joekrill

It's not like the underlying problems and learning curves didn't exist before this, though. You had to learn to use and configure Ansible/Terraform/Puppet/whatever to get your "classic" servers up and running. You have to deal with secrets and configuration management somehow. You have to manually deal with your dependencies and inter-dependencies, and any possible conflicts that came along with that. Logging, service discovery, metrics collection, etc.

And for some folks it's better to continue using that "classic server" strategy and deal with those problems. Maybe they've already invested the time to learn to deal with those problems, or they already have systems and practices in place to deal with that stuff in an elegant way.

But a lot of folks are seeing the enormous benefits of containers and the ecosystems that come with them. For them it's worth the trade-offs and the time to take to learn how this stuff works.

Anyway, it's pretty clear at this point that this stuff isn't going away any time soon, and in fact only becoming more and more popular and useful. Clearly there's a reason for that.

This jives pretty well with my (admittedly little) experience with Istio. It's certainly frustrating at times, but I still find the documentation is actually pretty decent.

It's just that everything seems to lead down a rabbit hole. But this, I think, is just a Kubernetes thing in general. I had the same experience they did with a monitoring stack. But that's because you have to ramp up on some many additional technologies (Prometheus, Grafana, Kiali, etc...). And not just ramp up on their usage, but how they work, interact, and are configured. For Prometheus, for example, they suggest using a federated setup, which adds additional complexeties.

I messed around with strict mTLS for quite some time before simply giving up - it just wasn't worth the time sink.

But in general I agree with the conclusions. Most things are pretty straight-forward and the documentation has really good examples (using their "Bookinfo" project). It's just the "going off the beaten path" thing they describe when things become difficult.

This is such a defeatist attitude and, I think, completely unnecessary. And saying it as fact sort of perpetuates the whole situation. It doesn't have to be this way. But most people allow it to be this way.

> Your co-workers may be amazing, but they were never your friends.

Anecdotally, I've met some of my best friends by working with them. I have many friends that I haven't met through work, but when you spend the bulk of your day with people you form bonds - and friendships - with them. It's sort of human nature.

> There's what you love, and there's what you do. It's best to keep some distance: because no one cares about what you love.

What you love and what you do don't _have_ to be different. And some people _do_ care about what you love. Most don't, sure. And at most larger companies you _are_ just a cog in the wheel. But that doesn't mean folks shouldn't strive to find meaningful work that they love to do. It may not pay as well monetarily, but it pays in other ways.

> No, you only cared them inso far as they can cook for you. This is how others saw you.

I don't seek out the immigrant family, but I'm friendly and cordial with them. I chat with them and treat them as equals. I pay them fairly for what they provide me. I don't try to squeeze every last cent out of them or negotiate my meal from them, or make them feel like less of a person. And in return they provide the same. Maybe I'm naive, sure. But if so, at least I'm not an asshole.

> Big companies, and indeed most big institutions is made by a silent majority of the defeated.

This is mostly true. I agree. It's unfortunate. But big institutions aren't the only options.

> You have to look elsewhere.

You don't have to. You can, and in some cases you should. But it's not the only option. There ARE people who aren't wholly obsessed with making money at all costs. Unfortunately, in the US at least, a lot of people don't have that attitude and _are_ obsessed with making money at all costs. And our society (at least in the US) has been built in ways that praise that sort of attitude. But there are plenty of people who aren't like that. It's hard to find them sometimes, depending on what sort of circles you run in and the sort of people you surround yourself with - but they are out there.

I'm surprised this surprises you!

This has all been pretty sudden and taken everyone by surprise, I think. And every sort of business is struggling with this sort of thing. A lot of folks who aren't used to working from home are being thrown into this new way of doing things. Not to mention schools closing so kids are home, spouses working from home too, and a slew of other things they now have to worry about during the day.

I highly doubt these stations have a storage room filled with unused gear just for moments like these. And certainly not enough that they can send out a full, high-quality kit to every single one of their on-air people. This type of equipment can get very expensive, so it likely just doesn't make any sense. And now I'm sure there's been a sudden run on equipment making it harder to get.

_This_ particular version of the system does, yes. But the next iteration may slightly weaken the privacy for some "legitimate" reason. And the next version slightly more. Then just a bit more. All for seemingly legitimate reasons. That's the slippery slope.

Redux is great, and I'm glad to see all this cleared up, to some extent. Especially the bit about the new context API somehow eliminating the need for Redux. I know some people don't like redux and that's fine - don't use it. But it's still super-useful to many, many people.

I sort of agree - for now, at least. The tooling around React for debugging is pretty great. React Dev Tools lets you easily debug your component tree. And the underlying source is pretty much what you wrote (JSX doesn't really get in the way here).

I've been working with some older Angular (1.5) code recently and it's been an absolute nightmare because the debugging experience is just awful. Error messages are unusable at times. Failures simply get swallowed. It's difficult to debug bindings. But with React, I don't have to deal with any of this (though much is because of the simpler API).

You see a similar thing with Redux. It's very straight-forward to debug, and there are similar dev tools. Even Apollo has dev tools for their GraphQL library. And I think this is what sets these things apart and makes them so much more popular than similar libraries - the debugging experience. And while I haven't used Svelte for a project, I'm getting the sense that the debugging experience is going to be painful. It may be great _most of the time_. But I don't think that's going to be enough in the long run. Just my opinion.

> At first I thought "oh great, this looks very nice but why does it exist when Next.js, Gatsby, etc. are already a thing?"

I honestly will never understand why people say things like this. As though there's no room for progress. As though there aren't alternatives that may or may not be better. Imagine if the folks building React thought "ya know, we got Angular, so why are we doing this?"... Or any of the many, many other similar scenarios. It's how we make progress.

Well for one thing it prevents ISPs from injecting ads (or worse) into sites.

There are some use cases where this really won't work. For example, if you're doing something like server-side rendering with React, and then try to "rehydrate" on the client-side, the server-side node version may format slightly differently and cause sudden updates to your UI.

Also, I don't believe you can rely on a browser having a particular locale available. I'm not sure how reliable time zone data will be either, if you need to show something in a different time zone.

I think for some general use-cases this will work well. But there's still a lot of weird issues around this stuff in the browser.

> Monitoring the server logs showed that Bingbot only crawled the lowercase version of the URL.

I've always thought it was much more common that sites written in ASP.Net have case-sensitive URLs. At least that was quite common ~5 years ago (was it a default setting or something? I haven't done .Net stuff in a while). So it's pretty crazy that Bing only crawls lowercased URLs.

What's the tech stack behind this, out of curiosity?

"I'LL BE BACK" is "return". "STICK AROUND" is "while", according to the list of keywords: here:https://github.com/lhartikk/ArnoldC#brief-overview-of-the-ke...

I think it's just because "Mobile & Desktop" are grouped together. React Native is still number two in the list, so if they were separated out, you'd have Electron rising to the top on desktop, and React Native staying at the top on mobile.

"...have been a solved problem and commodity for a while"

So there's absolutely no room for improvement? Should we just move on from everything that we've deemed "a solved problem and commodity"?

Another possibility: they want to foster an image of a product designed to last, with very little maintenance cost. I'm not suggesting car windows are a maintenance cost, by the way - just that it adds to the overall image of reliability.

Additionally, I'm not sure where you draw the line at what are "non-problems" and what exactly is and is not "wasting tons of r&d dollars". Or, as others have suggested, what constitutes a "PR stunt". Is it wasting time and resource to select Tesla-specific paints, interior designs, wheel designs? After all, every other car has those. They are "solved problems" - just do whatever the other guys are doing!

It's not really a clear distinction, though. I have a laptop that has a touchscreen, but also a regular touchpad and sometimes I use an actual mouse with it. Sometimes I touch the screen if it's easier even if I have a mouse connected. I also sometimes remote into it. Then there's my tablet: I can use a bluetooth mouse with that if I want. Or an external touchpad.

> Again, let me emphasize, this is not inherently unfair.

I guess our definitions of what is "unfair" are quite different. I think a better term here would be "illegal". It's most certainly not illegal - but I definitely would not consider it fair.

Companies throw options at employees - or potential employees - like candy. They imply, explicitly or not, that when the company gets big and successful, these options are going to be worth tons of money.

Most of us here know they're probably worthless. But executives/entrepreneurs/whoever most definitely suggest otherwise. So it's more like false advertising.

Now is that "fair"? I don't personally think so. I think it's pretty dishonest. I think when sale time comes around, they most certainly realize that these employees think they're finally going to cash in, and they are more than happy to let them think, even though they know otherwise.

Obviously there are exceptions. There are occasions where they actually do end up being worth something. Or where the seniors folks are very clear about how worthless these things actually are. But, in my opinion at least, those are most definitely the exception to the rule. I'm also pretty cynical for the most part, too. So there's that.

At some point asking for too many permissions because such an annoyance that it actually leads to people basically agreeing to everything, sight-unseen. Just look at Windows UAC, or previous iterations of Android's permission system. My guess is they are trying to avoid this sort of situation.

In my experience, most SaaS startups are all about "gettin' them logos!" The more "logos" (other well-known companies that use their product) they can pile up and tout on their website, the better. And so they'll make significant deals to get a well-known name signed.

And I'm not saying this is wrong or a bad approach, by the way. It certainly lends credibility if, say, Google is using my SaaS product.

From Guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html):

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

I'd say this type of thing most-definitely applies here.

The most significant difference is that WhatsApp is at least platform independent. iMessage simply is not an option on Android - it's limited to iPhone users only and it doesn't seem like Apple has any intention of changing that. WhatsApp, on the other hand, can be used by whoever wants to download it.

It's still vendor lock-in. Just not to the same extent.

Well, you're discounting this entire article based on one point out of five. It's useful information, regardless. And they are upfront about it. So I don't particularly understand the problem, and calling it "complete fucking bullshit" seems a bit overboard, to me.

They don't have to believe it. But I think many do (Whether they are lying to themselves is another thing). Most sales/marketing folks I've worked with actually do believe their product is superior and the best.

I don't think it's really as black-and-white as your suggesting, though. In the "employee/employer" context: there are plenty of employees who do think they are the best person for a job. In most cases that's probably just not true, given the size of a candidate pool. Are they lying to themselves?

Well there is one for the first: `text-align: center;`.

But things can quickly get very complicated. This all needs to be done in the context of a ton of other CSS rules that could alter layout. And by the way, what do you mean by "vertically centered"? Using the font's baseline? Text top? Bottom? How are we dealing with text overflow if there isn't enough room in your rectangular element?

This discussion always makes me think of one of my favorite NewRadio scenes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhrnMbhMgmw

It makes a really important point, though: where do you draw the line at what is considered "advertising"? It's a pervasive part of humanity.

> Real world advertising is not about informing, it's about convincing.

That's life, though, isn't it? Me convincing my employer I'm the best person for the job. Convincing my wife I'm the best choice for a husband. Ultimately, everything becomes a sort of "advertisement". It's a very slippery slope.

It's even more interesting that this article even says:

> When I say "advertising", I use this term somewhat loosely...

Which is a problem when you want to make bold claims like "Advertising as cancer".

This is obviously anecdotal, but that was not my personal experience. I was getting ready to go to bed last night when I saw this and grabbed my tablet to see if I needed to worry. This bolded bit was the first thing I saw, and I immediately thought "hm, must have been over-exaggerated, no SSNs were exposed". Now I obviously read on and saw the bullet point, but for someone skimming this, it's not at all obvious.

But further, why even word it that way? It was clearly done intentionally. There's no need for this to be presented in this way other than to intentionally try to mislead. Why not just say, in bold letters "140,000 social security numbers and 80,000 bank account numbers were compromised". Or say it "The following were compromised".

The way they are disclosing this is pretty disgusting, in my opinion. Go check out their info page about this[1]. In bold it says:

> No bank account numbers or Social Security numbers were compromised, other than:

Then below that, in non-bold, it basically says "oh, except for these 140,000 social security numbers and 80,000 bank account numbers" - which is the primary reason folks are worried about this!

To me, the first thing you are going to see is "No bank account numbers or Social Security numbers were compromised" in bold letters. Which is completely false and misleading. Technically they are telling the truth, but the way they've done it is clearly meant to be misleading.

On top of that, I'm a Capital One customer myself, and I can't figure out how to find out if I was affected at all!

[1] https://www.capitalone.com/facts2019/

> Setting it all up is a one-time expense...but this is knowledge that stays with you (and the company) forever.

That sort of depends on how well documented the entire system is, I'd think. And even then, I'm not sure this is quite as good as it sounds.

Presumably this system is going to be humming along smoothly for quite some time. But when something breaks or goes wrong, is it going to be easy to go find the problem and fix it? Probably not. Whoever built it - if they are still with the company - will likely have forgotten a lot of the little details. Even if it's documented well, that documentation needs to be reviewed, understood, and (re)learned.

So yeah, it's pretty low maintenance, sure - until something goes wrong. And it inevitably will.

I'm not saying this is the wrong approach. Thousands of dollars a month for a PaaS is nothing to shake a stick at. So this very well could be a great approach under the circumstances. But there will be hidden costs down the road. It's just a matter of when and how much trouble they cause. (Will it cause your systems to go down for days while a bug is investigated, for example).

> The author of this piece doesn’t seem to understand the process either.

I think that's rather the point of the piece. At least that's what I got out of it.

There's a recurring theme every generation where the older generation thinks the younger generation is just dumb, or doesn't care about things that matter, etc. In this case it's the older generation shaming the younger generation for not knowing how photographs used to be processed. But that doesn't really matter. It's just some arbitrary piece of nostalgia. And anyway, digging further, those people doing the shaming only have a very limited understanding to begin with.

"without a middleman" means it won't rely on some 3rd party to work. As a contrast, for example, a SmartThings hub requires an internet connection to work because (almost) everything is sent to Samsung first.

Whether you want to connect to your home directly over the internet is up to you, in this case.