HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

rootsofallevil

162 karma · joined May 3, 2013

submissionscomments
rootsofallevil··on From Azure Functions to FreeBSD
I've seen these mysterious and unexplained 503s occur

Solution:

1. Delete Function App

2. Deploy again

3. Profit?

rootsofallevil··on EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy
Nuclear doesn't have a great record in other countries either. I might have the wrong figures but Hinkley Points C is over 2 times over budget and likely to be 5+ years late.

The exemption being France and maybe China?

France did a programme of nuclear power stations rather than the 1 or 2 offs that seem to be the norm elsewhere and that seems to have worked pretty well.

I'd be surprised if HPC is competitive with solar + wind + BESS when it comes online but I could well be wrong

rootsofallevil··on Ask HN: What are you actually using LLMs for in production?
> Beyond the obvious chatbots and coding copilots, curious what people are actually shipping with LLMs.

We're delivering confusion and thanks to LLMs we're 30% more efficient doing it

rootsofallevil··on AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era
> you can get 80-90% of the way there in a minute or two with AI assistance.

That just leaves the other 80-90% to do manually ;)

rootsofallevil··on Dependency injection frameworks add confusion
I haven't really done any c# for 5+ years. What has changed?

I remember trying to effectively reverse-engineer a codebase (code available but nobody knew how it worked) with a lot of DI and it was fairly painful.

Maybe it was possible back then and I just didn't know how ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

rootsofallevil··on An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews
> I think performance under pressure is a virtue. An important job is never going to be entirely free from stress - you want somebody reliable who will take that in their stride, you don't want someone who will buckle when things get difficult.

Some people experience extraordinary high levels of stress in an interview setting. From your comment, I suspect that you are not one of them and might have trouble imagining what these levels of stress feel like.

rootsofallevil··on What's Wrong with Tech Hiring
>I wonder if tech is unique in having an implicit mistrust for everything on the resume. I've worked at several large companies where people don't even bother looking at them before interviews. I blame the FizzBuzz blogpost (https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/) for making everyone deathly afraid of imposters. It's a masterpiece in ego-stroking - of course you can write FizzBuzz, look at all these sorry suckers who can't. Resumes are lies, only a 45 minute brainteaser on CoderPad can reveal the truth (ignore existence of Leetcode).

While I agree with you on the whole, I have had interviewed candidates who couldn't code.

One of them basically said that they would learn (CS degree but 4 years as a PM), which was fine but not what we were looking for.

Another simply refused help and proceeded to bat their head against the brick wall of simply syntax. Didn't show signs of nervousness, panic, etc ... just seemed not to be able to code.

In short, I think they exist (programmers that can't program) but they are the exception not the rule.

>In reality if I'm considering a senior candidate from FAANG (like, actually senior, not 4 years out of school), simply talking about past experience is perfectly fine. The work is the fucking same, everyone is migrating from legacy system X to a distributed system with zookeeper and kafka, they'll fit right in. It would take a truly psychopathic liar to fake their way through all the mundane details you could ask about a project like this. And if one slips through the cracks, they'd probably make a great PM anyway. (As long as they're on your side.)

I agree with you that an interview probing the experience of the candidate by getting them to talk about what they've done seems like a far better proposition. You will get a better idea of what the candidate knows, doesn't know.

rootsofallevil··on I want a better shell (2019)
> If I'm doing something complex enough to really benefit from "everything is and object" then why not just use a more capable language like python?

I've seen this line of reasoning mentioned a lot but never justified.

A few reasons to stick with Powershell over Python:

Team might not be familiar with Python (and the benefits of learning might be outweighed by the learning curve, shallow as it might be)

Hard to judge what the cutover point is (namely at what point does a script benefit from being written in Python?)

A lot (some?) of stuff out of the box in PS requires libraries in Python, which requires installation, which cannot happen during the script (I think at least, I've not done that much Python)

rootsofallevil··on Job descriptions should show a salary or salary range
I don't know, maybe things are different in the UK but I'd say that about 50% of the job ads I see have a salary range.

Is there any point in applying for a job without a good idea that they can match your salary expectations?

rootsofallevil··on Amazon workers vote against unionizing in Alabama
Talk to people in places like Germany and you might get a different take about bad/good unions
rootsofallevil··on Amazon workers vote against unionizing in Alabama
but does your manager? or does s/he actually only see the pizza guy delivering the pizza?
rootsofallevil··on Amazon workers vote against unionizing in Alabama
>There will be false positives, but the rate is low

What do you base this on?

My experience is that if you are perceived to be good you can get away with being a low performer for a lot longer than if you are not perceived to be good, I have seen it quite a few times.

rootsofallevil··on CUPID – the back story
>One never knows what the future may bring.

Exactly, so make the changes when you need them, otherwise you are relying on hitting the abstraction lottery

rootsofallevil··on CUPID – the back story
that's an interesting take, what would you consider strawman arguments in the article?
rootsofallevil··on Are You Trading or Gambling?
it would be more accurate to say:

Would I bet $20/day that something will happen to this car that would make the rental car company want to be reimbursed for?

Depending on rental car company the limits of scratches, dents etc .. can be very low.

rootsofallevil··on New UK police speed gun can read license plates from half a mile away at night
> 1) The speed limit obviously an arbitrary choice - the chance of death is decent at 50k/h (standard "town" speed limit in Slovenia) (so why not 40hm/k or 30km/h), and e.g. Germany has no speed limit on the highways (in some places) so there's really no good reason to set a limit of 130km/h (why not 110km/h or 150km/h)?

As are most limits.

I get that driving on a motorway at say 85 mph is probably not that much dangerous than the speed limit (70 mph) but 100? 120? 140?

I know about Germany, but would you say that Britain's or Slovenia's road are designed and kept to the same standard?

> 2) The easiest objection to (1) is "society has jointly decided about acceptable risk limits" but that clearly isn't true. Speed limits are simply a bad idea. A much better idea is speed constraints - roundabouts, speed bumps, chicanes [0] - i.e. actually forcing people to drive slower or else they ruin their cars.

how do you constrain speed on a motorway?

> The fact that governments default to traffic cameras etc. is proof (revealed preference) that they don't actually care about safety and people driving slowly, but what they want most is making their citizens live in fear, punishing them and extracting money from them. This is particularly obvious when there's a hidden police / traffic control on some section of the road where it's obviously safe to drive fast, but it's just technically within city limits so it has a low speed limit.

In this country (UK) there is this myth that the cameras are money making devices, when during the 2008 crisis they were turned off to save money for some constabularies, this is the same type of argument.

rootsofallevil··on How I read books: a guide on how to learn
> If you treat every book too seriously you just waste your time and kill the pleasure of reading.

I gave up on reading non-fiction seriously as I realized that I started to skew non-fiction books due to taking them too seriously.

I, now, learn at lot less from each book but I do take pleasure in reading so it's an overall win.

Furthermore, I can always look deeper into a book if I get really interested into

rootsofallevil··on Pfizer Covid vaccine approved for use next week in UK
> Patriotism is the belief that your country is the best by virtue of you having been born in it

I can't find the original quote but I 100% agree with you that it is pretty odd to take pride in something you have an extremely tangential relationship with

rootsofallevil··on Pfizer Covid vaccine approved for use next week in UK
> does have a history of dubious at best procurement

That is a very tactful way of describing what has gone on in this country for a while

rootsofallevil··on Is your programming language unreasonable? (2015)
> I don’t care what my language will let me do, I care more about what my language won’t let me do.

I think this is the best summary of the article. In short, please protect me from my own stupidity and/or laziness.

rootsofallevil··on Meeting everyone on a new team
would you say that you trusted your manager enough not say anything or were you just venting and maybe revealed too much?

For me, potential job changes is the only thing I will lie about to a current manager.

I appreciate that a manager might be concerned about losing staff but if half the team have gone due to very clear changes in the way things are run (dictated from above), why would I be any different?

rootsofallevil··on Ask HN: Why are you against open plan offices?
> I'd like team size cubicles.

For a while we had 1st and 2nd line support on the other side of the aisle from us on a floor that had ~ 75 people working there, it was so hard to concentrate.

My boss was trying to get a room built for our team: 4 developers, 2 Analysts and 2 testers alas it never happened. Something about collaboration, despite the fact that our team was working an entirely new product line using a new technology (for the company).

rootsofallevil··on Ask HN: Why are you against open plan offices?
> I feel like you'd miss out on so much collaborative effort and serendipitous & spontaneous conversations with colleagues that solve problems out of the blue

This happens for sure

In my experience the ratio of beneficial to detrimental serendipitous and/or spontaneous conversations that result in any benefit is extremely low, so low in fact as to not being worth it. The problem is that people tend to remember the useful one conversation and forget the other 100.

At my current job, never have I ever been involved in anything that has resulted in a solved problem from a casual conversation, yet I was regularly interrupted by other people before I started working from home.

rootsofallevil··on Microsoft now blocks reply-all email storms to end our inbox nightmares
I've seen a few of these and, as somebody without anything to do with the running of the email servers, I can say that they have been quite good fun to watch.

The right thing to do, of course, is email the whole group asking them to stop emailing the whole group ....

rootsofallevil··on After 50 years of effort, researchers made silicon emit light
it depends how infrared

(from memory) Current fibers have a dispersion minimum ~1300 nm and an attenuation minimum ~ 1550 nm

rootsofallevil··on UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson tests positive for Covid-19
they tend to do a lot of hand shaking and celebs will have people asking for selfies and stuff like this, so essentially they are in close contact with a lot more people than the average person.
rootsofallevil··on UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson tests positive for Covid-19
> should encourage people in UK and anywhere else to take it seriously

I'd love for you to be proven right but given what we've seen so far, not least from the government, I'm very much on the fence on this. Maybe in a few days we might have cause for cautious optimism

rootsofallevil··on Google offers certificate to help IT career growth
Having been in both sides: Consultancy and Client. My experience suggests that this is far from universal.
rootsofallevil··on Software certifications; a waste of time and money (2018)
The problem I see with certifications is that a lot of them tend to have trivia questions that are easy to look up but relatively unimportant, e.g. naming restrictions on azure resources is one the comes to mind.

I'm currently following a couple of certs for the learning paths, might even take the exam for one if my employer pays for it and the time off

rootsofallevil··on Google offers certificate to help IT career growth
Do you think so?

I know some employers do care but more to be able to claim X consultants certified in tech Y than as a guide for hiring.

Capgemini are pretty big on certs but most people we hired didn't have them, just got them after they joined (This is my experience in the UK)

Page 1 of 2Next →