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BinaryIgoron Talent

True; and the best case scenario is to discover something that you do have a natural, above average talent/aptitude for and you're interested/obsessive about it as well. This very thing is possibly your biggest leverage in life

BinaryIgoron Talent

Well, the absolutely best-case scenarios is when you both have an innate talent for something and deep interest/obsession about it; I think that the article encourages you to find exactly that and then focus on it, because once you combine innate talent + obsession, you do have unfair advantage over the others

BinaryIgoron Show HN: SQLite Online – 11 years of solo development, 11K daily users

Oh; I meant on this website, of course :) Not generally in life

BinaryIgoron Show HN: SQLite Online – 11 years of solo development, 11K daily users

How do you make money?

BinaryIgoron Programmer in Wonderland

It depends; sometimes yes, sometimes not. In my experience, described phenomena certainly exists.

Nothing wrong with delivering business value - that's what mostly software is about after all; here, I am talking about pure incompetence and a certain approach that only reinforces it

BinaryIgoron Programmer in Wonderland

True; in the same vain, tools that have more implicit and declarative philosophy - React, Kubernetes, most ORMs, Spring Boot - are also harder to understand and reason about for the same cause - you have to know exactly how the given tool works (new abstraction, magic) to understand what might happen at runtime.

We replace verbosity - since these tools are usually way more expressive than the thing they abstract away - with a new abstraction layer that allows us to type much less stuff but at the same time introduces a completely new cognitive complexity layer.

As always; sometimes they give more than they take, sometimes not ;)

BinaryIgoron Programmer in Wonderland

Keep the curiousity up and learn your Fundamentals - things that do not change that often and on which most of our tools and frameworks are built. Dive deep into OSes, networks - build your own TCP and/or HTTP server, assembly and the machine code - how the CPU and memory works? As well as some algos and data structures for sure. These few things cover most of it ;)

BinaryIgoron Programmer in Wonderland

True; but I would argue that even if you don't care that much, when things don't work as expected - you pretty much always need to understand your tools and/or the layers of abstractions that are below. If you don't, not only you're going to feel lost, but you will not be able to solve certain set of problems

BinaryIgoron Programmer in Wonderland

Exactly; but, if you started from higher levels, it's never too late to go lower, step by step. I did exactly that and I highly, highly recommend doing it

BinaryIgoron Why doesn't anything work anymore?

Probably many reasons, but a steady and sharp - when accumulated over many years - decrease in the average dev competence would definitely be at top of the list

BinaryIgoron Why Self-Host?

You can always host your stuff on a few machines and then create a few DNS A records to load balance it on the DNS level :)

BinaryIgoron Why Self-Host?

"Many many years ago I was running an Android phone with Google services like Google Maps. One day I was looking for a feature in my Google account and saw that GMaps recorded my location history for years with detailed geocoordinates about every trip and every visit.

I was fascinated but also scared about that since I've never actually enabled it myself. I do like the fact that I could look up my location for every point in time but I want to be in control about that and know that only I have access to that data."

This made me thing whether there are any services (or ideas thereof) that would provide this kind of functionality but story encrypted in a similar way as proton does for email; in theory, you can use this pattern - data stored but encrypted on the server, but decrypted only by the client - to rebuild many useful services while retaining full sovereignty of your data.

BinaryIgoron Why Self-Host?

Exactly; but I would rather say that you don't need CDN unless you have tens of thousands of requests per second and your user base is global; single powerful machine can easily handle thousands and tens of thousands of requests per second

BinaryIgoron Two things LLM coding agents are still bad at

"very subtle and silently introduced mistakes" - that's the biggest bottleneck I think; as long as it's true, we need to validate LLMs outputs; as long as we must validate LLMs outputs, our own biological brains are the ultimate bottleneck

BinaryIgoron Devpush – Open-source and self-hostable alternative to Vercel, Render, Netlify

Interesting; some questions:

1. Is there a support for deploying into a multiple machines? If so, how does it work?

2. Where and how secrets are stored?

BinaryIgoron Who needs Git when you have 1M context windows?

Over the years, I've heard so many stories like these without happy ending - developers wasting days and sometimes even a week or two of work, because they do like to commit and use git often - that my long-time upheld practice is to pretty much always create feature/develop branches and commit as often as possible, often multiple times per hour.

BinaryIgoron Show HN: Timelinize – Privately organize your own data from everywhere, locally

Interesting; how easy is it to backup it up somewhere - yes, on a cloud for example - and then restore/sync it on another machine? Is the data format portable and easy to move like this?

BinaryIgoron Magic Wormhole: Get things from one computer to another, safely

So if I understand correctly, even if I use your relay, the relay relays encrypted data, never learning what I am sending?

BinaryIgoron An open letter to llms.txt

Simple yet powerful idea; 100% agree!

BinaryIgoron Stop Using Encrypted Email (2020)

Protonmail solves many of these issues, if both recipient and sender are there :) It's as good as the email can be at the moment; I don't think apps like Signal can fully replace something as universal as email - maybe we can extend the underlying protocol to support e2ee natively?

BinaryIgoron Modern messaging: Running your own XMPP server

I hope not; I hope there is a culture change; but, hope is not a strategy so it's better to build alternative tools and learn how to use them

BinaryIgoron Modern messaging: Running your own XMPP server

"Since 3 years the European Commission works on a plan to automatically monitor all chat, email and messenger conversations.12 If this is going to pass, and I strongly hope it will not, the European Union is moving into a direction we know from states suppressing freedom of speech."

If this come to pass, there will be two approaches:

1. People will not share anything important online, only in person

2. Every friends group will have a more technical guy/girl who will ran chat infrastructure for them

Interesting article though :)

BinaryIgoron Magic Wormhole: Get things from one computer to another, safely

Been using it from time to time to transfer secrets; out of curiosity, when I'm sending something to some via this tool, do you known what machines is it relayed through? I am sure it's not peer-to-peer; would not be as reliable!

BinaryIgoron Work is not school: Surviving institutional stupidity

"Meanwhile, subjective decisions are constantly happening behind the scenes. The decisions about who to trust, or who gets a shot are made through informal reputations and shared stories about your value. Then the “data” is used to justify them in retrospect."

True; as long as humans are humans, this will remain to be the case.

BinaryIgoron Work is not school: Surviving institutional stupidity

It's just it's stupidity or incompetence more often than malice; but, of course you should judge on the case-by-case basis and if somebody repeats certain (evil) behavior it's malice

BinaryIgoron Work is not school: Surviving institutional stupidity

5) Yes - but even if not popular, competent people are always respected 6) I would say that there's correlation, but it's not 1.0, more something like 0.5 - 0.7; other factors matter as well.

Sometimes these do not hold true, but then you have a truly toxic organization - one that you should run from, as fast as possible

BinaryIgoron Increasing your practice surface area

Good read, a summary:

When you become obsessed with A, your whole life becomes a practice of A.

BinaryIgoron Why Tech Inevitability is Self-Defeating

Interesting, beautifully written; I especially like the ending:

"Inevitability is rhetoric, not truth. Predictions aren’t laws of nature, they are acts of persuasion. And because no one can ever know how much is determined and how much is open, the only rational stance is to live as agents. Supersonic flight once looked inevitable until people stopped it. You, too, have already reshaped the world once; you can do it again. Don’t give away your power."

BinaryIgoron Why Tech Inevitability is Self-Defeating

You examples with human cloning and some chemicals/drugs plus potentially nuclear energy being first favored then disfavored (now seems to be getting back to favors) are telling; it shows that outside the pure properties of technology itself, a lot depends on a given society/civilization value systems and who gets to decide what's important and allowed and what's not

BinaryIgoron ICE Is Buying a Tool to Track Phones, Without Warrants

I wonder what's the most important source of location data here - apps that you have given permissions to do so? Telecom providers? GPS?