KZeillmann

My impression from the (now deleted) text is that the phone wasn't booting or in a state where it could be factory reset, at least not without considerable effort.

Another way to look at it is that lotteries are a way for poorer people to subsidize college education for richer people.

It seems there's a lot of criticism here about Backblaze - about how other services do it better, etc.

I'm a current Backblaze customer, not a data hoarder, etc. If you're not using Backblaze to back up your data, what are you using? Backblaze is great for me cause all I want it to do is back up my docs, files, etc. and there's very little maintenance I have to do. Is there something out there that does it better?

A team getting to 100% test coverage and enforcing it feels like an application of Goodhart's Law.

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

At my last job, we required 100% code coverage for most code, and the other parts of the code (in ideality) were marked with ignores that were well-thought-through.

In practice, I ended up writing a bunch of test cases only to hit the if blocks. It didn't mean that the tests I wrote were any good. I'm still a fan of 100% test coverage, but with some leeway for what needs to be ignored, and what needs to be tested later (non-critical paths, if you have a deadline, perhaps)

We tried it and moved away from it. A few reasons - one is IDE support, which has been mentioned in this thread. The other was release configuration. At the time we were working on it, it was more difficult than it should have been to use env variables at runtime (rather than build time).

I'm used to the Spring Boot approach - start with having different Spring profiles for different environments, and then let your secrets come in via env vars, but doing this via Distillery at the time required some hackery - they wanted you to build a QA build and a prod build, which didn't make much sense. Maybe it's better now, but that turned me off a lot to using it.

My issue with polling is that many races were well beyond the margin of error. The Senate polling in particular was bad this year.

Sara Gideon was favored to win the Maine race in the polling, because there hadn't been a single poll showing Collins in the lead since July. She lost her race by 9 points.

It's also strange to see the region makes a difference in the poll error. The polls in Minnesota were basically spot-on, but in Wisconsin (demographically very similar), the polling average was Biden +8, with one ABC news poll showing him +17, the kind of outlier result you'd expect with a +8 average. He's gonna win there by ~1 percentage point.

There's something wrong with how a lot of these pollsters determine samples, or how they judge someone's likeliness to vote.

Placement. Either you want a probe thermometer measuring the internal temperature of the meat or an air temperature probe on the indirect side of grill. The gauge on the grill is likely to be off 50-100 degrees F. They're often cheaply made and not as high quality as something like a probe themometer from Thermoworks, or presumably this Weber device.

Using a meat thermometer (leave-in probe or instant) is a fantastic element of modern cooking, and a huge advancement in food safety. I can't imagine cooking without it. It doesn't mean I don't enjoy experimenting - but it does mean my chicken doesn't dry out or come out undercooked.

The temperature gauge on the lid is a terrible judge of what the actual air temperature is inside your grill. It's often low quality and not in a proper placement for your indirect heat. Depending on placement, it can be off by more than 100 degrees F

It's probably because HN is a particularly privacy-focused community and Zoom's privacy policy is a bit more questionable than other companies

On my current team, we would all WFH on Thursdays and Fridays as a norm. At the beginning of the month, we were told that we should WFH indefinitely because of COVID-19.

I've got a great office setup and am used to working from home, sometimes for a week or two at a time, depending on circumstances, but WFH during COVID-19 feels like something else entirely.

I don't even have kids to take care of, but some combination of 1) having my wife home during the day, 2) the feeling of being cooped up (even though I get outside time walking my dog in my suburban neighborhood), and 3) the foreboding feeling of existential dread taking a toll on my mental health has cut my productivity in half.

This sounds like Scrum with one week sprints.

Fingerprint sensors work in the dark. Facial unlock doesn't.

Edit: looks like I'm probably wrong on this one

I think the bigger issue with Epstein specifically is that it was an open secret that he hadn't changed anything about his behavior

Oh look, it's the weekly "Agile is bad" post. I've successfully worked on two teams (including my current job) where we're a truly agile dev team. We value interactions over processes and tools, collaboration over contracts, and responding to change over following a plan.

Agile is not and has never been a cure-all. Scrum doesn't solve any problems. It's supposed to reveal the problems that exist and make them apparent to anyone looking at the scrumboard. If you don't change your team dynamic and just start looking at a JIRA board every day in 30 minute "standup" meetings, you're not agile. You're just cargo culting.

I'm tired of people blaming "agile" -- which is mainly about self-organizing teams and adapting quickly to changing circumstances, for what's really a management failure.

What's the benefit of a hot code upgrade vs a blue/green deploy?

It's weird -- I use Google Fi and loved it, and I got great customer service, up until the point I ordered a Pixel 3 through them back in November. I had to contact them so many times to find out why they hadn't shipped yet, and the regular customer support people had no idea what was going on, and when it got escalated to shipping, they also seemed to have no idea but were much less apologetic about it. After a few weeks of not having my phone shipped, I ordered it through the Google Store (with 0% interest financing instead of paying it off through my bill, oh well) and I got it within a week. It's ridiculous. I'd been a loyal customer of Fi for over two years, but that ordeal almost made me want to quit. If I had to go through what this author went through, I would have done the same.

Some of the AWS UX is okay but the parameter store UX for the web console is some of the worst I've seen. It's difficult to navigate and paginate, and the search function is barely worth using. It would be amazing if they had fuzzy search on the names.

Thanks for writing this! I've been interested in computer graphics for a while and too many tutorial dive straight into the details without explaining key concepts. I'm eager to get started reading.

I work on a team where our products are all in Fargate containers. I understand the appeal of serverless -- you never need to exec into the container, but half the time when we're debugging an issue in prod that we can't reproduce locally, we'll say, "wouldn't this be easier if we could just exec into the container and find out exactly what's going on?"

Yeah I don't get why so many other commenters seem to think a direct listing means the company's all of a sudden about to die or its product is all of a sudden going to turn to crap. If this is the best way to achieve liquidity, that sounds good for them.

Guess there's a conflation of terms. I think a lot of people enjoy the "automatically play the next episode after this one ends" feature. Recently, however, Netflix has added a "blast sound out of my TV when I hover over something I might want to watch" which I never want. If I'm interested, I'll click in and watch the trailer. I rarely want it to start playing a video just cause I hovered over the title.

I don't see how the local police would have any more access than they would if Comcast were in charge. They'd still have to get a warrant to search anything.

To be fair, the proposal would have raised our already high sales taxes, and those pushing for the proposal didn't do a good job convincing us that it would actually solve our traffic issues.

This is an absolute no-brainer. Mosquitoes are flying disease vectors that deserve to be eliminated. In the Americas, they're an annoyance, but in many other parts of the world, they cause millions of deaths per year.

Many studies have shown that the extinction of mosquitoes would have little if any ecological impact. I think if we had to worry about malaria in the Americas, we'd have eliminated mosquitoes years ago, and this wouldn't even be a question of whether or not we should do this.

If you look at 24 hour cable news, I'm sure that's what you see. It's entertainment passed on as journalism. There's still good journalism going on if you know where to look. The New York Times, the Washington Post, for example, are incredibly informative and useful sources for news.

Asking out of complete ignorance: What can a mainframe do that other kinds of machines can't? I barely understand what a mainframe is or why you'd use one over other technologies.

Underlying study: https://www.bankrate.com/career/most-valuable-college-majors...

This might suffice to see if the candidate is able to write decent code, but what about their ability to communicate their ideas with other developers, their approach to tech in general, or how they'd mesh with the team on a technical level?

Regarding the "we don't know how this stuff works" point, doesn't the FDA approve a ton of drugs where we don't know the exact mechanism of how it works? Do we need to know exactly and precisely how something works to know _that_ it works?