10
points
Fishkins
Joined 560 karma
- I'd say "good old days" thinking is probably involved, but not the full explanation. Over the past few decades, software has gone from a fairly obscure profession to being seen as a great way (maybe the best way) to make a lot of money. In absolute numbers, there are probably at least as many engaged, curious engineers as before. There are almost certainly drastically more uninterested engineers who are there partially or fully because of the money, though.
edit: I hadn't scrolled down to https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=45303388 when I wrote this
- It isn't nearly as big of an issue as the phone size, but it is still a nuisance. I know there's no chance of it ever coming back, but I'd like it to.
I still have a small amount of hope that someone will make a modern, well supported ~5" Android phone. But that's also feeling less likely.
- I'd say a large part of the country had the same sentiment about George W Bush. I'm not sure whether that was true or just an act, though. In politics, I think the opposite of Hanlon's razor has often been applicable. It's easy to feign ignorance to avoid responsibility.
That being said, I believe there has been an increase in genuinely dumb people in American politics in the past ~15 years.
- Huh, that's interesting. Mixing indexes and FKs is a major conceptual error.
FWIW, I've also asked everyone I've interviewed in the past decade about indexes and FKs. Most folks I've talked to seem to understand FKs. They're often fuzzier on the details of indexes, but I don't recall anyone conflating the two.
- Early on at my first full-time job I requested a week off to attend a Quaker conference. My manager approved the request without comment. After I returned from vacation he asked how the competition went. He'd never heard of Quakers and had genuinely assumed I was attending some Quake tournament.
- > Ah, but - in large and poorly-maintained codebase, it is always the case that some refactoring is already in progress, likely stalled for weeks, months or years as priorities have shifted without it having been completed.
This is true, and something I also thought of when reading that point. I don't think it's necessarily a counterargument, though. It's probably a better idea to spend your time helping to complete the previous refactor instead of starting your new one. Codebases in which many refactorings are started but not completed can be worse than ones that aren't refactored at all.
There could be exceptions if your new changes is very small, localized, and unlikely to interfere with the other changes going on.
- Custom feeds and starter packs seem to be promoted much more on Bluesky than lists were on Twitter, but how different are the actual capabilities from Twitter lists? I never looked at my algorithmic feed. Instead I make a "list" of accounts I followed and pinned that list to my home view. That way I only got exactly their posts in chronological order (with no ads). I saw that recommended by some HN user long ago, but I don't remember who.
I have fully switched to Bluesky at this point anyway, but the list approach worked fine for me on Twitter long after most users were complaining about the feed algo.
- According to the Mozilla docs, O(n) lookups would actually violate the spec [0]. As a sibling comment says, a tree set is one option to satisfy the spec. Another is a linked hash set, which would have O(1) lookups [1].
0: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
1: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/util/LinkedHa...
- I don't have any prior knowledge about Richard Hanania, but the second sentence of that wiki page is
> Between 2008 and the early 2010s Hanania wrote for alt-right and white supremacist publications under the pseudonym Richard Hoste.
That seems much more serious than just being a "partisan commentator"
- > I guess this depends on your threat model. In what cases would your password vault be compromised, but your TOTP vault still be secure?
If Bitwarden is compromised, like LastPass was. Of course the vault should still be encrypted, but I don't want to rely on a single company managing everything correctly. It seems much less likely that two different companies will be compromised at the same time.
- I agree TOTP is much better than MFA prompts or calls/SMS. TOTP does protect against the first two attack methods the article lists.
However, it's not quite as good as a hardware key, because it's still vulnerable to the third method the article lists: "Calling the target, pretending to be part of the company, and telling the target they need to send an MFA request as part of a company process."
I generally consider TOTP "good enough" for a lot of applications, whereas prompts and SMS are not "good enough."
- > And then we learned secondhand that most of these non-profits were run by narcissists leaders with worse office politics than regular offices.
I've worked for a tech-focused nonprofit for the last decade, and know people who have worked for other tech nonprofits. My experience (direct and secondhand) does not match what you said here. There are lots of good mission-focused tech companies to work for (both non- and for-profit). If, as a sibling comment suggested, you want to bring clean drinking water to the world, I know people who have worked at charity: water and enjoyed it.
It's true the pay will usually be below market rate for software engineers. It still can be much higher than most people in US[0] will ever make, and not an obstacle to living comfortably (by any definition of "comfortable" I consider reasonable). It's possible it could make it more difficult to buy a nice house in a central location in one of the more expensive cities, but that's true for most people and needs systemic changes to address it.
0: I assume we're talking about the US, since that's where the really high tech salaries are (and it's the place I live and have experience)
- I agree most engineers should be doing SOME things beyond code-centric activities. There are things that almost nobody, whether they're an IC or people manager, wants to have take up their whole day. That requires spreading them out across staff.
Problems arise when that work isn't assigned out explicitly, evenly, and thoughtfully. Sometimes there's important work that isn't really assigned to anybody, and it can end up landing with whoever is least willing to ignore it. Over time, that can lead to situations that feel (and/or are) unfair.
- One of my former coworkers (whom I'll call Doug) had his boss at a previous job more or less do this on his behalf. Doug had been working for a small company that was acquired. The new owner asked the boss of the smaller company what Doug had been making. The old boss reported a number much higher than Doug's actual salary. The new ownership just said "sounds reasonable" and Doug immediately got a massive raise. Doug said he was a little uncomfortable that a lie had been involved, but he didn't feel he could contradict his boss, so he went with it.
I'm not exactly sure why the circumstances didn't involve the new employer from actually checking his previous salary, but based on my interaction with Doug I'm sure the story is true.
https://www.aiweirdness.com/dont-use-ai-detectors-for-anythi...