idolaspecus

It definitely could be the case that my last point and GP's last point overlap to some extent. I read it (with the sentence before it) more as a claim that certain characteristics aren't factors when it comes to "greatness".

I appreciated the first 90% of your comment, and consider the picture of greatness you painted therein something to aspire to. Deep thoughtfulness, personal responsibility, craftsmanship, and virtuosity are all traits I hope to one day embody. But as a matter of argumentation the last line is simply discordant, it does not follow from the anecdote (beyond the obvious fact that the anecdote is anecdotal).

In my experience the most brilliant people aren't brilliant individually or brilliant as a team player or brilliant at X or brilliant at Y, they're simply brilliant. The one exception to this observation, in my experience, is that I've met a few brilliant mathematicians who are very narrowly brilliant.

An old coworker (Vim user) of mine had a good response to another coworker who asked him "why don't you use an IDE?":

"I do, it's called Linux."

Vim and Emacs minimize magic, modern monolithic IDEs maximize magic. I think there is fundamentally no good reason why an IDE should be provided as one gigantic tool, because that's not how software works. You could say Vim and Emacs aren't IDEs, they're platforms for composing IDEs. Software engineers swear by these platforms because their very structure is exceptionally well-aligned with the sort of high-quality software they want to build.

I guess I agree the word "must" is maybe too far, but I'd hardly go so far as to say it satisfies the requirements for "dogmatic BS".

The pdf version is 67 pages, hardly something only a giant company could afford to read, and the rest of this comment falls apart once you notice this detail.

> I call BS on dogmatic rules like that. Good architecture is analysing the requirements at hand and explicitly articulating and weighting the trade-offs.

This is quite the straw-man argument. For example, the section [1] whose title you quoted explicitly calls out the need to perform an evaluation first:

> When functionality is required, existing IT assets in the organization must be evaluated and used first, unless they do not exist and/or are a significant mismatch to the required functionality.

The "book" is clearly a draft-quality rough collection of notes, many of which are not fleshed out extensively, but it's quite unfair to consider it as a set of "dogmatic rules".

[1] https://nocomplexity.com/documents/arplaybook/businessarchit...

For the same reason as if it had said “I recently got a React dev job which mostly consists of writing Kubernetes deployments.” It sounds like the beginning of an article which uses buzzwords without a lot of depth.

> I recently got a DevOps job that mostly involves writing a new backend system in Go completely from scratch.

If this wasn't on the front page of HN I'd have stopped reading here, but it is, so I didn't, then I regretted it.

I in general agree with most of your points in this thread and disagree with the claim that you've been disrespectful (to GP and to the Aztecs :)), but I do think there's an interesting and important space between your idea re. Aztec rituals and those who'd say your view is "disrespectful".

It's plausible, in my opinion, that evaluating the Aztecs' ritual sacrifice practice in terms of the modern scientific POV leads to a categorically incorrect analysis. I.e. the questions--whether the Aztec gods exist, whether unfalsifiable claims "make sense" or can be operative, etc--might not be relevant or interesting.

I.e. the function describing the relationship between how closely our actions align with true facts as we understand them intellectually and broad outcomes in quality of life (defined however you want) is almost certainly not monotonic.

I guess in short all I'm saying is that our conscious, intellectual understanding of the world is not the only useful motivator. And I don't mean this in some sort of supernatural, metaphysical, spiritual way: I mean that objectively rational behavior sometimes results from subjectively irrational behavior.

Related: I'm looking for essentially the same product as OP but with the additional requirement that it's hackable. I'm trying to build a device that can play and record audio with a single hardware button that toggles between modes. For example, I'd like to be able to be listening to a podcast, push a single button once, record a memo to myself, push the same button again once, and be back to listening to the podcast.

I don't have specific references on hand, but I'm pretty sure that your wager would be ill-begotten. Studies have shown that simply abstaining from distraction takes mental energy (for lack of a better term) and reduces performance in a number of ways. This suggest that designing your environment ahead of time (what OP is trying to do) is more efficient/productive than resolving to maintain disciple in the moment. Again, I don't have specific references on hand, but I know that this phenomenon is discussed in both Thinking Fast and Slow[1] and the Craving Mind[2].

[1]https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11468377-thinking-fast-a...

[2]https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32714199-the-craving-min...

> It is extremely unlikely you can convince anybody outside a country of (3) without some intervening international body, so the "crypto economy" replacing currency to fight an authoritarian regime is practically never going to happen.

Could anti-authoritarian outsiders use (3) to effectively support anti-authoritarian insiders?

I can’t help but take this chance to recommend Guy Gavriel Kay’s Sailing to Sarantium. It’s an absolute masterpiece of a novel set in Byzantium just after the Nika Riots; the chariot races and Blue/Green dynamic play a big role in the plot.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/104097.Sailing_to_Sarant...

> I have a bug, I'm frigging anxious, I gotta GO GO GO as fast as I can to find out what it is already, and you think now is the time to type parens, commas and quotation marks?! Fuck you! By which I mean to say, short code is important, short commands are a must.

Hahaha! This is excellent, made me crack a big IRL smile.

I completely agree that his attitude for parts of this video is cringey, but Feynman is famous for (among other things) his ability to simplify and communicate complex ideas. Feynman diagrams are the perfect example of this.

Edit: I guess my point is just that being willing and able to communicate simply and effectively is not necessarily at odds with being a condescending prick.

I don't know about selling clicks in general but, for me, that headline is even more compelling. Corporate executives' salaries are canonically justified by the fact that they're tied to the success of the corporation. If executives get their millions even when their corporations tank, I see a serious problem.

Is the rest marketing bullshit because of insurmountable technical challenges or is it because you have to __trust__ the VPN service? I.e. if I were to somehow think up a business model that included some novel level of transparency, could I provide a VPN service that could honestly claim to provide privacy and security to its users?

Oh no. They say you shouldn't meet your heroes, but now I think it might be just as important to never learn which editor they use.

I agree that maintaining comments is difficult and that they tend to drift. A good way to mitigate this problem is to explicitly include checking comments as part of the code review process.

I'm not saying you did this, but I think that most people who point out little issues with the mundane processes within software development haven't yet grokked the dev process in its totality. Commit messages, code reviews, comments, documentation, unit tests, design patterns and idioms, all these practices' strengths and use-cases compensate the others' weaknesses. I.e. to basically any gripe (again, not saying you griped) like "process X isn't worth it because of some maintenance issue" there's an answer along the lines of "well that's what process Y is for". Together all these processes produce high-quality codebases but when you lack one or more of them the whole thing falls apart quickly.

I think they can in fact all be "so, so, important". Maintaining a large, long-living, complicated codebase is a genuinely difficult problem involving a plethora of actually critical components and processes.

In my experience the engineers who write good commit messages are also the engineers who read them and also the engineers who understand their value and also the best engineers on a team.

Your argument that "most engineers don't care about commit messages, so they must not be important" is akin to "most people are overweight, so health is unimportant".

I don’t know many details, but he’s been using Java for 10 years or so, and he’s not particularly interested in the new hotness. 10ish years ago I asked him how to learn to code and I know he in turn asked his brother, who’s a tad younger and I think is a CS professor somewhere in the Midwest. He ended up giving me Learn to Program Ruby by Chris Pine.

Edit: One more thing is that he’s the most intellectually well-rounded person I’ve ever met, a characteristic which I wouldn’t be surprised if it was common in programmers with more than a couple dozen years of experience.

My grandpa is ~75, started programming professionally in his early 20s, and currently works as an engineer for the University of Utah, so my hunch is that there’s more people with 50+ years of software engineering experience than you might at first suspect.

Either that or I just doxxed myself ;)

This is correct. Every headset I’ve purchased has had this feature, but I’ve only purchased gaming headsets.

Edit: this is the headset https://www.astrogaming.com/en-us/products/headsets/a10-gen-...

Also, this is not an endorsement, I would actually not recommend this headset.

I can mute my headset using a switch on the headset itself. So this project turns a key on your keyboard into such a switch?

If I’m not mistaken, the hollowed out book in which Neo keeps his illegal floppy disk is Simulacra and Simulation.