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tdumitrescu

1,406 karma · joined November 19, 2013

http://cmme.org/tdumitrescu
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tdumitrescu··on FBI tries to unmask owner of archive.is
If the last 9 months have shown us anything, it's that long-running government institutions are a lot easier to kill than we thought. And the idea of archive.org being under the control an administration like the current one in the US is pretty frightening. They would have absolutely zero qualms about deleting and changing that data.
tdumitrescu··on Python has had async for 10 years – why isn't it more popular?
That's the main problem with evented servers in general isn't it? If any one of your workloads is cpu-intensive, it has the potential to block the serving of everything else on the same thread, so requests that should always be snappy can end up taking randomly long times in practice. Basically if you have any cpu-heavy work, it shouldn't go in that same server.
tdumitrescu··on It's OK to hardcode feature flags
Seriously. This is one of those cases where rolling your own really does make sense. Flags in a DB table, flags in a json file, all super simple to build and maintain, and 100x faster and more reliable than making the critical paths of your application's request cycle depend on an external provider.
tdumitrescu··on How shut-down Bay Area tech companies ditch their fancy gear
Nobody is going through the significant work of raising VC and then TRYING to fail. All for the sake of temporarily using some fancy office furniture.
tdumitrescu··on Tour de France: How professional cycling teams eat and cook on the road
Hey if they wanna pay me for real transparent food I'll cook them up some "Emperor's New Hollandaise"
tdumitrescu··on A bunch of programming advice I'd give to myself 15 years ago
> If you only do something very rarely anyway, spending time to automate it won’t have a great ROI

For code-editing, maybe. But in general software engineering, there are tasks that I have to do maybe once a year or less that are always way more painful than they need to be because I don't remember the details, and anytime I automate even part of them (or yes, just document a little better), it turns out to be well worth it. Stuff like bootstrapping new environments, some database-related work, etc.

tdumitrescu··on A bunch of programming advice I'd give to myself 15 years ago
I think everyone's got a different threshold for where returns start diminishing sharply. While I'm squarely in the "don't waste time micro-tweaking your editor" camp, there are some little bits of shortcuts and tooling that made me much more fluent at code-editing with very little investment. One example that stands out is the multi-cursor support that Sublime Text popularized (and which I use all the time in vscode now). It eliminates a good 80% of repetitive typing, or symbol refactoring that would have involved clunking through menus in old IDEs, and makes experimentation that much quicker. Feels fundamental, like copy/paste shortcuts which everyone knows now.
tdumitrescu··on Carpenter's AirTags help uncover 'massive' case of stolen tools in Maryland
Nitpicking: Crook Manifesto is the sequel to Harlem Shuffle, which came out years earlier. There's a third installment planned.
tdumitrescu··on OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?
Whoa. That article says that SpaceX does tender offers twice a year?! That's so much better than 99% of private companies, it makes it almost as liquid for employees as a public company.
tdumitrescu··on Petrucci Music Library
For sure, I'm not meaning to denigrate IMSLP, as it's a great project that offers access to so much material that's otherwise a pain to get to. I was just trying to make the distinction that when I want the highest-quality materials I can find for performance or study, that's not where I'll find them. But it's wonderful for quick easy access, invaluable for browsing and making finds when you're far from any university library etc.
tdumitrescu··on Petrucci Music Library
Take from a musicologist and semi-professional performer: IMSLP is great for finding quick scores of random stuff, but the editions are often pretty shoddy, like either super outdated with weird editorial decisions that no one's agreed with for the last 50 years, or someone's totally amateur transcription full of errors and equally weird decisions. Treat it like you might treat Wikipedia as a research source (ok as an initial point of entry, but soon you want to dig into the real sources).
tdumitrescu··on Triplebyte acquired by Karat
Yeah, our experience with Triplebyte really fluctuated a ton over the years. Made some hires pre-vetted by them who were real badasses and contributed a lot, but then there were periods when they sent us numerous candidates who could barely squeeze out a line of code and clearly must have gamed their process somehow. Feels like they were searching for some sustainable growth model and never managed it.
tdumitrescu··on From Ruby to Node: Overhauling Shopify’s CLI for a better developer experience
I work somewhere with plenty smart engineers, and plenty of in-house golang expertise. I've seen several small internal tools rewritten from Python to Go, and contributions by the wider team totally dropped off. It used to be absolutely trivial for anyone to make changes, and the "deployment" of such scripts was basically "get the code reviewed and merge it." Now there's a whole Bazel song and dance, compilation as part of the dev cycle, producing binaries for distribution, and it's introduced just enough friction that people no longer make the little tweaks that used to be dead simple. Say what you will about loosey-goosey dynamic languages, but they work superbly for things like CLI tools.
tdumitrescu··on Theory-building and why employee churn is lethal to software companies
"Many teams in the industry constantly rewrite parts of their code. Not because they keep figuring out better ways of approaching the problem but because nobody on the team has an accurate mental model for how it works and how the code fits in with the rest."

This part rings very true, as someone who's been through plenty of rewrites / "make module X not suck" projects. A side observation here is that usually the original author (sometimes long-departed or departing) understands very well the limitations/flaws of the original system/implementation, but can be excluded from the design of the replacement for any number of misguided reasons. Trying not to bruise the ego of an early employee, thinking that they wouldn't agree with any changes, whereas those are often the people in the best position to guide a rewrite, and often would love the chance to fix some of the decisions they had to make originally.

tdumitrescu··on Remote workers are wasting their time proving they’re working
Distracting Slack noise. I'm always a little annoyed when people do this and litter public channels. If you feel strongly about communicating your status changes all day, set your personal status - if someone wants to communicate directly with you, they can see that you're "out to lunch until 1:30EST! :foodemoji:" or whatever, but it's not proactively notifying everyone else who doesn't care.
tdumitrescu··on Ask HN: Does Hacker News still do in person meet ups?
Still in the east bay. Plenty of humans still here
tdumitrescu··on Ask HN: Have tech salaries been stagnant for the past decade?
From your other replies here you sound a bit burned out. 220 is easily within the reach of devops people in the modern software industry, and certainly not just at the big-name tech companies. But you do have to work for _some_ kind of decently-funded company if you want it as a salary rather than doing your own thing (consulting etc).
tdumitrescu··on Can the American mall survive?
This past weekend I found myself in a mall in the East Bay (Bishop Ranch in San Ramon) and holy carp was it bumping with people, like a mall from before the before times. A big open central courtyard with families hanging out all over this fake grass, kids riding the escalator to gawk at people from the second level, I was like "what year is this?" A lot of the shops and restaurants were more bougie than those of past malls, there was a big Williams Sonoma, eating options included The Slanted Door, Mendocino Farms, Delarosa Pizza, so a far cry from the Sbarro and Cinnabon style of the classic mall. Maybe that's their secret.
tdumitrescu··on Please do not use Python for tooling
What a bizarrely arrogant (condescending) way to formulate arguments.

"It is okay to feel provoked by this statement. As pointed out previously: you have probably invested a lot of time in Python. You will be inclined to justify and defend that investment. I would urge you to take some time to think about this and try to calm your urge to come up with counter-arguments. Let it sink in and try to be open to the possibility that this is how many users experience software written in Python."

tdumitrescu··on Hacking the Hedonic Treadmill
I've been exercising quite regularly for decades, including a good amount of running alongside weights and other resistance and cardio. I love it, and hope I don't ever have to stop, but I've never experienced any sort of "runner's high" or big reaction to exercise, even after very hard or long workouts.
tdumitrescu··on 45 SF traffic cops issue just 10 citations combined a day
Think it's bad in SF? Go across the bay to Oakland. Red lights and stop signs mean nothing here.
tdumitrescu··on Tell HN: Salesforce has globally revoked Slack's holiday shutdown benefit
Off-topic but great username. Don't expect to come across a lot of Ars Subtilior references here on HN
tdumitrescu··on How Duke Nukem II’s parallax scrolling worked
It wasn't just coding, it was also a lot of design/art resources. Going from 256->16 colors would look terrible with automatic dithering. My recollection is that there were a few Sierra titles made for VGA that also supported EGA and that it looked like someone had gone through each screen by hand to make the low-color ones look acceptable-ish.
tdumitrescu··on Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco
> drivers are expected to takeover for irreconcilable issues

Remote employee "drivers" take over when a car signals that it doesn't know what to do

tdumitrescu··on A common trap for people entering programming jobs
Agreed. Personally I'm always grateful when someone joins and brings along a good up-to-date idea of how our particular languages/frameworks are used and taught by the rest of the world. It's so easy for a big internal codebase to devolve over time into a bunch of weird patterns, and forcing some newcomer/outsider perspectives onto it is a great corrective force.
tdumitrescu··on What should you do with stock options during a recession?
Every company gives refresher grants. If you only got 1 grant over 4 years, then the company doesn't care about retaining you.
tdumitrescu··on The giraffe neck evolved for sexual combat?
A modern classic Tinder opener too: https://www.reddit.com/r/Tinder/comments/u4u9ke/giraffe_line...
tdumitrescu··on I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)
I remember this too, from our 4th-grade "G&T" math teacher telling us the story. Although I use the formula so rarely that I don't keep it memorized, whenever it does come up, I think back to that day in class and that moves the gears enough that I can derive it empirically pretty quickly from small-number examples and the knowledge that it involves two consecutive numbers.
tdumitrescu··on What do great engineering managers need to know about compensation and equity?
Forgive me if I'm stating the obvious, but it's a perverse incentive from the company's point of view. By the time the employee has gotten to the stage of getting actual offers from other companies, they've already gone through all the friction of the job hunt; at that point, the path of least resistance is in fact for them to leave the current job, otherwise they have to go through the new process of getting a counter-offer from their employer, with all the risks that involves too.
tdumitrescu··on Don't just shorten your URL, make it suspicious and frightening (2010)
Well yes, the whole email will be more likely to get routed automatically to spam.
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