23
points
almost
Joined 3,552 karma
tom at almostobsolete net
http://almostobsolete.net/ (Geeky website stuff) http://tomparslow.co.uk/ (Freelancer portfolio stuff)
I'm a freelance programmer in Brighton in the UK. I work in lots of languages but I seem to use Python and JavaScript the most. I spend most of my time working from a Brighton co-working space called The Skiff (http://theskiff.org/) which is very nice.
I was on Twitter @almostobsolete but who uses Twitter anymore?
Find me on Mastodon at @almostobsolete@mastodon.me.uk or on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/almostobsolete.net
- This sounds very "the perfect is the enemy of good". Tests don't need to be perfect, they don't need to be written by different people (!!!), they don't need to cover 100% of the code. As long as they're not flakey (tests which fail randomly really can he worse than nothing) it really helps in development and maintenence to have some tests. It's really nice when the (frequent) mistakes I make show up on my machine or on the CI server rather than in production, and my (very imperfect, not 100% "done properly") tests account for a lot of those catches.
Obviously pragmatism is always important and no advice applies to 100% of features/projects/people/companies. Sometimes the test is more trouble to write than it's worth and TDD never worked for me with the exception of specific types of work (good when writing parsers I find!).
- When it's a library it's fairly important what it's written (or at least written for)
- For something this simple that doesn't need to grow or interact with the rest of the system why would you need Backbone or React? And why would you expect any version to be shorter as it's mostly just the HTML and the data.
I remember writing Backbone applications with lots of deeply nested components. Trying to keep all the state in sync and reacting to events. It certainly wasn't simple and straightforward.
This just feels like a very silly article.
- Wasting time is absolutely glorious. Don't let anyone tell you that you can't or shouldn't.
Or as Kurt Vonnegut put it "I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you any different"
(That being said if Tik Tok is making you sad delete that shit right away. Wasting time is glorious but feeling depressed sucks.)
- Nostalgic! Who needs a colar display or even a monochrome display when you've got a high res (for the time) black and white screen :)
- 360 degrees in a circle predates Plato by quite a lot (2000 years I think!). It comes from the Summarians more than 4000 years ago. They used a method of counting on fingers that goes up to 12 on one hand and 60 using both hands, so their numbering system was based on 60. 360 is 6 * 60 and also roughly how many days in a year.
Later societies inherited that from them along with 60 minutes in and hour.
- So it monkey-patches a set of common http libraries and then detects calls to AI APIs? Not obvious which APIs it would detect or in what situations it would miss them. Seems kind of dangeorus to rely on something like that. You install it and it might be doing nothing, You only find out after somethings gone wrong.
If I was using something like this I think I'd rather have it wrap the AI API clients. Then it can throw an error if it doesn't recongise the client library I'm using. This way it'll just silently fail to monitor if what I'm using isn't in its supported list (whatever that is!)
I do think the idea is good though, just needs to be obvious how it will work when used and how/when it will fail.
- I haven't, but it sounds honestly really bad. Sounds like it sucks for everyone right now. I just think your product will make it worse, probably only very slightly worse but still worse.
- Surely this now means now hiring managers (and people your code incorrectly identifies as hiring managers) now get spammed with loads of bullshit generated messages. Which obviously they'll ignore. But now you've made their jobs a bit harder by breaking a previously (maybe) working communication channel.
So you've put a effort in to build a product just to make the world slightly worse on net. Not hugely worse, but still it doesn't seem like the best way you could have spent your time.
- Yes, but how likely were you to spend tens of thousands of dollars or more on software?
- This sort of article seems perfectly poised to be useless to beginners (no context, doesn't tell you how to use the things) and experts (no nuance, just listing basic features) alike. Who is it for? Why does it exist? Why is it posted here?
- There are a finite number of names, and an even smaller number of good names. But apparently an infinite number of hacker news posters who comment on every new project to complain that the name has been used before for something else.
And even the fact that this is a fork of an earlier project and the name comes from that doesn't stop it!
(I'm aware I have chosen a very weird thing to be getting annoyed at over my breakfast crumpets this morning)
- Weird that a gambling app would take thename of a popular character from legend!
Or maybe not, try actually naming something sometime and you'll see. It's not easy to come up with something that fits all the requirements AND has never been used before.
And it's not like anyone is ever going to get confused and accidentally try and use Dropbox's internal load balancer to buy options on a stock or something. Or try and make a gambling app the star of their next hit movie for that matter.
- Coins used to be largely worth what they were worth because of what they were made of. So cutting them in half would lead to two seperate halves of the value. I'm sure there's more nuance than that but broadly I think that's how it used to work.
- Not your comment specifically, you're one of many saying FUD.
Honestly if you accept that the comment was talking about real tradeoffs then I'm a bit baffled that you though it was FUD. It seems like an important thing to be talking about when there's a post advocating moving away from PaaS and doing it all yourself. It's great if you already knew all about all that and didn't need to discuss it, but just stare into the abyss of the other comments and you'll see that others very much don't understand those tradeoffs at all.
- I run a business that is a long long way from a stock exchange or a payment processor. And while a few minutes of downtime is fine 30 minutes or a few hours at the wrong time will really make my customers quite sad. I've been woken in the small hours with technical problems maybe a couple of times over the last 8 years of running it and am quite willing to pay more for my hosting to avoid that happening again.
Not for Heroku, they're absolute garbage these days, but definitely for a better run PaaS.
Plenty of situations where running it yourself makes sense of course. If you have the people and the skills available (and the cost tradeoffs make sense) or if downtime really doesn't matter much at all to you then go ahead and consider things like this (or possibly simpler self hosting options, it depdns).But no, "you gotta run kubernettes yourself unless you're a stock exchange" is not a sensible position.
- You really think that, incredibly lukewarm, argument for Heroku is so extreme that it could only have been written by some kind of undercover shill?
- The fact that HN seems to think this is "FUD" is absolutely wild. You just talked about (some of) the tradeoffs involved in running all this stuff yourself. Obviously for some people it'll be worth and for others not, but absolutely amazing that there are people who don't even seem to accept that those tradoffs exist!
Would having someone else write the tests catch more logical errors? Very possibly, I haven't tried it but that sounds reasonable. It also does seem like that (and the other things it implies) would be a pretty extreme change in the speed of development. I can see it being worth it in some situations but honestly I don't see it as something practical for many types of projects.
What I don't understand is saying "well we can't do the really extremely hard version so let's not do the fairly easy version" which is how I took you original comment.