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atomashpolskiyon Ask HN: Is Jekyll on GitHub a good solution for hosting a website?

Yes, I use Jekyll as gh-pages -- to host the website for my OSS project on github. It fits this purpose perfectly.

Great question! Todo lists are next to useless for me. For important stuff that I have to do and must not forget about, I set up alarm clock (without description, as such stuff is in the back of my mind anyway). The rest is kept in text files, notebooks, napkins, etc., which I re-visit periodically or remember about spontaneously.

atomashpolskiyon No code reviews by default

The problem is not with code reviews but with how adversarial they have become. Instead of making the best attempt to comprehend and embrace the author's style and intention and finding compelling arguments for the question "why this code is probably fine and should be merged as-is?" people nit on all kinds of stuff, mostly highly subjective. Along the way they don't actually catch that many problems or bugs but instead new problems and bugs are introduced while implementing their nits. All surrounded by a lot of noise that has to be dealt with in an already stressful multitasking environment. I agree with other posters in this thread that most people can't code review for crap and have very perverted idea about code review aims and goals. Code reviews as they are practiced now only serve to destroy trust, velocity and team morale. As someone noted elsewhere in this thread, if it's me (directly or indirectly) who's going to be held accountable for a deficiency in my code, whether it has been reviewed or not, why do I have to adjust my code to someone's arbitrary criticism? Common sense tells me that not requiring to have my code reviewed at all times and, by doing so, stressing my personal responsibility for the things I do, would actually increase my sense of ownership and keep me on my toes, more likely leading to better coded/tested changes, wouldn't it? I.e. it is not about blindly trusting all code that I produce but rather trusting in my ability to judge and make final decisions: to request code reviews or not, to address comments or not, to do my job as I see fit or not.

atomashpolskiyon Julian Assange can be extradited to the US, court rules

What's with people's opinion on this? E.g.

https://www.change.org/p/free-julian-assange-before-it-s-too...

Signed by 666,000 people.

I even donated 10 bucks or so back in the day to advance this petition.

Did UK court take this public opinion into consideration when when ruling the verdict?

I'm pissed as hell. What are the realistic options for ordinary people like me to stop Julian's torture?

atomashpolskiyon Is Britain becoming more meritocratic than America?

It's like one of the most wide-known facts about Warren Buffet is that he likes fast food and coke and even bought himself a diner. Or that Bill Gates drinks (or drank at some point) at least one can of coke a day. So cute, so down to earth! See, they're just like us!

atomashpolskiyon The Dead Mac Scrolls (1992)

Approximate dealer repair cost:

1 new 3.5-inch 20 MB HDA ..... 488.33

Holy moly, that's a lot

atomashpolskiyon A Bit Overcomplicated

Yeah, not everybody has to work with networks or cryptography, but I would've imagined that people at least read libraries that they use (to figure out what's going on under the hood) and inspect/debug low-level stuff from time to time.

atomashpolskiyon NYC to mandate proof of vaccination for many indoor settings

One more example: itch in one's throat and nasty suffocating cough that does not stop for an hour. Surprisingly, this might be caused by reflux (without the accompanying stomachache).

I imagine it would be pretty easy for someone not used to dealing with gastritis on a regular basis to attribute such a symptom to "COVID".

atomashpolskiyon Ask HN: Share your side project

https://github.com/atomashpolskiy/bt

BT client for JVM. Been getting a lot of love from contributors lately.

atomashpolskiyon Google and Facebook mandate vaccines for employees at U.S. offices

I can absolutely feel a kind of religious zeal and moral superiority from the pro-vax side. It will be hilariously stupid if long-term side effects turn out to be real.

atomashpolskiyon My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”

Absolutely, most problems are caused by either of:

- stupidity

-fear

-greed

The problem is figuring out which instances of these are induced by society and civilization and which are inherent to human behavior in general. While we can try to address the former, the latter probably can't be fixed without significantly changing our definition/perception of what humans are.

atomashpolskiyon Media blackout after key witness against Assange admits lying

Man... Every Soviet schoolboy knows that the existence of an electoral system does not necessitate a democracy. It's not Russia that is your existential problem in US, it's education.

atomashpolskiyon Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?

Not a 90s programmer, but I think one of the greater fallacies of the optimistic 90s and early naughts was a belief that technology in general and Internet (cyberspace) in particular will be able to remedy many of humanity's woes. It turned out that, at the end of the day, even very sophisticated technology is infinitely inferior to quite simple and very well understood economic forces and political will.

atomashpolskiyon Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?

This sounds too simplistic (idealistic?). Maybe computers at their core are indeed pure, neutral information, but internet is definitely more than just that. It also amplifies all kinds of adverse mass psychology effects, rewards herd behavior, enables propaganda wars, provides means to monitor and control population at unprecedented scale, etc. I'm not saying that you're completely wrong, but I think you might be willing to see only the brighter side of it.

atomashpolskiyon Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?

More generally speaking, markets were killed by oligopolies.

atomashpolskiyon Ask HN: What's your Go-to web stack for Java?

I really prefer Bootique as an alternative to Spring Boot: https://bootique.io/ Simpler, smarter, very easy to customize.

For higher loads I pick Vert.x.

Other than that, it's almost always 3 J's: Jetty, Jersey, Jackson.

atomashpolskiyon Ask HN: Projects for learning a language?

Yeah, it seems like 90% of Rust jobs that are realistically accessible for someone with my background (different servers for the most part) are in crypto space, which I dislike, and there are very few of them as well. Java gives me better and more numerous options to choose from, and recently I even landed a Scala position in a very interesting domain. So it's about variety and job safety after all.

I also would not want to program in Rust for 100% of the time. It's a great tool to have for certain mission-critical types/parts of software where the cost of a mistake is high, but it also can be very frustrating to work with, at least until you become proficient with the idiomatic ways to structure programs and code in Rust. And even then I would not pick it for R&D type of work for instance, where you have to experiment and refactor a lot. Borrow checker is something you have to keep in mind at all times, and as I said already it can be extremely frustrating when you simultaneously have to think about design, execution logic and performance. Doubly so when the parts you're working on are not going to be concurrent in any foreseeable future.

OTOH, I can see how coding something well-defined and to the spec can be rewarding and less expensive in the long run with Rust.

atomashpolskiyon Ask HN: Projects for learning a language?

For learning Rust I just picked a random, reasonably sized C++ project and spent a few weeks porting it to Rust. Was more than enough to get a grip on the core language features and tools and start receiving interview offers for a Rust position (though I ultimately decided to stay on the JVM track). The project was a face detection library: https://github.com/atomashpolskiy/rustface

atomashpolskiyon Ask HN: What is your current side-project?

https://github.com/atomashpolskiy/bt

Has been my primary side project for the past 5 years. Looking for collaborators btw.

atomashpolskiyon Ask HN: What has been the biggest contributor in improving your sleep?

Drinking beer before going to bed. Sleep like a baby.

atomashpolskiyon Why has no one made a better Goodreads

I find Goodreads UX tasteless and clunky, especially on mobile. My favourite website in this department is fantlab.ru, though it's mostly in Russian.

atomashpolskiyon Funds for Open Source

Yeah, right. So this is not what I had in mind -- a way for the society to invest into projects that might not have an obvious immediate business value. Like society invests in raising and educating kids, for example, hoping that some of these kids will bring positive value to the world when they grow up.

atomashpolskiyon Funds for Open Source

Easier to add OSS tax into the social security payments. The difficult part is collecting usage analytics so that funds get distributed "fairly".

atomashpolskiyon Funds for Open Source

Did consulting, yes. Two concerns: 1) Some guys want IP on improvements to the original codebase 2) When I work on client's problems, I have less time to work on the original codebase, so the earned money is not exactly reinvested into the project, which is the primary point of donations.

atomashpolskiyon Funds for Open Source

So this is only for projects with paying or willing to pay customers, right?

Say, I have a small, permissively licensed personal project (bittorrent implementation), that has some userbase, including for-profit companies.

There is a lot of shit code in there, and many features are missing. Let us assume for the sake of the argument that given sufficient time I would be able to turn it into a state-of-the-art reference library. But given the current state of my financials I'm finding it hard to justify putting any effort into it for free at the moment and end up purchasing other opportunities not related to OSS.

I'm pretty sure it is not a unique situation and wonder if there are any solutions for this (e.g. angels, incubators, something like that?)

atomashpolskiyon GitHub, fuck your name change

In Russia we have a joke that would roughly translate to this:

Lesson in the primary school. Teacher says: "Kids, today we will be learning letter 'A'. Who can tell me some words that start with this letter?" Kids: "Apple! Address! Adventure!" One boy, Vova, says quietly: "Ass." "How rude, Vova!", the teacher exclaims, "There is no such word in English!". Vova, quietly: "How strange... Ass is there, but the word is not?"

Sums it up pretty well, I think.

atomashpolskiyon The EMA Covid-19 data leak, and what it tells us about mRNA instability

I'm all for science, but as one of the other comments points out, you can't ignore other factors at play and just exclude the humans from the equation. It's not like science is brought upon us from the heavens above. If some product cost billions in R&D and still does not work quite as planned, you may rest assured that the owners will go to all lengths to cover the losses and persuade buyers to ignore the facts as long as possible. This is simple logic, isn't it?

atomashpolskiyon The EMA Covid-19 data leak, and what it tells us about mRNA instability

Our instincts.

atomashpolskiyon Ask HN: Do you think Agile/Scrum is beneficial for software delivery?

I'm not arguing this, but what does it have to do with standups?

atomashpolskiyon Food Prices Are Soaring Faster Than Inflation and Incomes

Gotta contact the suicide hotline, man