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castwide

80 karma · joined June 20, 2019

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castwide··on Sticky wage norms and the real wage cost of unexpected inflation
Nothing you include in "total compensation" is guaranteed by employment.
castwide··on Polymarket has flooded social media with deceptive videos by paid creators
Alternative link without paywall: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/they-looked-like-t...
castwide··on Rockstar employee shares account of the company's union-busting efforts
I imagine the GP was referring to the fact that Costco experiences that kind of growth while giving their employees excellent pay and benefits. Even low-level store employees typically make $20-30 an hour.
castwide··on Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming
I can appreciate the desire to focus on abilities first, but this felt like a shotgun approach to the same old checklist strategy. Like a crawler found my resume somewhere on the web based on a few keywords, and the recruiter couldn't even tell me what the keywords were.
castwide··on Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming
In my experience, it felt that way from the outside. I got solicited by five different Amazon recruiters in 2022 alone. The one time I engaged, they didn't even have a specific role in mind. It definitely gave me the impression of blanket hiring with the primary (if not sole) purpose of increasing headcount.
castwide··on The Two Towers MUD
Bartle also wrote Notes from the Dawn of Time, a great series of articles about MUD design and programming. The stuff about command parsing is especially interesting.

https://www.skotos.net/articles/DAWNOF.shtml.html

castwide··on College Students Are Using 'No Contact Orders' to Block Each Other in Real Life
Safe spaces aren't really censorship. People are allowed to make fun of them. The hypocrisy comes into play when the ones who claim they're not allowed to speak their minds seem more like they really just want the entire world around them to be their safe space.
castwide··on Make It Ephemeral: Software Should Decay and Lose Data
Fair point. But that just means the breadth of files that might need to be preserved is even broader than I suggested.
castwide··on Make It Ephemeral: Software Should Decay and Lose Data
I'm talking documents in a very general sense. It might be a text file, audio, video, a software installer, source code, or anything at all.

> A video from the 90s that you never read or accessed in that period? Yes, a candidate for deletion, or at least a decay. For example, if it was a video, the transcript might be saved, but the video might be lost. We may also get some written interpretation on the visual elements of the video.

My point is that the video shouldn't decay, either. It might not be playable in modern media software for a variety of reasons, but that doesn't automatically make it a candidate for deletion.

castwide··on Make It Ephemeral: Software Should Decay and Lose Data
The disagreement here seems to be about what kind of data should be considered ephemeral. Traffic logs from a decade ago? A ten-year-old package lock? I'm sure I don't care anymore. Documents I wrote in the 90s? Yeah, I might still want them. I might not need them everyday, but I can say from experience that I've needed to track down files that are more than a decade old, and I'm glad I was able to find them.
castwide··on The bottom is dropping out of Netflix
I feel like Netflix has been declining for years. A decade ago, their recommendation algorithm was phenomenal. Today, both their library and their recommendations are severely lacking. I'm not sure how much longer I'll bother to subscribe.
castwide··on What’s entering the public domain on January 1
Heirs benefit because intellectual property is inheritable in the same way as any other property, such as real estate. If I owned a valuable copyright, I'd certainly want my children to get it in the event of my death. (Though I still agree that copyrights endure longer than they should.)
castwide··on The Further Text Adventures of Scott Adams
I can't imagine how many future developers were originally inspired to learn programming by playing your games. A text adventure was the first thing I wanted to make when I learned BASIC on a VIC-20. Even now, I maintain an interactive fiction SDK for Ruby (https://gamefic.com). Thanks, Scott!
castwide··on The fast-food workers’ season of rebellion
I suspect wages aren't the only thing impacting prices. External factors like material shortages and supply chain problems have also had an effect.
castwide··on Google Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro
I only had to review Doodles since October 1 to find Yoram Gross and Ivan Piddubny (the latter of whom was exceptionally able-bodied).
castwide··on WeWork Book: The $10T Mirage
Not worthless, but last I heard it was at a $9 billion valuation after receiving around $20 billion in venture capital, so not exactly a success story either.
castwide··on Show HN: DragonRuby Game Toolkit
I can vouch for Ruby's practicality as an embedded scripting language. The first time I used it was in a game engine (which, IIRC, also predated Rails) with a C++ core. Writing the high-level game logic in Ruby was pleasant, and hooking into C++ functions that did the heavy lifting kept it performant.
castwide··on Ultima VIII – How to destroy a gaming franchise in one easy step
MMORPGs have always been a mix of both. UO was definitely one of the most sandboxy, but it also demonstrated why a sandbox full of children needs a supervisor.
castwide··on Peter Naur's view of programming
The article makes a lot of good points, but I disagree with the notion that source code is worthless. The true test of the source's value isn't what would happen if it got stolen. It's what would happen if it disappeared altogether.
castwide··on Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies
Especially anyone who works in law, government, banking, or healthcare.
castwide··on HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash
> If you ignore the tooling of Flash, very little about it is appealing.

The tooling seems to be what most people miss. That's not trivial. Adobe Animate is supposed to fill that void, but from what I've seen, it's a long way from a drop-in solution.

castwide··on Ruby 3.0
rc1 was just a few days ago, but preview1 was released in September.
castwide··on Amazon hires 427,000 people in 10 months
I agree 100%, and often use NewEgg and Monoprice for specific needs, but there's a huge swath of stuff where I check Amazon first just because they're always competitively priced and ubiquitous. Recently, there was an appliance accessory I needed that was only available from Amazon. Their position as the first place to buy online is crazy.
castwide··on Things I Was Wrong About: Types
Any example where the type is defined as something more specific than an array (especially in PHP, where the `array` type doesn't even differentiate between numerically indexed arrays and dictionaries).

Regardless, I still think the type hints in Symfony's version are better than nothing. It's also worth noting that `private static` is concerned with scope, not types.

castwide··on Things I Was Wrong About: Types
> You know it returns an array, but you don't know what the array contains. So you don't know how to use it.

That's a limitation of your specific example, not type systems in general.

castwide··on RBS, Ruby’s new type signature language
I'm still trying to make sense of this announcement. With a lack of type annotation in the Ruby core, I chose to build off YARD to make gradual type safety work. Now I don't know if there will be a standard that supports type safety or if I should continue down the path I'm already following. Help me, Ruby core developers. You're my only hope.

(edit: I should have explained that I'm talking about the type checking features I'm developing in Solargraph: https://solargraph.org/guides/type-checking)

castwide··on Browser Games Aren't an Easy Target
To be fair, they probably have more practical reasons for using Rust than simply to obfuscate the code.
castwide··on Anti Homeless Spikes
Part of that problem might be explained by thoughtlessness, but I can think of four practical reasons:

1. "Trash" marks a spot where you intend to return. This can help ensure that you have a regular place to sleep.

2. What appears to be trash might have some value to the hoarder, e.g., trashy but wearable clothing, recyclables, etc.

3. Litter can camouflage minor valuables, so you can accomplish #1 and also have a hiding place for stuff people might steal.

4. Given all of the above, trash naturally gathers in a homeless community and eventually gets dumped however is most practical.

castwide··on The Startup Side Project Bubble (2013)
I think the reasonable takeaway is "don't let your side project interfere with your job," but the article comes dangerously close to conflating it with "employees shouldn't have side projects." The draconian aspect of the latter becomes obvious if you replace "side projects" with "hobbies."
castwide··on Ask HN: My company wants my side project. What can I do?
IANAL, but it's definitely not that simple. I've worked in salaried positions and still retained ownership of my side projects. There was also one instance where I refused to sign a NCA that threatened my IP, so YMMV.
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