Hacker News Reader

zgluckon Reasons Not to Be a Manager (2019)

It will depend lots on the product/project. In my case the product we built went gangbusters for a decade. I ended up abusing/building Lego kits as form of mindless therapeutics while watching very-easy-to-digest sitcoms to wind down. I have quite the collection now.

Most products/projects aren't like that that though - but perhaps the pressure is still there?

zgluckon Reasons Not to Be a Manager (2019)

(Context: Northern Europe)

Switching jobs is quite hard as an (engineering) manager, at least if you're a bit introverted like me. Often you depend on the number of people who trust you from their experience working with you that have switched companies and have come into a trusted position there.

My career:

ages 20-30: Individual contributor.

ages 30-45: (Engineering) manager, running product development teams of varying sizes (up to about 50 people), being all over the architecture/system design. Not really coding in a focused way.

ages 45-now: Individual contributor, coding most of the time.

I was really concerned I wouldn't be able to keep the interest in actual coding all day long when I went back to that, but lo and behold, I'm actually finding it more fun and rewarding than the management roles. Stress is down too.

You too can recover from being a manager :).

zgluckon ASML EUV lithography machine could keep Moore’s Law on track

Huh, wow.

ASML: $287B

AMD: $182B

Intel: $154B

zgluckon Alcohol without the hangover – scientists are finding ways

Drinking lots of water before going to bed works really well - when you remember doing that...

zgluckon Ways to shoot yourself in the foot with Redis

And the default limit is 10k connections.

https://redis.io/docs/reference/clients/#maximum-concurrent-...

zgluckon Police are not primarily crime fighters, according to the data

How is it not relevant?

zgluckon Police are not primarily crime fighters, according to the data

Where was the attack? Does mschuster91 consider being associated with antifa (that's how I interpret it) an "attack"?

zgluckon Police are not primarily crime fighters, according to the data

Observation: Your profile says: You call it "alt-left", I proudly call it "Antifa".

zgluckon Waymo kills off autonomous trucking program

Never heard of it...

zgluckon Chinese developer leaves S.F. with trail of broken real estate deals, lawsuits

The decision to lead with a photo of some random (white-ish) victims instead of the perp is bizarre, especially given the headline.

zgluckon SpaceX punched a hole in the ionosphere

So now they'll also have to deal with "preserve the ionosphere" activists who have no clue.

zgluckon The U.K. government is close to eroding encryption worldwide

I've lost count of the number of u-turns they have done already. I think it's like 5 or so.

(I'm including their various attempts to ban porn from the internet.)

zgluckon The U.K. government is close to eroding encryption worldwide

The UK is an island, physically and metaphorically. It can dig its (financial) grave if it wants to, the rest of the world won't really care much.

The headline is false.

zgluckon How Americans Learned to Stop Worrying and Take Vacation This Summer

https://archive.is/ao3G4

zgluckon Why it's so important to figure out when a vital Atlantic current might collapse

The UK Met Office on this:

“As far as we’re concerned in the Met Office, the paper is far too simplistic,” said Richard Betts, the Head of the Climate Impacts at the Met Office Hadley Centre.

He added: “There’s still no evidence that we’re kind of past the point of no return in terms of devastating impacts.

“On the basis of one paper, don’t despair.”

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/07/27/amoc-ocean-colla...

zgluckon Cities with their own psychological disorders

One of them was expected to "die at her post" by a bank executive.

I wasn't a bank executive, it was the the social democratic prime minister Olof Palme.

During a phone call he asked one of the hostages: "wouldn′t it be nice to die at your post?"

https://sverigesradio.se/artikel/591659

(https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2021/03/the-murder-of-swedish-prim...)

zgluckon Tarsnap outage postmortem

Tarsnap is undoubtedly expensive, but it also donates to various efforts!

I mean.. you could purchase a cheaper service and also donate to various efforts. Bonus: Then you'd also be able to pick those efforts.

zgluckon Tesla has a range inflation problem

This is blogspam, the actual article is here:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-ba...

zgluckon Rethinking Window Management

Not Gnome, but you're kind of describing the mac Stage Manager feature. It's quite nice with most apps.

zgluckon Alphabet Announces Second Quarter 2023 Results [pdf]

Not my experience. They tend to work well. The problems comes when you want to do something very slightly unusual.

zgluckon Digikey's Physical Connectors Tutorial

Im my experience: If there's one thing that makes sense to stock at your own little lab - to avoid waiting 1-3 days for getting that little thing that blocks that project you want to complete - it's a wide assortment of connectors. The rest can often be improvised in many ways using various microcontroller boards and voltage level converters etc that you'll probabably already have.

The next most useful thing: A great assortment of fasteners!

I think the thing to do here is to buy like M2x60 through M10x60 (A4 stainless, insex screws) and then use that nut-retapping trick to get that custom screw length that you need.

"Do you mean cutting the screw to length with a nut on it, which then fixes the thread as you unfasten it?"

Yes. Looks like I've been too chatty for today, HN's rate limiting brutally tells me to shut the fuck up.

(The especially evil thing about this: You don't know until you press submit if your comment will be accepted or not. You could be writing the greatest comment of the week, but you have no idea if it will be automatically refused or not. You can only write and hope for the best. Fuck everything about that.)

zgluckon ProtoWeb – Surf the web like it's 1995

Saw that video. Seems like an awesome effort! It's on my list of fun things things to do on a rainy summer day, this summer.

zgluckon Alphabet Announces Second Quarter 2023 Results [pdf]

GCP has a smaller number of services but they tend to be very well designed with excellent taste.

AWS has a bazillion services, often very obviously designed by people without good taste and/or experience.

GCP's incompleteness is super annoying. The general daftness of AWS service design is tiring and somewhat soul-sucking.

I used to think that Google would eventually get there, but lately I've realized that they are totally happy offering an 80% product forever. So for now I'm very reluctantly team AWS.

zgluckon Tell HN: Finally, a good use for the 9th bit

In other news; cannabis is still widely available in California.

(I'm jealous.)

zgluckon Before you try to do something, make sure you can do nothing

or a new 3D system to get a single triangle to display

The first hardware-accelerated 3D API I used was the first version of Direct 3D in 1996. It took days to get get single triangle.

Carmack described it well:

https://www.bluesnews.com/archives/carmack122396.html

Direct-3D IM is a horribly broken API. It inflicts great pain and suffering on the programmers using it, without returning any significant advantages. I don't think there is ANY market segment that D3D is apropriate for, OpenGL seems to work just fine for everything from quake to softimage. There is no good technical reason for the existance of D3D.

...

Many things that are a single line of GL code require half a page of D3D code to allocate a structure, set a size, fill something in, call a COM routine, then extract the result.

zgluckon Twitter’s Rebrand to X Could Be a Trademark Nightmare Thanks to Microsoft

Monotype Executive Creative Director Phil Garnham Executive told The Messenger in a statement that the company “can confirm that whilst it is similar, this is not the capital X glyph from Monotype’s “Special Alphabets 4.”

zgluckon Twitter has officially changed its logo to ‘X’

Not X, 𝕏. (Mathematical Double-Struck Capital X, U+1D54F)

zgluckon Man found guilty of child porn because he ran a Tor exit node

Yes. That is also why we need to keep Kosovo out of the EU until this has been fixed - which I'm pretty sure won't happen any time soon :(.

zgluckon Man found guilty of child porn because he ran a Tor exit node

Have you read the court's decision? If not, how would you be able to tell?

zgluckon Man found guilty of child porn because he ran a Tor exit node

I noticed they mentioned “logs” of you talking about hosting CP, can you elaborate?

They took a bunch of IRC logs where I stated what I can and can’t host at a web hosting provider I owned. The logs do exist but are taken out of context.

The "reporting" here is at the level of a 90s scene mag.