obviouslynotme

Classic radio is down-only. It goes through hardware for demodulation and amplification. I can turn a classic radio off.

How long will it be until there is an ad that makes it confusing how to dismiss it and uses a police siren to get your attention? How long until someone uses the radio to ransomware your car using a remote code execution vulnerability?

It has nothing to do with flashing images, which I do not tolerate in my car either. It has to do with ads themselves, which have always walked the line between interactivity and malware. I don't want someone to be able to run arbitrary code on my car for $0.0004. No way.

Could you imagine ransomware on your CAR? While you are driving in it?? No thank you.

I don't want my car to be a software platform. I want it to be like my microwave. It might have software, but software is only incidental to its operation. I do not want to tweet from my microwave. I do not want ads in traffic. This is non-negotiable for safety reasons alone.

I don't care what I have to do to attain that. If that means replacing the radio. I will do it. If you brick my car if I don't have a Manufacturer Approved radio, I will go rebuild some grandfathered antique car.

I would believe this if Google wasn't notorious for providing the worst customer service that will avoid someone going to prison. Cable monopolies have a better reputation.

I am going to save this and print it out with the title "This is why we don't do business with Google."

I would vote for anyone who would even talk about light pollution as a serious issue. All my friends (rightly) think I am a wacko because I advocate the removal of all streetlights and regulation of private outdoor lights.

I think 4chan with only slight moderation would be amazing. Get rid of all porn and illegal stuff. Keep the rest. You could advertise and keep the FBI participation to a minimum.

You are right that blacklisting is too strong of a word. It would be enough to just look at early leaving like a resume gap. It won't stop you, but you will be asked about it. Have enough to show a pattern and you are essentially out.

People dread Haskell because Hello World uses monads.

Having worked on a pre-Fortran77 code base, names are a big fucking deal. Half the code was written before variable names could be longer than six characters.

The pendulum is swinging back from the overreaction to that, Java's famous AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean. As awful as that name is, I will take it any day over L(IH+GV).

I don't understand it. It takes months to get even minimally productive and years to decades to grok your code base. You would think that companies would be dying to retain programmers and blacklisting anyone who leaves any company in less than five years.

Rust doesn't add anything that increases maintainability beyond memory safety. This is nice, but it's not even 1% of what maintenance work looks like. Maintaining a decades old code base means adding features without blowing up the beast. This involves: (1) digging through the code to find the area that does something close to the new feature, (2) trying to understand what is going on, (3) figuring out the style of it for conformity, and (4) slapping that bad boy in.

Of these, (4) is by far the easiest part and the only one Rust will help you in. The digging for understanding is far more time consuming. The other parts require art, discipline, and linters.

Heroku has always had a place in my heart. It was, by far, the best way to deploy small apps. One `git push` to deploy. It just worked. The problem is that by the time you grow up and hire multiple people, you very quickly run into a point where hiring a devops guy is cheaper than Heroku. You hit this limit much quicker if you are doing something more complicated than monolith + database.

There is also something I like to call the Ruby on Rails dilemma. Rails is a beast when it comes to rapid prototyping and small teams. I don't think anything else comes close. But as your team and system grow, all the conventions that let you speed ahead in the beginning start holding you back. Now you are digging through Rails code and doco trying to find ways to override defaults without destroying everything else.

Heroku is the PaaS version of Rails. Small projects are super easy to get going. You don't get a better starting experience. But as you grow, all the conventions of Heroku that helped you launch with ease start becoming month-long expeditions for work-arounds. Worse, Heroku isn't open source. You can't look at the code to understand your issue. It doesn't take long for someone to lose their minds and spend a weekend creating a presentation on the benefits of moving to another platform.

Anyone familiar with USG CI procedures will only be surprised by how nice only using the No-Fly List is. The FBI tends to be a bit more professional than other agencies though. God have mercy on your soul if the ATF ever becomes interested in you.

If you are looking for a super simple CRUD site, then Ruby on Rails is best in class.

1. Up and running immediately.

2. Generate 99% of the code if you don't care about styling.

3. The small portion of your site where you need something more complex is simple Ruby code instead of spending months reading No-Code documentation.

The ACLU used to be my favorite organization to donate to. They had a set of principles and defended them rigorously. Due to the way US jurisprudence works, most people who are victimized by laws and courts are criminals and general scum. It takes maturity to rise above that initial distaste and accept that criminals and scum not only have rights too, but are the most important people to defend from victimization. Not every civil rights case will be Rosa Parks.

Needless to say, I no longer donate to the ACLU. I know why they have changed, but I do not like it. I will not support it. They can take their dirty money and play their political games by themselves. There are many good charities that need support.

They don't pay all earnings to the USG, only everything above a certain threshold IIRC. It's only counterproductive if you think like a normal person instead of a central bank. Their mission is to keep the dollar stable. They are doing that by keeping the USG stable. All the central banks are acting in concert right now to save the global financial system. My guess is that we are being slowly transitioned to removing the USD as the world reserve currency and replacing it with a World Bank electronic one.

The Fed isn't part of the US government. They are a private bank with special powers granted by Congress. When they purchase USG bonds, they hold them and receive interest.

I think most Americans are incapable of telling me what a right is, let alone a specific one. This is intentionally left out of public education.

Because it won't change. Everyone here knows what Google is and I will bet you that over 90% of HN unique users come from a Chrome browser.

It will only get worse. Google always steps on everyone when it dominates a market. Gmail marked your private email server as spam by mistake? Good luck even finding someone to care. Chrome is at this very moment disabling the HTTP2 standard push feature, essentially asserting Chrome as the real standards body.

This is what all of us chose. Without some regulatory body stepping in, privacy will never come back. Even then, that regulatory body will probably be completely staffed by Googlers, since they are experts in Internet privacy.

I am going to make the real controversial opinion:

Who is surprised here? Google makes money by spying on people. Everything they make is designed to make money. Search history gathers what you are interested in. Android and Chrome vacuum your physical data and more. YouTube both gathers your interests and might become a serious advertising platform someday. Gmail vacuums up what Android messaging misses. Google Ads, Fonts, and Analytics catch anyone who isn't using Chrome with the help of webmasters. Every major Google product is designed around one purpose: knowing everything about you.

I have used Firefox for years and years because this is obvious to me. Google shuts down divisions that make a lot of money all the time. Yet somehow, they are just spending ungodly amounts of money on all this "free stuff." Please. I don't care if you watch a 30 minute YouTube video on how to set all of your Google settings in just the right way for them to graciously not upload live video of your face. Two patches later you have to do it again. This is all while trusting this highly sketchy company to honor its settings. It's like trying to set the perfect contract with a demon or wish for a monkey paw. The real way to win is to not do it.

    Damocles was an obsequious courtier in the court of Dionysius II of Syracuse, a fourth century BC tyrant of Syracuse. Damocles exclaimed that, as a great man of power and authority, Dionysius was truly fortunate. Dionysius offered to switch places with him for a day, so he could taste that fortune first-hand. In the evening a banquet was held, where Damocles very much enjoyed being waited upon like a king. Only at the end of the meal did he look up and notice a sharpened sword hanging directly above his head, held only by a single horse-hair. Immediately, he lost all taste for the festivities and asked leave of the tyrant, saying he no longer wanted to be so fortunate. Dionysius had successfully conveyed a sense of the constant threat under which a powerful man lives.

- The Sword of Damocles, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sword_of_Damocles

The powerful are perpetually terrified. They are scared of each other. They are scared of the populace. If someone created a perfectly secure computer or phone with secure messaging capabilities, from the hardware up, that company would immediately be told to play ball or face blackballing.

This is the problem with all fads. They are usually great ideas pulled from smart and capable teams, but, then the soulless "how many flair do you have?" companies try to replicate it. They eventually take over the fad, and instead of becoming smart and capable themselves, they make the fad soulless and "how many flair do you have?" This is exactly what happened to Agile.

Life is controversial by its very nature. I'm not saying you have to go full teenage edgelord, but we have to learn to accept that everyone has different lives and experiences. These experiences lead to different viewpoints and opinions. I have very different viewpoints than even myself a few years ago. I imagine a completely different person in a different city or country would disagree with at least some of them. And you know what? I am okay with that.

I don't like this fake-wokism SV monoculture creeping into everything. I wouldn't mind them sharing their opinions on things if they didn't have teeth. Somehow the professionally oppressed are backed by nearly every major corporation on the planet. It makes me overreact. I don't like it. Most people don't like it. Everything they say sounds like "Pick up that can, Citizen."

Archive of twitter thread that started this: https://archive.md/VpYl2

The null-terminated string is the most compact memory representation for a string. A strong competitor was Pascal strings which are led with a byte that carries the length of the string. The only problem is that limits you to 255 characters in a string. You would have to do some UTF-8 style length encoding to make it memory efficient while still capturing long strings.

Older computers had a lot less memory. Programs would write their own virtual memory systems to swap code and data to and from disk. C was born in this era. By the time large flat memory and many registers were available, the old C string was already the standard. It is very difficult to get away from that because everything from the OS on up assume standard C strings.

I can understand Résumé-Driven Development. Our industry is famous for its "Must have (X+2) years of (X year old technology)" job requirements.

Explain a Topic At Multiple Levels - This is an excellent question. Communication is an underrated skill in most tech teams. They just complain that others "don't get it." The ability to understand others' points of view and interests and communicate with those in mind is important.

Tell Me About a Project You Led - This is another good one. A good related question would be, "What leaders have you had in the past that you admired?"

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion - I don't like it. I support all three, even without the business bonuses. However, the jargon in that community is vast and quickly changing. There's also potential for unintentional landmines. Worse, no sane person on Earth today is going to walk into an interview and tell you they hate those things.

Tell Me About a Disagreement - This is another good one. Conflict is present anywhere two or more people do anything. Conflict resolution is a big part of the workplace and how well you do in it. For leaders, you should also add followups on how they help mediate conflict.

The Weakness Question - This question is famously poor. In a frictionless vacuum where no one is swayed by concretions, it seems like an excellent question. Everyone has weaknesses that they have to work on. It is the central mechanism of improvement. In practice, you are going to pull in unconscious biases that shouldn't but will effect your decision. Worse, you will lose strong candidates that will see you even asking this question as a red flag. I strongly recommend never asking any version of this question in an interview.

The entire issue with DS&A interviews is that they test skills that insignificantly correlate with performance. It takes months of time to reach the level of remembering how and when to use every foreseeable DS&A topic within a few minutes. The rest of the time is needed for clarifying questions and writing it all out. It only adds more randomness and stress to an already very random and stressful event.

His interview would be better than a DS&A interview except there is a presentation to an audience instead of a 1-on-1 conversation. This would make sense for a sales or upper-management position, but not a line SWE position. The reason for rejection is also suspect as that should have been caught in resume reviews. My guess is that he wasn't picked for whatever reason and they gave him a general rejection. Either way, I would much rather my career rest on my actual work experience than my ability to solve DS&A trivia on a clock.

Most people don't understand what it's like to work on a large C++ or Rust code base. Compilation time is a huge factor in productivity.

You see this all the time. As companies get larger, they become more and more difficult to understand. This is even more so the case with software companies since they are essentially complexity factories.