs to be something valuable that can also act as a energy storage.

Carbon fuel is perfect for this. Millions of ICE cars exist and are still being produced. Long distance airplanes will be carbon fuel based for a long time. And so many other uses. I think another option is water. Water can also be seen as a valuable resource that acts as energy storage. Use the excess summer power to fill up a near empty dam with desalinated water? Sounds like a perfect fit for regions like southern California or Arizona.

bit_logic··on Engineers find neat way to turn waste carbon dioxide into useful material
Every time there’s a discussion about synthetic carbon fuels, there’s the same frustrating replies. I want to reply to those with one statement: the whole point is to use excess power from solar/wind. There’s always the same replies pointing out how it’s more efficient to use the power directly in EV batteries, laws of thermodynamics, and other similar things. Those completely miss the point. Solar/wind is going exponential and we have a big problem of storing excess power. Massive really massive amounts of batteries is one option. But converting that into carbon fuels that work directly in existing infrastructure and is effectively carbon neutral is a good option too. That’s where the discussion should be, not pointless arguments about efficiency of EVs.
bit_logic··on Amazon added a non-compete after the employee entered the U.S. on an L1B visa
So if a newspaper writer is working on a novel during their evening hours, the newspaper should own it? Everyone would agree that's ridiculous, why should it be tolerated in software?
bit_logic··on Apple’s Mac Chip Switch Is Double Trouble for Intel
Maybe this rumor is only half right and it isn't what everyone thinks it will be. Instead of replacing x86, what if it's just Apple adding their ARM chip to the laptop? Basically just take the current MacBook and stick a iPad ARM chip in there. And maybe make the screen a touchscreen too. It would make iOS development much closer to the real thing. And for non-developers they can run iOS apps natively. So you get a Mac that can run both x86 and ARM natively. But if you try to use more iOS (ARM) apps you get really long laptop battery life since it's optimized for that. And x86 is there when you need to run more power hungry applications. Seems like the best of both worlds in a single laptop if they do this.
bit_logic··on Async Python is not faster
Overall, I think the whole reactive programming style such as node and async python are mistakes at this point. They come at too high a cost for code complexity and maintainability. Synchronous style was always superior with only one flaw, using OS threads.

But now there are solutions both existing and upcoming such as Go and Java Project Loom that fix that one flaw. I don't see much appeal in the reactive style at this point.

bit_logic··on Tell HN: Interviewed with Triplebyte? Your profile is about to become public
This behavior from Triplebyte is unacceptable. If you live in California, there is CCPA now with financial penalties for companies that don’t comply. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Consumer_Privacy_Ac... It’s similar to Europe’s GDPR. CCPA allows sending a deletion request and they will be fined if they don’t comply.

Looking at their privacy page: https://triplebyte.com/privacy

It mentions these options for deleting:

https://triplebyte.com/privacy-center

privacy@triplebyte.com

By CCPA law, they must acknowledge and comply with a deletion request within a time limit. The fines can add up very quickly per user request if they don't comply.

EDIT: Updating my post since I looked at the deletion request forms for some other sites and it seems similar. Probably try the form first and if it doesn't work, then the email.

bit_logic··on Should I Block Ads?
Ad blocking is a security issue now. When the ad networks started serving malware, what were the websites response? Basically nothing, they just said it's not their problem and pointed the finger at the ad networks. Ad blocking is now vital to having a safe web experience. This is not some trivial issue. Computers and the web are critical for modern life now. The same computer that people use for browsing news sites is also used to do online banking, pay bills, apply for unemployment, do work with sensitive data (for example a work laptop), and so many other things.

And computers are also used by minors. Some of these ads are really disturbing and not something minors should see. Again, when this started happening, how did the websites respond? They did nothing.

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