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angersock

15,241 karma · joined September 21, 2011

Engineer, coder, and all around cheerful human being.

Strong opinions, weakly held--sometimes, held weekly.

Contact me at: username at angersock dot com.

"The modern social web is a miracle of progress but also a status-driven guilt-spewing shit volcano." --Paul Ford

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angersock··on Should the police be able to investigate your genetic family tree for any crime?
Why would you help the police state?
angersock··on You Had Me, And You Lost Me: Why I don't read Megatokyo (2004)
Decent summary here:

http://badwebcomicswiki.shoutwiki.com/wiki/Sinfest

Tldr, he took the soul out of the comic and the characters to push an agenda, and devoted cycles to mocking his fans instead of keeping up the wholesome stuff.

This is like the one case where that isn't an exaggeration.

angersock··on Ask HN: Aspiring Manager – is management overhead or is it valuable?
That "overhead" is essential to keeping a team running.

Hiring means the right people get brought in and the talent pool grows and a positive culture (say, blameless post-mortems, learning and sharing, etc.) forms.

Firing means that people aren't getting booted on a whim and that when they are getting booted it's done quickly and efficiently.

Performance reviews help guarantee good pay or good feedback for the people on the team, and are what helps keep them from leaving.

Meetings are the way that you advocate for your team and where you can meatshield to keep the howling vortex of crazy that is business for making their life harder.

It's all "overhead", but that "overhead" is very important to the quality of life.

angersock··on Tell HN: Vulnerable incumbent in EHR
I'm shadowbanned right now, so I doubt anybody will read this, but I worked in EHR/health IT for a couple of years.

"replacement users might love?"

Users loving these systems is completely immaterial. The key to these systems is that they:

a) integrate with the massively nutzo installations of health infrastructure devices

b) provide flexibility to capture really arbitrary workflows and business logic

c) provide compliance and auditing to ensure that billing and security for patient data is handled correctly

d) most importantly, come from a company that is Too Big to Fail and which can be payed gigantic sums to offers absurd SLAs and to take on the liability of killing people using their software.

That's before you even touch on the "boring" issues of multi-year sales cycles, truly byzantine and absurd legal requirements (because the only thing hospital legal teams want to do is tell you no), FDA certification for certain types of systems (itself a very tricky and expensive process), and all sorts of other bullshit.

Epic is not something you just "replace".

angersock··on LED Strain
You'll see extra discrete instances of your finger, as though lit by a strobe light.

This is how we used to be able to measure speed of spinning objects too. :)

angersock··on US Is Net Oil Exporter for First Time in 75 Years
If it was pointless there wouldn't be so much money in it.

You sound like somebody completely out of touch with reality. People like you hurt our cause.

angersock··on YouTube top earners: A seven-year-old making $22M
What an incredibly sad way of living and defining friendship.
angersock··on Elon Musk won’t be smoking weed in public again, NASA admin says
I'm betting everybody at mission control was sober when they lost both shuttles. Temperance didn't save anybody in the Appllo 1 capsule.
angersock··on Realizing domains still sell for 800k+ has changed my domain squatting tactics
Well put.
angersock··on Realizing domains still sell for 800k+ has changed my domain squatting tactics
What did you expect?

You didn't post about the cool sites you built. You didn't show off your code. You didn't add value.

You posted bragging about "Hey, what if I 'collect' more domains? How much money would that be worth?"

You're not displaying something that most would consider "hacking".

angersock··on Realizing domains still sell for 800k+ has changed my domain squatting tactics
Domain squatters are scum. You're scum. Congrats.
angersock··on Questions to Ask Before Joining a Startup
How old are you? Are you supporting a family? Where do you live?

What's the amount of your salary? What's the value of your equity compensation? How much time do you get off?

(your benefits may not be as good as you think)

angersock··on Questions to Ask Before Joining a Startup
Real talk: most companies aren't gonna exit for $1B.
angersock··on Questions to Ask Before Joining a Startup
It's true though. What's your counterargument?

Tired memes can be tired because they're true.

angersock··on 40M people with diabetes will be left without insulin by 2030, study predicts
Making saltwater doesn't require a cleanroom.
angersock··on The Homeless Crisis Is Getting Worse in America’s Richest Cities
Why are you still in SF? There are day jobs available pretty much everywhere.
angersock··on Ask HN: What are the most impressive companies for new grads to join today?
If you're joining a company because it's prestigious and looks good on a resume, instead of because you see the opportunity to do good work and learn from people better than you, you aren't a hacker--you're just some wannabe seeking affirmation.
angersock··on Why affordable housing is scarce in progressive cities
Check out Houston.
angersock··on Lobste.rs has now more than 10k members
I'd wager such people are in the minority.

If your company doesn't let you put up dotfiles, or blog about some neat framework trick you learned, I'd be shocked.

Folks that don't have the time/inclination to display those things frankly probably aren't going to have the time/inclination to contribute meaningfully to the community, and the accumulation of a nonparticipating majority is one of the pathologies of these sorts of forums.

angersock··on Lobste.rs has now more than 10k members
For folks that are interested in joining, feel free to swing by #lobsters on freenode and ask for an invite. You'll probably get asked for your Github, personal portfolio, or some other indication you have technical chops, and then somebody will send you an invite if they feel comfortable attaching your name to their account.

It's not a community for everybody--we deliberately focus on actionable technical information and training, and tend to skip over more entrepreneurial or marketing stuff ( https://barnacl.es is a sister site that's way better for biz talk).

The culture is ongoing in refinement ( https://lobste.rs/s/oackyq/lobsters_community_standards#c_sy... ) and evolution, reinforced by periodic meta threads where aspects of the site and culture are drug up and commented on and tweaked.

It's probably the most rewarding and healthy tech community I've been involved with in the last decade. :)

angersock··on Lobste.rs has now more than 10k members
> The discussions I have seen him fight out, and ban people over were ugly. They usually started on the premise of technical disagreements and escalate into a war because of the founder being high on lobsters being his platform so his opinion has to be the right one ...

Examples of this?

angersock··on RemoteMac.io – Dedicated Mac mini
Apple users should feel right at home then!
angersock··on Ask HN: NDAs at corporate hackathons. sign or don't sign?
Don't sign any NDA you don't have to.

Fuck that and fuck the people hurting workers with them.

angersock··on Attention and Memory in the Age of the Disciplinary Spectacle
The dinosaurs had no space program.
angersock··on Programming Paradigms for Dummies: What Every Programmer Should Know (2009) [pdf]
That most certainly wasn't the case. The source for Plan9 is pretty plainly not hierarchical OOP.

Plus, the failure of Plan 9 was more an early 90s thing.

angersock··on A Look at Gab, 'Free Speech' Social Site Where Synagogue Shooting Suspect Posted
Looks like both Joyent and Paypal pushed them off their platforms. Paypal has always been kinda scummy, but it's interesting seeing Joyent suppress free speech of paying customers.
angersock··on Your DNA Is Out There. Do You Want Law Enforcement Using It?
How would you feel about having a taser in a collar at the base of yours (and everyone's) neck? It only gets turned on by the authorities if they see a crime in progress. It's perfectly harmless otherwise, right? If you're not doing anything wrong, what's to fear?

In the case of markers like this, it's pretty easy to correlate by race or other heritable factors criminal behavior. If there's no harm in it, when a crime goes down in an area it seems reasonable to go and just round up all the people with rough genetic markers matching, right?

It might even make sense to keep them in groups organized by genetic markers and race, since that should speed up policework dramatically.

And later, if you want to procreate with somebody, maybe you should make sure their genotype won't mark your kids for poor treatment by the authorities--after all, accidents _do_ happen, and the labwork is never 100%, so better safe than sorry.

Can you see why this makes people antsy?

angersock··on Arabic, a great language, has a low profile
The discussion has been polite so far and it's not an unfair point.

Earlier in the 20th century, German was the language of engineering. Before that, French. Before that, Latin. Before that, something else. Languages and their significance in different fields wax and wane.

angersock··on SQLite Code of Ethics
Isn't it great to have a world full of tolerance? :)
angersock··on In Texas, Techies Are Trying to Turn the Red State Blue
> Also the goal of the tool (and all it does) is help register people to vote.

Well, that's a worthy goal. :)

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