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conor-

267 karma · joined February 10, 2019

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conor-··on Gorhill pulls uBlock Origin Lite from Firefox store
Blink is to Servo what Chromium is to Firefox.

Supporting Servo on its own doesn't really move the needle a whole lot if it's missing all of the rest of the bits that make a comprehensive browser.

Firefox is already using Servo (at least in the form of Quantum) under the hood and is still the best option available to prevent more of a complete Blink monoculture than already exists with every other major browser being Blink-based or some reskin/fork of Chromium

conor-··on Meta's Hack (HHVM) language appears to be no longer maintained
Wouldn't the large amount of existing services written in Hack be reason enough to keep it around?

The cost of rewrites at that scale certainly has to be far more expensive than the cost of paying a team to maintain HHVM

conor-··on Valve New Employee Handbook (2012) [pdf]
At this point, sunken cost into a Steam library aside, I won't buy a game if it isn't on Steam and at least SteamDeck supported.

Valve alone has made it possible to game full-time on Linux as a first class citizen and has greatly improved a lot of the Linux desktop experience which is more than enough for me to be willing to continue to only buy games from them.

conor-··on Eric Schmidt Says Google Is Falling Behind on AI–and Remote Work Is Why
Maybe they just need to invent LeetCode interviews for PM and BA roles
conor-··on Go is my hammer, and everything is a nail
I haven't looked too deeply into it but I came across https://github.com/ergo-services/ergo not too long ago and thought it could be pretty interesting to try using OTP in Golang

Packaging a Go service in Docker and dumping it into k8s is probably the easier/better understood path but also deploying Go services onto an Erlang node just sounds more fun

conor-··on Go is my hammer, and everything is a nail
I think it depends on what kind of data you're dealing with. If you know the shape of your data, it's pretty trivial to create a struct with json tags and serialize/deserialize into that struct. But if you're dealing with data of an unknown shape it can be tricky to work with that. In Python because of dynamic typing and dicts it's a little easier to deserialize arbitrary data.

Go's net/http is also slightly lower level. You have to concern yourself directly with some of the plumbing and complexity of making an http request and how to handle failures that can occur. Whereas in Python you can use the requests lib and fire off a request and a lot of that extra plumbing just happens for free and you don't have to deal with any of the extra complexity if you don't want to.

I find Go to be bad for interviewing in a lot of cases because you get bogged down with minutiae instead of working directly towards solving the exact problem presented in the interview. But that minutiae is also what makes Go nice to work with on real projects because you're often forced into writing safer code

conor-··on Go is my hammer, and everything is a nail
As someone who isn't super proficient in Java I usually find Java daunting to get started with full of buckets of "meta" issues like in my other comment.

What JVM do I use? Does it matter?

Does it matter what version I install, what if I have to install/manage multiple versions?

If I want to write a web service can I use vanilla Java stdlib or do I have to use Spring or some framework? If I use Spring, do I have to get into the weeds of dependency injection and other complexity to actually get my app off the ground?

With Go, none of those questions exist. I install the latest Go, create a main.go file, I use net/http and I'm off to the races.

conor-··on Go is my hammer, and everything is a nail
Go is the only language I've ever felt highly productive working in. Oftentimes in other stacks I find myself in analysis paralysis on meta things that don't matter:

- what design patterns/language features make sense to use

- what is the best lib to accomplish X

- how do you keep things up to date

With Go, the language is so simple that it's pretty difficult to over engineer or write terse code. Everything you need is in stdlib. The tooling makes dependency management and upgrades trivial because of strong backwards compatibility.

conor-··on GitButler is now fair source
Considering GitHub created their own implementation of git to dance around the gray areas of the GPL, it doesn't really come as a surprise that the new product from the same people are also shying away from copyleft or permissible licensing.

Obviously that's likely a pretty uncharitable interpretation of something a lot more nuanced, but it's really frustrating to watch companies increasingly benefit from GPL'd software while simultaneously taking their ball and going home when it's convenient.

conor-··on Official proposal for Type Unions in C#
This[0] lib implements F#-style discriminated unions. The way I've used it is to make my outer layers return "Result" types that wrap the DTO, error, etc. under one umbrella. It allows for pattern matching your results which makes error handling easier and also allows your models to evolve over time without changing your function signatures at the edge.

[0] https://github.com/mcintyre321/OneOf

conor-··on Moments in Chromecast's history
I actually just bought a current gen Chromecast because I was looking for a "plug it in so I can watch YouTube on my TV" device similar to the Gen1 and was also dismayed at being forced to register/log in with a Google account and go through all of the hoops. I wish I had done more research and had I known that current Chromecasts are basically just a thin proxy of the exact same "Google TV OS" that ships on a lot of current smart TVs I would have paid the premium to buy a Nvidia Shield or something
conor-··on Why is it so hard for the U.S. to build quality transit?
I've seen a lot of suggestions that there should at least be a high speed rail corridor from Chicago to NYC and one from SF to LA because those are 2 of the most highly trafficked domestic flight paths.

The fact there isn't really high speed rail connections across large cities in the Midwest is kind of silly considering there isn't much terrain to contend with like there is on the coasts. Even the 1 new route Amtrak introduced from Chicago to Minneapolis has seen pretty high demand.

conor-··on Ask HN: Who Went Mac –> Linux?
> I can tweak my Debian all day long but it won't ever run Rufus

Why do you need to run Rufus instead of using dd or mkisofs?

> if I baby Debian and focus on particular workflows, I can set up a workflow for what I want-aka a writing environment or my golang environment but it lacks the robustness of jumping between applications seemlessly like Windows has

This sounds like something solvable by switching to a different desktop environment or using a window manager with more configurable options

> Debian however won't allow me to run windows apps, will have driver issues (like my completely incompatible-still audio drivers for a laptop from 2008)

Perhaps this is a Debian-specific issue because of restricting non-free repos by default and other less principally stanced distros wouldn't suffer from that issue? Also many Windows apps that don't even run on Windows anymore will run perfectly fine under Linux with Wine or other compatibility layers.

conor-··on Don't Just Say "Hello" in Chat
You can always reply and say "can you send me a link to that" and place the onus back onto whoever is asking something about that Jira.

Do that enough times and eventually people start to get the hint.

conor-··on Tooling has improved for ambitious software developers
> its called a container for a reason, its how we isolate your shitty application from bringing down the rest of the system or the hardware that you dont understand

This reads as extremely cynical and also uncharitable towards the benefits containers provide around managing different versions of dependencies or run-times for the people who do understand the hardware.

It's really nice to not have to wrangle multiple versions of Python or set up venvs or whatever else on a target server that may be hosting separate apps. The alternative of having a couple of self-contained containers with nginx in front of it is better in many ways.

conor-··on I'm a Programmer and I'm Stupid
I'd probably fall more in the spectrum of dumb programmer vs smart one, but I like clean code/consistently enforced patterns because it reduces the amount of mental overhead required to get code state into your brain. I'd rather focus on actually solving the problem at hand vs wrangling with messy, overly clever code.

That's one of the reason I like Go so much. The language is simple and easy to read with common, idiomatic patterns to the point it just gets out of your way and you can actually focus on what you're trying to do instead of spinning your wheels with a million clever ways to write the same code.

conor-··on Ask HN: What would you look for in a platform to learn programming?
> what does the perfect programming education platform look like to you?

A series of loosely guided, non-interactive tutorials that require researching/figuring out on your own with some pointed hints when one gets stuck. Many of the online platforms are too hand-held and gloss over a lot of pretty important details about the how/why of writing, building, running a program. It'd be nice to see something that introduces a lot of correct vocabulary for unknown unknowns that equips someone with the tools needed to find answers on their own by knowing the right words to punch into a search engine.

Even just referring to the opening pages from K&R it says: "you have to be able to create the program text somewhere, compile it successfully, load it, run it, and find out where your output went. With these mechanical details mastered, everything else is comparatively easy." Jumping right into "hello world" that runs in a fully abstracted web IDE glosses over so much of the basics that a complete programming novice wouldn't understand.

My experience with being self-taught was that struggling with really basic things like installing the language/runtime/whatever and actually getting a hello world working to then write more involved apps was just as valuable as actually building a project because it required learning how to find answers and discover the correct vocabulary to articulate the language, system, tools I was using

conor-··on AMD Publishes XDNA Linux Driver: Support for Ryzen AI on Linux
I bit the bullet and transitioned to Linux full time after Windows kept nuking my boot sectors every time it had to do an update and haven't looked back at all. Even gaming on Linux is continually getting better with more and more competitive MP games with anti-cheats supporting Linux now due to the SteamDeck

Unless you're working on something that is heavily Windows-specific (legacy .NET Framework, Win32, Visual C++, etc.) that requires Visual Studio and Windows as a runtime developing on Linux is a much nicer experience.

conor-··on Good DevEx increases productivity. Here is the data
GitHub Actions is predicated on push n' pray SDLC. Actions is also showing some of the warts that exist from being forked from the old Azure DevOps TFS pipelines.

I haven't used GitLab CI runner too often, but the carrot of being able to use a runner on my local machine is extremely appealing.

conor-··on Ask HN: Is Traditional College Education Obsolete in the Tech Industry?
1. CS programs tend to focus on fundamentals that are building blocks for many things in the industry, even with a fast-pace of change (or more often high level of churn) so "keeping up" is probably better left to specialized programs or bootcamps to teach very specific technology rather than academic/foundational principles. However it'd probably serve CS tracks well to introduce something like a CompTIA A+ course as a 101 class since a lot of the tracks are predicated on students knowing the basics of a computer, which is increasingly less common as the post-PC era kids are becoming college aged.

2. It depends. There aren't really any shortcuts to becoming a well-versed or competent engineer. Being self-taught still requires putting in as many hours (or probably much, much more) than going through a traditional 4yr CS program and that probably is a much more difficult path in almost every case.

3. I don't know how much weight is put on this in general, but my experience is that not having a degree results in a lot of applications being discarded immediately. I personally don't care about someone's background as long as they know what they are doing or are capable learners.

4. I think this is kind of flipping in the opposite direction in the last handful of years. There was a sweet spot in the 2010s where self-teaching using online resources was very doable and it wasn't terribly hard to find high quality content- but with the rise of CV-boosting blogspam that just rewrites the "Getting Started" page of a popular framework (a large chunk of Medium) and AI-generated content being pumped to the top of web search results it is becoming very difficult to find high-quality, accurate content to base learning off of and I think returning to books or forms of learning provided by traditional ed will become more common as there is some curation and signals for quality.

5. My background is self-taught through being generally interested in computers and just learning anything I could through using Linux/FOSS tools/engaging with various communities adjacent to those interests. College wasn't accessible to me for cost reasons, so I got a job as a tech support rep after high school to get a foot in the door of a software company and climbed through QA to software engineer, to infrastructure, devops and whatever else in-between. I think college is still the best path for most people because self-learning either requires insane amounts of discipline or an unusually deep interest in computers and tech for its own sake (not just as a means to an end of a job). I also think the tech industry has matured a lot and the era of getting hired by being self-taught with some demonstrable skills is over just due to the sheer volume of job seekers in the industry and a degree being the minimum gate used when evaluating new hires.

conor-··on Xfinity had a data breach [pdf]
> What Information Was Involved? On December 6, 2023, we concluded that the information included usernames and hashed passwords. For some customers, other information was also included, such as names, contact information, last four digits of social security numbers, dates of birth and/or secret questions and answers. However, our data analysis is continuing, and we will provide additional notices as appropriate.
conor-··on Cats kill a staggering number of species across the world
There's a handful of programs around Chicago that involve TNRing feral cats[0] and providing them a caretaker so that they can hunt rats. You pretty much just provide the feral cat with food, water, and somewhere outside to sleep and let the cat be a cat.

[0] e.g. https://treehouseanimals.org/programs/community-cats/catsatw...

conor-··on Am I a Good C Programmer?
How do you feel about Go if you've ever worked with it? It seems like it was intended to solve exactly those types of pain points associated with maintaining Java programs
conor-··on Should Windows have a default CLI editor?
I think it feels like the inverse. It seems like MS wants people to use more CLI and has been retrofitting PowerShell as a full-fledged Windows administration layer. But the problem with it being retrofitted is it feels very clunky and difficult to explore.

There's also Windows Terminal which seems like a genuine attempt at making interacting with shells in Windows less painful in general.

conor-··on Spotlight: Sentry for Development
Thanks for the reply. Would the Spotlight sidecar possibly be able to run independently and consume spans emitted by the Sentry exporter[0] or some other similar flow beyond strictly exporting directly from the Sentry SDK provided by Spotlight?

This tooling looks really cool and I'd love to play around with it, but am already pretty entrenched into OTel and funneling data through the collector and don't want to introduce too much additional overhead for devs.

[0] https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-co...

conor-··on Spotlight: Sentry for Development
Is this supposed to be intended for people who are already all-in with Sentry? Or can you possibly share some insight as to where this makes sense to use vs instrumenting with an OTEL SDK?
conor-··on Ask HN: How are you dealing with the job market anxiety?
Foundational skills can mean different things. In your example of React/Redux the foundational skills means learning things like how the JS Eventloop works, browser APIs, Layer 7 networking protocols, etc. i.e. the underpinnings of what React/Redux relies on to work correctly rather than just learning how to write a bunch of stuff on top of React without fully grokking the what/why of what's happening.

All of the aforementioned skills are broad and will allow you to pick up new things a lot faster because you understand the foundations vs just being shoehorned into being "$Framework Engineer"

conor-··on Microsoft Will Eventually Start Charging You for Windows 10 Security Updates
Linux is closer to being a generally accessible OS than ever before, especially with Valve pushing it as a 1st class platform for gaming.

A desktop environment like KDE is a fully modern, integrated desktop even down to being able to use KDE Connect to use your smart phone from your desktop.

You mentioned hating Ubuntu and 3 other distros, but really the fundamental differences between distros is mostly how they package software, and how frequently they downstream new software. Install something like Pop_OS, never touch a terminal and move on.

conor-··on Ask HN: How are you dealing with the job market anxiety?
Where do you typically find out about local meetups, events, etc.?
conor-··on Ask HN: How are you dealing with the job market anxiety?
I think the reduction in that working is because of an over-saturation of people who play buzzword bingo on their resume, LinkedIn, whatever to the point that it's impossible for a hiring manager to really discern who actually has a broad set of skills vs who is just trying to jam noise in the signal.

That's probably where social connections come in because it at least provides a verification layer of "yeah X actually does know how to do A, B, and C we should get them into the hiring pipeline"

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