hackthemack

Wayback Machine already has a copy. If the site does not load for you, try https://web.archive.org/web/20261026222905/https://www.grego...

I will never understand how so many intelligent people in the software industry, programmers, my colleagues, were/are so short sighted, and... perhaps selfish.

Every time I have brought up unions for the past 25 years, you get this prevalent attitude that "we" programmers have it great. Do not rock the boat.

I do not mean to pick on any one individual, but look at this comment thread from just 1 year ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44485959

"Yeah, look at union successes like dockworkers holding economy hostage via a legalized monopoly, while having more striking non-working members long useless due to automation than actual workers! I sure aspire to work in an industry like that." -- some hackernews user

What?

"There is not a single problem competent developers have that unions would solve" -- some hackernews user

What?

Well. Now we will all suffer. I am bitter. I will suffer because of years of shortsightedness and stubbornness and some kind of "we are ubermensch" and above all the little people who need silly little crutches like unions.

Same. pass-by-value copy-on-write. I always find other languages strange that they do not have this.

The user base on Hacker News has really gone down hill. Voting down my comment above has no basis in the guidelines or the strictly information content of post, and hence, I have to conclude people just vote down opinions they do not like.

I propose that voting on comments should have a required field addendum, so that before a vote can be cast, the voter has to type into the field the reason they are voting it up or voting it down.

Let me clarify one point I was trying to make. It is my belief nobody is going to give you UBI. I offered up Keynes prediction as a little bit of evidence about human nature. The United States could have easily built infrastructure and safety nets to feed all of its citizens. It could have easily provided a much improved welfare system, universal health care, and other social services. But it did not.

Me too. Here is some history to back up how absurd the statement is.

In 1930, John Maynard Keynes wrote an essay title "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren"

He predicted that in 2030, technology, productivity, capitalism would solve the economy. There would be so little work to do and so many resources that the average work week could just be 15 hours!

He wrote that once all us plebes were liberated from work, what we would face is humanities greatest problem. What purpose will we have with all this new found leisure time!

We only have to wait 4 more years to relax.

I had similar? thought many years ago when strong typing became another one of the programming mantras touted on the internet.

Even dynamically type programming languages will layout what types the languages has. But that is usually the conventions built off of years of history, usually based on C.

But what if you wanted to define a custom type to use? Say you wanted to make type mysmallint, and it was an integer that is between 1 and 1000. Now, you can write up code to do this but it is not the same thing as declaring type int. *

*unless you are using Haskell, F#, or others I am not aware of.

What if you wanted to define a custom type that says this string only contains ascii characters? You can not easily define that as a type and pass it around the code. You have to write custom code and do checks.

The Freakonomics podcast goes into events that happened before 2020. It mentions the following article, for example.

https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-h...

This has been known a long time. Freakanomics did a two part podcast on does advertising actually work. It is long but well worth a listen if you want to hear some science about advertising.

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-w...

The second part goes into internet advertising.

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-w...

There are transcripts of the episodes on the page if you want to read instead of listen.

Just my personal anecdata, it took my a while to put a finger on it, but it seemed like something started to change in products in the 90s. Bag of chips started to fill up with more air and less chips, candy bars got smaller, airlines started reducing seat sizes. Super huge discount? retail stores opened, that you usually needed a membership card. Walmart started offering the cheapest sourced product from around the world that was often just slightly inferior to what you use to be able to get, or the price on the higher quality item went up while the slightly lower quality item price went down. Washing machines started using all these cheap plastic parts that more easily wear down or break. Electronics started to get added to everything whether it is needed or not, usually for switches where the electronic part is cheaper than the mechanical equivalent.

And I realized, this is what people want, in the sense of this is what they will pay for, this is how they vote with their wallet. What I want is not this, but it is what society wants.

One of the arguments I have heard that he did not have a proof is the following.

He wrote his note in his copy of Arithmetica around 1637.

He most likely wrote his proof for the case of n=4 in the 1640s.

He sent letters to other mathematicians in 1640, 1657 where he talks about the case of n=3 but writes in such a way that it seems like he does not have the answer.

Why would he write n=4 after? If he had a generalized proof?

Why would he tease other mathematicians with a special case in 1657 if he already had a generalized proof?

Yep. We can go around and around. Like, does health care count for some of the discrepancy? Or the more generous time off that Europeans typically have?

I do recall some reports that concentrated on just workers that had unions in the United States versus workers in a similar field that did not have unions, and it concluded that unionized workers get paid more.

But, it was not the tech sector, so someone, maybe you, will argue it does not count.

Just very, very difficult to get to the bottom of what is the best way.

I am in the we should unionize camp. My stance is based on, the tech companies have way more leverage than you or I. They do not work in your interest. A union is imperfect but it is better than nothing to get "some" leverage back.

These topics are just so difficult to debate. They are filled with feelings and one person's perspective or anecdote, and it is difficult to drill down into what is true or what is not true.

You wrote "Modern tech workers arguably have the best career deal in the history of humankind".

How do you know?

And, for the sake of argument, let us say it is the best deal in the history of humankind, does that make it fair that the big tech companies did the following...

As a small rebuttal of sorts, consider

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

You are making less money than what you would have been making if that illegal arrangement had not been made.

I agree. No matter how complicated, or unnecessary, or unintuitive a piece of software or technology is... There is always this contingent of people who pop in and say "It is not that hard!" and furthermore tend to express a view of "I am superior because I figured out this obtuse thing, and you must be inferior because you have not figured it out".

I do not know why that mentality exists in the industry, but I see it all the time... for the past 35 years.

I guess I am officially old and no longer know what the cool "it" is any more. The C++17 example seems much more clear to me. It is more typing, but so what? It is not that much more typing, and it looks like code that people have written for 40 years.

Ah! Thank you for the more in depth explanation. I was not aware that codeberg had such a system. As others pointed out, it is probably iocaine.

Thank you. I went and looked at what else it could do and it does have a much larger feature set.

Is your complaint about Anubis? I see the "checking if you are human" kind of text too when going to codeberg, but it is usually only a second or two. It is because I run a bit of obfuscation and resistance to browser finger printing.

But you find seeing the text for a couple of seconds too annoying to use codeberg? Maybe it is more than 2 seconds for you?

Everyone has their views on what is acceptable in the world and what they will put up with. Just, to my point of view, I think codeberg is trying to fight the good fight in keeping llms from crawling their website.

Question for mermaid users out there. I have not used mermaid more than just superficially looking at it but it looks to me like a re-implementation of graphviz? Which has been around forever. Is there something it does that makes it more appealing?

I am not knocking this Free Mermaid Diagram Editor either. Seems decent. But, similarly, edotor has been around forever.

https://edotor.net/

When news broke about the affair, I remembered, 6 months prior, watching an episode of the Daily Show where Jon Stewart interviewed Paula Broadwell and they even made jokes about if her husband was jealous of her spending so much time interviewing David Petraeus.

https://archive.org/details/COM_20120127_020000_The_Daily_Sh...

I sort of agree with the idea that LLMs are great (sometimes) at distilling all the quantifiable things they have churned through into something similar or, perhaps, putting together things that someone has not thought of putting together yet. And not so great at the intangible things, like good taste.

But, quoting "We've reached a dangerous moment. This moment threatens to convince too many of us that our lived experiences do not matter."

I think that "moment" was long before AI LLMs came around. I can only speak from my lived experiences, and I would say the tech industry and capitalism already put a low, low value on "lived experiences". Take game development, it seems to me, that big game studios rely on "a new fresh crop of college grads" will appear every year. We can push them as hard as we can. Hopefully, they will quit, and we can hire another batch.

I see it too, with lower wage jobs. No point in trying to keep our burger flippers happy. They are going to quit. Might as well factor that into the equation and just make a system with a revolving work force. No commitment. No retirement plan.

Agreed. The best time to form a union was 20 years ago (Especially because Tech Workers had leverage because they were in demand). The second best time to form a union is today.

I jumped to a similar conclusion right away and popped over here to comment only to find you have beaten me to the punch. I use to keep a work wiki page of common problems the team encounters over and over again.

Years ago, I stumbled upon the "idea" was already debated in other fields long before programming. Lumpers and Splitters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpers_and_splitters

It is a tale as old as time (in the industry)

I wrote a while back, Most of the executives I have met really have no clue. They just go with what is being promoted in the space because it offers a safety net. Look, we are "not behind the curve!". We are innovating along with the rest of the industry.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46670190

I love fossil. Something about it's opinionated workflow that matches what I think. But

network effects. I just can not bring my team to use fossil. They have to share code with others. Other departments. And everyone (99%+) uses git. It just feels like a disservice to force them to use fossil. It is a catch-22.

It is similar to so many other things in the tech space. Trying to get fellow developers to use functional style idioms. Trying to enforce immutability. It is like something big (like a facebook or google project) has to force the community to get on board.

I prefer the full quote by Douglas Adams.

I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

Many years ago. Maybe 2005 to 2015? I had a friend who used cpanel to run a web hosting company. He made quite a bit of money doing that. He was not a programmer, but he could setup up wordpress and install plugins. I remember asking him once if he was worried he would get hacked and then lose control of his servers? Lose his customers?

He said he was worried but he had backups upon backups. I saw him restore a bunch of websites once, using cpanel, and I thought it is an amazing little bit of software with all of the click a button to setup many different things (like WAF). A real time saver and provides some guidance if you are not a unix-internet guru.

I always liked looking at the maps different people have made over the years. It is interesting how they can come out looking different but represent the same latent space.

https://www.vaultofculture.com/vault/nst/2023/02/13/zorkmaps

Something about it reminds me of force directed graphs, where you only care about the nodes and edges (the rooms and connections).

You wrote "I don't understand what is missing"

ipv6 was standardized in 1995 6to4 was standardized in 2001

6to4 is not used in any meaningful way today.

What was missing was ipv6 should have had 6to4 (but better) in it, in 1995.

Now, I could go on about what is wrong with 6to4, but every new topic is just another surface area for ipv6 proponents to launch another question (I sometimes suspect in bad faith).

The embedding I believe you are referring to is not a part of the global routing model. (maybe I am wrong?) What I am describing is making that kind of declaration central to the system in a deterministic, network wide mapping of ipv4 to the larger ipv6 space. The translation in ipv6 ended up being handled by a mix of mechanisms after the fact, rather than a single, uniform mapping model that tied directly to the address structure. I think part of the problem is they did not put that front and center, at the beginning, when doing the initial specification.