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FuNe

819 karma · joined June 13, 2016

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FuNe··on Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming. It’s Time for That to Change
That's weird. This was discussed here a few days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16934942
FuNe··on Alphabet's Median Pay Nears $200k
These are start-ups, right? The article is talking about Fortune 500 companies, not start-ups. Having said that the top 2 ones are pharmaceuticals. I wonder whether the fat salaries trickle down to their bioinformatics divisions.
FuNe··on Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change
So -basically- SO says that a lot of its contributors behave like bullies but, being unable to actually yell at them (because SO needs them) tries to fuzzy out/alleviate the issue by taking the blame for them. I don't see any way that can work out. For what is worth I can testify my own little experience from that pit. * Contributors who downvote other answers without any excuse/explanation/commend (I guess it makes their own answer seem better). * A tiny minority of users ever upvoting (that's a largely thankless community). * Moderators that are being extra harsh with language usage (I'd say most of SO users are not native English speakers but this does not stop some native ones considering themselves somehow superior). *Extended usage of points, badges and several other facebooky notifications to tap into your dopamine receptors.
FuNe··on 150 days of living and coding in a van
Living in a van might also be part of the answer to the skyrocketing rents wherever there are jobs worth their salt. Which -housing- is one of the real big markets that desperately needs to be disrupted as it siphons money out of the productive sector into the rentiers' black holes.

Disclaimer: Living/renting in Dublin/Ireland.

FuNe··on Robots will not take your job
"that industrial automation has been responsible for the loss of up to 670,000 jobs since 1990. But just in the period between 1999 and 2011, trade with China was responsible for the loss of 2.4 million jobs: almost four times as many. “If you want to know what happened to manufacturing after 2000, the answer is very clearly not automation, it’s China,”"

I think globalization in general would be more accurate than "China".

Yet I also think that automation is also a factor which even though might not be the major one yet it can very well be in the near future. I'm in IT industry and I've witnessed at least one line of job going out of the window - namely manual testers- due to automation. I bet everyone has similar stories from his own walk of life. Yet most of the jobs lost in my locality was due to them being shipped to low cost countries. So - all in all- these two factors work in parallel and probably globalization is holding up automation up to a point (where automation cost > low wage worker).

FuNe··on Cassini's Saturn Mission Goes Out in a Blaze of Glory
Why not worrying about the same thing about Saturn though? The best thing would be to slingshot Cassini in outer space like Voyagers but I guess they wouldn't have this option here.
FuNe··on A Not So Distant Mirror: Jack London's Political Writings
HN algorithm magic. You submit a leftist story (that is no propaganda but it just paints the world in its factual colors). The story gets upvoted quickly so it makes it to the front page (which will get it up voted even more). Then the magic invisible hand of the market appears and the story gets lost in HN underbelly.

Note to self: Why am I still bothering with HN? It is exactly like the general IT crowd. Anything worth discussing is not.

FuNe··on Warren Buffett’s Best Investment
Interesting read: http://web.archive.org/web/20130912101039/http://www.commond...
FuNe··on Capitalism Is Collapsing and Nothing Is Rising to Replace It
I'm not following though. So -any user can flag a post without any need to justify his action? Where is the value in that? Only posts that are at least neutral to all get to pass? Then we end up talking about anything but the things that actually matter in fear that they will generate "heat".

The posted article is much more decent than most anti-Trump articles that were the norm in here the past months. Personally I cannot wrap my head around it being flagged. If this is a result of a defective process then fix the process - that is if this is supposed to be a forum of reasonable practical people trying to find solutions to problems (aka hackers).

FuNe··on Capitalism Is Collapsing and Nothing Is Rising to Replace It
sssst - you will get downvoted for asking such questions. Answer: HN is pro-capitalism first and foremost. Everything else -democracy and truth included- take a back seat here.

@HN admins: you can hide your heads in the sand as much as you like. Good luck and thanks for the fish.

UPDATE: OK - I'll take at face value the replies and apologize for the attack to admins. I'm still not following though why/how this is flagged.

FuNe··on Capitalism Is Collapsing and Nothing Is Rising to Replace It
flagged? It transcends me why this post might be flagged. And it will be a marker of very bad undemocratic qualities of this forum if it stays like that.
FuNe··on Capitalism Is Collapsing and Nothing Is Rising to Replace It
It's not that it's a big secret http://money.cnn.com/2013/03/04/news/economy/buffett-secreta...
FuNe··on Beware of Developers Who Do Negative Work
I've been in this job long enough to know that there is no silver bullet in tech stack, methodology, technique, etc. Yet, it took me a while to get there and even if I did it means nothing because wherever I look I see S/W houses being governed by adherents of the this or that 'true religion'. I think that most of that is just cargo cults - i.e. what happens to work for this company (and whereupon people there believe in) is taken to be the way to go for any other company/product/case.

Are SPs bad/evil/nice/safe/etc? I don't know and I cannot tell unless we are talking about something concrete. Senior devs were saying a few years ago that they are the holy grail. Senior devs are saying now that they are the devil. Go figure.

Is TDD the holy grail? Dunno - these days TDD seems to be synonymous to progress and modernity. Any opposed view seem to belong to cavemen but wasn't that so with OOP just a few months before functional became the way to go?

Anyway - you catch my drift. I'm doubly cautious when I hear people speak with the greatest conviction about this and that these days unless they are speaking off a concrete example.

FuNe··on Programming Music: The Applications of Algorithmic Composition [pdf]
I think that hip-hop (bar abstract hip hop) is mainly about the lyrics.
FuNe··on Programming Music: The Applications of Algorithmic Composition [pdf]
Bjork (I think) said that electronic music has no soul cause no one bothered to put one in it. As a long time listener of mainly electronic music, I agree. Among the various genres and artists of electro music there is a ratio of computer/human input to each piece. I find the pieces were the human input is minimal, boring and dry. In a way the human in these sorts of music is the necessary ghost in the machine that makes the piece worth its salt.

I would be very impressed if a fully computer synthesized piece would actually strike a cord in humans. I'm not talking about brutal bam-bam-bam techno pieces that evoke no emotions whatsoever.

FuNe··on Facsimile of the Voynich Manuscript Now Available to Citizen Cryptographers
What would the explanation be according to Occam's razor here?
FuNe··on Many Ryanair flights could be free in a decade, says its chief
I'm quite regular customer of Ryanair and I can only be skeptical of similar statements by its CEO. Truth is that you can find outrageously cheap fares BUT that applies only to dates where demand is very low and routes where competition is high. In all other cases Ryan is almost as expensive as the rest of the airlines. That is to say that their major objective is making a profit, _not_ providing cheap fares. It just so happens that marketing themselves as a cheap fare provider is their business model (i.e. that's how they make money). Also this has a lot to do with the rivals they deal with on each route. Which means that once they beat competition (and they regularly do) they won't necessarily continue offering low fares.
FuNe··on Having a ‘work spouse’ makes you happier?
This depends a bit on the demographics of the company but it is quite common these days.

After all -sad as it may be- people spent an insane amount of time at work and for lots of folks work is the only social circle they maintain.

FuNe··on Having a ‘work spouse’ makes you happier?
Care to elaborate a bit on the Postmodernism part ?
FuNe··on General Motors to Lay Off 2,000 Employees in Ohio and Michigan
I agree and sorry for linking to dm piece (I'll be more careful next time). I see though the link was changed - not by me though (you cannot change a link after submission which would be handy). Also it would be more appropriate/accurate as it now appears that I submitted a link which I actually did not.

@HN admin

FuNe··on Canada's immigration website crashes on election night
Correct me if I'm wrong but lots of people here seem to think that Europe is some kind of progressive booming social-democratic economy/society with free health/education and all. The trend here IMHO is exactly the same trend that put Trump in office - only in Europe (having some more historic experience with such things) we do things a bit more hardcore. Extreme right wings (fascists) are getting more and more power, nationalistic views abound in all states, welfare state is being dismantled, etc. Our 'Mexicans' equivalent are people fleeing from war zones (Syria, Afganistan, etc) that get dumped in buffer Southern states (mainly Italy/Greece). Economy is in shambles for most countries (add in the terrible lock-ins caused by common currency). Each state is mostly looking after its own interests when there are big issues (war) at EU periphery. ... Do I need to go on? Fleeing USA for EU is like jumping a flaming ship for a ship that is half-sunk.

My 2 cents.

FuNe··on A list of headless web browsers
You can also go with a regular browser tied on a vncserver display (pros: you have real captures/video of the tests, cons: the solution gets a bit heavier than when using xvfb)
FuNe··on The Mega Rich Have Found an Unlikely New Refuge
“The world is heading into a major crisis,” said Internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom in an Oct. 31 Twitter post. “I saw it coming and that’s why we moved to New Zealand. Far away & not on any nuclear target list.”

It will probably ruin his day but the good thing with nuclear fall out is it's globalized nature. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_%281959_film%29

FuNe··on Docker in Production: A History of Failure
Exactly
FuNe··on Docker in Production: A History of Failure
Thanks! That looks promising.
FuNe··on Docker in Production: A History of Failure
That's what I do but given that the process is run in parallel being part of a complex CI system I needed to write quite a bit of logic to do the pruning safely myself. Main problem being that I couldn't rely on docker daemon not deleting images that might actually be still needed by other processes building in parallel.
FuNe··on Docker in Production: A History of Failure
Being caught in the containerization craze myself I'd love to hear whether the story is exaggerating or is painfully accurate.

So far I've been bitten by the inability to clean up images of certain age.

UPDATE: Another really annoying thing is the inability to tag an image directly into a registry (AFAIK). You need to pull, tag and push back again. Given that images can be GBs long you end up with really heavy net traffic for a simple task.

FuNe··on Mozilla stops distribution of WOT addon
Reminds me of the old saying. "When the service is free the product is you."
FuNe··on Ask HN: Who is firing?
There is also glassdoor.com but it's not specially geared towards layoffs. But you can get a decent idea of how well a company does.
FuNe··on Noam Chomsky: The Alien perspective on humanity [video]
It's difficult to propose a neutral-all-win solution when what is perceived as a problem is actually advantageous to certain groups of people. E.g. how can you find such a solution to the troubles brought upon most of West States finances when they decided to finance the failed banks with tax payers' money. Similar situation with climate change, arms commerce, etc.

Also, proposing solutions, is a step you take after a critical percentage of public understanding has grasped the problem as such in the first place. Being there is highly disputed - see the part with what dominates the current electoral debates.

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