drunkpotato

The best developers I've found are the ones who know how to work without an IDE, even if their preference is to use one.

Contrastingly, the worst, slowest developers I've worked with rely on their IDE without understanding what it's doing for them, and are helpless in new/unsupported situations. They also, 100% of the time, screw up their git repositories on a regular basis, and need someone who knows what they're doing to help them out, costing their colleagues time and frustration helping them when they won't help themselves.

Some people from the first group find they prefer not using an IDE. It's rather the opposite of laziness, it's choosing the workflow they find most productive, even if it differs from your preferred workflow.

I quite like Endless Sky (link: https://endless-sky.github.io/ ), an open source Escape Velocity-style game, and Supertuxcart. But I think in general you're right, the vast majority of finished, fun, playable games are going to be commercially developed.

Give it a rest. The fact you’re attributing words and sentiments I didn’t write and arguing with a straw man tells me there will be no productive discussion between us.

One of the nice things about HN is being exposed to a broad range of opinions. As fairly left wing myself, I don’t find it particularly welcoming nor hostile when it comes to political issues. Which is a refreshing change from the normal echo chambers both the left and right can get into. However, some people interpret “there exist people with different opinions than me” as somehow being a mob, which just seems like an angry attempt to silence discussion. (I’ve seen left and right complain about that on HN, so I think it’s less about politics alignment than it is about certain personality types that can be found across the political spectrum. The right’s equivalent of militant “SJW’s” or whatever the current bogeyman is.)

Actually, as long as the monsters are powerful and connected, they are well-protected, then and now.

In U.S. law, corporations exist in a bizarro-world state where they are people for some purposes where it's advantageous (to take advantage of free speech, for example), but not people where it's disadvantageous (for liability and punishment, for example; there is the meme "I'll believe that a corporation is a person when Texas executes one!"). I believe that is what GP is referring to.

Hmm I have the opposite reaction, as a parent with a very "not boring" childhood I hope to provide enough stability for my children's complaint to be that we're boring, while taking the good parts of my childhood and instilling a sense of independence and capability in them. Time will tell if this is successful.

The legal standard for guilt in a criminal trial is "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt." There is a lot of room between "likely" and that very high standard. It is perfectly consistent to think someone more likely committed a murder than didn't, yet still have a reasonable doubt. So I really don't think there's any shame here.

Interesting point on open source, but many popular open source projects are all or partially supported by paid positions. And I don’t think all current businesses would be viable without leveraging open source.

Software Engineers have some leverage, but not a lot and not uniformly. The way to get more would be to get better at organizational politics, but that isn’t typically of interest to many software engineers.

While I think some careful regulation is required, I don't see how it would be legal to ban Twitter, nor possible for Twitter to entirely eliminate bots. But I think regulation could provide some carrots and sticks to encourage platforms like Twitter to be better at spotting and responding to these campaigns. Right now there's not enough incentive for them to invest much in combating bots, when their incentives are overwhelmingly to drive engagement (and advertising dollars).

It’s also not universally American. One of the adjustments I had to make in Boston is “how you doin’?” being the start of a leisurely conversation instead of a quick pleasantry.

I realize you’re being sarcastic and that hacker news is a social media, however there is a difference in degree and what behaviors the site encourages. For me, personally, using HN and a very limited set of subreddits is an enjoyable waste of time, and doesn’t feel like an addiction. I would also credit HN as exposing me to technologies I might otherwise not have seen, and enriching my life in some small way.

As for other social media, I deleted my Facebook and Twitter and feel like a mentally healthier person for it, and I think it’s a choice everyone has to make for themselves, but we should be providing information and support to people who quit. I would liken it more to alcohol use: many enjoy it in moderation, it’s an addictive problem for some. I strongly dislike the semi-compulsory nature of Facebook groups for activities that only organize on Facebook.

Thank you! That workflow makes sense. We’ll see if I remember that next time I Cherry-pick.

Cherry pick is faster and easier for me in the CLI. I’ve read Magit’s documentation on Cherry pick dozens of times and I still have no idea what it’s doing. I think I have successfully done it in magit once, but now I don’t bother and just do it on the command line.

For everything else I absolutely love magit. The ability to stage and commit chunks in a visual fashion is an unbeatable killer feature!

I enjoyed this fascinating read about a software business idea that failed, why it failed, and why the person who tried it still thinks there's the nugget of a viable business in the idea.

I understand the IP address being used as evidence to start an investigation and perhaps some surveillance but it seems way too flimsy to justify search and seizure. Is this sort of grasping at straws acceptable in other areas or is it just because of how computer illiterate the legal system is?

The things the writer complains about certainly happen, but thankfully haven't been the majority of my experiences. I don't have as much emotion invested into the hiring process, but I have been on both ends of it at various times in my career, and I can say both that (some) companies have ridiculous expectations and hiring gauntlets, and that it's hard to find decent developers. I think any hiring manager can tell you horror stories about devs with "ten years of experience" who can't write a for loop.

I take company complaints about worker shortages not to be literal, but to be part of public relations, marketing, and appealing to politicians. Annoying? Sure. But also part of the game. I understand the article is mostly about berating companies for being dishonest about hiring, but I don't think an appropriate counter is to be dishonest about being hired. The rest of my response focuses mainly on the perspective of a career dev looking for work.

Your mileage may vary with different tech scenes, but my take on these experiences:

"Problem no. 1: Companies rely too heavily on automated filtering." While true, if this is your first and major complaint, you rely too heavily on job submission pages. Get a decent recruiter, reply to some linkedin recruiters, and be open to possibilities. You should expect applying to a job board without an internal champion recommending you to have similar odds to cold calling someone to sell them insurance.

"Problem no. 2: The credentialism barrier." I can't speak to the author's experience with this, only to my own. No more than 20% of the time I've interviewed has not knowing a specific programming language or technology been any sort of problem in the interview or even mentioned. I have noticed this happens somewhat more often with Java shops, who expect you to be very experienced specifically with Java, but even there most of them are pretty understanding that you may have some catching up to do (again, in my experience).

"Problem no. 3: Education is inaccessible." This seems a fair complaint, though not specific to technology.

"Problem no. 4: Low Pay and Bad benefits." This is a surprising one to read in technology. Maybe I've just been lucky and in a good area, but tech jobs are pretty well paid, decent benefits, good vacation (not at AWS though, seriously guys, do better), and with a pretty low investment in learning some people skills and negotiating tactics you can drastically increase your earning power. Read "Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In." It's short and phenomenally helpful when negotiating salary and benefits.

I empathize with the author's annoyance about listening to what amounts to a PR campaign from tech employers, but again, I think the counter to that is pointing out that it's a lot of hot air, not complaining about how hard it is from a dev's perspective seeking employment. I am open to being wrong on this, however, and welcome dissenting opinions telling me how wrong I am!

Happy to see HyperTalk-inspired innovation on the web! It looks cool. How did you decide what verbs and nouns to support? Also, thanks for the twinge of HyperCard nostalgia you gave me!

I honestly can't tell if this is sincere or sarcasm.

I also want to add on to the praise for the Nvidia Shield. After a frustrating experience with Roku, Roku stick, and Fire stick, the Shield experience has been great and I haven't regretted it.

I've done several database migrations, and it's true, but not because the data is hard to extract. It's moderately easy to dump out CSV or JSON files to S3 and load them back in to another database (only moderately because you have to deal with fiddly encoding issues). So in that sense the data is easily extracted. Tools like AWS Data Migration Services, while not perfect, can also make this a lot easier.

However, at least three issues make a database migration non-trivial:

1. Custom data types that have to be replicated somehow in the new database; this usually involves figuring out how to parse the output representation in a sensible way.

2. User-defined triggers and functions, or custom database features, that may not be available on the new database.

3. There is usually a lot of infrastructure built on top of a database that can be hard to switch over, like if you've used roles substantially in Postgres for access control. Not to mention any business intelligence tool built on it that tends to have a lot of hand-rolled SQL. For example, Periscope can be database-agnostic, but any queries you write might be customized for one particular database vendor.

So in my view, it's not really data concerns (except case 1); there are a lot of operational concerns that make database migrations hard.

I can think of two ways a thought could be unthinkable:

1. It could be uncomputable, since it seems likely to me that we can't think uncomputable thoughts. (Not a rigorous scientific hypothesis, but it seems more likely than not to me.)

2. It could be uncomputable in a human lifetime. I think these already exist today: can anyone really be said to thoroughly understand a proof generated by an exhaustive computational search?

One can play around with the semantics of what we mean by "unthinkable" and "thought," but I think "computable" at least provides one interesting start to an exploration of this concept.

I care a lot what other people do with their money. I care if they use it to harm people. I care if they use it to buy legislation to replace pensions with 401ks. I care if they “earned” it through fraudulent means. Some ways to use money are beneficial or neutral, but some are harmful.

Or the person who changed the code then disables the test or sets N to 100,000,000 or something equally pleasurable to debug.

Same. Much as I’d hate to do it I’ve been eyeing a Windows system, with Linux either through the OS layer or virtualized.

You specifically went looking for instances of violence at the protests, and you found a couple. This is the very definition of confirmation bias: you have a conclusion, and then went looking for supporting instances.

You didn't look for data about how much violence there was relative to other protests, or injury statistics, and you certainly didn't look at comparisons between right wing and left wing violence. You started with the conclusion you needed. You need the protests to be violent to confirm your world view, so you went looking for some instances to try and support your conclusion.

However, nothing in your paltry few examples refutes anything I said. Given the vast numbers of people participating in the protests, and the length of them, they were remarkably peaceful.

On the other hand, a tiny fraction of that number of right-wing violent lunatics concentrated in DC on Jan 6 and in one day committed more violence and slaughtered more law enforcement officers than at all the BLM protests combined. BLM protestors want police officers to stop killing people, the Jan 6 insurrectionists came looking to violently overturn the results of the election, and are feeling emboldened to commit more violence in the next week.

I hope this helps you stop and think.

That is fascinating! I love these stories of people optimizing/gaming the system in ways you maybe didn't account for or didn't predict.

You see what you want to see. Classic confirmation bias. I watched the livestreams, and most of the time it was a lot of running and massive amounts of tear gas, and occasionally police brutally escalating violence against those protesting police violence. I think it's rather telling that you describe fireworks as mortars to try to make them sound more threatening.

I haven't seen any videos where a BLM protestor beats a fallen cop with an American flag, or kills a cop. Both of which happened during the violent far-right insurrection on January 6. I have seen many more credible stories about data and studies showing that violence from far-right extremism is a much more dangerous current problem than far-left extremism.

I will continue to call last year's protests what they were, remarkably peaceful world-wide protests against police brutality and for police reform. And I will call the Jan 6 event what it was, a deliberately stoked violent insurrection against the US government in an attempt to overturn the results of a democratic election, on the basis of nothing but lies and grievance. We should strive to accurately describe things as they are.

Interesting timing for this to float up the front page.