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cosmiccatnap

69 karma · joined November 8, 2019

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cosmiccatnap··on Ask HN: How often do developers fail at their task?
I think for anyone who candidly tries and has a good understanding of programming, they won't fail if given reasonable time.

The problem is always the marketing, management, and c-suited who have never written a line of code in their lives but want to dictate the terms of a feature.

An example might be a new frontend page

On the surface there is a business use case for it, a client wants it asap. The sales and marketing get that feedback and push it along to the developer to estimate...now here is the issue

Sometimes it's easy and no big deal, you write a backend model that wraps a hopefully existing db table and a frontend to wrap that model. Hopefully you have some wireframes or even a crude mspaint example of what they expect. Sometimes you don't and just copy a similar page and adapt.

The issue comes when that isn't the case. Maybe the page they want ties six tables worth of data together and requires a mother of all stored procedures or a hard coded query in the backend somewhere. Maybe what they are asking has no symantic connection at all and you need to create six different lookup ID columns, maybe even what they want like a graph of complex data or a docx generated in JS is just a bad idea for page performance etc. Maybe the feature breaks the convention of your codebase entirely and becomes a security concern or requires a major package like react or flask to be updated to get a function that would simplify it. Any number of things can go wong and eventually do.

This all comes down to the company. At a good company developers and project managers have the freedom to express that the estimate for a feature or the scope or even rational for a feature is going to be complex and take time you will need to find. At big companies this means working on it while being in scrums or sprint meetings and quarterly meetings and brainstorming meetings and whatever the hell the sprint bingo or poker stuff is. A good management team will understand what they don't understand and give your team the bandwidth they need to do their job well.

At a bad company your estimate is ignored or shamed in some way and you are forced to lie which is often the case and say everything takes 2x as long to finish just in case there are crazy issues you didn't understand. The management will tell the cline yup front that a feature will only take a week before even talking to development estimating based on a similar ticket to snag a sale for themselves and when they are wrong they push that blame onto engineering to save their skin progress reports. If the feature doesn't make sense as described by the client to marketing and sales and you have no recourse then you end up creating bloated and needlessly complex software that is essentially designed by somewhat unnatural selection and over time you get random api endpoints and UI/UX sins that snowball into what we usually call "typical banking software" outlook is also an excellent example of this problem though.

Sadly the honest developers tend to go over budget or estimate at these companies and management typically only sees that as a data point in their tracking software and usually ask your micro-manager or PM to crack a whip without any context for why and how. Its invariably the engineers fault because every level beyond them has exponential disconnects as to what the true work of writing software requires in your codebase. They have no understanding of technical debt or limitations on front ends/backends.

Occasionally a new hire from college just can't cut it but I've never seen it happen because someone is genuinely not smart enough. If you just try in Ernest you will succeed somewhere but if you get fired for not delivering deadlines don't beat yourself up immediately, ask yourself what you were task to do and consider how realistic that was...and realize there are plenty of other jobs out there who will respect your opinion.

cosmiccatnap··on NASA – Artemis I – Liquid Hydrogen Leak Detected Once Again
With as many issues as they have had you would almost think that their budget had been significantly cut year over year despite almost universal agreement among Americans that it is one of our most noble institutions
cosmiccatnap··on TikTok is manipulative, addictive, and harmful to privacy
I agree but nobody is holding a gun to anyone's head telling them to watch cats smelling stuff and people making songs in response to hot takes.

You want to stop them? Make a better platform that respects their privacy while still trying to make a living.

Good luck, you'll need it.

cosmiccatnap··on Reading fast, reading well, and reading widely (2020)
I can and have. The author makes it quite engaging compared to reading it in book form which I have also done.
cosmiccatnap··on A new Linux handheld game console based on ODROID-N2
...it's running Linux. It will be supported until the sun dies.

It's also sad that you think I can't play games I own on this. As if I'm going to rip my mint copy of FFVII open when I can play it upscaled. It's just a sad backwards way to think about it.

cosmiccatnap··on The end of Moore's Law forced YouTube to make its own video chip
...or they needed a chip that supported av1 and despite all the major tech companies being a part of the working group for years none of them had implemented it because Nvidia has a stranglehold on the industry because it makes money from h26x codecs
cosmiccatnap··on Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay
What do you think the first step toward that is, if not this.

The benefits outweigh the cost several times over.

cosmiccatnap··on Oracle started as a CIA project (2014)
...that we are aware of
cosmiccatnap··on Design the next iPhone
Even in a fantasy I can't get usbc
cosmiccatnap··on The ABI status of ELF hash tables
Seems like there is some handwaving here that "DT_HASH" should be supported forever because "The DT_HASH format is mandated by the System V ABI specification"

It was replaced by DT_GNU_HASH in the gnu implementation of libc

....I think these people have forgotten what GNU stands for.

cosmiccatnap··on Apple M2 vs. AMD Ryzen 7 Pro 6850U Performance in Nearly 200 Benchmarks
It's telling that people don't know this is comparing the performance on Linux in the comments just based on the site.

It tells you how much the culture of HN has shifted away from technical and engineering types. It's also telling that they think 16gb of ram changes the outcome of very trivial tests that don't use 8gb anyway.

A typical programmer knows what phoronix is and does and shouldn't be surprised by how it performs tests since it has done so the same way for a decade...but then I suppose most people on this site are not technical people anymore.

cosmiccatnap··on 6 Raspberry Pis, 6 SSDs on a Mini ITX Motherboard
I love fun projects like this. I would love to know if I could make one a router since the nic has two ports.

I have a poweredge now which works fine but it's nowhere close to 20 watts and I barely use a quarter of it's cpu and memory

cosmiccatnap··on Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade
I had a laptop in storage and went on a trip. I didn't want to bring an expensive MacBook but I did want something that could take a note or two and check my email so I took a very old Dell latitude with me running arch on an intel 2xxx something (ancient)

When I booted it up I realized to my surprise I had been running arch not windows...so I checked my email and then decided on the hotel wifi to try and update it.

I will admit after about 6 years there was quite a bit of fumbling with pacman sources and keyrings and the delta to upgrade on a laptop that old and hotel wifi wasn't great but after I left it for an hour it finished.

I rebooted it and there I was in i3 without a thing wrong. Wild

Maybe if I used gnome it would have been a different story but I think the point of the article holds that arch is much more stable than people give it credit for if you are willing to learn a bit about how it works.

cosmiccatnap··on A little exercise each day improves muscles more than one big weekly workout
I'm not sure why this needed to be studied...

If you work out only one day you can work out for maybe two hours. You can easily workout an hour a day or even 30m which is still 5 hours a week...

Like, this study is kind of coming to the conclusion that working out more is more progress and we'll...yea duh

cosmiccatnap··on IRS audits poorest families at five times the rate for everyone else
Capital is a cascading problem of inequality.

If you have money you can pay to keep it by having someone well versed in the tax laws to find a loophole. If you have a lot of capital you can even then use that money to essentially buy a new loophole in the tax law.

Sad...but not surprising. Money buys everything in this age even laws and the people that govern them.

cosmiccatnap··on 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
I think people will look back on this time as a second guilded age.

They will look upon the greed and the ego of Zuck, Bezos, Gates and Musk the same way we look back upon J.P. Morgan, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, and Carnegie.

This statement will sound as bad to people in 2100 as arguing against 8 hour works days sounds to us now. How many generations folly have to be blamed on the working class before we can come to our senses and regulate those who would amass wealth beyond measure but cannot hold a single drop of responsibility, humility, or honesty without it burning their skin or slipping between their fingers.

cosmiccatnap··on NSA, NIST, and post-quantum crypto: my second lawsuit against the US government
It's funny how often the bitterness of a post is used as an excuse to dismiss the long and well documented case being made.
cosmiccatnap··on NSA, NIST, and post-quantum crypto: my second lawsuit against the US government
If you spend all day making bagels do you go home and make bagels for dinner?

It's a static text blog, not a bank

cosmiccatnap··on Forms in modals: UX case
Friends don't let friends commit modals
cosmiccatnap··on Microsoft Windows is prohibited at Gitlab
Using a fork to eat your soup is prohibited at Soups Only (tm)

HN: While I agree that eating a soup with a fork is bad, I think the employees should be able to try.

cosmiccatnap··on Pearson Says Blockchain Could Make It Money Every Time E-Books Change Hands
Pearson is a great example of how a single company can have such a profound effect on the accelerating decline of an educational system.

If you ask a soda manufacturer if water is good for you expect a point of contention, and with Pearson the same. That which is good for society might not and often is not good for a particular companies bottom line.

cosmiccatnap··on What the Hell Is Up with Dilbert?
The wild part is that you just pulled a Dilbert with this comment...
cosmiccatnap··on The Dangers of Microsoft Pluton
It's not open...well...at least not to you.

Anyone who calls something secure without publishing the spec is just selling you a bridge.

cosmiccatnap··on Shopify to lay off 10% of workers in broad shake-up
Marketing...
cosmiccatnap··on Lockdown: The coming war on general-purpose computing (2012)
"It’s tempting to stop the story here and conclude that the problem is that lawmakers are either clueless or evil, or possibly evilly clueless. This is not a very satisfying place to go, because it’s fundamentally a counsel of despair; it suggests that our problems cannot be solved for so long as stupidity and evilness are present in the halls of power, which is to say they will never be solved."

Sadly I think occam's razor applies here past this statement.

cosmiccatnap··on AWS open sourced the AWS console design system
Glad they did this. It should be taught in UX/UI design classes as a cautionary tale.
cosmiccatnap··on Ask HN: Remote work credit? I built an app that the company thinks my boss built
This is either astroturfed or one of the most depressing things I have ever heard another human genuinely believe.
cosmiccatnap··on The trouble with symbolic links
Features add complexity and robust features add robust complexity. Robust features that span a core component like filesystem handling span many utilities.

Maybe we should do the same search on samba vulnerabilities have have him take a look in the mirror...

cosmiccatnap··on Commenting on Hacker News
I find that there are many things controlling this not covered here.

1. Fanboys - if an article about an apple product is posted, the very idea of constructive criticism is somehow an affront to Steve's ghost. Same can be said for everyone except Google which seems to be the universal punching bag regardless.

2. Shilling - I'm glad that you are the creater of BloatJS and are willing to answer any questions that show your product in a positive light but you are also on the front page of /r/technology and 20 other blogs because you are trying to get VC funding. Maybe a few of these would be fine but it's hard not to see this suspiciously sitting in the top 5 on any given day and then see the author fumbling to answer the universal question of "what did this solve?"

3. Astroturfing - pick any major article, pick your poison, you will find the comment section littered with suites of all shapes and pay doing damage control with unsubstantiated claims that then cause argument loops that derail useful conversation. Someone will ask for a summery and a well thought out response will get a few bumps, meanwhile Tom who works in marketing has 136 replies to his "rebuttal" that things are fine at BloatSoft and word to the contrary is simply twitters fault.

It's not just HN it's any site that gets sufficiently big but the saddest part for me is how transparent it is. The size causes people who don't use these technologies to lurk around all day and people who make them to defend it all day and the margin of actual people who don't have some axe to grind gets fewer and fewer until they, intelligently, realize one day it's all fluff and not worth their time.

People get called out for just reading the headlines of articles but when half of them are false advertisement and a good chunk of them are just literal ads no wonder...and mercy be upon anyone coming to the comment section for clarity.

cosmiccatnap··on We haven’t killed 90% of all plankton
In practice...we have. The idea that our behaviour will somehow drastically improve is pretty optimistic to put it mildly.

In practice, it is almost a statistical inevitability that we will continue to overpopulate at this point and in that way there is nothing hyperbolic about the statement that, more than likely, they are as good as dead.

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