laingc

There’s a certain section of HN that has apparently decided that everything was better when C was considered a high level language, production was a single physical machine that you personally managed the cabling for, and 640Kb of memory was all anybody would ever need. This section of HN is either composed of god-tier ninja programmers, or of people looking back through rose-tinted specs and pining for “the good old days” - my guess is mostly the latter.

Maybe you run an amazing shop and everyone should be as good as you - I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. But in my experience, every company I’ve seen that’s populated by people with this kind of attitude has been a raging dumpster fire, perpetually running a hair’s breadth from exploding violently.

The world writes, reads, and runs a lot more software than it used to, serving a lot more people in a lot more countries with a lot more variation in the circumstances of how it’s used. This adds up to a lot more complexity.

Docker is one very important tool that helps us to manage this complexity. Yes, it also introduces some difficulties that you didn’t have before, but it solves much more difficult problems pretty well. We use docker for almost everything, and it’s a lifesaver.

> There are people who happily pay $2,000 for an Apple laptop. There are people who are happy with Linux on a $100 machine from Goodwill.

This is the weirdest sentiment that I see all the time on HN, but enough people express it that I have to accept it as both widespread and genuine.

However, I think that if you think $2000 US for an Apple laptop isn't the best value for money you can get on the laptop market, then you're either very good at finding bargains or completely bonkers.

Yes, macOS is no longer for developers. Yes, for extreme workloads I use my linux ryzen7/2080ti or the cloud rather than the MBP. Yes, they had a strange couple of years with the keyboards.

But honestly, they're the best hardware hands down. Not just the best absolutely, but the best per dollar. And personally I love macOS, but I'm just a manager these days so I guess I would, right?

Well, China quite clearly is.

They most certainly paid for it, as well as financing many of the key contributors to related open source projects.

During the works on the Milford Sound tunnel, the workers kept coming back to site to find their road cones in the middle of the road. They didn't know how this kept happening, so they set up a camera on site.

Kea were pulling the cones into the middle of the road to stop traffic, because when the traffic stopped the tourists would get out and feed the kea.

Douglas Adams joked about dolphins and white mice because he'd never encountered kea...

To build on that, most scientists* are also terrible at statistics.

Perhaps more controversially, I also don't think statistics in general is a particularly rigorous or well-founded field. Where there is any analysis at all in the field - that is, very rarely - it provides guarantees only with hefty assumptions and in the limit. I'm fine with that from a theoretical perspective, but practitioners of all stripes seem to assume that with real world phenomena, the data either satisfy the assumptions or, more defensibly, don't violate the assumptions by enough to invalidate the results.

I don't know about others, but I see real-world datasets all the time that wildly invalidate the assumptions of common regression analysis, to take just one example.

To reign this little rant back into a well-formed comment, perhaps my summary is "everything and everyone is wrong, almost all the time, and I'm not quite sure how to fix that."

* In my personal experience.

* for a very specific, nonstandard definition of a kernel machine...

Do you by any chance often have cause to compile and use tools or libraries written by academics? Or regularly use projects that aren’t as big and well-developed as Postgres and Nginx?

This is a pretty common sentiment on HN and I’m sure you have your reasons for it, but to me personally it just seems bonkers. Docker is an absolutely game-changing tool for me. I can’t count the number of times it’s saved me from completely screwed up system libraries, tools installing config files in weird places, conflicting versions of this or that, or other versions of system pollution. I write a simple docker-compose.yml and I’m good to go - Docker takes care of sand boxing, networking, mounts - the works.

As I said before, you must have your reasons for your view, but my own experience is the polar opposite.

edit: typo

We are a Gitlab client, and very happy with their service. I hope that their business model succeeds, and am happy to be supporting them.

The Bronze --> Premium transition seems to me to be a valid price restructuring, and this will prompt us to upgrade to Premium rather than downgrade to Free.

However,

- Ultimate seems like minimal value for substantial extra cost. There's no way we could ever justify it.

- The collaboration model is terrible. We would love to introduce lots of our clients to gitlab as part of a collaboration - thereby increasing gitlab's mindshare, install base, and potential customer base - but the price tag attached to inviting a previously-free-tier collaborator doesn't make sense for us.

- Premium needs to include Jira-killing features. Do that and we're yours probably for life.

Did you reply to the correct comment? I can't understand what you're referencing here.

We use a Slack plugin called Geekbot [0], which asks "What did you do yesterday? What are you doing today? Anything blocking you?" by default, but can also have a range of other questions. It posts the responses in our "standups" channel and gives me a daily summary. We find it very handy!

[0]: https://geekbot.com/

I’ve never really figured out whether ZeroTier can be trusted. WireGuard has an excellent reputation among people I respect.

What is it about ZT that made you trust it with your traffic?

It absolutely is.

Yes.

You can vote with a resident visa in NZ.

That’s a surprising comment.

We are one of the easiest countries in the world to immigrate to, and have an extremely immigrant-friendly culture.

I don’t know about “non-corrupt”, but we in New Zealand do a fairly good impression of it.

I completely agree with this. I have a constant battle with some (not all) of my team to get them to think through a problem from its fundamentals, and try to find the best one or two or three ways to pose the problem.

Conveniently-posed problems lead to both convenient solutions, as well as a variety of potential ancillary benefits.

One practical application of this, for those who are more business-minded, is that I have set a very clear and tight tech strategy for our team. There have been quite a few instances where posing a problem differently has allowed us to better align with that strategy by enabling us to pursue solutions that make use of our existing technology stack and in-house tooling, rather than requiring us to introduce more dependencies and spread ourselves even thinner.

Yes, but right now there is no technique not making use of Deep Learning that is remotely competitive. It really is that clear a distinction.

Ok, interesting. I would usually be willing to give much more benefit of the doubt, but given how unnecessary the comment seemed to the rest of the post, I guess the obvious conclusion is a dog whistle.

Not doubting you for a second[0], but I didn’t see anything anti-Semitic in that post, so am I missing some internet meme or American cultural reference?

[0] Footnote in case it is necessary: antisemitism must be stamped out wherever it is found.

Oh really? I use Jellyfin also, but I never knew it supported audiobooks!

This looks great, nice job!

As an aside: does anyone know of an audiobook organiser? Essentially Calibra for audiobooks. Preferably with a web interface for running in my home server. I’ve tried booksonic, and found it very clunky and lacking proper organisational features.

Absolutely agree. I'd go so far as to say this is one of the real strengths of mathematical naming conventions.

You are absolutely on point with the contrast to Law; I have degrees in both subjects, and this has also been my experience.

Jargon exists for a reason. The deeper the field, the better the jargon needs to be to allow proper communication. The fact that we can communicate complex mathematical ideas in language at all is a minor miracle.

This thread thus far has a ton of comments from people who haven't bothered to actually read anything about how WhatsApp works, or how the Signal protocol works.

It would make for a better comment thread if everyone did that prior to expressing an opinion.

I mean, no more so than having poetry or pyenv do some special magic to hopefully give me the right environment?

Maybe it’s more brittle than I’m imagining, but I’ve been doing this for years and have never had it break.

I don’t use this method. I set the path myself, and it works without anything else.

The first thing I do (or rather, ansible does) on any new PC or server is install Miniconda to a location inside my home folder, and set it as the first item in my PATH.

I’ve been down most of the python installation and packaging rabbit holes, and this practice has served me well.

I want a platform that both I and my 72-year-old father can use without concern that he might be phished into downloading another App Store.

Billions of iPhone sales show that people clearly want the same.

If you want a top-end device with a widely used OS where you can install a thousand app stores, you can have one. Any one of a dozen major phone manufacturers will be happy to sell you an Android device.

You might consider your iPhone a computer, but I don’t, and more to the point Apple doesn’t - and you and I both knew that when we bought them.