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bsanderton Ask HN: What open source project, in your opinion, has the highest code quality?

This is not necessarily about the code, but I've been really impressed for a while by the lodash project and its maintainer's dedication to constantly keep the number of open issues at 0. Any issues get dealt with at record speed, it's quite a sight to see.

https://github.com/lodash/lodash/issues

bsanderton Reality Driven Development: Fixing Project Management in Software

In my experience, knowing when work on some functionality will _start_ plus a rough estimate on effort (talking hours/days/weeks level) is quite acceptable for most stakeholders. It is also far easier to provide, and less likely to be off by an order of magnitude, which some low-level estimates may suffer from.

bsanderton Software Testing Anti-patterns

    it('sends an email to the user', ...)

bsanderton Chrome 59 stable released

One I've been looking forward to for a while: native notifications on OSX!

bsanderton Show HN: Early-stage Yahoo Pipes spiritual successor

Vendor lock-in.

bsanderton Malicious Subtitles Threaten Kodi, VLC and Popcorn Time Users

Please don't fall into the Dunning-Kruger[0] trap by assuming a straightforward task is also easy to perform. These things may very well be complex and include aspects that are not immediately obvious. And even if they don't, even simple code executing simple tasks can be vulnerable to bugs or flawed reasoning without the authors (or tooling) being stupid or naive.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

bsanderton GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

Feature-wise it's great but the .com version can be really slow. A simple git push of a few small commits took me about 50 seconds earlier this week.

bsanderton Thought Experiments to De-Risk Your Startup

> It's super powerful because word dropping cost nothing to produce and cost a lot to dismiss with proper arguments.

Sounds like you may be referring to the Bullshit Asymmetry Priciple: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit#Bullshit_asymmetry_pr...

bsanderton Amazon seller’s account suspended after changing profile name on Kindle Fire

This also reminds me of a talk by Maxim Februari at the most recent TEDx Amsterdam[0]. From the description:

The infrastructure of connected things [..] imposes norms on citizens. Not in the form of written laws: the norms are hidden in the design of things. Citizens can’t protest the new laws, or change them, because they do not know them. And because decisions are made automatically, the laws can’t even be violated [..]

[0]: https://youtu.be/qIVTKBeiabI (skip to 2:30 to get to the meat directly)

bsanderton What’s wrong with Git? A conceptual design analysis

Git only started really clicking with me when I started thinking of most of my actions as graph building and traversals. It also helps to realize that for most intents and purposes, commits in git are immutable and "destructive" actions such as rebase don't _actually_ rewrite history, but rather create a new path in the graph and moves your branch pointer to it, leaving all previous commits intact (though potentially hard to reach and subject to garbage collection).

bsanderton Ask HN: What is your favorite internet rabbit hole?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_eponymous_laws

Which contains (apart from the obvious Murphy's law and Occam's razor) such pearls as the Peter Principle, the Dunning-Kruger effect, and Hofstadter's Law. 20+ tabs guaranteed!

bsanderton Primary Model Predicts Trump Victory

Not specifically about this prediction, but he touched on the uncertainty factor in the latest Model Talk podcast episode: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-much-uncertainty-is-...

bsanderton 'Black Mirror' Is Back, Reflecting Our Technological Fears

That one and the Christmas Special were the two episodes that kept me up at night.

bsanderton EC2's most dangerous feature

What also floats on water?

bsanderton Why's that company so big? I could do that in a weekend

To me this is a form of the Dunning-Kruger effect[0], where only somewhat informed people estimate the cost of a "0.1" (or POC) release without considering the famous "unknown unknowns" which may involve scaling, billing, 3rd party integrations, etc.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

bsanderton Don't Start Big, Start a Little Snowball

While luck isn't something you can completely control, it doesn't have to be entirely random either. I read this article a while back talking about a "luck surface area"[0], which you can expand, increasing your odds of being "lucky" in the future.

[0]: http://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/increasing-your-luck-surf...

bsanderton Insomnia 3.0 – A simple and beautiful REST API client

I would love to see a general purpose API client that works similar to the Elasticsearch client Sense [0]. A simple, free-text scratchpad style client that allows for easy editing and firing of requests. Maybe it's hard to support all the advanced functionality this way, but I find Sense absolutely invaluable when working with Elasticsearch and would love to use it on other API.

[0]: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/sense/current/introduction.h...

bsanderton Why we lost Uber as a user

> The PostststgreSQL project never fails to impress me.

Let's see how many iterations we'll need for people to actually notice what was pointed out here ;)

bsanderton John Oliver buys $15M in debt and forgives all of it on 'Last Week Tonight'

Love that podcast. Really a shame he's stepping down from it.

bsanderton Specifying JSON

Try writing YAML in combination with templating (such as in Salt). Because indentation means hierarchy, it's terrible. I'd much rather use JSON in such a context.

bsanderton Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?

Yes. This is one of the main reasons I like to do most of my writing (which, admittedly, is not a whole lot) with Markdown.

bsanderton A Protocol for Dying

I am from the Netherlands. Euthanasia is legal here, although strictly regulated (as I think it should be by the way, this is not the sort of choice that should be taken or approved lightly by anyone involved). Several doctors had to sign off on it, and they were thorough in making sure that this was his decision alone and that nobody around him was "pushing" him into it. Fortunately (if you can call it that), his medical situation was a textbook case of unbearable and hopeless suffering, and also he still had a clear enough mind to express his wishes. That made the approval process fairly straightforward in his case.

bsanderton A Protocol for Dying

I stand corrected.

bsanderton A Protocol for Dying

Or he may have been diagnosed one or more years ago.

bsanderton A Protocol for Dying

From personal experience, I can very much relate to and agree with this piece. My father went through a similar process: cancer (melanoma) – two years of treatment and coming to terms with the facts – euthanasia. As a family, we have been very matter-of-fact about it, which was definitely something he encouraged and participated in. We frequently talked about all aspects of his disease, the future, how it affected him and us. Sometimes one of us sighed that it would have been so much better if he would have suddenly died in his sleep but I always disagreed with that, it would just have come with a different set of emotions and grieving. I am actually very happy that we were able to share parts of this process with each other while he was still around.

The weekend before his death, our house was filled with people who worked up the courage to come say goodbye, he sat among them in the living room and took a few minutes in person with everyone as much as his state allowed. I sat on his bed as he was treated with euthanasia, which was one of the most intense experiences of my life. I still miss the man every day, but because of the process we had together, I have nothing but fond memories of the times he was still there, including the very hard periods of time that come with a disease like this.

This turned into a bit more text than I intended but my point is this: If you ever have a choice in the way you are to die, take heed of the points in this story. It may seem brutal at times to be as honest and open as you can about such an intimate process, but having gone through it once, I have absolutely no regrets. I wish Pieter and his loved ones all the best in the coming times.

bsanderton GitHub is down

whoosh

bsanderton Use the Unofficial Bash Strict Mode (Unless You Love Debugging)

Yes, but for use in a CI it's a real drag

bsanderton Heisenberg Developers (2014)

> The company is bigger than you are, its decisions weigh heavier than yours. Stop with the ego-belief that you know better than it.

You sound just like a church.

Friction is good, differences in opinions and priorities are good. Especially in a creative environment. When a part of that is silenced based on just organisational/hierarchical arguments, everyone involved will become less effective in one way or another.

I do agree with you that after not being able to fix the organisational problem, walking away is not the cowards path.

bsanderton Two HN Announcements

> I read a study on it once, but I can't find it now.

You mean you had it once, but now you lost it?