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It is true that JS and the web + JS ecosystem is absolutely overloaded with “utility” dependencies like lodash or some weird fusion experiment in a way that Python or Java is not. I personally have implemented and removed a ton of dependencies in the latter two languages with little hassle - I’m aided by the fact that these languages support DI or hexagonal architecture and a good project layout can prevent something that I don’t need, care about, or understand from becoming ubiquitous and cumbersome as my codebase grows.

Devil’s advocacy here (and I know this is overwrought and beaten to absolute death here and abroad daily) but is a large dependency tree really that bad?

Most modern backend development assumes a ton of dependency management, tech like Docker has proven for at least 10 years that it can be manageable in production at scale. While I get that browser compatibility can be a pain in a way that the backend doesn’t have to reckon with I don’t really see why dependency management for something like React should be a decision factor for front end.

That’s also not to insinuate that we should just do it (SPA + massive amounts of JS) because browsers can handle it or that there are zero downsides to JS dependency management, but rather that the positives and negatives of zero-JS solutions should be adjudicated on things like developer experience and speed of delivery.

It’s pretty cool. I would personally suggest Kafka or RabbitMQ depending on your needs, as Jetstream has proven to require a lot of ops engineering to remain stable in production

There are lots of people selling them on things like Facebook marketplace. Seems incredibly risky for them but who knows.

This is sadly commonplace in tech blogs: rather than taking a great opportunity to hook the reader, the writer will drop a vocab term in bold and move on.

Jetstream does indeed have message persistence: I can issue queries like “get messages on topic since 5 minutes ago” - I do this a ton. However, that seems to be the extent of the storage/query API that it exposes for historical messages. I’m quite a big fan, and would recommend it with the caveat that Jetstream is considerably more complex than simple nats and I get the feeling I’m barely scratching the surface with it.

Yeah, 90% of the time when I’m using my phone (e.g. right now), I’m at home, on my couch. I could be using my laptop or desktop which are both close within reach, but I like being able to read HN while my partner plays Zelda.

I’m not exactly the demographic of “only uses mobile” - I am very much a “pre-mobile internet user” (coding, games, music all required me to pick up some desktop skills) but can attest to the fact that I don’t hate the experience in a way that’s commensurate with how much I’d hate having a hot laptop on my stomach or sitting in some other room typing this out.

Love the story. Would also love the story of how normally non-druggie nerds get amphetamnines in the pre-adderal era.

Well there you said it, you work some places for 5+ years, therefore I would strongly consider you. The main reason is that longer stints give you an opportunity to become a master with at least one set of tools. If you interview and are apparently not masterful with your own toolset, then I’ve caught a coaster. I’ve found that it’s much harder to acquire this signal vs. noise thing with exclusively 2 year stint people because they spend half of their life on boarding or unemployed.

Also, I get what you’re saying, but DI was around in 2005 and some good engineers (older than I) were using it back then. It seems lot of good ideas skipped a generation!

Usually this kind of thing comes from “trying to keep costs down” at a poorly funded firm, usually startup-ish. I’ve worked places where the oldest engineer was 30 and it’s rough, quality and stability just aren’t in the average 25 year old’s toolkit.

Agreed, I will almost always take someone with 5 years of experience at a couple of good shops rather than 20 years of experience broken up across 10 different ones.

This is my understanding as well. Rare is the day I’ve solved a production firefight by editing some algorithm - it’s almost always arcane configuration, restarting services in the right order, some network thing flapping/dos-ing the rest of the system, some service aggressively restarting and dos-ing others, actual malevolent dos, noisy neighbors, resource starvation, etc.

You can but part of the awkward geological/hydrological fact of the matter is that whatever you leave there will be waiting for you next year. 70k people all taking a poo in a basin with no inflows/outflows will probably have some interesting consequences for the otherwise geologically stagnant area.

Rangers are basically “the cops” of BLM land, so if there’s an issue they’re the ones who will show up. In general these guys do the best with what they’ve got and they probably hate BM and all the hassle it brings. A normal weekend in rural Nevada requires maybe a call about a rancher’s lost livestock or a normal patrol route. These guys are certainly ill equipped to handle 70k outsiders showing up for a week, and particularly not well equipped for settling interpersonal/ideological disputes elegantly. I think their “ram down the barricade” strategy is pretty parsimonious given the time and tools they have to deal with protests and angry travelers.

Which is why the “radical self-reliance” thing is so ironic/sad in this situation. Most people aren’t there for that, despite the warnings that RSR is part of the deal, the fact is that anyone who’s particularly interested in that kind of experience is already solo backpacking or something this weekend.

I understand the usage of miasma, but flippant is just not a normal modifier for that noun.

I wouldn’t be critiquing their choice of words if I didn’t know what they mean. In general flippant is a word that describes attitudes or actions, not a toxic death cloud.

Don’t have them on hand (or necessarily put faith in them) but a couple of studies have claimed to show a link between vaping and higher susceptibility to ordinary lung disease (bronchitis) with the suspected cause being that people vape far more than they smoke in terms of air volume, and that the higher temp of some vape products adversely affects the lungs in a way that cigarettes don’t. I’m pretty skeptical that there’s anything as bad for you as smoking unless it’s obesity or a sedentary lifestyle- all 3 are correlated, as is alcohol abuse, depression, and a number of other bad things. I think vaping is probably too new to know anything definitive about it, though.

It definitely takes a second to develop that intuition, I remember being quite confused as well. As I got more into CS, I began to think of proofs similar to how I do unit tests: you externalize or “fix” as many as the inputs as you possibly can, and then abuse the remaining degrees of freedom as much as possible to show that your solution is complete.

I agree. I’ve found ruby and its developers to be pretty friendly and open to other languages and styles.

You certainly still could collect that half million by going into the office.

> Encore automates infrastructure for seamless development, from local to your cloud.

> Develop locally with instant infrastructure, preview PRs in dedicated environments, and skip tedious Terraform with automatic infrastructure setup in your cloud.

If you thought this sounded like a sales pitch for bad engineering practices, it’s because it is.

I find it very funny that a company hawking their mutant CI “solution” talks so much about pmf when what they’re selling is pretty undifferentiated

One good thing about the rigid institutional environment, for better or worse, is that having exposure to that rigidity and institutional side of things can at least give kids some skills in the long run for navigating the anti-human organizations that form so much of our public and private sectors.

Is it really a scam if it helps kids fit in and learn? I have a pretty strong baseline bias against homeschool, but a lot of the testimonials in the article are pretty positive. For every fear people have of homeschools being dangerous or inadequate, it’s hard to look at public education as anything but that.

The “economy” you attribute these increases in QoL to is pretty mercurial - are we talking about mercantilism during the 1700s, robber baron capitalism of the 1910’s, Chinese state capitalism of today, or Western neoliberalism of the 1990’s?

I certainly don’t, and hacker news has a certain conversational feng shui that leads to most posts reading a lot like everyone else’s. If you read through the top 10 comments on any post, the style will be extremely similar on 9+ of them, which is nice because that way you don’t end up with anyone caring who the other guy is, anyway, you just want to read what people have to say

This is why consulting companies are basically organized blight - you hire them to do work but 80% of the money goes to the customer facing/relationship management side of the business and the workers get fuck all done because they’re just following dumb orders half-interestedly, as opposed to a good team of workers who, if properly managed, might actually get something great done.

Yeah. “We succeed and fail together” - unfortunately, unless this is true from a management and reward perspective, it can never be true at a team level. Additionally anything raised in a retro that contradicts a management edict will never see the light of day.

If your PM is appraised by Power Point quality or number of sprint points while engineers are managed by some other criteria, success and failure become asymmetrical and incentives clash.

Sure. To me that sounds related to the “lack of backlog refinement” and “no AC” parts of this. If there’s no text on a ticket, there’s not even a map! Good luck with the territory, in that case.

There are a lot of reasons for spillover in my experience. They’re all interrelated.

First and foremost is that most product/project managers, engineering managers, “scrum masters”, etc. do not truly love doing the work of backlog refinement, ticket management, writing acceptance criteria, or other forms of planning that entail actionable results. They may love the glory of leading or assisting a team of software engineers to build great products, but I’ve seen maybe 1 or 2 who are actually qualified to be the agile/process guy/gal. Additionally, they’re frequently counter-incentivized to be meeting jockeys, PowerPoint creators, and “culture people” who simply do not do the job as it’s meant to be done.

As soon as ^^ happens, sprints are destined to fail, because the work of sizing tickets falls squarely onto engineers who would probably rather be writing code than talking about it, so they make informal agreements about value of a story point being a day’s work or not blocking tickets that don’t have defined success criteria, or what have you. As such, tickets are not properly vetted and grow to be massive, amorphous chunks of work that either allow devs to hide from the (painful/annoying) process of Scrum and just do their thing.

The last (and worst) of the reasons spillover happens is that people are burnt out, unmotivated, or unrewarded by the process. If the “customer” (also a massive rats nest of a concept in Agile) isn’t at the demo and actively interested in the product being developed, any amount of “points” will feel arbitrary and useless. There’s no faster way to lose interest in Scrum than canceling a demo and having your developers lose faith that completing that ticket actually matters to someone.