fallous

I've found that when in discussions where choices made now will create problems in the future it's useful to raise that issue by couching it as a potential issue of priorities. Yes, the short-term solution may create problems in the long-term but sometimes the short-term priorities are more important. Taking on a tech debt isn't inherently bad, it's when you take it on unknowingly or without a full understanding of the terms of that debt that it goes bad.

Just as with any other debt, the cost in the long term must be balanced against the needs of the short term. And as with any other debt, if someone takes on that debt and then decides to ignore repayment there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth when the bill comes due. ;)

That sounds like a violation of the Visa/Mastercard agreement. Those networks do, in fact, charge the merchant for the use of the network but their licensing agreement specifically prohibits mentioning that surcharge or passing it on to the customer. Instead the allowable method is to provide a "cash discount."

That surcharge is also why most credit card terminals default to debit card when presented Visa/MC debit card is used. Debit cards incur a lower fee from the network than the credit card fee. Of course the customer also has less recourse using debit vs credit when it comes to chargebacks, extended warranties, etc.

Yes, note that I did not justify banning the twitter account in question and pointed out that it was hardly a leap to get the info even if they banned that account.

I was simply replying to a comment that inferred the only way flight info was useful for a stalker was if you planned on stalking them in another plane... which is obviously incorrect.

Knowing when/where a private plane lands makes it a lot easier to stalk the passengers of that plane.

This is of course entirely separate from whether such info was used against Musk or his family, or whether such a possibility is sufficient grounds for attempting to silence those who make it easily accessible (it's still accessible thanks to ADS-B for anyone with basic technical skills and cares enough).

There are many excellent benefits of exercise, but substantial weight loss is not among them. The human body evolved to be really efficient, especially in aerobic activity. A predator whose main method of hunting is long-distance running prey to exhaustion isn't going to last very long if it burns ludicrous amounts of calories during such activity since no predator is 100% successful.

There's approximately 3500 calories per pound of fat and the average human will burn about 100 calories per mile of sustained running. If you want to lose a pound a week (a pretty healthy weight loss rate) you can either run 5 miles a day without changing your diet or skip 2 energy drinks a day without changing your exercise regime. Unfortunately many people that think a big workout is burning huge amounts of fat often indulge in excess eating as a reward which leads to even less weight loss (or even weight gain).

Again, exercise has a ludicrous number of benefits and absolutely should be encouraged for those benefits but weight loss shouldn't be included among them.

"Play" is doing something you want to do. "Work" is doing something someone else wants you to do or needs to be done. The former gives you complete agency, the latter is a reduction of your agency. If that something is valuable enough to someone they will pay for someone else to do that thing they can't or don't want to do (the pay is necessarily related to the value they have assigned as well as the retention of their agency in the matter). Of course they have to find that someone else that is willing to do that something for the pay offered, which means that someone else has to weigh whether the loss of agency is worth the payment offered to them.

It is not so much that "we love to do the actual core activity" since there are few programmers that would enjoy being constrained to constantly re-implementing basic CRUD functionality for months or years. We instead love the core activity driven by our own agency, doing what we want simply because the reward is satisfying that want.

I've had burn-out a few times over the last 30+ years of working for various reasons both personal and environmental. Take it as a given that everyone responds differently and there is no One True Way(tm) to recover, but I can at least offer the solutions that worked for me in the past. These days I can detect the symptoms of an oncoming bout and proactively work to avoid it now.

If the burnout is not yet crushing and putting me into a black dog bitter mentality I've found that taking a leave of absence for a few weeks can often lead to recovery. That leave means dropping all work, all work-related communications, all browsing of tech-related news/info, and anything else that will lead my mind back to a work mentality. If the company caught on fire and burnt to the ground, I would only know about it when I returned from leave. I try and change up my routine and stimulus during that leave; taking long walks in areas I've not visited, trying an entirely new and alien hobby, or generally seeking out experiences that are unfamiliar. It's basically an intentional effort to get my brain to context-switch.

Once I return from leave, I sit down and write out what led me down the path of burn-out and then work with my direct reports to minimize or eliminate those things in order to ensure my long-term employment. If they are unwilling to cooperate, I quit.

I did have a bout of burnout 15 years ago or so that was seriously deep, and in that case I left the tech industry for a few years and ignored it with great enthusiasm. Eventually my interest re-ignited and I spent a couple of months getting back up to speed and re-entered programming.

One thing I can tell you is that walking away for a few years isn't a fatal decision for your career. Despite the FOMO hype and paradigm-of-the-month tone of most tech news and vendors, if you've got the mentality, experience, and skill of a good programmer returning after a few years hiatus requires a fairly short on-ramp for getting back to whatever the current hotness and "state of the art" may be.

I can say that pivoting from one burnout situation to another potentially stressful environment (your unease with management certainly qualifies) is a quick way to an even worse case of burnout and degraded mental health, or at least it has been for me.

Good luck and I hope you find some useful guidance in the many replies I'm sure you'll receive here on HN.

Except for Snow Leopard, Mountain Lion, El Capitan, High Sierra, and Big Sur.

They do have the benefit of at least referencing a single entity, unlike Ubuntu's naming convention.

It looks like they've reinvented the Gateway 2000 Handbook.

Borland seemed to be in flux in the year or two prior to the split. Turbo Prolog was hyped and then seemed to disappear (although I'm pretty sure it shipped a version or two), Turbo Pascal was advertised for the then-new Amiga 1000 and never shipped.

It's hard to understate how critical Borland was in the shift from the BASIC era of home computing for many users and inexperienced programmers in the 80s and early 90s.

Over the years I've learned to be suspicious of simple solutions to difficult problems and those who assert such solutions. When trying to convey that healthy skepticism to others I tend to use the phrase "beware those who express the certainty that can only be born out of ignorance or a swindle."

The analogy I use to explain how the acquisition of knowledge leads to humility is akin to climbing. You start in a ditch and can only see a single mountain that you must ascend to be knowledgeable. Once you reach the peak of that mountain you are greeted with an entire new range of mountains that would remain hidden from you without the benefit of your newfound perspective. You may also safely assume that beyond each of those mountains lies yet another set of partially or completely obscured mountain ranges.

As Socrates said, "if I am wise it is only in that I know what I do not know."

The One True Way will always rise up and claim its victims, especially the inexperienced and/or naive amongst us.

I sometimes think TOTW is actually an ancient one that thinks Cthulhu is an infant.

Hurt you in what way? Have you become less knowledgeable due to your curiosity?

OK, 4-5 years ago I was hired by a startup building a data storage/sharing hardware solution that emphasized security. Each storage device could be a an ad hoc member of a group of devices and there were multiple users for each device/group. Individual chunks of data (be it files, filesystems, dirs, etc) had ownership and privileges as did the devices themselves.

What the startup did NOT want to be is the single source of authority or federation for permissions, group membership, user management, etc (they would not only become the single point of attack but the devices themselves would be dependent upon the existence of the company continuing to provide federation services, so going-out-of-business would render the devices useless).

The most obvious solution to those issues was a blockchain-based system. As long as devices existed they could continue to interop, the entries in the blockchain provided audit trails, the entries could be replayed for sync purposes, etc.

Facebook changed when it decided its best source of revenue was advertising and that it would own the ad inventory (Google did the same thing, and with similar loss-of-value to users, which also devalued the underlying behavior the company depended upon for quality targeting).

I think that Facebook's only real revenue option that would have also retained the fundamental value of the social network and its effects was to behave either as a third-party sentiment/preference analysis service ala Nielsen Ratings or as a source of ad targeting for individuals (based on their sentiments/preferences expressed within FB) that could be sold for use external to the FB experience... and I have suspicions that even the latter might have eventually led to distorting that core FB experience.

The social network and the behaviors within it were only truly valuable if externally observed without intervention. By pushing behaviors that FB itself wanted users to perform they broke the uniquely valuable part.

I apologize for the pedantry but "blockchain" != "cryptocurrency." My inner cynic is bearish on cryptocurrencies, VR (at least in broad adoption), and to a lesser extent blockchain tech but of the three the one that has the least-worst chance of finding a useful broad fit IMO is the use of blockchain tech since it's really nothing more than a trustless method of double-entry accounting and a potential means of avoiding the risk of direct federation for service providers (you stop being the single point of failure/data breach target).

Sadly I also suspect that blockchain will go down with the whole cryptocurrency ship due to guilt-by-association, much like the AI winter that followed the overhyped 1980s era took with it a number of viable limited-domain solutions that had to wander the desert for 20-30 years before being revivified for the current AI/ML efforts.

Wikipedia is also suffering under the issues of "moderation." The original web was based on the idea of "throw your crap up, if people like it they do if not they don't." Evaluation both the content and the credibility of content on the net was up to the viewer. Adding moderators apart from the original authors and viewers, especially when those moderators are at an integration level (be it wikipedia, twitter, google, etc) is in direct opposition to that original ethos.

How shocking. An advertising company who uses search as a venue for advertising does not produce the highest quality of search results for those who search.

Stop thinking of google/alphabet/insertnewbrandnamehere as a search company. They attempted to make money from the search engine in the 1990s when they couldn't find customers willing to pay for that technology and the company chose to make money from ads. Your company is defined by how you make money, not by user perception or press releases. Google is an ad company because they make money off of advertising. Goodies they give you that leads to better targeting of advertising for them is merely good ad business, stop thinking it's for any other purpose.

I tip my hat to you sir, for providing 25 years of the pleasure of pursing the scientific method and experimentation, even in areas that would be often dismissed by Those Who Know Things(tm). If a claim is made, well then roll out the experiments and demonstrate it works or it's false.

In the 90s I actually thought you were responsible for the Scientific American Amateur Scientist column but after a year or so of regularly browsing your site I realized you were simply what Amateur Scientist SHOULD have been in the 90s, reflecting the zeitgeist of the prior decades of SciAm AmSci.

I spent plenty of time kicking it on usenet circa 1990 and later, but as a content creator you have to bust out your gopher links for proper cred. ;)

I've lived to see this kind of thing enacted in a good portion of the Anglosphere and my visceral reaction is to engage in a combination of civil disobedience and a determination to undermine every overstep made.

With regards to things like the Aussie requirement for phone check-ins every 15 minutes or they will deploy police to follow up and confirm your location, turn off the phone and make them eat the cost of having to deploy all available police resources just to see if people are submitting to the whim of the government every 15 minutes. Bonus if you opt to answer the door naked and claim you were busy showering/having sex/aligning your chakras/whatever.

Any bureaucracy will naturally follow the path of least resistance. It is your job to make it more painful for them to pursue their goals than it is to leave you alone.

It's always a joy when I randomly feel the need to check and see if amasci is still up and running and am greeted with the comforting display of good old mid-90s HTML text and links offering all manner of interesting content.

What a dichotomy to the current "all pages must be apps/infinite scroll and optimized for ads" design that has reigned for the last decade or two.

It's not actually rational, let alone long-term optimal, to act as though there is a predator behind every bush given a 1% (in reality it's probably a couple of orders of magnitude less likely, but we'll ignore that). If you need water and head for the local watering hole, avoiding bushes will most likely result in you not getting water since bushes tend to grow where there is water. I may be 1% likely to get eaten by something hiding behind the bush but I am 100% likely to die if I don't drink water.

Avoidance of all possible risk is a recipe for paralysis. Part of being rational is evaluation of risks vs rewards as well as recognizing the dangers of unintended consequences and the fact that nearly all meaningful decisions are made with incomplete information and time limits.

Note that INXS also trotted out the "filmed performance" video for Don't Change from Shabooh Shoobah and was one of, if not the, first hit for the band internationally.

While I agree with your overall point regarding the importance of contextual history when looking at any design, one nit I would pick is your statement that there was no internet when Phil Katz created and PKWARE released PKZIP. First release was Feb of 1989, and I was most assuredly on the internet at that time, and in fact that is where I first encountered PKZIP.

The 80s BBS scene was built around things like ARC, LHarc, and ZOO. ARC essentially got killed by its creators SEA thanks to their suing PKWARE over PKARC. Many BBS operators banned the use of ARC after that lawsuit in protest (a similar furor would erupt 5-6 years later over GIF).

One problem is that we've turned "efficient" into some sort of noun that is self-referential, rather than the actual definition which is constrained to a particular result. "We must be efficient." should beg the question "to achieve what?"

The second problem is that efficiency is often applied across many small scopes of operation, ignoring the effects on efficiency at greater scope. You can be tactically efficient at the expense of strategic goals.

The third problem is that efficiency is often over-fitted in a chase for maximalism, which necessarily creates a rigid system that is highly dependent on little or no variation between the past and an expected future. Just-in-time supply chains fell apart due to things like the covid-19 lockdowns, which often cascaded across both vertical levels of specific industries as well as across industries.

From a system design point of view, building a system that has no flexibility in scaling but is instead maximally efficient based on current (and recent past) levels of demand is a disaster waiting to happen. In the old days we'd laugh at a commercial site that got slashdotted because it was incapable of handling burst demand.

I recall that we rapidly turned the "write once run everywhere (WORE)" slogan into "WORN- write once, run nowhere" thanks to all the platform-specific changing that always occurred.

Having been around in the 1990s, I can assure you that "underhyped" is the very LAST thing I think of when Java is mentioned.

This may be fine for an initial hiring practice, but as you note it will become problematic in the future. Interestingly, you dodge the real source of the problem (and its possible resolution) by hand-waving the "career ladder."

Once you have an employee and a history of experiencing their work within the company you have the basis for deciding where pay diverges and what career ladder they wish to follow. The fundamental question you should always ask yourself regarding compensation for an existing employee is "what would it cost me to replace the value they deliver to the company?" That isn't based on title or prior work experience, it should be based on a real understanding of their work, initiative, and the other aspects of their involvement with the company that delivers value (along with a balance of possible deficiencies that reduce that value).

Does that tend to produce valuations for existing personnel that may be higher than possible new hires? Sure, but then bringing on a new hire has its own costs regarding training, accumulation of institutional knowledge, etc but those are real costs that must enter the compensation equation.

If an employee wishes to gain more compensation, their career ladder is to find ways to deliver more value. That isn't dependent on titles or checklists of certifications, it's based on what directly contributes to the success of the company.

I had a friend who, many years ago, got a military contract to manufacture an item. I jokingly asked him if he was competing with $1200 hammers and $500 toilet seats and his response was "if you had any idea how much paperwork and red tape is involved in doing anything with the government you'd say that the $500 toilet seat was under-priced and the contractor probably lost money on every one."

I'd agree that we tend to frame things in a reductionist way, but I don't think that's peculiar to Western thought so much as it is endemic to humans and their limitations. Given limited resources of time and knowledge the vast majority of people either attempt to limit the scope of the problem domain or opt for satisficing behaviors to achieve "good enough" results. It is rare that when confronted with a problem that a person has the luxury of time, creativity, and/or attention to derive first principles. It is doubly difficult when examining systems because the failings of most systems are not immediately obvious but instead the result of unintended consequences or the complexity of multiple conflicting behaviors resulting in perverse incentives... and if at the creation of the original system such problems were not foreseen what guarantees that the replacement system does not create worse results? Most people are cautious in proceeding when they are facing unknown (or unknowable) obstacles.