EnKopVand

I gotta say I also wonder about the effect of it. I hate assembling their furniture and the only thing I really care about is the quality and longevity. Which often means that we don't get IKEA products, because their good quality products are often more expensive than their competition.

About the only reason we ever get IKEA furniture is because of how it's delivered. We have two 140cm wide beds so that we have plenty of space for co-sleeping with the offspring (this is semi-normal in Scandinavia), and the offspring also has IKEA beds. Why? Well because IKEA was the only company that delivered beds disassembled in a way that made it possible for us to get them upstairs. We talked with some of the neighbours, and, only one couple managed to get a 140cm wide bed upstairs, and they did it, by disassembling half the stair case and break down half a wall. Now I have no idea why IKEA is the only company that delivers a mattress that is rolled up and without air and bed frames that aren't already assembled around here, but that's just how it is. So it was either IKEA or a ton of trouble.

I did a stint in management, before I figured out it wasn't for me. In my country that involves getting into university level management courses, networking with other managers and getting a mentor. At least if you're working in an organisation that values its employees. Throughout it all the truest thing I ever learned was from my mentor who was one of the best managers I have ever worked with, and this is a direct quote. "Nobody is irreplaceable, sometimes it's expensive to say goodbye to someone, but nobody is irreplaceable.".

Over the decades this has proven itself to be true so many times. I've been part of big enterprise organisations as well as smaller startups that had some "vital" proces which relied on that one person. When they left however, it didn't really change anything in the big picture, sometimes it let to the entire guts of a company getting ripped out and replaced by something different, but in the big picture it just became another thing to solve.

I think it's a good thing to learn, both as a manager but also as an employee. Because at the big picture, what "irreplaceable" really means is "liability", and that's not a great thing to be at a company.

Good managers will work with you on how to reduce your importance, and great employees will know how to do so themselves. In the world of work, a good work relationship is one where the organisation you work for give you opportunity to grow, and sometimes that means, outgrow the organisation itself. But it goes both ways, and you should try to respect that, even if you're the rockstar employee because it'll make you even more valuable.

> It doesn't matter what people want. Big companies can afford to push something and force it on you until you think you want it.

Then why aren't Meta making sure all those youngsters join their platforms? I'm not going to pretend that advertisement doesn't work, but there is also a big difference between getting people to drink a Coke or a Pepsi and getting them to join a social media platform and actually spend time on it.

I'm still not sure what the metaverse is supposed to be. I have an idea, sort of Second Life with VR, but if that's true, then I'm not sure why they think anyone but a few enthusiasts would want it. Before I got into working on climate change software, I did a long stint in the Danish public sector, and nothing in any of the stuff we did suggested that young people wanted to use VR. AR maybe, but not VR. In fact, the way young people consume entertainment media today, is basically exactly how we did it on a Gameboy, except now the Gameboy can do more than just play games. There are also so many social platforms that aren't Facebook, that a lot of youngsters aren't even on a Meta product anymore.

I guess time may prove me wrong, but I really don't see why the world would want a metaverse until you can actually plug into it, like the matrix. Then things may change.

I think it's the first time I've used an ORM where it was effortless. I still struggle with EF from time to time.

It obviously lacks a lot of the wider .Net features, like having easy access to ODATA for all your models.

I went from VS Enterprise to VS Professional to VSC over a decade. We still use Azure DevOps, and, a lot of Azure things in general, so it's not like I'm anti Microsoft or anything, but I frankly don't miss VS the slightest.

It depends a bit on what tools you use, but if you've jumped the ship from VS to VSC and mainly use the dotnet cli for things then there isn't much of a difference between platforms. If you're using VS, as in really use it and all it's feature, there is going to be a massive difference.

That being said, I've used .Net and C# for over a decade and it's frankly just a clunky language and toolset. It's gotten better with Core (now just.Net), but it's still just not there. It's not a secret that we've been doing more and more TypeScript where I work, but I recently did a little bit of Go and Gorm made EntityFramework feel like something from the stoneage.

So I'm not sure I'd really recommend it unless you already do a lot of .Net. It's not that it's bad, it's just that it's a dated way to build things in a world where the Java way of doing things makes less and less sense.

> If you are going to then say that people are too stupid to discern real from fake information, and therefore need the loving hand of Big Tech to tell them how to think, that's a pretty negative take.

The first part of it is pretty busy proving itself true though. Don't get me wrong, I don't think big american tech companies are good curators of this, but previously extinct diseases are showing up again because some people are literally too stupid to vaccinate. There is far too many people who now believe the earth is flat, and so on.

So yeah, people are too stupid to discern real from fake information, and why wouldn't they be? If the school system fails to teach you how science works, then you're going to read sources that say vaccines are dangerous and you're going to see doctors who tell you vaccines are dangerous, because vaccines are actually dangerous. The problem with anti-vaxxers (not all of them, some of them think Bill Gates is inside the vaccine and that's just crazy) is that they read the information, but they don't seem to understand the information. Because vaccines are dangerous, but not vaccinating is more dangerous, which is why we vaccinate. This is completely anecdotal, but some of the anti-vaxxers I've talked with even seem to understand the whole vaccine > not-vaccine, but then don't fully seem to grasp the scale of it. They'll go "yeah, I know it's a little selfish but why would I risk my kids to help others?", which is very understandable, but what they don't consider is what happens when everyone thinks like that. Because vaccines aren't just > not-vaccine. That little > is actually on the scale of society breaking bad, but that part of the information doesn't make it through the noise.

I don't really think the world wide filter is the solution. I think we should get systems that are better at prosecuting people who wilfully spread harmful information instead. So that it doesn't take 10+ years for people who claim things like the Sandy Hooks parents are actors to face the consequences of their evil. On the flipside, I don't really want worldleadersarelizards.com to be the first results on my search engine either.

Facebook groups and events is basically the only reason I use Facebook, and while it’s very anecdotal I’m not the only one in my also anecdotal network.

It’s not actually the functionality that works for Facebook, it’s the fact that people have a Facebook account that they check. As more and more people quit, it becomes more and more of a bother to continue using Facebook to organise things, but when they have 3 billion users, they’ll probably remain a good place for groups and events for quite a long time to come, unless someone figures out how to do it with e-mail, which is basically the only other thing that everyone also has.

As others point out, social media sort of leaves a gap as far as being “the people registrar” or a modern form of the yellow pages. But as long as so many of us remain on there because it is what it is, then they can really continue to fuck around quite a bit before “dying”. I think it’ll be legislation that kills them in the end, because unlike other large American tech companies, Facebook doesn’t seem to have a plan that doesn’t involve making money off privacy data. Even though Google is obviously struggling with being an advertisement company first, they could potentially shift to other products, but what can Facebook really do?

In my decade around management that was not my experience with onboarding new people.

Maybe that is because we didn’t have a fascist linter for C# the way we do with Typescript, but it’s always been much, much, harder to get people to make “good” C# code in my experience. It hasn’t been hard to have the build things in C#, but it’s been hard to get people to build things the same way so that they can work on each others code flawlessly. So hard that I would never again consider using resources on it until developers drop significantly in pay, which isn’t likely to happen until I’m retired, if ever.

I wonder if it has to do with regional differences. I’m Danish, everyone (there are odd cases, but it’s more “everyone” than “almost everyone”) here has a CS degree and often they’ve been taught Java, sometimes C# but poorly, while obtaining it.

I’ve been a C# developer for a decade and I still think it’s hopelessly convoluted for getting very simple things up and running. Maybe there is something wrong with me, but it’s just not intuitive to me and it has frankly never been. I do think the move to core and then core to .net has improved things, but it’s still a really weird and way of doing things compared to other languages that I have worked with, and most of the “boiler plate projects” are very rarely useful, so why are they there?

Then once you need to go beyond the standard libraries it becomes a nightmare to deal with. In some cases, like extending the AD libraries, it’s sort of easy to extend classes with methods but the documentation on how to do so tends to assume a lot of domain knowledge. In other cases like if EF’s standard functionality isn’t enough for you, or you need to deal with weirdly formatted XML or non standard SOAP requests (don’t ask) it can be such a nightmare that it’s sometimes easier to write a micro-service in another language to do the “translation”.

I think it speaks of a language that doesn’t see too much use by its own creators. I may be wrong on that, but having build a lot of things for Azure, Typescript has often felt more like a first class citizen than C#. Obviously not for everything, far from it, but sometimes and those sometimes are enough to make C# troublesome because unlike things like typescript that are great second class citizens in the Microsoft ecosystem, C# isn’t. It either fits really well or you have to fight it.

What makes you think that the personable engineers aren’t also the ones leaving?

One of the reasons I have a lot of job offers isn’t that I’m the best technical engineer you’re going to meet, it’s that I have a large network and is generally seen as a nice person to work with. Obviously my ability also plays into this, but you can be both good at your job and a decent person at the same time. In my experience most people are.

> Play the cooperation game.

Like I said in my original post, I do this, and in my personal opinion experience so so most people. The thing is though, I have a lot of experience (and education) with/in the “MBA” side of things, and a lot of the things you see some companies do, that this article also touches on, like putting up a needless bureaucracy around estimates and time tracking, don’t actually work as intended. Time tracking tends to lead to cultures where the speed of delivery becomes more important than the quality, and estimating things by the hour is frankly just impossible in a field where you can spend an hour on something incredibly stupid and then 10 minutes on some brilliant solution to an issue marked as complex. I mean, maybe my anecdotal experience is from a mediocre perspective, but even after decades of programming I still do the equivalent of talking to a rubber duck, or at least asking my very good friend and coworker to come and spend 5 seconds spotting where I’ve made the obvious mistake (and the other way around), which we have time to do because we’re not on the clock to deliver as fast as possible by the way.

In a world of a lot of shitty business practices, people who can, will take their cooperation game to the place it makes the most sense for them. Including when they are also very personable people.

I think the point here may be that when you’re dealing with an occupation in which the best engineers can pick and chose. Then you’re likely to lose your best engineers unless you’re exceptionally good at managing them. Especially if you introduce boundaries and restraints.

I’m not sure it’s naive to view the world like the author does. I’ve worked both sides of the fence, and while I’m now back in software development I do see the appreciation for my experience with creating the most business value out of your resources that managers come with. The thing is, though, if I don’t have to work in a place with too much bureaucracy or too many constraints then I’m not going to do so. I obviously try not to be an asshole about it. I don’t follow the company dress code in the basement troll factory where they placed IT, but I do have a suit at work that I can change into whenever I leave the “cave”. Those sort of things, so naturally I’ll play a long way in regards to what management want, but I’m never going to do estimates by the hour until the job market actively forces me to do so. Which likely won’t be in our lifetime. So when/if management go down the route of treating Software Development like they treat any other department (which like you state also are under significant constraint) then the company is just very likely to lose their most talented developers very quickly. I suspect that it would be (and probably is) exactly like that in any department, it’s just easier to get away with in engineering because we’re privileged enough to be able to leave our jobs today and have another good job by tomorrow.

What does the AI do in its spare time?

> Experts claim that climate change is playing a part in these record-breaking heatwaves.

Should’ve left it at that buddy. Nobody needs your opinion on climate change. Especially not after 50 years of climate science only being wrong about how bad it was going to get.

The whisk actually works like the electric ones. It has two “whisks” and then it has some sort of wheel that you turn around to make them spin. It’s really astonishing how something so simple can challenge my English so much lol. But you can get drills that work in a similar fashion, I know because we had them at carpentry class when I was in what we call folkeskolen, so maybe the school that you go to before high school?

I don’t really like electrical appliances. I use a manual whisk (Google translate turns hjulpisker into auxiliary whisk) for everything “whisky” even though we have a vitamix thing that cost more than my MacBook Air.

So I’m an idiot like that, and you might expect me to use a manual drill (I guess it would be auxiliary drill if Google translate is right), and until I bought a house you would have been right. Now I own both an electrical drill and a drill hammer. So while my whipped cream still takes a few minutes more than an electro mixer you won’t ever find me drilling a hole without a power tool. It’s just not worth it.

Great article though, it’s nice to see all the options covered.

I do think the “selling out” argument is still a thing in the modern world. Here in Denmark we’re going back and forth on how to regulate things like influencers, and I’m not sure there would be a push back against it if being forced to tell people that you’re advertising a company that pays you money to advertise them wasn’t still seen as negative. Even here on HN it’s not like the buy of Red Hat by IBM was revived with a lot of love.

So I think user deng has a point about “selling out” still being a thing.

That being said, I think there is a big difference between selling out and wanting to remain in control of your creation. I have no idea whether George Lucas likes what happens with Star Wars or not, and I hope I’m not going to start a debate over it either, but by selling it he lost the creative control in a way the Bill Watterson didn’t.

My guess is that being “seen” as a “sell out” isn’t actually something that comes into play when people consider what to do with their creations very often. Because honestly, why would you ever care? So maybe there is less of it today, but to state that our public discourse has changed on the subject? I’m not convinced it has.

I think the biggest issue for location based apps is that no one except niantic have access to Google’s map data.

If that data was easily available, I imagine you’d see a lot of great location apps. It’s not hard to imagine the normal Pokémon games in the location setting, where you actually move around instead of moving an avatar around and “fight” Pokémon in different areas to “win” them, or go to “gyms” and battle with friends and what not.

You’d probably need to design the stranger meeting stranger part around having that sort of thing only happen in secure locations like in the DND/Warhammer shop, and everything on non secure locations be based on friend systems, but still, it’s not hard to imagine a good location based Pokémon game. It’s just that niantic won’t make it.

Maybe open street map can supply the data, but you’re never going to have access to Google’s real world live monitoring of the movement of everyone with a smartphone.

There are a number of tax-laws that you can utilise if you know what you’re doing and you work for the right companies. You can invest 14% of your yearly pay in stock options or regular stock if your company has financial programs to deal with the legalities, of those 14% the first 57000kr will be taxed at 25% and the rest will be taxed at 42% when you sell the options or stock.

Other than that you can deduct things like your mortgage, and you can put more money into your pension investments, and a range of other things.

Most of these are methods that a lot of people don’t know about, mainly because they are financial tricks that nobody teaches you about.

You have to understand, however, that a lot of us Danes are quite happy with our high taxes because it pays for everything. I have ADHD for example, and though I don’t need it, my Elvanse medicine cost me around 80kr because the state pays the other 2400kr. We’re of course not always happy with how the politicians handle our taxes, especially these days where they seem increasingly unable to meet citizens need, leading to many smaller towns setting up communities to run things like schools because the public schools are closing. But over all, I think that even though we have 13 different political parties were basically mainly different branches of social democrats.

I’ve been around the Danish SWE industry for a few decades and we get yearly reports on average pays from unions like these: https://www.prosa.dk/raad-og-svar/loenstatistik-a

And unless the average pay for developers in Germany is significantly lower than it is in Denmark, then this advert for honeypot.io is really sort of shooting itself in the foot. Because the average wages you seem to be capable of getting through them are lower than what you should be getting.

I mean, 45.000 euro a year is lower than what a freshly educated nurse makes in Denmark as a comparison point. It’s sort of sad to use nurse wages as a statement of a low wage, but that’s the world we live in.

This is just blatantly false on every account. Especially the part where things like non-organic wheat are sprayed with weed-killer in the days before it's harvested because it increases the yield and protein as the wheat goes into turbo-mode because it knows it's dying.

I don’t think it’s an issue of the tool or the tool created, as others have pointed out, but how would you ever know someone stole your stuff this way?

We still compile our TS to an ES5 target with bootstrap. If you copied a form from our site into the tool, it would be hard for us to tell you took it from us rather than writing it yourself. Maybe if you took some of our more custom card designs, but really, we wouldn’t know that you didn’t just design them yourself similar to how we did because you had the same issues.

I think it’s hard to answer your question. The development mentality of Python seems to have changed a little, going into 3.11, and you see sort of a shift in the priority of clean vs fast. I think you can assume that Python will continue to care about speed, but really, it sort of always has. Just like it’s going to continue to care about clean implementation. Then there is the part where Python will likely never become a “fast” language in the sense that C is a fast language, but the flip side of this is that Python was probably already fast enough for most uses. I tend to like to use the “we aren’t Netflix” or the “stackoverflow runs on IIS and always has” arguments when it comes to worrying about speed in anyone who isn’t Netflix, but that doesn’t really apply to Python since the backend of Instagram is django, and if Python can power Instagram then it’s probably fast enough for you, unless you’re already working with C/C++/Rust and know exactly why you are working with those.

I know I’m a bit more focused on the business side of things than a lot of techies here on HN, it’s a curse and a gift, but what I read the 10-60% speed increase as is money. The less resources you consume, the less money you burn. Which is really good news for Python in general, because it makes it more competitive to languages like C# for many implementations.

This comes from the perspective of someone who actually things running Typescript on your backend is a good idea because it lets you share developer resources easier so that the people who are really good at react can cover for the people who are really good at the backend and the other way around in smaller teams in non-software-engineering organisations.

I think the bad “web” has a lot more to do with the business side of things than whatever development tools you use. If the website is free to use, it’s either a passion or community project or it sells you. Sometimes that works out sort of well in places like HN, and other times it works out less well like on the infinite amount of shitty news papers. But those news papers can be shitty in all technologies even in the physically printed form.

I do think we need a better tool for finding the passion projects. Because search engines have basically become the “portals” they replaced by curating search results into being about herding us toward sales, but I’m sure we’ll see a shift sooner or later. It’s sort of already happening with more and more people returning to things like news letters instead of reading blogs.

One of the things that have changed quite significantly in our life time is that you can’t drink or be drunk at work anymore.

I worked a decade in the public sector, and some of my older coworkers (they are 55-60) now could tell stories from when the server room was genuinely used to take naps when people needed to sober up a little. And this was everyone from the craftsman workers to the mayor.

It’s sort of how you see a picture from people sitting in a cinema in the 80ies with cigarettes lit, it’s so foreign to most of us that it’s crazy to think that this was the norm a few decades ago.

Obviously more people are going to take their drinking home when the drinking doesn’t start at work, and now that we’ve been through a few lockdowns our habits have changed quite a bit as well.

I use iOS and I don’t think I’ve ever seen one of those lists in the App Store. I don’t insta a lot of apps, however, so maybe I’m not the typical user, but one thing that Apple has is that the actual permissions are off by default.

I had Instagram for a while as an example, because I liked to look at miniature painters, but Instagram never had access to my contacts, images, location data and so on. It would ask for permission of course and I would decline.

Does Google do something similar or are permissions on per default? I mean, the info is still a nice feature in the App Store to help people make better choices, but the real protection for people like me is the “This app would like to access your pictures, will you let it?” box that pop ups when you run the app.

This is good advice, but it should probably be extended by saying that the VPN you chose matters. At least around here many VPN are just as inclined to share your internet usage with law enforcement and/or the law firms sending out those letters as ISPs are.

So you gotta make sure you use a VPN that doesn’t out you to the authorities, and, can’t be made to do so.

I have some insight into this as I’ve worked a decade in the public sector of Denmark, and I don’t think the general role of doctors will change that much.

I don’t see ML have much, if any, impact on a doctors role in diagnosis. I know this is a little strange to hear to a lot of techies, but we once had IBMs Watson work on our data to see what IBM and Watson could come up with, and while the output wasn’t bad, it was sort of useless because we already had 50 years with of analytical models on virtually everything. So in essence what Watson did with our data, was to generate a lot of BI that was inferior to the BI we already had. Diagnosis is sort of the same story because what doctors do is basically to refer your symptoms directly with the medical lexicon and your history. ML is likely going to help collect the data and tie it together, to make diagnosis both better and faster, but you’re likely still going to have a doctor review the results, just like you would your “data scientists” on any other important ML data. Where ML will change things is in early detection, where your medical data from every source will be crossed and checked much better because that’s the sort of things ML is good at. So maybe you’re going in for a blood test for something completely unrelated to cancer, but because the tech has improved, it’ll also screen you for cancer and alert your doctor if your numbers are off.

Where we’ll see the biggest impact will be in areas that can be turned robotic. Things like the lab work on your blood tests, which is currently still a very manual process. Or in surgery where precision machinery will slowly take over a lot of the cutting. You’re likely still going to need surgeons to monitor the process, not so much the actual surgery but the planning and the recovery, because these things are impacted by so many real world factors that we may never get ML models that are good enough to handle them on their own.

It’s often in the places you may least expect it that IT makes the biggest difference. The biggest impact I saw in the medical system was automated medicine distribution and in wound cleaning. The medicine distribution “used” to be handled by nurses putting the pills for patients into boxes and then healthcare workers administering it the right time. The automated way was having the pharmacy distribute smart-dispensers that would alert citizens to take their medicines and then sort of “punch” the right pills into a tray when the patient clicked on it. I put “used” in “ because the automated smart system is more expensive than the old way, and this resulted in many places still opting for the old way, despite it being more error prone. The wound cleaning is an AR/ML success story. Basically wounds can be really nasty, and contain nasty things that even the best nurses in our system won’t spot as well as ML. So what we did was hack a pair of Google glass to never send data to Google (I believe Google was very helpful in this process by the way) but instead feed images of the wound to ML recognition and then alert the nurse to areas in the wound where the nurse had missed a spot of nasty. Really awesome stuff.

In general I expect that medical, along with farming, tech will be some of the most interesting tech areas in the next few decades, but I don’t expect either to replace doctors or nurses. I expect to see it make doctors and nurses better at their jobs. It will free up some tasks, and change which doctor professions get the highest pay because a neurosurgeon won’t be the Hollywood rockstar, but really, they kind of aren’t outside of Hollywood anyway, at least no in Denmark.

I’ll admit I don’t know a lot about trademarks, but we’ve had a few cases here in Denmark where a small business were basically on a path to close down because a larger chain reported the small business for trademark infringement over something silly like having the same last name in your business that the large chain is called. Because of the way the law works, you have to spend some months defending yourself (and shut down your business while you change your name/logo/whatever), which often isn’t affordable for small businesses.

Luckily Denmark being Denmark, as soon as these things hit the news the public responds by hating the larger business and throwing amazing amounts of support at the small businesses. I just don’t think the law is very good when the public needs to circumvent it in order for the small businesses to survive, even when the small businesses are in the right to begin with.

So you are very likely absolutely correct, but because the world sort of sucks, the copyright law still hurts people it shouldn’t. I’m not sure there is an easy solution, because obviously you wouldn’t want direct copy products or DeWalt in stores either, but it’s certainly not good the way it is right now.