Scubabear68

Agreed. I like to do these scans but for informational purposes, not as a gate. Also most tools allow you to annotate code to turn off warnings, which can help when used intelligently.

Of course some teams will over use such tools and turn off the metrics left and right.

In the end there is no substitute for experienced engineers.

Old style Java code often exhibits low CC, and as you indicate this is not necessarily a good thing. The actual logic is often spread out in a multitude of helpers, proxies, deep inheritance chains, and unneeded abstractions. The end result is a system that is very difficult to reason about.

Also, in general terms over use of DRY can lead you here.

In many cases it is better to “risk” higher CC by concentrating logic where it makes sense.

Agree completely. This interview approach is going to lead to terrible biases coming to the forefront that have nothing to do with job performance.

It also sounds like an HR nightmare in some states here in the US.

I agree. Facebook ads are so aggressive that I have cut way back on my usage, as have others. Also pieces of the app keep breaking with more and more frequency. And account hacking or impersonation is rampant.

Having an application, process and hardware inventory is a must if you are going to have any hope of disaster recovery. Along with regular failovers to make sure you haven’t missed anything.

I just did a due diligence with a company that only had servers in one data center. They were supremely confident that there was no way a whole DC could be impacted by an event.

A bit of a non-event to me, this is a bug in user code. I don’t see it much differently then freeing a block twice or using an uninitialized pointer. It’s the price of using C.

Forgot to add - public schools in the US are effectively mini monopolies. You are forced to send your kid there, unless you work very hard to get your kids into a “choice” program, or can afford private school, or have free time to home school.

In our State, NJ, in theory each County has a County Superintendent to over see schools, and the State Dept of Education to oversee them. In reality, the County and State bureaucracy does little to nothing to provide actual oversight, and schools become private fiefdoms. The end result is school quality varies wildly, and housing prices are very strongly correlated to school quality. In our crappy district, real estate agents complain it is very hard to sell housing to families with children or who will soon have them because the schools are so bad. This creates a downward spiral for the school as fewer and fewer kids are enrolled.

Kia Telluride has a HUD that projects a bunch of info on the driver’s side windshield. It is awesome, a bunch of info is available to you without having to turn your head away from the front.

This is different from a headset where you are not seeing things directly but instead through cameras and some amount of visual processing. Also, vehicle HUDs show limited info and are not distracting eg they don’t project a game or video on your windshield.

I know. Sarcasm aside though, there is a growing movement of HS and elementary school teachers looking to remove all KPIs from schools. It is very worrying that this protected class of workers are arguing they are special compared to every other problem in the world and their performance and those who they are teaching should never be measured.

Standardized tests aren’t a fix, they are a form of measurement to diagnose the problem. When your son has a B average in 8th grade and scores in single digits on State standardized tests, it is clear there is a very serious problem.

The fix is to get proper leadership in the schools. Our Superintendent started his career as a gym teacher, and it shows. At a school board meeting when parents criticized the low standardized test scores, he crowed that they don’t matter because colleges stopped looking at them.

This is not surprising to me. Our local school district started using social promotion several years ago when a new Superintendent started. Struggling students were ratcheted down to being taught materials 1-3 grades below their level. Extra credit not related to the subject were allowed to boost grades (such as coloring assignments in 4th grade Spanish). The end result was a huge population of kids with straight B averages who performed dismally on State standardized testing.

We know because our kids were two of those students. We took them out of public school into private last year. The first six months were hell as they had to catch up from their deficits and learn how to study for real. 18 months later they are getting real A’s and B’s (and a few C’s) that are real grades.

We need standardized tests because more and more school districts are going the social promotion route

I didn't think I'd find my Apple watch very useful, but it actually is. In situations where it may be awkward to take out (or even carry) your phone, the watch can act as a mini-phone. Going on runs without a phone is very liberating, while retaining the ability to track your run and stream music to Airpods. It does a decent job of tracking pool swims as well, thanks to being waterproof.

Not life-changing, but adding enough convenience to be worth it.

Judging by this behavior, some others I won’t go into, and local Facebook wars, we have a significant concentration of jerks without a doubt.

The prior CTO came from much larger, highly regulated startups. His only experience was very large scale systems with complex requirements. He took the approach that worked there to this much smaller, mostly unregulated startup in a very different industry.

It happened because he was the only semi technical person who was an FTE. Everyone else was from a consulting firm that the private equity owners “suggested” they use.

I inherited it from the prior CTO and team.

This was one of the better solutions they had. They also had Talend for ETL and Snowflake for “analysis”. You don’t want to know what Snowflake cost.

For the same roughly 15 millions rows…

Was using Postgres Aurora RDS at a startup client last year, and the Aurora costs were through the roof. We had some moderately inefficient union queries that burned through credits like no tomorrow. Just a handful of users lightly using the system cost about $3,000 a month.

I loved everything else about it.

Edit: it was real estate market data, so only about 15 million rows.

We live in a very rural area, and the most annoying thing is huge pickup trucks with giant light arrays over the cab or on the grill, especially the ones that just look like a wall of light. The blinding effect is tremendous, and it is doubly dangerous in our area because the deer population have exploded. I don’t know if these are legal or the cops just don’t care, either way people use them with impunity.

I think the use case is supposed to be hunting and camping, but these assholes seem to no blinding everyone around them!

I have yet to find a really good online electronic control system. Having worked with the Apple, Windows, and Sony systems, they all suck.

The Apple ones seem to have a hundred holes kids can break to extend screen time or download apps, and sometimes it takes awhile for a change to take effect. Windows was completely broken last time I checked on my son’s gaming machine. And Sony PlayStation - oh, so so painful.

So it isn’t just Android. It’s everyone.

Cron scaling? Seriously?

By definition cron does not scale, it is account by account per VM/machine with no rhyme or reason.

“Midvale School for the Gifted”

Hard to believe because I have seen the cron dumpster fire at so many companies. Random cronjobs running on random boxes ends up with mystery jobs whose existence often goes unnoticed as people leave the org and docs are out of date. Random accounts with different cron jobs, with no visibility from one account to another. Box failure leads to mystery jobs failing with no way to figure out what happened. No “advanced” features like retry and retry with exponential back off. No database with job history. No parallelism.

Every place I have worked cron turned into a dumpster fire.

I can’t believe an org of Slack’s size relied on cron scripts for anything critical. It is the worst possible way to schedule jobs at scale. Serious problems with discoverability, single points of failure, and failure mode options.

Also surprised they didn’t just use an open source scheduler or product. There are a gazillion of them.

This.

To anyone entering a new topic for themselves, not knowing what you don’t know is the biggest barrier and risk. This is why, for example, cargo cult style development is so fraught with issues.

I am a technology consultant with mid sized global consulting services firm. Reading Hacker News is both entertainment and professional research. I get tremendous hands on insight into technology that directly informs my own thinking on various technologies, and have served as a great early warning system of “here there be dragons” in various products.

I completely disagree with the article’s core premise. I have read voraciously for my entire life since I was a little kid. Maybe much of it wasted, yet tidbits of knowledge I have gained over the years of reading come up constantly, and give me a bit of a leg up in conversations.

HN is a big part of that, I can read about a wide array of technologies and processes and science that I normally would never encounter. And without fail, some number of those topics will come up in work conversations and I can speak somewhat intelligently on the topic.

The same is true even for fiction. Having read some semi-obscure book long ago may be a connection I have with a new acquaintance.

Again, a lot of it is wasted, it there’s no way to know exactly which bits will never come up, and which will.

As a lay person, this was beautifully written, and I feel like I understand the issues to a degree better than I have before from casual reading.

Very important to people like me, because I really struggle with advanced math. I dropped an EE degree because while I could do the math, it was incredibly hard and in no way intuitive to me.

Lucky you. In our public school district, English test scores are slightly lower, Math is at about 30%, and Science is below 20%.

Passing rate is 99%.

I ran into this in a non profit I helped found a few years ago.

You very quickly find that your org will attract seemingly random types of people, not united by skill but by whatever the cause is. Many of them will have no applicable skills that can help your org.

If the org is relatively small, the best you can do is find out who the most skillful people are, what exactly they’re good at, snd advocate / influence / pressure the org to slot the right people into the right place.

It takes enormous patience and organizational skills, because you can’t order anyone around in a non profit successfully.

And in particular, get a good person as Treasurer and a leader for whatever version of Operations you have, and competent folks leading whatever major cost centers you may have.

We put a poor choice in charge of overseeing legal teams (our biggest cost by far), and they blew the entire budget on a frivolous lawsuit that was thrown out by the judge eventually.

Things are different to a degree in much larger non-profits, they are closer to regular corps, but they are still their own beast.

And often the org will be fatally flawed and it is best to just walk away.

Interesting. I have had success going into a lucid dreaming state by locking my hands together with the fingers interleaved with each other, with both hands resting on my chest.

Perhaps something about hands is a unique sensory input?