Hacker News Reader

stratigoson Project Management Software Can't Save You

Agreed. A business/organisation needs to ask itself, "what truly is someone's motivation to be a project manager?"

stratigoson Project Management Software Can't Save You

No, it will not solve the problem of employee disengagement. Project Management is on the border of being a b.s. job to begin with. I suspect most PMs will be replaced with AI in the next 5 years. Given the low level of skill required to be a PM, and that no one in the universe is passionate about such a "trade," there is no tool that exists that will "save" an organisation. Figuring out the issue of employee disengagement in roles such as this will be of benefit, a tool is just a tool.

stratigoson Strong static typing, a hill I'm willing to die on

Youre missing the perspective of a business owner and operator that has to hire many people with diverse patterns of thoughts and beliefs who will most likely work for their organization for less than 24 months.

stratigoson Strong static typing, a hill I'm willing to die on

Unfortunately this attitude is not profitable, and also smacks of someone who works on their own island and costs a business more than they add value given their inability to work as a team. This attitude might find a way to be profitable when held by a university professor, though that does not mean its desirable.

stratigoson Strong static typing, a hill I'm willing to die on

This article might be right in an academic sense. I suggest the author and those who believe similarly that its a "hill to die on" rethink their approach and spend 5-8 years doing professional consulting (do not confuse consulting with staff augmentation). You will indeed die on the hill as a business cannot expect everyone it hires to believe the same thing, and you cannot expect to force anyone to use strong typing properly. In short, while you may believe this is the right path, most folks dont care, and all that remains is an extremely complex, antipatterned, mysterious ball of mud that no one wants to work with because no one fully bought into the concept for which you were willing to die.

stratigoson Detroit man steals 800 gallons using Bluetooth to hack gas pumps at station

while im completely against theft, theft is as old as economies of any kind. It is utterly irresponsible for the developers of such software system to have no/little defensive measure or protection against intrusion.

This is article is like saying the bank teller has some kind of responsibility to mitigate an armed thief emptying out the bank vault when the bank vault has no lock, no door, and no real form of security.

Up until now, the technology firms which creative this software have pushed the responsibility of security unfairly (and, imo, criminally negligent) onto their customers. This article just represents that the respective technologists need to actually do their job.

stratigoson Cosmological time dilation in the early Universe

The article feels dated, like the study began long before the latest revelations about our cosmos have been announced. E.g., we believe the current universe is > 23 billion years old, and that the 13.x bn year timeline is now out of date. Secondly, there is a growing agreement in the academic community that the big bang is just teleological fantasy at its best, and that there is no way to know what happened before inflation, just that inflation happened. So accurately we now know the universe is > 23bn years since inflation, and we have no idea what happened beyond that border, just that it "appears" to be expanding from a point.

Its also very dated to perceive time as a 4th dimension. This is not academic, this is now common knowledge. 4th dimensional reality is the superposition of all objects in 3 dimensions, see the term "tesseract." Its the stuff of kindergartners to believe time is the 4th dimension.

Also agree with the other comments that it sounds naive to measure things in "seconds" when there is nothing relative from which to measure time in the earliest states of the universe.

The article basically sounds like it came from 1970s WASP academia, and is a few decades behind in the current academic perspectives of astrophysics and cosmology.

stratigoson Mercedes EVs can go faster for $60 a month

oh no they have car DLC now? This is a nightmare. With what Ive learned recently about cobalt mining and the dependencies EVs have on them, it sounds to me like were better off with combustion engines.

Guess I can hope for a future with a hydrogen fueled V8!

stratigoson Mojo might be the biggest thing to happen in programming for decades

Meanwhile, in the Erlang universe ... ;-)

stratigoson Stop Saying “Technical Debt”

Folks need to be more concerned about code entropy than technical debt, often developers do not know the difference ;-)

The latter does allow progress, the former inhibits it.

stratigoson We are drowning in information while starving for wisdom (2021)

One is only starving for wisdom if one refuses to eat!

Kong Fu Zi say:

"By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest."

Drowning in information? Youre gaining wisdom the bitter wa ;-)

Starving for wisdom? You may be thinking it is too easy to find wisdom. Try a bit harder. Wisdom might be right behind you when you are focused on how bad something in front of you may seem.

stratigoson Traces of ancient ocean discovered on Mars

NASA proved in the 70s that some microorganisms survive atmospheric rentry. In fact, they could not possibly be killed by any means known to man, except for some enormous cosmic event with very powerful radiation / cosmic rays. This was done to question the idea of it being "safe" or not to travel in space or other planets, if it is possible to "scrub" our ships clean and avoid bringing germs with us. Apparently thats not 100% possible, some critters survive space and the harshness of re-entry just fine.

stratigoson Metal Archives 20th Anniversary

Metal Archives Forever \mm/

stratigoson How to advertise to developers: deep dive into paid developer marketing

One problem the advertising industry fails to understand is that an advertising agency, or whatever source the ads originate from, is a socioppath.

Developers are logical and practical thinkers and despise sociopathic behavior.

Developers have a very strong resistance to this sort of manipulation.

Advertisers are unable to cope with this reality or understand their true nature in our economy, so they continue to do more "research" on how to engage developers, who in turn, learn how to better detect and evade sociopaths

Im also very surprised that in 2022, there are developers that see ads at all, outside of glancing at some non technical person's youtube tab.There are browsers now that are completely ad free, even without add-ons or extensions. Ads are horribly toxic in nature and an offense to the human psyche and to any person's dignity.

stratigoson System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

System76 makes decent laptops that run linux really well. Ive had zero of the notorious firmware issues of trying to linux-on-laptop.

As a software developer, I wouldnt ever use Pop_OS again. Vanilla Ubuntu is way better, and less complex, and has way better support. All I recall from Pop_OS related issues, on System76's behalf, are tumbleweeds.

Oh and Ive had 4 of their laptops, used primarily for software development, since 2016.

For a physical machine, its been a great experience, albeit slightly too expensive (and for that reason Im not buying them anymore).

At a software level, I am forever disinterested in whatever it is theyre offering. Even the marketing language describing this "Cosmic" thing is has hard to parse and understand as my experience with Pop_OS.

stratigoson Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content

I link to WayBackMachine as Ive built a great many greenfield applications for startups as a freelancer, which only existed for about 6-8 months before hitting their burn rate. If I linked to their original domains, my portfolio would be a list of 404s.

stratigoson MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan

Hooray for firefox! Why use any other browser?

stratigoson Nets on the outlets of drainage pipes save waterways from pollution

this is so damn simple, that I fear for us, for not having thought of it sooner ><

stratigoson We can't judge another programmer's abilities in a 60 minute interview

I am approaching 1.5 decades as an employed software engineer. Interviewing culture seems to change a little over the years, but usually in other wacky directions that leave me feeling entirely disengaged from the industry. I also very much love my vocation, though it alone is not enough to keep me enduring through the insanity of technical interviews , "cultural fit" assessments, and the violence of linear reductionism.

Articles and discussion threads like this are pretty much the only reason Im willing to interview at all (and thus remain in the industry). So thanks for sharing, Im glad to know other people are aware of how bonkers this is.

The long version takes years of explaining.

The short version is: I am highly allergic to cognitive dissonance.

stratigoson A Long Adventure: Repairing Ultra-Rare NTSC Amiga Ultima 6

I can understand why a fan of the Ultima series goes to such lengths :)

stratigoson Anthropologist Richard Wrangham on the emergence of homo sapiens

a speculative, linear-reductionist rant... interesting read nonetheless

stratigoson Google launches AMP for email

> ...get their work done faster

precisely :)

work! work! work! work! work! work...

stratigoson Munchery Shuts Down

youve released some great talent into the world. munchery developers are some of the best ive worked with :)

stratigoson “Stylish” browser extension steals all your internet history

Ugh! After so many years, I now have to view a white-themed internet again. I forgot how painful and blindy websites are!

Pls redesign the whole internet to be dark themed, so we dont need add ons like this to fix the world. Thanks!

stratigoson Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role

I agree in full with this article. I too have been freelancing for > 4 years, handling whole startups' software needs myself, and am faced with the exact same gauntlet of perplexing steps. My experience parallels the author's perfectly. Now we just get asymmetrical experiences on 1) number of highly qualified candidates for a job and 2) job creators' belief that not enough qualified candidates are available for the job.

stratigoson To Delete Facebook or Not to Delete Facebook? That Is Not the Question

Zuckerberg revealed his true colors years ago. I had a facebook for a moment in perhaps 2005-06. I deleted it. I have never regretted that, quite the contrary. I have enjoyed a life free of social media, and free of its trappings and influences. I watch my friends get sucked into "comparing mind," scroll through streams of advertorials and recieve the corresponding subliminal stressers, and constantly have their mindfulness interrupted by notifications. I think the general concept of social media is great, and a necessary thing for the world at large. I think facebook is evil, and it blows my mind that people still continue to use this platform (And similar ones) even though the company sells users out again and again. This era goes way beyond "jump! how high?"

stratigoson Designing very large JavaScript applications

> It's interesting how in 2018 web development === react. React this, react that.

Its quite popular for sure, but after just doing a job search for about 6 months, I came across a surprising number of firms using ng, ember, and even vue in a couple places.

modern ruby on rails with ujs is still hugely popular

stratigoson The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework

Ive been grinding away at these for months... coming out of freelancing, latest contract with a startup that hit its burn rate and failed, and having beeen unemployed for almost 6 months (except not really unemployed, since contractors dont actually collect unemployment...).

So many companies have these assignments. Theyre infinitely better than whiteboarding, or hacker rank tests, or "pair programming" on some crazy abstraction for only 30 minutes. Some of them are so much work - I am working on my 20th hour of a really involved full stack project, and still think I have about 6-8 more hours before its "pretty".

Then I have 2 more to do, and I told the HR people at those companies Id do them 3 days ago.

One weekend I spent 12 hours doing a SOA example project, and on Monday, the owner simply deleted the upstream - and my fork along with it - and said nothing back to me. I hadnt even turned it in yet!

Hours, weeks... its been months of this. Im working for free and its just energy that goes into thin air.

Not once has anyone actually done a real code review, I suppose they just get buried in hundreds of these little projects to review and select someone and just never get back to you :-/

Next week I have about 6 interviews lined up. Cant wait to see how many unpaid hours of work I get to do!

...oh, and I have > 12 years of industry experience, have built multiple applications that garner 50mm requests per month (I can almost guarantee you, that youve been on at least 2 of my websites before), have worked with IoT, HIPPA medical, ecommerce, greenfielded, been on big teams, worked internationally, have buttloads of experience, and every person Ive ever worked for praised and lauded me plenty. Yet I cant get a fucking job for the life of me because of these paint-by-number processes.

Yah anyway, back to the grind, for free...

stratigoson An argument that companies should pay users for their data

Ive been saying it for years - I wont allow fb, twttr, ggl, or any of the tech giants access to my data until they compensate me fairly for it. If theyre making billions off of us, then I want a few thousand in return. Until then, no accounts and no data from me! Privacy Badger, ABPlus, block @ DNS level, etc.

Also Ive been a succesful technologist, programmer, and social being for many decades, and not having any of those accounts has never been a downer in my life. I feel much healthier, sound, and happier than my peers that have FB accounts. Cant see the value in that jank. Cant see why it makes sense to empower those companies at our expense.

stratigoson Is Loneliness a Health Epidemic?

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/97008.Love_Freedom_and_A...

Check out this book for a good angle on the difference between loneliness and aloneness.