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Can we collectively refrain from making comments like this on Hacker News—or in any venue, for that matter? Is it that hard to read an assumed “In my experience, it is often the case that…” in front of everyone’s comment?

The care and thought you put into your writing, regardless of medium, says everything about how (and how much) you care and are thinking about your audience.

Some cigar chomper transformed The X Files from a beloved show to one where everyone just wanted the damn thing to end.

When I think of royalty free music for “creators,” my mind instantly goes to the sort of cliched, bombastic audio that is used to score “epic b-roll” that serves no purpose in so many YouTube videos. The world needs less of this, not more.

I don’t know about you, but reading that first paragraph of the organic chemistry textbook was not a drag. It may not have been Carl Sagan’s Cosmos but I don’t understand how any generally curious person wouldn’t find it interesting. For the record I never took anything beyond Chemistry I in college.

Coming soon, if it's not already here in Preview Edition: Eternal Hacktober. Every day GitHub more resembles a gamified social media platform.

I wanted a monochrome terminal but was willing to tolerate traditional ANSI color. Once you start with 24 bit color you may as well start using a VNC client.

What sapped my will to live was the impossibility of doing a C-u C-x = on the overlays to determine how their contents were styled, forcing me to go into the source code of a ton of different packages to go fishing for face names to coerce to visible values.

Yes it’s possible but it’s insane. Emacs carries around all of this terminal baggage but many module developers seem to have forgotten about terminal users. Additionally, theming is conceptually broken in that it creates an MxN problem with themes and modes’ face names. This could be solved if modes stopped with the proliferation of mode-specific face names but good luck with that.

I basically gave up on Emacs and switched to a combination of VS Code and old-school vi for Go and everything else, respectively. Finding an effing theme that allowed me to program in Go in a terminal without making LSP’s overlays unreadable was nearly impossible. I spent days trying to make this work. I’ve used Emacs since 1991.

And can’t we all get back to the really important work of complaining about the absence of free snacks, the main reason we’re here?

Upon reading it my thoughts went to yesterday's Verge article on the audio recordings of Zuckerberg's Q&As. Facebook has many vocal rank and file people who seem to believe they've arrived at Enlightenment and want Zuckerberg to toe the line. His imperfect attempts to walk a tightrope that keeps everyone happy infuriate the Enlightened, who believe tightrope walking is in its very conception a concession to Evil. They conclude that he's an Agent of Hatred and start taking steps to coerce him into compliance with Correct Thinking.

ICX Media | Golang/Python GCP Data Engineer| DC, NY, SF, LA | REMOTE

ICX Media is helping organizations gain insight into online audiences and act on those insights. Key to achieving that goal, ICX is building a world-class data practice, and we’re looking for people to help us achieve our ambitious goals. We have embraced Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and are building atop it batch and streaming workflows using Dataflow (Apache Beam), Cloud Run, and BigQuery, orchestrated using Cloud Composer (Apache Airflow).

Our preferred languages are Python and Golang. We highly value data science as well as relational modeling and SQL knowledge, skills, and experience. If you’re an engineer that wants to concentrate in data engineering or a data scientist that is interested in making a move to the engineering side, this may be a great opportunity for you.

The ICX data engineering team has embraced a remote-first approach to working and has members that span Eastern to Pacific time zones. This opportunity is open to US citizens and others authorized to work in the United States.

Contact me at work my email (ewatkeys@icxmedia.com) and please reference this post.

Yes and? If you carry this on your keychain heading into a security checkpoint, expect to receive interrogation++.

"This (watch|car|toupee|smartphone|encrypted USB key drive) will totally make you more attractive to potential relationship partners!"

The claimed "plausible deniability" benefit seems dubious. You are carrying a branded device with marketing materials that tout its ability to offer you plausibly deniability…

SO is the opposite of MDN. If you do not approach any piece of StackOverflow content with the presumption that it could be dangerously not-even-wrong, God bless you.

Preaching to the choir. It amazes me that the ML and Data Science folks have settled on anti-FORTRAN. (Or maybe, put that way, it’s less amazing.)

Django's migration tool is awesome; I can see how people could get seduced by it. It's happened to me.

Assembly code making poor choices can be outperformed by Python code making smart algorithmic choices. The sentiment behind "don't use Python for performance critical code" isn't wrong, but there's nuance. Programmers should make informed choices about space and time complexity regardless of the language being used.

Your typical assembly programmer may be far more aware of their obligation to do so than your typical Python programmer, so in my mind it's more important that languages occupying Python's ecological niche behave predictably. It can be challenging to balance that need against other constraints like limiting the number of abstractions someone needs to master in order to be productive.

Both your and the parent's sentiments are so on-point. And they're one of the reasons I don't like ORMs or the use of in-app constraint checking. The mid-Aughties rise of CRUD-focused frameworks that treat the database as a sidecar to the web app ignored as inconvenient the full power of an RDBMS, in part because MySQL was the not-full-RDBMS that they were often paired with.

It's not necessarily about money. An engineer can burn through tens of thousands of dollars per month in cloud spend because they have access to the AWS [or] GCP console, but that same engineer may not have the first idea about how to get the CFO's sign-off to purchase a license that will facilitate a halving of that spend. And that same CFO can institute a policy against using credit cards for recurring payments that prevent that engineer from expensing the purchase through a corporate card. And the software company may not offer a bill-via-invoice option — or they may only offer it for amounts greater than the amount the engineer wants to spend.

So much of what happens in sufficiently large organizations has nothing to do with profit maximization. Think confederacy of dunces, not a conspiracy of greedy evil geniuses.

Sometimes the best thing that could possibly happen is something not working. How many times did Twitter bump up against its inability to scale on the way to being successful? (Yes, maybe a bad example.) What if someone had said, “Oh it’s never going to scale, we shouldn’t do this“? History has shown that if there is a need or a desire, people will find a way to satisfy it. There are good problems to have and bad problems to have – make sure you are not on the side of trying to avoid having good problems.

Color me old, but wtf, the JS script kiddie obsession of never writing a line of code that can be packaged in a module has now come to shell scripting?!

We don't care about reality, merely perceptions. "Well I humiliated the person for an hour in front of a whiteboard" is the new "Nobody gets fired for buying IBM."

Meaning and purpose are not things that you find in work; they are things that you make. As a CTO in a small adtech company, my standard pitch to hungry young talent went something like this: You're not going to be curing cancer or putting people on Mars, and we don't have daily catered lunches or a foosball table, but I will give you A) more responsibility than you would have elsewhere, B) more opportunity to make an out-size contribution to the company, C) more freedom to choose the tools and methods you want to use, and D) lots of data to play with. And then I would point out people who honed their crafts and made money in adtech and then went on to work on curing cancer, sending people to Mars, etc.

I am reminded of a story about a janitor. Being a janitor doesn't seem like an obviously meaningful and fulfilling job, but if you work as a janitor to provide for your daughter so she can go to college, then that job indeed can be profoundly meaningful.

This has been going on for decades. Websites are a battlefield in the eternal war for supremacy between factions inside an organization. Tufte talked about this effect in print material in VDoQI. Carousels are a strategy designers use to get these factions to temporarily agree on a home page design.

How about hashing IPs? You could still see if someone were on your abuse list if abusers.contains(hashfn(req.addr)).

If people are cutting Barclays slack, perhaps it's because the guy on Twitter is painting this as a satanically evil deed when it was probably just someone making a stupid mistake.

Additionally, the aggregate bandwidth cost of delivering that JS file during its lifetime is probably less than $0.05. How many copies of this file would need to be concatenated to equal the size of David After Dentist?

No one levels up on the Internet — and especially Twitter — by being calm and reasonable.

Here’s another question: Would any of our lives be any worse — or would they be better? — if we simply chose to walk away and not be a part of any of these platforms, HN included? How much of our lives is made up of karma whoring, level grinding, and falling into the <https://xkcd.com/386/> trap?

Tim's thoughts dovetail nicely with the Mathbabe "Microfinance is mostly a scam" story also on the front page at the moment. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23662482)

Technological change always causes collateral damage, and, having been in the business for 25+ years, I can't say people were previously more tuned into the negative consequences of our creations in 1994. With every passing day, however, our power to quickly and sweepingly change the structure of physical and social reality grows, and too many investors give their ethical and moral obligations no more thought than an eight year-old does while burning ants with a magnifying glass.

There's a place for thinking about the world through a spreadsheet, but before pouring tens of billions of dollars into science experiments on human civilization, as a professional and a citizen and a human, you have an obligation to pause and look around before pulling the trigger on a deal.

Taking an example from some time ago, I believe Groupon was a singularly ill-conceived and pernicious business akin to payday lending. And perhaps there's a place for payday lending (or microfinance) but the ability to wave your hands and exclaim "(fin)tech start-up!" allows you to avoid the reputational damage usually associated with working in such milieus.

“Higher quality than Yahoo answers” is an extremely low bar.