EnKopVand

> Are next.js and other similar React frameworks worth looking at if you don't use node.js on the backend?

It depends on why you’re doing so. We’ve recently moved from a C# .net backend to a TypeScript node backend and in such a case it (well obviously) makes perfect sense to utilise next.js.

In other cases where you split your front end and backend quite clearly, like using .net APIs and a JS front end it can make sense to use some degree of nextjs if you need to integrate some compiled parts into your react, maybe you need a fast loading and/or front page then it can be valuable to mix it.

If you don’t know why you’d need it, you probably don’t, however.

Sapiens by yuval noah harari deal with a lot of the things you’re pondering.

> Start with the User Experience and work backwards to the technology you need.

> The best software is built by engineers who have empathy for their users.

I’m not sure where all the criticism here comes from but those alone are some of the most valuable insights any developer can obtain.

The fact that Google, in my opinion, is as far from those insights as a company can possibly come is in my eyes unrelated to the lessons that the author has learned working for Google. I think there is way too much anger in this thread, and I’m surprised to see it here on HN. I’ve personally moved all my services away from Google, including the paid ones like gsuite, but this article doesn’t seem to warrant any of the harsh criticism here based on its content.

I don’t want an unlimited bandwidth promise, I want a cap that I know can never be exceeded. I mean, I use Azure professionally and one of the key reasons I don’t use it to host my own stuff is exactly because it could potentially become very expensive. I’d rather have my own stuff shut down until I decide what I want to do with it.

Things like alerts are fine, professionally, but not for things like running a small app, blog or whatever, that you’re not sure where is heading.

I don’t think anything I’ve build on my own time has ever ended up breaking my bank, but signing up my credit card is a risk I’m never going to take, and I’m fairly certain I’m not alone in that. Of course I have no idea if there are enough of us to make small scale fixed prices products profitable at scale.

I don’t think you’re “bumping against the same “free” forces somehow”, because you seem to have given away the whole pizza for free for 6 months.

I think you need to study companies that transitioned from a free to a paid product rather than compare yourself against businesses that increase their regular sales through free samples.

Out of those I think Microsoft is the only one that isn’t sort of inflated. If Facebook disappears the world will hardly notice. If Apple does it’ll be hard to find a good laptop that can keep battery for 9 million years and it’ll be hard to find a “tech works out of the box so well that if you buy your grandmother/mother an iPad you’ll never need to do tech support again”, but still, it’s just a luxury brand.

If Microsoft disappeared the entire European public sector and most Enterprise companies in the world would cease to function. That being said, I would be some what comfortable owning Apple stock through the coming crash because they are likely to bounce back. I wouldn’t buy them at current market prices, but that goes for Microsoft as well. But I mainly put my investments into green energy on long term plans that tend to 4-6x the money over 7-10 years. Which isn’t where people who’d risk it with things like tech company stock are likely to gamble.

All three companies make healthy money though, as you point out, and that makes them pretty solid as far as this topic goes. I don’t even think Facebook/Meta is “inflated” in the bubble sense, I just don’t think it has a good future because legislation is coming after them big time; and unlike Microsoft and Apple, Facebook isn’t very diversified in its business models.

> It's a rule of thumb that your total debt should not exceed 1/3 of your income.

Unless tax deductions work very different in the US than they do in Denmark, that is pretty bad advice.

Here, sitting on a 60% mortgage loan that is many times higher than your annual income is genuinely a good idea for most people because of tax law. It’s not until you have assets that are worth more than your house that it becomes a good idea to pay off the entire loan.

Meanwhile having even a small “quickloan” that is 0.1% of your annual income is a very stupid idea.

I mean, if you don’t know finance at all then maybe it’s a good rule of thumb as you’ll never bury yourself in debt, but loans aren’t just loans.

> In 1985, Neil Postman, who was a media critic, wrote a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death. Postman argued that the media de-emphasizes the quality of information and over-emphasizes our desire to be entertained. Remember, that book was written over 35 years ago in an age without the internet and social media…

When I read that I knew the article was by someone who was young, because all those trends described in the article started before social media. But they did start when “media” started measuring their success based on user time consumption (post advertising).

> We’d rather have a real picture in a lavish private jet over a real experience that’s normal.

I think this is where the author sort of misses the mark with the article. Because that is exactly an example of how many people actually don’t want to be consumers, but rather producers.

Now, you can think that’s a bas thing. I certainly think it’s sad to see children who would rather be YouTubers than scientists, but at least those children still want to make something with their lives. I’m not sure whether social media has made it easier to become rich and famous, but at least you don’t have to deal with editors to even get your content put on MTV.

> Kittens learn that from observing their mother. As far as I know, cats can’t communicate the way we do, so they learn by copying each other’s behavior.

I’m not going to pretend to know how cats work, but we had a rescue kitten that never saw it’s mother (or any other cat) so anything and it still used the litter box.

> Same strategy, same actions, different times, different outcomes. Becoming rich and famous is mostly a matter of luck.

I play Blood Bowl, it’s basically chess mixed with dices. It’s very unbalanced and leans much more heavily into the dice side than the chess side. After around 2000 matches I’ve learned that it’s indeed great to be lucky, but to win consistently you need to be lucky at the right times.

I personally prefer that sort of thinking because it indicates that you need to set up your circumstances to capitalise on the luck that comes your way.

> it seems he was demoted for insubordination?

Probably, and what management blunder that would have been if Jeffrey had left Microsoft because of it.

That wouldn’t be the main risk in my country. It would be people using your home as a brothel and fucking everything up.

If AirBnB can provide a way for that to not happen, or at least for it to stop within a few days with our strong renter-protection laws then they could basically replace every long term rental business in Denmark.

I play Blood Bowl, both in virtually and as the little miniature game, and since every Danish person in the world of Denmark is basically on Facebook and nowhere else, it’s been the primary platform for coordinating leagues and tournaments for the past many years. The platform has gotten so bad at it though, that there are serious thoughts about moving somewhere else, the issue being that everyone is on Facebook and nowhere else.

Maybe you’re going to be correct, but I think that these closed platforms are all going to do what Facebook has and slowly become places that a lot of their users no longer like. In that environment I think someone is going to come a long with a decentralised form of social media the way e-mail or a phone works that is easy enough to connect through that everyone in Denmark is going to be on that and not everywhere else.

I think the only reason it doesn’t exists yet is because you sort or needed a world where GitHub pages, and Dropbox, and so on figured out a way to sell their platform IRON through the use of open APIs. I think it’s coming though.

We recently moved, and as is tradition here in Denmark, we ended up buying most of our big living room “look at my furniture and judge me” stuff at cool “styley” places and then the rest (and a meatball dinner) at IKEA.

I haven’t been to IKEA since I lived in a dormitory that was close to IKEA two decades ago, where the meatballs and soda-refill made for a good hangover stop, but the plate I had two weeks ago was exactly like I remembered it to be. Not great, not terrible.

I was sad that they don’t do soda refill anymore though.

Before I went back to software development I found myself in some national task forces for enterprise architecture in the public sector, and as such got to do a lot of speeches on it at different conventions. For around the first year I literally had to do the presentation for myself. In the beginning I spent an entire day talking to the mirror, otherwise my presentation would be terrible. After a couple of years of it, I can now pull a presentation out my ass on the spot about basically any subject of which I have a solid foundation of knowledge.

I imagine game mastering to be a lot like that. Except when playing a game or D&D you also have a bunch of people participate in your presentation. I think you may have skipped the practice part a little too much, but I’d encourage you to get into to it as a player because it can be really fun with the right group.

I personally play AD&D with a bunch of other 35-40+ year olds, and the primary reason is to spend a few Saturdays each year drinking beer. Basically the reason for which I play blood bowl. The stories we go through are better than playing Baldurs Gate was though, largely thanks to our game master and the fact that nobody is too serious, and maybe because AD&D wasn’t designed to be as forgiving or “your character is now a God” as the modern systems. Anyway, we found our group through Facebook, and while there are two sets of “friends” in it half of it are solo players who joined us, so it’s certainly possible for you to find something if you look!

I’m surprised you see those two pieces of “advice” as being different schools of pedagogy, because to me they are very much the same. The latter is a better approach, but it’s still a very flawed approach to childcare that were largely ”deprecated” in the 90ies in my country. Because neither of them deals with the child as more than a piece of clay, or an, animal as the author even highlighted.

Don’t get me wrong. Both ways work, and more modern pedagogy builds on the lessons learned from these approaches, but the best way to deal with crime and punishment isn’t these methods, it’s to deal with children rather similar to how you would deal with an adult but then comfort them as though they are children. If that sounds weird to you just imagine how annoying it would be for you if your boss started complimenting you on every thing you do that aligns with what they want to cultivate in you. I know some people might like that, but most of us would feel like we were being treated like idiots. The effect is a little different in children, but some will still feel that way and others will grow up to be very compliment seeking and spend decades in therapy learning how they I be themselves.

What you’ll want to do is to calmly explain why X behaviour is amazing and how proud you are of it. When that is actually true, and then only for as long as it takes for your children to learn that saying thanks when someone give them something is good. Similarly you calmly explain why Y behaviour is terrible, but it’s not like you can’t use reasonable amounts of punishment to teach about consequences. By reasonable I mean things similar to “if you don’t stop hitting the cat in the head with your doll now that I’ve explained why not to do so 20 times, then I’m going to take the doll away for the rest of the day”.

The biggest influence, and most important advice, is consistency. If you say that you’re going to take away the doll for the rest of the day, or when you say no to ice cream, then you absolutely have to follow through. Except when you were wrong, or when you’ve greatly miscalculated the importance of something, and if you’re consistent enough otherwise, then this will simply teach your child that it’s ok to be wrong and admit it. On the flip side of this, you actually have to say yes. One of the biggest challenges I personally faced when I had my first child was that it’s ok to sometimes have ice cream along with your breakfast within modern pedagogy. But it turned out that by saying yes when there is no reason not to, then it becomes really easy to say no because a no is just accepted as your offspring knows that it won’t always be a no.

I think a lot of good parenting is working on yourself though. I mean, why are you getting worked up over what a 4 year old is doing? You have an infinite amount of patience compared to them.

It has a lot more to do with how bad they are at selling IT to enterprises in my experience from the European public sector, which is now a very large Azure and AWS market.

We went with Azure because it was the sort of “obvious” direction for a non-tech enterprise organisation that was already heavily windowsy and using office365, but what Microsoft and Amazon sell to enterprises is support. AWS didn’t start out so well here in Europe, which is what gave Azure the chance to catch up, but once Amazon caught on, they became more compliant with European legislation than Microsoft is. Things like guaranteeing that every employee that comes near your data is an European citizen, is one area where AWS is still better than Azure, but basically what they do that Google doesn’t, is that they listen and adopt to the needs of the trillion dollar industry.

When Teams rolled out as a new feature in Enterprise 365, as available to everyone, our techies called Seattle (I can’t spell redmund) and a few days later it was possible to not have it auto-available for everyone. When we had issues with Google education, and Google education was actually Google’s best attempt at being supportive of enterprise, we had to talk with a chatbot and eventually had to physically drive to Google Denmark to annoy someone to get real support because our sales rep was on vacation.

I’m not sure if you know this, but a major part of selling IT to enterprise is to sell the CTOs the ability to say “yes, email is down, but our guys are working directly with the people at Amazon/Microsoft headquarters and they are calling us with updates every 30 minutes.” or “yes our servers are in Ireland, but some of our best techies have gone and physically inspected them with the EY consultants and our DPO firm and it was completely GDPR compliant”, and all the other stuff you get to do when you make the companies billions.

I think it is a little unfair for you to expect a good discussion when you line up no real reasons as to why you would be deleting your account other than you seemingly dislike Musk a lot.

I’m in the “fortunate” position to not have strong feelings about Musk either way. I may delete my Twitter account if he takes the company private, but that will be more of protest against billionaires owning platforms that I think should be non-profit organisations because of their public impact. That being said, I’m not sure how that is even relevant to most people here on HN as my “protest” is not really matter.

I think Twitter might be opening itself up to a competitor if Musk does something stupid with it. But Twitter is probably already pretty open to disruption as it is exactly for the reason big money sees wasted potential in it. “Owning” the space for public discourse is sort of twitters thing, but it’s much less good at it than LinkedIn is at owning corporate discourse as an example.

But it all sort of depends on what Musk does with it, doesn’t it? Maybe he will make it better.

There is something to what you’re saying, and things like what the EU is doing as a response to the impact or big American Tech companies is probably what is actually interesting to a lot of us. Because it directly impacts how we’re supposed to build solutions as we need to implement more and more bureaucracy into the way we handle data, often in ways, that we need a corporate lawyer to audit because we’re software engineers. Note that I’m not saying this is good or bad, but I do think it’s interesting because it impacts us.

What I don’t personally think is interesting is American politics. The sort of thing where there are two sides, or anything where anyone might write “liberal”. As a European, where we have multiple parties work together, and where many what Americans consider “liberal” is basically the ultra Christian Right wing, is sort weird and uninteresting. Not that I don’t think things like identity politics and what not aren’t important, but maybe not something to be discussed here on HN.

I would personally be vary of judging people on what they put on their GitHub accounts, because a lot of the real work people do is often locked away in private repositories (or on other platforms).

I can use myself as an anecdotal example. I use GitHub mainly to store guides and neat tricks for myself, and to sometimes share some excellent code. All my current professional work lives in Azure DevOps, locked away so that you would never know so if I didn’t tell you. I have a NPM package that should be private but is public because we share it with some contractors and nonsense occurred (loooong story that is basically answered by “above my pay grade”). If you found it and looked at my GitHub profile, then you might use it, and you’d experience some breaking changes that you typically wouldn’t with good OSS NPM packages every time we make some major updates to it. Because we don’t really factor external user into our processes.

I’m curious as to when the forecast is from. We missed our expected q1 target by quite a margin as well because the market, and I mean any market, has been hit by the war and the inflation.

Much thanks to my then undiscovered ADHD I spent my university years switching between ”categories” (it’s not exactly the same as majors/minors here in Denmark because everything on a bachelors was tailored for you up front), 7 times before I ended up with Computer Science (which was where I started). Two of those years was spent studying History, and the primary subject through everything was that sources matter. Because history is exactly as described here, influenced by its writer and the context in which it was written. Which is why history as far as academia is concerned tends to be much more “peer-decided” than anything. With good and bad side effects. But basically a lot of history is a group of experts spending their careers discussing whether or not a set of pottery inscriptions can mean that Denmark went on a crusade or not. But that is academia, and though my brief period there I got the impression that it took its sources very serious.

I’d like to say that maybe I got this article wrong, but isn’t what this article talks about more political science than history? The fall or the Roman Empire is a part of history, but how it’s used in political discourse has nothing to do with history, until decades from now anyway. People with an agenda has always used texts and history to further it, but isn’t it those people who are far more in control of what becomes history than the people who wrote the works?

This is completely anecdotal but most medium (and similar platforms) that I end up on from HN are basically an A4 page of what is essentially nothingness.

This is not to say it’s not interesting, because it is, but what typically happens is that I end up in the “want to know more” state, but then don’t actually get to know more. This is not really on the medium authors, it’s more just my social media consumption taking me back to HN and then never looking into it again, but that also means that my time on the medium article was sort of wasted doesn’t it?

I can’t for the life of me remember a single medium article that had any sort of impact on me or anything I do tech wise.

I can give you my perspective on it as someone who went the dev -> architect/team lead -> university level education in management -> stress -> adult ADHD diagnosis -> dev route and the extremely short answer is that you do not move into management it you want to code.

What you need to do is to figure out not only what you want to do, but what you like to so. I excelled at management, I enjoyed being involved in significantly more important projects and seeing how the world works form the perspective of really high level enterprise management on the national scale of the public sector while being there as what is essentially a specialist advisory role. I enjoyed working with people and helping them find their motivation and grow, and I never got put down by the hard decisions, but as it turned out, what I’m actually build for is solving problems. It did turn out that I had undiagnosed ADHD and what some people call “flow” I call “hyperfocus”, what some people call “boring” I call “painful” and what some people call organisational politics I call hell. Now all of this wasn’t triggered until I had my first child, because it wasn’t until I had what was essentially 3 full time jobs (1 added for ADHD energy expenditures) that I couldn’t keep up, but when that happened it fairly quickly became apparent that I could never be a manager and a father of small children at the same time, and then what do you do? Well, one of my friends mentioned his company was looking for a developer, and knowing the CTO I reached out and got myself hired as a developer. In the past five months I’ve build some really amazing things, I’ve read manuals on how solar inventors work and setup data collection and distribution for our partners. I’ve build a typescript node package for generic Odata APIs and worked on cash flow predictions and I’ve had such a good time doing it that I’ve gone from part to full time (in a healthy way), something my leading psychiatrist thought would take five years.

Depending on your area of the world it’s very likely that you can’t make the same career out of programming that you can out of management, but there is currently a bigger demand for talented programmers than talented managers in a lot of places. So it’s certainly possibly to keep being a programmer if that’s your jam. You can also move into different forms of Enterprise Architecture and still do some amount of coding if the advisory specialist role appeals to you.

If you want to manage then I encourage you to do so, and go at it wholeheartedly. Which means cutting down on coding to the point where you no longer do any. You can still do it as a hobby, but not professionally. If you want to develop then I suggest you use your experience to find your way into places that are great to work.

I think the bit on window management reads a little too much like someone who sort or made up their mind upfront. I use windows in my professional life, because that’s how we roll in Denmark, but back in 2015 I bought my first personal MacBook and it’s been a great relationship ever since.

On windows I need to install tools for things like snapping pictures because the default snipping tool isn’t quite good enough. I also hate window management, especially on multiple screen setups where you can’t move the mouse from one screen to another if the resolutions are different (4k screens and an open laptop as an example). Mean while a lot of the things the author complain about are things I find decent on a Mac. The fact that you can easily auto-size windows so that you have 1 full screen, 2 half screen apps, and x csized windows on 3 different window spaces is just awesome.

The biggest issue is that even after 7 years I still have no idea how many little tricks I still don’t know about Mac OS because it never tells you how to use it and pressing shift command (or maybe it’s option) 4 to snap a screenshot isn’t exactly intuitive.

The Christian bible doesn’t condemn suicide. Most of the mentions were written in a period where society didn’t combine suicide with something inherently bad. Even in the more recent parts you can see Mathew praising the suicide or Judas because it was better than living with the guilt.

Obviously organised religions have found ways around what’s actually written in the bible, and you won’t have a hard time finding Christian’s who think that not killing includes yourself. That is an interpretation though, and unless God spoke to you personally to clarify it, then it’s frankly a lot worse for you to judge someone than to leave that sort or stuff up to God. Even if you are on some misplaced quest to save souls then Jesus already has you covered by dying for your sins.

Contrary to what you may think I don’t have a problem with religion, but I do think people who use religion to spread hurt are assholes. Considering that religious texts were written, selected and curated by people I frankly think it’s on the individual to interpret them. If your interpretation leads you to harassing dying people then you should stop and become a better person instead.

One of the best things I ever did in my career was to quit. I had gone a route I thought was “the” route for a career in tech. First developer, then architect/developer then project manager/developer then into actual management leaving development more and more behind without being fully able to because no one could do what I did at the organisation.

It all went very well, I got involved with national task forces and was part of defining the national enterprise architecture for public software in Denmark. A long the road I also started doing conference/network/whatever talks and felt hugely important. Then I had a daughter, went down with stress that turned into depression and eventually found myself with an ADHD diagnosis at almost 40. Turned out my parents hadn’t wanted me to get one when I was a kid and had to see doctors because, well, I had ADHD. Not because my parents sucked or anything, but at the time it wasn’t called ADHD but DAMP (Danish word for steam, as in a thundering steam engine), and they believed such a diagnosis would be a bad stigma. I don’t blame them, but they probably “saved” me into changing my university major 9 times and eventually having to get a lower academy degree while working two jobs (not common in Denmark where we are paid to study for 6 years and have free (as in beer) access to most education).

Anyway, there I was with not enough energy to do the two full time jobs I now had, parenting and work. My former places of work was amazing in all of this, not only did they send and pay for a lot of the help they also let me work part time while being part time sick (in Denmark this gives you full pay, but the sick part of it is paid for by the government). Despite this, and despite being lucky enough to get appointed to one my countries leading psychiatrists for adults with a late ADHD diagnosis, I found myself wondering if I would ever work full time again.

Then I quit, and I don’t be back to developing software at a company that lets you actually build cool things. I started at 30 hours a week, but here half a year later, I’m going back to full time.

If you have the ability to pick and chose, as many of us in tech are fortunate enough to have, then I can only encourage that you use it if your current job makes you unhappy. Of course you’ll probably need it o do some work to figure out what makes you happy, or even if you are currently unhappy or happy.

What an outright evil thing to say to someone. I think you do yourself, and, whatever religion you may have been indoctrinated into a great disfavour by not actually learning about your faith.

Most religions don’t actually forbid suicide anymore than they forbid a lot of other things like wearing leather pants. The fact that organised religions still make it more tabu has a lot more to do with controlling populations through faith than what is actually written in your religions texts.

Why do you think the previous poster is right? I personally think they are being sort of silly.

Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely think you should consider your tools, but I recently had to get a screw out of a bookcase. It was stuck in free air and was just going round and round, so I ended up using a hammer to push it in the right direction. This is far from the only time I’ve used my hammer for something it wasn’t intended for, and it got some new scratches on the side, but at the end of the day, the screw got out.

Which is important to remember here on HN, because this isn’t really a “programming community”, it is (or was perhaps) a platform for investors to sneak peak on interesting opportunities masked as social media for hackers. And the ”monstrosity” was launched after all, which is the most important aspect of any product.

Aside from that, I think it’s reasonable to assume that a lot of smaller and personal websites are used as learning experiences. So naturally a lot of them are going to be build “suboptimal” because the reason the tool was chosen was the tool itself.

If you’re asking me if I know that the world isn’t fair then I hate to tell you this, but I feel a lot more guilty about the shady supply line that led to me being capable of writing this reply on my iPhone than of any work or investment I’ve ever personally been involved in.

That being said, I don’t agree with the sentiment that a company needs to “growth hack” to go from startup to successful IPO. It obviously happens, but a lot of companies succeed by selling something that is actually useful. It may not be as glamorous as working for a FAANG company, but you can make a pretty decent career out of helping non-tech companies scale beyond excel sheets.

> The only fundamental way for a business to make more money is to invent actual, new feature and business models.

I’m not sure this is fair for services like Airbnb where what they sell is conveniences.

Their entire product existed before Airbnb. It even existed before the internet. What Airbnb did so successful was that they branded themselves with a good product that disrupted the market by being easier to use.

The thing about disrupting markets by selling easy of use, is that your competition is already well versed in the market you disrupted. Some of them may do the dinosaur but others will take your ideas and try to make them better. If you don’t continuously improve the ease or use of your product, then people are going to download eurobooking or whatever other options there are now instead.

You know this, because you’ve likely done it yourself a million times with various applications that do the same thing, but some find a way to be easier to use.

Obviously these companies are going to want to find (or invent) new products to get included. But that is typically more of a non-software quest that eventually leads to some of the engineers being tasked with building what the marketing/sales/business process people find.

I think it’s a little unfair to call it greed because of how the world operates. Dumped down a little the path for a successful company in the west is to have founders create a small company with a great culture that cultivates growth through a great product. Eventually bigger capital notices the rapid growth and invests, typically letting current and coming employees buy options at the same rate they do because they want to keep the culture until the IPO. Eventually the company has grown enough that it is now a large or even enterprise company while skipping all the steps in between because of the rapid growth, and with all the challenges that come with the that, and then the IPO launches. Talented capital will launch lower than they could, so that they can IPO at 100 and then truly sell out at 400-500 (made up numbers to give you the idea) a couple of years later where the company becomes a truly public company.

During those years the founders and much of the talent are very likely to leave the company. Partly because working for an enterprise wasn’t what they signed up for, but mainly because the rapid growth has likely stagnated, which means that you can get so much more out of your time building something new.

Your time is limited and how you get to spend it is directly tied to your wealth. Why would you waste either on something that doesn’t grow when you could be growing your wealth 40% a month on something else?

Maybe it’s greed, but it’s also how you play our system.

The only weird part about it all is why we aren’t teaching children financial impact and how to maximise it in schools. I mean, I had no idea how rigged the world is until we had our first million (in Danish KR, so around $150k). Simply being able of putting down 30% on the loan for our house ourselves means that we have around 10k DKK ($1500) more to ourselves, every month, compared our friends who are similar places in life minus the start capital and thus are paying those $1500 directly into the banks pockets.