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fj39dkf

78 karma · joined April 9, 2019

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fj39dkf··on Boeing engineer breaks silence on MAX 737
> Trying to vilify people and attempting to create an environment to produce massive punitive damages and lawsuits, or to bring political pressure to change staffing decisions dramatically decreases safety. The FAA has spent almost a hundred years building up an environment of cooperation with a shared responsibility to understand failures and enable the changing of the entire aviation industry whenever necessary to promote safety. This has been fabulously successful.

346 dead passengers is definitely not successful or acceptable. You think the rating/MCAS problem doesn't merit further investigation?

fj39dkf··on OpenBSD Is Now My Workstation
"Reactionary" doesn't mean literally "reacting to a problem", it's a political term that comes from the French revolution, referring to monarchists who became organized and motivated as a reaction against the French revolution.

It's more or less synonymous with "conservative" and "right wing" which have similar origins, although today it has more of a pejorative connotation in English, or sometimes specifically refers to people on the colloquial "far-right" who advocate for ethno-nationalism, authoritarianism, military adventurism, nativism, etc.

fj39dkf··on The Long, Slow Death of Venice
Are you sure this description of an American tourist didn't come from a 1990s newspaper cartoon? Fanny pack? Really?
fj39dkf··on The rise of remote working will continue
Interesting to see all the pro-100%-remote comments here. I worked for a company for about two years. One year in, they decided to go fully remote. The goal was to save money (the business was bootstrapped at the time) and to allow one of the founders to move to where his wife was attending graduate school. I don't feel like our productivity changed much. I enjoyed the flexibility but found myself feeling horribly lonely without the normal day to day interaction. So, they offered to get me a dedicated spot in a co-working space. That helped some, but not as much as being part of an in-person team.

So I ultimately left, although for other reasons. Now I work at a place with a generous WFH policy but a central office. I WFH maybe one or two days a week and this is way better.

I think it depends on the job itself sometimes as well. I work on a data science team, and I've never found a good replacement for doing math on the whiteboard with someone. The communication barrier introduced with a network connection is just painful in that case.

However, I also live in Boston, one of the few American cities with (mostly) functional public transit. My commute is a 10 minute train ride where I can read email/slack and think about what I'm doing that day. Or if the weather is nice, it's a 30-45 minute walk. It's no pain at all to make it into the office.

fj39dkf··on Ask HN: Why is .NET not popular with startups?
Those "hipster bubbles" are the areas where most tech innovation is happening. Nobody is saying that insurance companies aren't using .NET.
fj39dkf··on Suicide Rates Among Adolescents and Young Adults in the United States, 2000-2017
There are many confounding variables here that make it difficult to draw a convincing conclusion. The ethnic disparity can partially be explained by the fact that white men have higher handgun ownership rates than other demographics (my guess is this is because white men also have higher incomes, not because white men inherently like guns), and such access to guns is associated with increased suicide risk.

I'm sure that's not the whole story though. And statistics on suicides are notoriously unreliable, as many communities consider it shameful and are incentivized to rationalize the person's death with another explanation.

fj39dkf··on Ask HN: Why is .NET not popular with startups?
Yes, seriously.
fj39dkf··on Ask HN: Why is .NET not popular with startups?
For students and researchers. If you're operating a business you still have to pay for VS licenses, or violate the free license and hope you get big enough fast enough that it's not a problem.
fj39dkf··on Ask HN: Why is .NET not popular with startups?
People have rightly mentioned the cost and vendor lock-in issues. The other problem is that - for whatever reason - good engineers simply want nothing to do with the Microsoft ecosystem. In this market, they have other options. So tying your infrastructure to .NET means limiting your hiring pool to mostly 9-to-5er enterprise developers who tend to fix problems by asking Microsoft to sell them the solution. Not exactly the attitude you want at a startup.
fj39dkf··on Ask HN: Why is .NET not popular with startups?
Every .NET developer I've worked with had to be painfully dragged out of the Microsoft world into the real one. It's just not worth the effort to hire people who solve problems by asking Microsoft to sell them the answer. Better to pick a technology where the talent pool has legitimately competent engineers.
fj39dkf··on The poisons released by melting Arctic ice
Obviously it would be nice if a crack team of scientists and engineers ordered some pizzas and had a marathon science session that comes up with something that solves all our problems and lets us continue burning fossil fuels as usual.

But that's simply not how it works, no matter how much money you throw at it. And you won't even have money to throw at it in the US at least, because belief in climate change is a political opinion.

fj39dkf··on The worst morale-boosting gesture I've experienced
I'm surprised this seems to work so well for you. I've had colleagues do similar things and it pretty much always resulted in them being "managed out", outright fired, or mysteriously lumped into a round of layoffs that otherwise didn't affect their department.
fj39dkf··on Retirees Might Run Out of Money 10 Years Before They Die
You're being downvoted because your portfolio's performance is almost certainly a matter of luck and a bull market, not your clever investment research. Not even Berkshire Hathaway makes consistent 30% annual returns, and they employ plenty of "stock market wizards".
fj39dkf··on I didn't get paid, so I open-sourced my client’s project
Good point, I assumed this is in the US.
fj39dkf··on I didn't get paid, so I open-sourced my client’s project
That's not really how contracts work. A contract is only "void" if it contains something fundamentally illegal, or if someone was forced to sign it. And that would be determined in court, not automatically.

The guy who promised to pay is breaching the contract by not paying, and the contractor's recourse is to sue him in civil court for the money.

fj39dkf··on I didn't get paid, so I open-sourced my client’s project
Do you mean intellectual property?

It would be defined in the contract, but usually the contractors never own the copyright to code written for other people.

Anyway, I agree with the other comments that this is unprofessional and immature. We have a civil court system to deal with these kind of issues.

fj39dkf··on Researchers strapped video cameras on cats and let them do their thing
Cats actually have 9 lives, at least according to current research.
fj39dkf··on Tenants win right to physical keys over smart locks from landlords
He evicted us because he could rent it out for more money.

Something about your comment makes me think there's more to this story.

fj39dkf··on Notre Dame Re-Imagined with Glass Roof
FYI this is a far-right conspiracy theory, typically found among white supremacists. there is no evidence that a secret cabal is planning some kind of new world order or plotting to burn all the history books.
fj39dkf··on Massachusetts Court Blocks Warrantless Access to Real-Time Location Data
What a weird thing to say about Massachusetts. It has a constitution and an elected legislature, so it's definitely not an "authoritarian state". It has one of the lowest rates of police violence in the country, so I don't understand the quip about the cops either. Can you clarify?
fj39dkf··on 26 States Now Ban or Restrict Community Broadband
Most of them are actually Republican-controlled state legislatures, or were Republican-controlled when the measure passed, even if they frequently vote blue in presidential elections.
fj39dkf··on Mathematicians Discover the Perfect Way to Multiply
It is pretty weird. I don't think there's a simple, empirical answer available. But if you would like to read more about incredible mathematical intuition and elegance, give the book Love and Math a read.
fj39dkf··on Startup Stock Options – Why a Good Deal Has Gone Bad
Can you elaborate?
fj39dkf··on 2019 Stack Overflow Developer Survey Results
Can you elaborate on what you mean by "socially liberal"? Which language communities are on the other side of the spectrum?
fj39dkf··on 2019 Stack Overflow Developer Survey Results
The survey provides specific numbers on this, no need for the pinch of salt: 41% of respondents have fewer than 5 years of professional experience, and 68% have fewer than 10.

A better question is whether or not this experience distribution is representative of all software engineers. It almost certainly isn't, because it's only surveying "people who respond to stack overflow surveys", but it's hard to know how different it is.

All that said, there is no need for the quip about trends and buzzwords. Of course younger developers are more interested in new technologies - they have a whole future career they need to plan for. One might just as easily and meanly say that old developers refuse to learn new things because they're just going to retire in 10 years.