Hacker News Reader

cs02rm0on First U.S. woman to walk in space dives to deepest point in the ocean

While I think there's value in recognising the first woman to do something notable, I sort of agree that it would be preferable to describe her as the first person here. Same applies to the US in my head. It's an absolute achievement, not one that needs qualification.

cs02rm0on GitHub reinstates Popcorn Time code

Imagine going into a box store and taking a copy of a box.

It's not theft.

cs02rm0on What a typical serverless architecture looks like in AWS

When your business API is one get data and one post data I find 100% serverless passable.

I'm starting to accrue a list of projects that started out looking like that, with product owners swearing blind that was the sum total of all they could want, but ended up becoming much more complex. Then you get into the pain of sequential lambda cold starts, etc and before you know it everyone thinks you're in too deep to turn around and the pain just won't go away.

Just one more AWS service and all our problems will be solved...

cs02rm0on Diagram as Code

The focus would make sense to me if, say, it exported to initial terraform templates or something like that.

cs02rm0on Apache NiFi

I've used it a fair bit, though not for a couple of years. Few points, some of which may be out of date:

* I've seen customers fall into the trap of thinking they don't need expensive developers because you can drag and drop, just people who can use a mouse can crack on with NiFi.

* It persisted its config to an XML file, including the positions of boxes on the UI. Trying to keep this config in source control with multiple devs working on it was impossible.

* Some people take the view that you should use 'native' NiFi processors and not custom code. This results in huge graphs of processors with 1000s of boxes with lines between you have to follow. Made both better and worse by being able to descend and ascend levels in the graph. The complexity that way quickly becomes insane.

* You're essentially programming with it. I've no doubt you could use it to write, say, an XMPP server if so inclined. Which means you can do a great many things of huge complexity. Programming tools have developed models for inheritance and composition, abstraction, static analysis, etc. which NiFi just didn't have. The amount of repeated logic I've seen it's configuration accumulate is beyond anything I've seen from any novice programmer.

I ended up feeling like it could be an OK choice in a very small number of places, but I never got to work on one of those. The NSA linking together multiple systems with a light touch is possibly one such use case. For most everyone else, I couldn't recommend it.

cs02rm0on Age Reduction Breakthrough?

Sadly, I'd revert to the idea that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

cs02rm0on Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?

Get a larger, higher resolution monitor. And when you can't do that get another monitor.

My main one's 5k2k and I could still use more space.

cs02rm0on Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?

I think !$ will do similar, at least in bash.

(I'm on a phone and normally rely on muscle memory so it might be the wrong symbols).

cs02rm0on NHS open-sources contract tracing iOS and Android apps

Sorry, it is. Managed to cross wires in my head.

In my weak defence, it's not often we get two bits of code open sourced in a week relating to UK government policy.

cs02rm0on NHS open-sources contract tracing iOS and Android apps

There's a code review, of sorts, (from an ex-Googler) here:

https://lockdownsceptics.org/code-review-of-fergusons-model/

cs02rm0on If you're hiring, be forthcoming about the dev experience

Have to agree, this really sounds more or less as bad as it gets.

I mean SSL MITM?!

cs02rm0on Redis 6.0 GA

Isn't MVC a pattern for UI layers?

I'm not sure redis, a database, is relevant.

cs02rm0on Lamest Edit Wars

Has anyone ever made an edit on Wikipedia without someone trying to start an edit war?

I think it's actually worse than StackOverflow.

cs02rm0on US Air Force Space Security Challenge 2020: Hack-a-Sat

If you don't meet the criteria, presumably they'd rather you trade any hacks you find with a different interested party happy to pay for the information?!

cs02rm0on Agile's early evangelists wouldn't mind watching Agile die

This has been following me around recently, I can't seem to get away from it.

SAFe is everything that has ever been wrong with the software industry rolled into one terrible thing that is anything but agile.

I can't fully express here quite what I think of it!

cs02rm0on Agile's early evangelists wouldn't mind watching Agile die

No, because management.

A key success of agile was to provide a buzzword that let engineers say no when they were asked for a fixed estimate for a fixed-until-it-changes scope to fit in a Gantt chart.

Take agile away and they'll be straight back to demanding to know how long it's going to take to build something when no one's really sure what the something is.

cs02rm0on Agile's early evangelists wouldn't mind watching Agile die

It was also a (much needed) counterpoint to the then prevalent waterfall model.

It still is and it's barely in the fight still in some corners of the public sector.

If Agile dies (and SAFe might succeed there) then there would be nothing left except Waterfall and people others would call cowboys.

cs02rm0on Google Duo rolls out realtime AV1

Would Meet get this rolled out next?

I've noticed video quality on it seems to be really poor recently and even just freezes for people who aren't the current speaker.

I don't have the same issue with Slack, Teams isn't great but isn't as bad as Meet.

cs02rm0on Remote software developers earn more than non-remote developers

One of those on-site benefits is a desk.

With a phone, IT access, rental costs for the floorspace, heating, electricity and all the other associated costs that a company can save on by hiring someone remote.

cs02rm0on When did I run that command? Update your Bash prompt with the command start time

(I assume) cmd-E is cmd-shift-e.

As in, the shift key's required.

cs02rm0on Half of American workers would rather work from home forever: poll

Video calls are all the social interaction I need with coworkers.

Probably more than I need.

cs02rm0on Half of American workers would rather work from home forever: poll

Might be worth checking CO2 levels, or leaving a door and window open.

cs02rm0on Ask HN: In the current crisis is starting freelancing doable?

The picture seems to be mixed, not just in the contract market. That might mean those out of contract are swarming around what's available, but you only need to land one contract to get started.

Personally, I don't know anyone who's not moved to a new contract for the same client over the financial year boundary, but that's obviously just anecdotal and most of the contractors I know are in the same sector.

cs02rm0on Ask HN: Freelancer Rates in the US

Someone paying not just for a dev but a dev with significant domain knowledge in a niche area.

cs02rm0on Don't Make Students Use Eclipse

My undergrad was a while ago, but we also did assembly and prolog first. The lecturer basically said assembler was almost to shock us into seeing how preferably the magic was. I still don't understand why prolog.

I struggled with the Java, but got my teeth into it on my own time to the detriment of my marks in other modules. Eventually it clicked enough, I got a degree and walked into a career where my skills have been in demand for 15 years. I'm pretty happy with that, I'd go so far as to say Java was by far the best part of the course for me.

cs02rm0on After 50 years of effort, researchers made silicon emit light

I would bet that more people know what a transistor is than what a brain cell is.

No chance. Everyone knows what a brain cell is, to some extent. Even people who have too few to rub together don't really feel like they know what a transistor is after reading the Wikipedia page for them, twice...

cs02rm0on E Ink smart screen puts a newspaper on your wall

Can anyone offer an LCD alternative?

cs02rm0on E Ink smart screen puts a newspaper on your wall

One suggestion I've seen is patents.

Unfortunately, I think it's killing a whole corner of the market. I'd happily pay $500 for one of these but not $2k. At that price I'd struggle to not use something that has more colours and a higher refresh rate.

cs02rm0on E Ink smart screen puts a newspaper on your wall

$1500 for the display, plus a $500 board to drive it, plus...

I really like it, but not that much!

cs02rm0on Show HN: FalsiScan – Make it look like a PDF has been hand signed and scanned

For bureaucratic reasons...

I feel that pain. When your only tool is bureaucracy everything looks like a nail. Or something like that.

I once had what I think was a document for a mortgage application refused because I'd printed it, signed it and took a photo on my phone to email back. Apparently it had to be done with a scanner and a camera was unacceptable.

I didn't have a scanner, so I chanced my arm, desaturated and thresholded the image then resubmitted it. I was thanked and it was accepted.