Hacker News Reader

codereviewedon The carried interest loophole survives again

Thanks for admitting the government is basically the mob and if I don't agree I have no rights or worth as a living breathing human being.

codereviewedon I have complicated feelings about TDD

Have you ever had to convince a non-technical boss or client that the exploratory MVP you wrote and showed to them working must be completely rewritten before going into production? I tried that once when I attempted to take us down the TDD route and let me tell you, that did not go over well.

People blame engineers for not writing tests or doing TDD when, if they did, they would likely be replaced with someone who can churn out code faster. It is rare, IME, to have culture where the measured and slow progress of TDD is an acceptable trade off.

codereviewedon Programming breakthroughs we need

My very first paid web gig was connecting a small business' Access based product catalog to their website. I was 14 or 15 at the time. I was able to do it with out any real coding knowledge except for some basic HTML I learned from MySpace and some copy-paste VBScript, haha. The site was a hit and I made $1,200 and immediately spent it all on an electric guitar.

codereviewedon Apple tells employees to work at the office three times per week starting Sept

Just because something has worked one way for ages doesn't mean it can't work another way. It really is a culture thing I think. If you've been working in an office your whole life and you are used to that then I can totally see it being difficult.

If you are a digital native whose social life has taken place largely online it is likely WFH is better.

In some ways the world/technology/culture has changed so much and so frequently over the last 40-50 years that each generation's lived experience growing up is markedly different than the last. In the totality of the human experience this is pretty rare. I think work is only going to become more age segregated over time due to cultural differences.

codereviewedon Apple tells employees to work at the office three times per week starting Sept

I got a certain amount of schadenfreude from seeing Apple's opulent "spaceship" campus sit essentially empty during COVID. A building shaped like an asshole is probably a good place for assholes to go to work.

codereviewedon Apple tells employees to work at the office three times per week starting Sept

Holy shit, to me you are a giant. I could not stand a driving commute of more than ~30 minutes.

codereviewedon 'Molecular beverage printer' claims to make thousands of drinks

I'll just have water, thanks.

IMO, this will either be vaporware or a glorified soda stream.

codereviewedon Police used a baby’s DNA to investigate its father for a crime

They just need to shorten the TTL.

codereviewedon More energy on less land: The drive to shrink solar’s footprint

I just don't see how land use is an issue worth worrying about right now, climate emergency and all. The federal government owns _huge_ swaths of sunny arid desert land in the west. It is largely not suitable for crops, livestock, suburbs, etc. We could install millions of acres worth of current solar tech out there and generate enough power for everyone. The real difficulty lies in the infrastructure it would take to get the power to where people are.

What we should be focusing on is transmission and distribution, those are the really hard problems. We could have all the power we want but if our grids can't handle the rapidly increasing demand it does nothing for us. And as more people go 100% electric for transportation, heating, and cooking the integrity of power distribution becomes even more important because we will have put all our energy eggs in the electricity basket.

The only place land use seems relevant is for smaller scale off-the-grid cases where someone's property is small but they want to generate all their own electricity.

codereviewedon Let websites framebust out of native apps

Why doesn't anyone ask what the user wants? Are we only about what the app owner or the website owner want?

codereviewedon An incident impacting 5M accounts and private information on Twitter

IME, numbers they have classified has VOIP or otherwise not a consumer or business cell service are disallowed. Skype numbers do not work, and I have had a spotty experience with Google Voice numbers as well.

codereviewedon Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?

What about my fear of heights? :lol: . There is a reason I chose a desk job!

codereviewedon Plan B for UUIDs: double AES-128

UUIDs have always seemed to be an over-engineered solution to a minor problem. In the cases I've seen them used folks are trying to get away from auto-incremented identifying serial numbers. Ostensibly, this is because it makes guessing other IDs in the database (or whatever) fairly simple and that could be a source for leaking information.

To me this is just security though obscurity. Just because I know an identifier doesn't mean I should be able to do _anything_ with it. If there are contexts where you really can't share the ID you should salt and hash it and use that value.

codereviewedon What’s going on with Google and Facebook hiring freezes?

You are 100% correct.

The confusion in the public stems from the fact that the news media selectively reports on recession in different ways depending on which party is in power. They ignore your fact when one party is in power and they highlight the "2 quarters of no growth" rule of thumb instead. Then when their guy is in power they go out of their way to say "Akshually a recession isn't defined by that it is defined by a committee."

Just a few examples: https://imgur.com/a/xbBzLIU