This is my throw away account. I got tired of fighting with assholes with my high karma account and just decided to make a throw away account. So many techbro assholes on here that have ruined HN. Y'all need to get laid and get a life.
>Being in meetings means you get to be in the room when decisions are made.
That was never my experience, especially if those meetings were standup meetings as the parent poster was referring. The standup meetings were a lot of feel good so the business could cajole the developers. Any actual coordination that needed to happen was outside those meetings among developers, with the business making their own decisions and dictating from on high.
I have a cat who will deliberately create a diversion so that she can steal my chair. I know when she’s doing it, but I go along anyway because it’s fun. The first time I saw her do this, it involved pushing the lift button on the motorized standing desk. I stood up, she jumped into my seat. She does similar tricks with other chairs around the house.
We were just talking about this yesterday in my family... I think you should take it as a sign of intimacy, that is to say that there is a familiarity and and comfort such that they are willing to share things about their personal life as though you know them on that level. Either that or they just aren't self aware enough to know that you don't have any idea who Emma and Jake are. The better approach is to say something like "I had to watch my son Jake for two hours" so that the listener has context, but of course that assumes the speaker is aware enough in their communication patterns to want to give the other party helpful cues.
I know there are many fans of these technologies here, but it’s been more than a decade and I still find myself asking the basic question of “what problem are we actually trying to solve?”
I could share my opinions, but in each case the answer doesn’t make sense. Instead, it’s groups with their own agendas using bitcoin / blockchain as a battering ram to achieve their ends.
I love what your cousin did, but there’s a big difference between that and beekeeping. Not even the same types of bees. The bees kept for honey / wax production and pollination are more like livestock than “nature.”
My son is learning Java and Python for a middle school class. I encouraged him to download Squeak and learn Smalltalk, as to my thinking a student is going to struggle to understand OOP if you jump into Java and Python. I know there are many OOP haters here on HN, but I'd encourage you to take a hard look at Smalltalk and consider how it approaches software engineering - it might convert you into a fan.
Ruby might superficially syntactically look like Smalltalk in a few places, but the actual semantics of the language and the overall toolset are nothing alike. Smalltalk was ahead of its time. The licensing and the hardware demands were too much of a burden, but the language and combined tooling solved many problems in elegant ways that today we attempt to solve with a big pile of stuff.
FWIW: There are plenty of landlords in the world who are willing to keep rents down in order to keep a good tenant, IE: you take good care of the property and pay on time. On the other hand, if they decide to up your rent over a leaky faucet, then it was only a matter of time anyway.
Loads of non-profits and small businesses that have surprisingly demanding tech needs but can't afford / don't understand / can't manage / have only a part-time need, etc.
No kidding. I would have preferred to migrate the client to GitHub, but they were convinced that wasn't acceptable - had to run their own GitLab. Turned into a mess of managing Gitlab updates and BS rather than working on the product.
Welcome to the cycle... don't worry, they will make you do devops soon enough too... then, maybe after they've burned through enough people or have lost enough money through broken software and ops, they will start hiring QA and ops again. Or, they will send it all offshore because the onshore talent isn't any good anyway - they keep leaving and costing us money with their broken software! Rinse, repeat.
Because good sir, rather than being snotty and downvotey and the type of jerk who has utterly ruined HN, I chose to reveal myself as a fellow beekeeper in hopes that there might be fellow beekeepers here who would also want to share their stories.
So, perhaps learn how to human and instead say something like "Wow, other HN human, I'd love to learn more. Have you ever noticed that different flowers or trees make a noticeable difference with your apiary? Have you experienced varoa? What's your thoughts on the various types of European bees, especially those that may have varoa resistance?" or any other number of hundreds of questions that might add to the dialog.
Or continue to shitpost, I don't care - this is my throw away account because I got tired of responses like yours utterly devoid of curiosity and just here to shit on everyone else.
Just harvested honey this past week from my hives... taste was absolutely the best honey I've ever imagined. So much more floral and complex than anything store bought. Watched them fly back and forth from the lavender to the hives all last summer.
I refuse to pay for either NYT or WaPo subscriptions specifically because of the OpEd pages. It's one thing to encourage provocation for the purpose of social dialog, but the abject lies and violence that both publications have allowed onto their pages are inexcusable. The NYT in particular has been given this reverent status by the left that it just doesn't deserve - it isn't your paper, they don't speak for you, their goal is no different than Fox News, IE: to attract paying eyeballs.
20 years ago when I was going to school in Winneshiek county, the average winter temperature was considered to be 19F. Lots of -50F nights. About every other year there was at least one story of someone freezing to death when their car broke down, etc.
>there is an incentive to get the most out of the individual negotiation since you almost certainly will never see each other again
You've got great insights here. That said, I can't help but think that perception - that it is a one-time, transaction relationship - is a key difference between winners and losers. What I mean is, from the standpoint of the salesperson, they should be seeking a long-term win and not just a win in this transaction. We'll use your example of a car, but I can think of many other places where this also applies. In the the car situation - you really want to sell / lease them the car, but you also want there services business. You want them to tell their friends to come buy from you. You want them to come back in 5-10 years and buy/ lease their next car from you. None of that happens if they walk away feeling like it wasn't a fair situation.
Likewise, even in a seemingly "done" negotiation, things have a way of cropping up. Like the buyer comes to take possession of the car and decides that the tires look more worn than what they believe, and suddenly want to renegotiate. Or, maybe you've agreed on price already, have started signing the paperwork, but then the salesperson wants to upsell you on the truecoat. Point being - I think you were even more right than you may have intended, in terms of the ongoing nature of negotiations rather than a fixed-position scenario.
Outside Smalltalk, TDD has never "worked" for me. But in a Smalltalk environment it was an absolute no-brainer and super slick because the environment was set up for it to just work. The nuance is the code-build-test cycle. In Smalltalk, they were all one and the same. In other languages and with other VMs, that cycle is disconnected. Likewise, once we moved to web applications, things changed. Now the unit we want to test is the API, or the widget, not really the function per se, but every TDD tradition has been at a much lower level. It overlooks that it takes real time and energy to build out tests at that higher level, and there are better tools than what have traditionally been "TDD."
When I was contracting, every few months I was looking at a new-to-me code base. First - if you don't know the language the code was written in, then you need to learn that at some basic level. Next, if there was some framework or set of libraries involved, see how many of those you can identify and how many you might already know. Start with trying to run through a build, as you'll either have success or it will throw errors and that will teach you something about both the health and the components of the project.
Once you actually get into the codebase, look for patterns. Often there will be pretty clear layers or types of components, identifiable either by name or organizational structure. Sometimes you'll see patterns that tell you "Oh, George must have written all this code, and Steve must have written all that code" because of personal idiosyncrasies. That's the worst case, but sometimes it's what you have to go on.
I spent a lot of years in application triage, where I was called in to fix serious problems in apps with which I had no experience. Like today's Apple outage - I used to parachute into situations like that and had to get things running, fix, post-mortem, etc. There are great tools out there where you can inject them into running code and watch real / test users execute code. Thats's a great way to very quickly learn how everything is assembled, IE: why did that piece of code get executed there, or why didn't that piece of code get executed.
This topic triggers me a bit because along with rants about CRT, masking, book banning, etc one of the buried topics among the loonies who have berated and attacked our school boards was that they were against electric buses. This is despite good info at least in our district that making the move would yield considerable savings over the service life. So point being, if you are following what's happening in your school district and there's an active group of nutjobs, don't be surprised to see them lash out against this too. I truly about fell out of my chair in shock the first time I heard one of these fools go off on a rant about masks that culminated in a monolog about electric buses taking away our freedom.
Trust as a contractor can be an interesting thing. On one hand they may not trust you because you are an outsider who they think can't possibly understand the nuances of their culture and business domain, but on the other hand they will often deliberately trust you on technical matters because you are bringing outside perspective. Point being - you may get more of the opportunities you want by virtue of being a contractor.
That said - I'm not completely sure what you are really after here. When you talk about wanting to be something more - like what? You want to be an architect? You want to be in management? You want to be a subject matter expert? Product management? I wonder if either a startup or a large corp would be good for you... what I mean is, let's say you are early at a startup. Well, you get to do a bunch of everything because there's no one else to do it. Alternatively, big corps can be a great place to spend a year in this team, a year in that team, and give people lots of experiences in one place, where each role builds on the next - assuming you are managing your career and don't get stuck somewhere. Not sure what's the right option for you, but I'm assuming you'll run with this and figure it out.
Analogy and tribalism are powerful tools. Analogy in the sense that a corporatespeak word can act as an abbreviation for a concept and thus the ability to get a group to the same mental space. A common language smooths communication and creates alliance. Thus, while it may outwardly seem hokey and painful, there really are understandable reasons for this linguistic evolution.
The hard part is when you leave that environment, say via retirement. People who have been embedded in Corporate America take a few years to detox. Some don't ever really make it out.
In my work, I have to create and share a lot of videos, and Vimeo is superior to YouTube for my needs. Doesn't auto-play some unrelated content when they are done with my videos, I can easily make basic edits like a custom thumbnail or branding, and it doesn't cover it in their own branding like YouTube. Integrates better into my site as well. So yeah - Vimeo is better than YouTube for B2B needs.
One piece of advice: If you find yourself saying things like "At my old job..." just shut your mouth. I mean this with the utmost respect that phrases like that are the best way to alienate your new co-workers. Listen and learn to how they do things, then over time start improving things if you see opportunities. If they want to know how you've done it in the past, they will ask. Otherwise, you just look like a know-it-all who can't adapt.
Your post fits with a conversation I had with someone last week, so let me ask - why would you choose Erlang / Elixir over Python for web backends? I've got my reasons for both camps, but since you point out the above information I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Sure, and Java went through this phase too, and I'm sure so have plenty of other languages. It's the stage at which a language has reached mass adoption and it is inevitable, but it doesn't mean there's anything wrong with the language.
I was there for a while too... that place and their compensation plans were... special. There were a lot of funny games that happened with their stock price too.
You realize that the core story of Heart of Darkness has become countless reinterpretation like Apocalypse Now, right? I mean, how bad can it really be if it spawned an entire motif of sorts?
As for English Patient - look, you might not like romantic sagas, but it's rather flippant to call it pretty terrible given the awards it won. Clearly someone enjoyed it.
Look I'm as environmentally conscious as the next guy, but here's the thing I don't quite get about induction - how am I supposed to use a wok, a tagine, or basically anything that is either a non-metallic pan or where you need a flame for the cooking technique? Every time I've talked to induction owners, their answer has been that there are many cuisines they simply don't cook and types of cooking vessels that they don't use.