Hacker News Reader

ratwwon Amazon to acquire maker of Roomba vacuum for roughly $1.7B

I would say Amazon has plenty of problems, but also plenty more incentive to behave and try to be careful with the data.

ratwwon We're improving search results when you use quotes

I would also love that.

One request from me would be for them to bring back the + operator and favour it instead of quotes, since Google Plus integration doesn't seem to be a thing anymore.

ratwwon Yes, the U.S. economy is likely in recession

Ah, I think I understand your point.

Your point is that "stuff <10% of people will like" doesn't make up for a mediocre film, and studios are trying to capitalise on that rather than working on better stories.

If so, I definitely agree.

ratwwon We're going to need a lot of solar panels

I don't see why you're trying to claim I'm an "extremist solar fan" here, when all I did was trying to clarify what someone else meant.

I seriously hold no dog in this race but you're literally calling me a radical... maybe you're confusing me with someone else?

ratwwon Game engines are more than libraries glued together

> Sounds like excuses. Get a bigger team, smaller scope, or more money.

That sounds ludicrous. A bigger team or more money are incredibly difficult, especially for hobbyist and open source.

And the whole goal of this idea is to reduce the scope of projects in the first place!

It's impossible to reduce the scope if it requires something that might be as big as the engine itself.

> Lapsus linguae. I meant to write debugging. So read it as, debugging JS in JS VM, isn't as good as debugging JS in JVM and vice versa (JVM in JS).

But the Javascript doesn't run inside the JVM or inside the Electron process. It happens in a completely separate process! It's the same for the syntax highlighting: it happens inside the Language Server for VSCode, and it's probably the same for JetBrains when using Typescript too.

> Implying your example isn't cherry-picked? Really? How much have you used VSCode for languages with other VMs?

Of course it's cherry-picked, but this is how counterexamples work. The point is that a JetBrains IDE isn't by definition "better integrated", there are several more factors.

ratwwon Being swamped is normal and not impressive

Let me try again:

The previous CEO of the story wasn't wrong about what's important at all. Only about how much time it takes. He considered everything important and maximum priority, but didn't believe the "previous thing" was taking 80% of the time of the team. I couldn't tell the team to "drop the previous task" like the other post suggested: it was also maximum priority.

"Important" and "Takes too much time" are very different.

ratwwon Being swamped is normal and not impressive

Sure, but "I doubt that's that big of a problem" is very different from "isn't important".

ratwwon Yes, the U.S. economy is likely in recession

Sure, agreed, but the point is that the “deeply-held values” you mention aren’t really the petty “culture wars” stuff.

ratwwon Yes, the U.S. economy is likely in recession

No, your point is that unless I completely agree with you about some specific voting demographics that happens to be a pet theory of yours, then I'm wrong about something completely unrelated. Seems like you're knee deep in this shit and projecting your views in an entire country.

ratwwon Being swamped is normal and not impressive

I've definitely had cases where the manager (and on lots of cases, the CEO) tried to "turn those conversation around" and bullshit me.

The thing they wanted me to do was maximum priority, but there was also some other totally unpredictable thing (often support related) that I also had to take care of. The higher-up was 100% sure it wasn't a real problem and assumed I was exaggerating the situation.

The solution to the problem of lack of trust is of course to convince them, or to leave. If you can't make changes that increase your productivity, you'll become stressed and burned out, and will still not be able to do enough. It is a decision they made.

ratwwon Yes, the U.S. economy is likely in recession

Thinking that film is bad isn't really "hating woke culture", though.

In fact I know plenty of "woke" people who also think that it sucks. Some maybe semi-secretly.

The film has plenty to be criticised.

ratwwon Yes, the U.S. economy is likely in recession

But the media in general is showing other perspectives. Be it on other channels, be it by showing people what "that despicable other side is saying". And there's always neutral media too where others can check.

Sure, media is a huge problem. But people behaving like animals, having no empathy, taking no taking time to reflect upon what they say and taking no time to check other perspectives is what's doing the real damage here.

ratwwon Yes, the U.S. economy is likely in recession

> Do you blame Russians/Soviets and Chinese when their media are state organs that set agendas and promulgate state positions?

In general I don't blame Russians for what Putin is doing, but I will definitely blame a Russian that unapologetically supports the invasion of Ukraine, despite having the means to know otherwise.

If I tried to give them another perspective and they tell me to go fuck myself, or if they were actively trying to push an agenda (like it's common in USA political discussions), I would definitely blame them.

ratwwon Yes, the U.S. economy is likely in recession

I don't think you're wrong per se, but I don't think GP is arguing that american "culture wars" are a media fabrication, just that it's meaningless, except for some wackos.

The problem is how the media (including social media) amplifies it.

ratwwon Yes, the U.S. economy is likely in recession

The "rest" that hates it is also a very vocal minority, probably even less than the 8-10%.

Most people don't give a shit about it. Assuming the rest does is heavy projection.

ratwwon Why intuitive troubleshooting has stopped working

I went to one too, and saw a talk about synchronising data between microservices and was astounded at how much work it was and the fact they had a whole team just to build tooling to debug issues on this specific company.

Basically they store 100x more data than they need because of data duplication between microservices. The company didn't even have that much customers (<1000), data or even enough users (a handful per company), but duplication was still generating several terabytes.

It's amazing how much complexity people are able to cram into simple system.

(Interestingly enough there's another recent comment on another article here talking about this exact issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32320660 )

ratwwon Ask HN: What does Full-Stack Developer even mean?

Angular 2+ is almost six years old at this point too, and the devs who knew v1 still could use it perfectly. And people did successfully migrate back then. And for real: this is "a framework that got a breaking change between major versions". If that’s the worst example we have, I would say the JS ecosystem is doing jolly fine! I've had worst breaking changes in backend frameworks, to be honest.

About the other two: like you said, both React and Vue can still run old code, almost unmodified. The track record of those two is way better than most backend frameworks, by miles. It’s not even a fair fight.

Sure there's new concepts, but it's not arbitrary stuff or old patterns, it's legitimate stuff that makes writing UIs better. But the old ways are still there too.

ratwwon Ask HN: What does Full-Stack Developer even mean?

The list of competing frameworks hasn't really changed in a long long time. And often people have to know only one of them to have a very stable frontend career, and 99% of the time it is one of the top 3 (React/Vue/Angular). These 3 have been staples for what, 7, 8 years now?

ratwwon Ask HN: What does Full-Stack Developer even mean?

In my experience that the frontend/backend separation was something that came out of developers who only wanted (or only knew how) to work on specific areas of the system and got business to adapt to that. Business and non-technical people eventually accepted, but many still long for the days of full-stack devs.

And I'm with business people here: coordination between multiple devs is definitely an overhead that impacts businesses and heavily limits possibilities of experimenting and iterating with ideas.

The separation is also often a kick the teeth of Agile ("we gotta do the backend before frontend starts") and performance ("just call those 5 endpoints N times, we don't have time to make an aggregated endpoint, should have told us before"). You can still have specialists for micro-optimisations and fine-tuning that SQL query, but the initial implementation phase really suffers from the separation.

There's also lots of "prejudice" and pedantry around the term "full-stack", and that's almost always from less experienced developers or students (which is why you don't see it here in HN but see a lot on Reddit), but that's another discussion.

It's even worse with developers who had some design training, IME. "Oh you say you had design training but I'm 100% sure you're absolute garbage in either that or in database modelling. Or perhaps in both!"

ratwwon Mr. Rogers sued the KKK (2021)

> I'd argue the five minutes of episode when Fred soaked his feet with a black man in a kiddie pool delivered a more crushing blow to the KKK than his suit did

I didn't know this story, so I searched for a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6O_Ep9bY0U

ratwwon Dear startups: I hate subscription services (2021)

Not all products need iteration or a custom backend, and those two things are often undesirable features for a lot of users.

ratwwon Dear startups: I hate subscription services (2021)

Sibling post is correct: I worked in a couple companies backed by Softbank and they specifically asked for engineering headcount increase.

Investors and CEOs think they need massive numbers because they misunderstand how dev headcount scales and how much overhead it generates. Hiring warehouse workers, moderators and content editors scale, so they extrapolate that to devs and expect the same results.

Also with lots of devs you need lots of designers, managers, product owners and other idea people, so there’s a lot of minor tasks being pushed trough, which would otherwise not be if it was a 20 dev product. Not to mention the extra need of support, QA and ops people, which in turn needs more coordination and management.

Going back to 10 or 20 devs is borderline impossible, even if you reduce the scope, since the infrastructure needed to support 100 or 1000 has too much of an overhead in itself. I would love to see someone try, though.

It is also cool to have 1000 devs in case of an acqui-hire. If your product sucks, you can still sell your team. Yay.

ratwwon Phrases in computing that might need retiring

> So there is a specific role and skillset for DevOps engineers (going by the original usage of the term), correct?

Be careful with that misquoting there: I said "different skillsets", I didn't say necessarily roles. An Ops and a DevOps person will know different things.

> Don't you feel that if you can hire a “DevOps engineer” for a specific role on a software team then we have all lost at using the phrase DevOps?

So, you copy-pasted this from the article. If so I'll assume you're agreeing with them and this conversation can be over.

ratwwon Phrases in computing that might need retiring

If we go by the original usage of the term, then yes, it's different skillsets between Ops and DevOps. You can't announce an Ops position with a DevOps title since the two are different by definition.

However, even if we go by your definition that it is the same thing, then the "Dev" part is completely redundant and we should just call it "Ops", since it's by definition the same thing and it doesn't warrant a new title, because it's the exact same thing. However I doubt that's what the case the original article is talking about.

ratwwon Phrases in computing that might need retiring

The point of the article is that even if we go by your interpretation where "a DevOps engineer that really is just an operations engineer", then we can completely retire the term, since it's not really special and we can just keep using "Operations". The difference between Ops and DevOps isn't just in how the team is organised, but rather what the job itself consists of.

Moreover, in a lot of places there are "DevOps" teams that consist only of Operations people, which is even worse. The usage of DevOps is to attract candidates, not to differentiate the skillset needed.

ratwwon Phrases in computing that might need retiring

We don't. "Operations" is not a synonym "DevOps".

Devops does involve operations, but is not exclusively that.

Having an Operations person work together with developers doesn't automatically make the Ops engineer into a DevOps engineer. Just as it wouldn't make the non-operations developers into DevOps engineers.

Maybe the better term would be "Operations Engineer for multi-disciplinary Team". Not DevOps.

EDIT: It was previously written "It seems we both agree that having a Ops engineer is not incompatible with DevOps?"

ratwwon Phrases in computing that might need retiring

> That doesn't sound waterfall-y at all. Sounds like an iterative approach to me.

I think you missed the crux of the issue: in a lot of companies, Agile is definitely waterfall-ish, with a lot of pre-planning, design working a few sprints in advance, a lot of "getting it perfect" during PR reviews, no follow-up, no evaluating the work midway, no admitting failure and reverting it before finished, etc.

> Having roles for operations is not incompatible with DevOps at all.

I think you also missed the problem on this one. If you have "roles for operations" that doesn't involve development, it's not a devops role, it's just an operations role. Sure you can have devops in the mix, but someone doing operations exclusively isn't devops.

ratwwon Ask HN: What technologies have made your life worse?

> Too many remote controls. One for TV, one for AppleTv, one for PS5 if I want to see a movie on bluray, one for the Denon AMP, etc... There should be a standard for that. Something with a touchscreen and an API manufacturers should support

There is a standard where you can use some keys in your TV remote to control your device via HDMI, but I never had a device compatible with it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Electronics_Control

ratwwon Ask HN: What technologies have made your life worse?

Been toying with leaving my smartphone home and using only a smartwatch for day to day stuff. I can use it for music, maps, emergency calls and contactless payment. So far I'm enjoying it.

ratwwon How to drive away your best engineers

I kinda understand when laypeople do it, can't really blame them.

I guess developers who do it got the habit from their layperson days.