Scubabear68

HN deserves to be at or near the top of search results because the quality of discourse is so high here, and on a very wide range of topics.

I have noticed an increase in errors here in the past few months though, I wonder if this is the cause.

Water is much trickier than many people realize. I live on the Delaware River, near where Washington made his famous crossing. The river here is very shallow and looks deceptively peaceful.

Yet people die on this stretch every year, even experienced kayakers who let their guard down. What generally happens is someone falls out of their kayak / tube / whatever, and their feet get caught in a snag in the bottom. The river current is enough to force them under water.

Most places around here will no longer rent water equipment if the river is running high and fast, yet some foolish people manage to go out and die.

But not sure what the answer is for people falling in from the banks or bridges. Comprehensive fencing is expensive and ugly.

The specific problem the author mentions likely would not be solved by a more restrictive license. SEO squatters take whatever they want, and I doubt it would be worth it to sue them for breaking license terms.

Wow, so no way to run TCP or otherwise get ACKs or NACK like packets back? Yikes.

There is a vast difference - literally vast - between Google employee’s salary over 14 years vs the median salary in IT overall.

This is especially true if you consider salaries world wide vs just the United States.

The charlatans are a serious problem in software engineering today.

I loved this line from TFA:

“But exposure,” some folks will say. People die of exposure.

It seems a lot of those gripes are about specific apps, or simply not understanding that MacOS does somethings differently.

By contrast I have never been able to use Linux successfully as a desktop OS because there is a dearth of polished commercial apps, and the HW compatibility has always been iffy. MacOS generally works out of the box with the HW, and the apps are generally highly polished.

I caveat the apps as “generally” because there are some turds for sure. iTunes and now Music have always been horrible, and somehow they managed to make Music even worse than iTunes.

Historically Macs do benefit from 3rd party software (see also Alfred), over time the best of it seems to eventually get baked into the OS. I don’t see that as a downside really.

In practice, YAGNI works out exactly how C3 ended up. Your architecture and design ends up myopic and short sighted, and gets overwhelmed by deferring complexity that could have been dealt with adequately early on, it is much harder to retrofit back onto an existing code base.

Fowler means it literally. He had examples published on Artima.com years ago where he gives examples of hard coding things left and right and adding better support “only when you absolutely need it”.

To be clear I am not arguing for big design up front. I am arguing to keep an eyeball on your roadmap, and that is not only OK to anticipate the future but maybe do some small amount of work to make the future work easier.

The fallacy of “You Ain’t Gonna Need It” is that you so very often do, and the developers down the road are cursing out the devs who ignored the future.

Perhaps the biggest fail of XP and C3 was the YAGNI philosophy.

As it turns out, in many complex domains, you ARE going to need it, so you should factor that into your design sooner rather than later.

This is also why many consulting lead projects fail, because the developers do not understand the complexities of the domain.

Not everything is a CRUD website.

A lot of the failure of XP was an assumption that all developers develop software the same way, and for all software teams XP’s tenants are optimal.

Practices like pair programming and TDD work on some instances, are absolutely terrible in others. The arrogance of the original XP folks was a hard core belief that they had found the silver bullet of software development, and then marketing it ruthlessly.

I generally don’t meta comment, but a bit surprising to me that the bulk of this discussion has been flagged dead. I think the discussion and criticisms there were valid.

I have watched his journey from early 90s days struggling with OO and C++, to all the nonsense of the 2000’s, and where he is today.

I looked at some of the small amount of publicly available code he has written, and it was frankly horrible. An example of somehow who shouts loud enough getting attention because he can shout longer than most.

Math is a tool used to describe the universe, not the universe itself.

The map is not the territory.

I think you misunderstand.

There are no physical proofs available that Christian it is right. As I say, it is all based on faith and belief.

Several other religions also have long philosophical traditions that are equally plausible - or not - and for which no physical proof exists.

I think the very definition of Christianity is that you are accepting the creed on faith. There really aren’t any claims you can verify or falsify until after you die (or during the special time of the Rapture).

In our case, you can track school performance via state standardized test scores. Yea, they are somewhat flawed and biased, but can still give you a very good idea of how good of a job a public school is doing. In our case, our kids (now aged 15 and 12) were getting B’s and high C’a, but were both scoring single digits on standardized tests for math, English and science.

As it turns out our district overall state test were abysmally low.

The net result is general flight from the public system, either via home schooling, “Choice” programs that let you go to other districts if yours is inadequate, or private school. Graphing our school enrollment numbers has gone from about 970 students in district in 2017 to 670 in 2023.

Yes, location is everything. I live in NJ in the United States. Public schools here are all over the place, housing prices in towns with good school districts is remarkably higher than those with poor ones. Sadly we live in a town with a poor one.

I agree phones and Covid play a big part in reading ability decline. But the last reason mentioned is a big one too. Curriculums have moved away from proven teaching techniques into psuedo science at the same time public schools focus less and less on teaching, and more on being social institutions. Moving away from phonics, dumbing down math, practically ignoring science.

Coupled with the increasingly common practice of grade inflation, kids are hitting college woefully unprepared.

The best decision my wife and I have made in our lives was to get our kids into private school 18 months ago. The difference is like night and day.

Bandwidth alliance looks to be a political tool for cloud providers to save face. Not dissimilar to public companies paying token tribute to ESG which is all the rage these days.

Again with the word salad.

It is very simple. If you move your data off cloud provider X, cloud provider X is losing revenue because you are doing things with your data off their platform.

They therefore charge high fees to move your data off the platform to discourage this behavior. Meaning you now need to use cloud provider X’s services to do anything with the data.

Attempts at vendor lock-in have been core to software service companies since they were born.

That’s an impressive word salad, but sorry, no. Egress costs are high strictly to keep you there.

This is why egress is dirt cheap on other platforms outside the big 3 cloud providers.

This is also why ingress is free.

The article says “ Cloud providers charge for egress because it costs them money to send data out of their network. They have to pay for the infrastructure and bandwidth required to send data to users”.

The charge is not based on cost in the case of the big names. They charge an arm and a leg because they want to keep you and your data on their platform. When you move it you are breaking free.

Hence the high costs to deter this behavior.

We left NYC in 2012 due to layoffs, but getting an apartment back then was incredibly difficult. I don’t think people who live in other areas of the US would understand it (except maybe SF folks). Competition for apartments is fierce, and pricing was through the roof even then. We lived in Manhattan for 9 years and then got priced out. A brief move to Sunset park, then further out to Bay Ridge. Bay Ridge was reasonable and not too hard to find a place, but it is an hour from Manhattan via subway.

The situation seems to be much, much worse now 12 years later from what I have read.

I have found a high correlation in my life between book reading and general happiness.

When I am in a period when I am reading books regularly, I am generally happy. Things are going well, I have good life balance.

When I go a stretch without reading books, I am generally stressed out and in burnout mode at work, and home life is not great.

Note - this is generally fiction. I read very little non fiction.

Note 2 - most people I know have no books in evidence in their homes. Maybe they read Kindle or other ebooks? But I think many simply do not read recreationally.

Elsewhere today I recommended RDS, but was thinking of small startup cases that may lack infrastructure chops.

But you are totally right it can be expensive. I worked with a startup that had some inefficient queries, normally it would matter, but with RDS it cost $3,000 a month for a tiny user base and not that much data (millions of rows at most).

I agree. My gripe was everybody in the same schema with a global “app” user.

Not a downside to me. Each team maintains their own DB and pays for their own choices.

In the kitchen sink model all teams are tied together for performance and scalability, and some bad apple applications can ruin the party for everyone.

Seen this countless times doing due diligence on startups. The universal kitchen sink DB is almost always one of the major tech debt items.

The kitchen sink database used by everybody is such a common problem, yet it is repeated over and over again. If you grow it becomes significant tech debt and a performance bottleneck.

Fortunately, with managed DBs like RDS it is really easy to run individual DB clusters per major app.

I hear what you're saying here, but I like to delay going in the second direction as long as feasibly possible.

In theory, the idea that "people can specialise where appropriate without having to understand the whole thing" sounds good. In reality, so many, many, many bugs and piles of technical debt pile up from developers with a worms eye view who don't understand how the whole system works. Eventually you have to make this compromise, but resist it as much as you reasonably can, and always strive to grow developers so they know as much of the system as they possibly can.