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r-s

315 karma · joined June 18, 2013

https://github.com/rselk
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r-s··on Things I know about Git commits
> 58. Trying to police commit history is going to be painful

This has been my experience. Very painful

r-s··on Making housing more affordable means your home's value will have to come down
https://www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/consumers/home-buying/first-time... The Canadian government did try a similar strategy for a bit (although I think it maxed out far below 50%). It was discontinued recently.
r-s··on Adam? ... is there a reason your laptop is in the fridge? (2006)
Smaller smaller world - I work with him today!
r-s··on The U.S. housing market vs. the Canadian housing market
Some bigger cities (such as Edmonton, 1M people) still have a somewhat sane real estate market. In Edmonton a single family detached home averages around 450k CAD, while average household income is over 120k.
r-s··on Ask HN: What are the top pains of software developers?
Carpal tunnel and poor posture causing back pain
r-s··on Ask HN: Would you consider starting to learn a programming language now?
In some cases it lasted even longer than that. In 2004 at a Canadian University I was told during the student orientation that CS was not a great choice due to outsourcing.
r-s··on ChatGPT and Code Interpreter = Magic
There is no reason someone couldn't change commit dates and be prolific far earlier than December
r-s··on Heroku Status – Dashboard/API Offline
Its been one hell of a rough go for Heroku lately.

I think you would be insane to start a new project with them today. Which is crazy for me to say, as I was one of their biggest fans for the last decade.

r-s··on Initial V: A BMW shifter converted to a Bluetooth keyboard for use with Vim
"Travel K for 20 feet, take the first L and immediately get in the H-most lane"
r-s··on Initial V: A BMW shifter converted to a Bluetooth keyboard for use with Vim
Some small part of me wants to use vim-clutch and make a manual transmission version of this.
r-s··on Non-linear career paths are the future
Did Shopify have a choice?

Many Canadians who got computer science degrees left to work for American companies for 2x-3x more money.

r-s··on Ruby 3.2’s YJIT is Production-Ready
Many many years ago I was hired to convert a Fortran app to C. The first person to try it ran it through a software called "f2c". It worked fine - but the code was totally non human readable so it couldn't be extended later, so it provided almost no value in this case.
r-s··on Ruby concurrency is hard: how I became a Ruby on Rails contributor
Thread safety in Rails is a total pain in the ass. So many libraries out there are not thread safe. I have worked with many large rails codebases and there always are gems that somehow work their way in with major threading issues. I think its a legitimate strategy to run rails apps single threaded and multi process. Not necessarily for all apps or workloads of course.
r-s··on Safely writing code that isn't thread-safe
I came to a similar conclusion years ago. Yes, there are examples of applications that have done it, but they often have very elite engineers. Most teams are comprised of various levels of engineers and its extremely difficult to get right.

I work more in web dev now and I suspect the majority of my team does not know the difference between a thread and a process. HN readers may scoff but these are productive engineers who have build some honestly pretty impressive apps and systems.

r-s··on Just a bunch of idiots having fun: a photo history of the LAN party
So does the "PHP4" book on the shelf.
r-s··on Ask HN: Do you regret being a generalist?
I don't regret it at all, but finding high paying roles can be a little more difficult. Its a tradeoff though, because after a few years at a role its often seen how valuable you actually are so in bad economic times you may be the last to get cut.

I also think generalists get pushed into management at a higher frequency. Not something I am personally interested in, but I get asked yearly at least at every role I have been at.

r-s··on Ask HN: Are there senior devs who liked switching from static to dynamic typing?
I am at a similar level / write a lot of Ruby. I have pretty mixed feelings. I do enjoy writing Ruby and echo the low friction between an idea and running code.

However, on very large Ruby projects I have inherited I do see a common flaw of a large (often insane) amount of exceptions being thrown due to type errors. Undefined method blah on nil class. Some of these apps have had 100s of developers working on them of various skill levels. For mission critical code paths I am often the biggest proponent of Sorbet.

While my personal projects involve heavy use of meta programming and taking advantage of duck typing, I have altered my writing style and opinions for large projects.

Part of my frustration with Ruby type system could be explained by the fact great Ruby developers are becoming pretty hard to come by and I have often had to work with developers who are picking it up.

r-s··on Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still relevant?
There is a surprisingly small amount of senior rails developers. Many who learned it when it was cool, have moved on. There are so many legit companies making tons of money on Rails stacks with 0 intention on leaving. The market is excellent for rails developers and likely will be for the foreseeable future.
r-s··on Ask HN: How do you deal with life altering decisions?
If I find myself having a hard time with a big decision, that almost certainly means both sides have pros and cons and its a very close decision. If one side had way more pros and less cons, it would be a pretty easy decision. If its a very close decision, one side can't be much worse than the other. Flip a coin.
r-s··on Heroku Security Notification
I too have seen something very similar to this. I am extremely nervous all my private repos got compromised. Watching this very closely.
r-s··on Attack campaign involving stolen OAuth tokens issued to third-party integrators
Its not fully clear to me, entire private repos been confirmed stolen?
r-s··on I Am Well Versed in Active Shooter Training. What About First Aid?
I did these drills in Canada sometime before 2005 (when I graduated).
r-s··on Best practices as code using RuboCop
Some discussion here: https://github.com/rubocop/rubocop-rspec/issues/94
r-s··on Ask HN: What car do you drive?
2006 Honda Element, manual transmission, AWD. Reliable, can fit an insane amount of stuff in it, consumables are cheap for it. Fuel efficiency is not great but i drive very little. Under 100,000km on it.

I bought it used several years ago and with used car prices surging and vehicles that can be slept in going up in value, I suspect its gained around $2000 of value.

Its slow but has major utilitarian charm.

r-s··on Ask HN: What's your absolute favorite tech stack, after having tried others?
Rails API + React

Just because after years of being in both ecosystems I am ridiculously productive and don't fall into as many traps. With heroku in 30 mins I could have app deployed production ready with auth, CI, API, database setup, and deployment pipeline.

r-s··on Mall real estate company collected 5M images of shoppers
If this system did not error out and display the error messages to the mall shoppers, it would still be unknown.
r-s··on We Don’t Need to Work So Much (2015)
I rarely seem to see that on the FIRE forums. It seems like 99% of people on those forums are trying to achieve FIRE, and very little discussion about those who have.
r-s··on Airbreak.dev: Jailbreak your CPAP machine to turn them into ventilators
I bought a CPAP off an Amazon seller here in Canada a few years back. I have a large neck and would wake up gasping for air in the night. It was going to be several months to get the sleep study so one day I impulse bought it. First night I slept 8 hours, couldn't remember the last time I did that. Best $600 I ever spent.
r-s··on This is your brain on a crashing stock market
Generally the FIRE crowd stays heavy in equities and considers a 3-4% withdraw rate to be safe.

Will this slow down a lot of early retirement plans? Almost certainly. However the market is not 0, lots of these people still have substantial amounts of money saved.

r-s··on [dead]
Seems back up now?
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