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dumpster_fireon The Future of the Vim Project

Yeah I used to have a massive spreadsheet tracking the entirety of household finances. I was worried that no one would know where the money was if I suddenly died, so I started a monthly finance 1:1 with my spouse. Even wrote an "upon death or incapacitation" playbook for her.

The second session was just her saying WTF I can't keep track of the location, ownership and tax benefits of 40 accounts!

I've since closed 3/4 of all accounts because of that.

dumpster_fireon Marijuana addiction: those struggling often face skepticism

Liking the smell of pine does not mean I want the smell of a pine forest fire in my house all day long. You don't see caffeine addicts rolling up coffee grounds to set fire to it, do you?

There's nothing subjective about not wanting smoke in my lungs. If someone wants to get pot buzzed, go eat an edible and waste a day of productivity for all I care. Smoking the entire house, and costing me my deposit while justifying it with "George Carlin wrote jokes on weed" is peak pothead narcissism that makes me want to have it permanently banned.

dumpster_fireon Marijuana addiction: those struggling often face skepticism

While I agree on the withdrawal symptoms, the main differentiating point for me is that drinking coffee doesn't waste time. Marijuana consumption is one of the most unproductive things to do for leisure. I don't do alcohol for the same reason, it's a massive waste of time. Both render the consumer functionally useless for hours, and, if you're older, assures that the next day will be extremely unpleasant.

There's also a big difference on a social level. Have you ever had a pothead as a roommate? The entire house smells like a garbage dump 24/7. Whereas freshly ground coffee actually smells good. Coffee addicts only bothered me with their unwashed V60s lying around in the sink.

dumpster_fireon The Resilience of Costco (2018)

That depends on the other person's search pattern. I did the same and got O(n^2). :(

Now I just use the hotdogs as the meeting point.

dumpster_fireon Tesla created secret team to suppress thousands of driving range complaints

The Tesla cars are the only cars I've ever driven that can simultaneously provide one with the very best, and yet absolute dog shit driving experience. It's a weird car that I honestly don't understand. Especially when people talk about the software being the best on the market. I don't recall the last time I cared about car software more than being able to use the turn signals properly. Great acceleration though.

dumpster_fireon Simple Sabotage Field Manual – How to Destroy Your Organizations

This just reads like a basic description of every large organization out there with humans in them.

dumpster_fireon India’s ban on rice exports raises fear of global food price rises

Okay I'm properly worrying now. I'll throw in a couple more thoughts and prayers to change the mind of Modi while at it.

dumpster_fireon India’s ban on rice exports raises fear of global food price rises

I'll only actually worry when Thailand bans hom mali rice exports.

dumpster_fireon Study finds billions of nanoplastics released when microwaving containers

Well yes, but whatever milk/water you serve in it right afterwards will still taste and smell of burnt plastic. I take it as something inevitable because no one's going to be giving a glass milk bottle to an infant.

Maybe I should dump every single child plastic drink/dinnerware for 18/10 stainless steel.

dumpster_fireon Study finds billions of nanoplastics released when microwaving containers

https://blog.mambaby.co.uk/feeding/how-to-self-sterilise-the...

Popular milk bottle brand instructing users how to sterilize their product with the microwave.

Boiling milk bottles is a very common way of sterilization as well.

dumpster_fireon Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

I'd prefer if they kept the y-axis starting at zero for a more realistic representation.

dumpster_fireon Engineers should focus on writing

The problem was that they only knew how to code.

dumpster_fireon Engineers should focus on writing

What data? I never said anyone can do coding. My spouse sure can't. Code is the easiest part of the job in my company where almost everyone is a genius (sans me). But few enjoy (nor do well with) syncing project goals with other teams. Someone has to do the dirty work while getting dissed by juniors for lack of code. I'm not sure if this experience applies to where you're working at so YMMV.

But I must admit that this is karma. For I have had an almost identical take as you more than a decade ago. Feels like I'm looking in a mirror.

dumpster_fireon Engineers should focus on writing

Clearly I have much more to improve on because you put it way better than I did. My communication skills are terrible.

dumpster_fireon Engineers should focus on writing

There's a misunderstanding here due to context. Someone working in a startup (been there) will find it difficult to understand just now much communications are required to get anything done in a large MNC. Out of necessity, people who have pushed enough code to understand the systems have to step up to do the comms instead of being siloed. I had many a time freaked out some other team because the phrasing of my email made them think we're going to dump more work on them. This is the actual difficult part about engineering at scale: Getting everyone on the right page.

You can opt to keep coding, but it won't get you far in your career. Does this mean the communications have more value than actual implementation? It depends. Again, this value differs at different company sizes.

I just got the chance to code again last month, and I've already completed 5 features (code reviewed) that the juniors couldn't complete in a year. I won't say they are worse at coding, but more that I am more familiar with how dependencies work because I've already done the same thing when I was a junior. Also, knowing who to ask for help also helps a lot.

I stand by my statement. Code is easy and code is cheap. One day you'll understand.

dumpster_fireon Engineers should focus on writing

Let me explain. Coding is the easiest because it's the most fun I get from my job. I don't have to talk to most people, I can have my alone time just writing code, cleaning it up, making it beautiful and lean, refactor as I like, whine about the unit tests taking more time than coding, and go home feeling like I've accomplished a lot. It's easy because that's all I have to focus on. Give it two weeks of junior devs telling me my coding style is outdated, and I've already adapted to the new meta.

System design at scale? Just trying to convince a separate team to work with us is a nightmare that I get insomnia from.

Coding is the easiest part of my job. FWIW I was just like you when I was a junior dev. Wondering why senior devs and engineering directors can't code. Now I know they can, but their time is better used to negotiate projects so that the junior devs can have their fun. Then I have to take time out to mentor junior devs on how to talk to people without being condescending, because that gets absolutely nothing accomplished in a large company.

dumpster_fireon Engineers should focus on writing

To be fair, unless you're building some low level infrastructural systems, coding is the easiest part, and code is cheap.

Drop any senior dev into coding duty, and their skills return after one to two weeks. On the other hand, asking a junior dev to implement a new system that integrates with 3 other departments, and you'll have to wait two quarters for them just to figure out who to talk to and how to get consensus.

dumpster_fireon Don't Take VC Funding – It Will Destroy Your Company

Firstly, fan of your company.

Isn't what you described as The Slog essentially just SMEs? That's not so bad. Perpetual meteoric growth for everyone is not healthy on a macro level. Couple of friends of mine are in what you describe as the worst outcome, yet they can buy houses and put their kids through schools (outside the US).

There's a middle layer of B2B that props up the economy in a more fragmented manner, and I don't think they should be dunked on.

dumpster_fireon Container Training

I remember the good old days of having to script my own deployments on our own on-prem servers, with linter free wild west testing. It went to crap pretty easily because we were always customizing something, automating something, customizing the automating of something. Dependency checking was also very manual.

Nowadays we work with way more traffic that incentivizes strict bin packing of traffic within the tightest bounds of the resource pool, with the fastest actuation time. VMs won't give you that. Containerization just makes that so much easier and snappier for large amounts of traffic. But then we had to go global, and orchestrating containers across continents is a PITA. So there's value in k8s for dealing with that. These tools vastly reduce the complexity with regards to managing globally distributed services. But as usual, we start customizing these tools, leading to more complexity.

With that said, I believe startups need to focus on the fastest development and deployment times. So stuff like Docker, Kubernetes or Terraform are entirely unnecessary. As I commented elsewhere before, no one with a total QPS of 10 needs anything beyond GCE or EC2 or on-prem servers. People born in the Cloud age seem to have forgotten that they can just run the cheapest Linux machine with HAProxy and httpd behind a static IP. The focus on always going straight to Cloud complexity, if anything, smells more like engineers in on some VC grift.

Side note: It's hard to hire senior/motivated Java developers. It became a self-fulfilling cycle. Happened somewhere around 2011-2014, no one other than fresh grads graduating from legacy courses still used Java or .NET.

dumpster_fireon Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

You totally underestimate how much baby fever tax first time parents are willing to pay using the logic "once in a lifetime only".

dumpster_fireon Learn how to design systems at scale and prepare for system design interviews

You just reminded me of the time I was explaining how to do consensus failover, and the interviewer asked me to do distributed single thread design. Great use of everyone's time. The market is full of LARPers who wish they had the chance to design something real, and they will take it out on you.

dumpster_fireon Why Physicists Tried to Put a Ferret in a Particle Accelerator

That's some top tier dad joke.

dumpster_fireon How to 1.5x your salary through negotiation

The ego here is palpable. Asking candidates to trust the first offer from a hiring manager is equally terrible advice.

> I realize you don't really care about us vs Adobe, you are going for the best bid.

Er yeah. It's a job. Unless you're OpenAI right now, you'd be hard pressed to find a candidate who means it when they say they love your company vision. It's all theatrics and gate keeping by ego massaging. It's a rite of passage for junior devs to believe words like yours until they find fresh grads earning double their pay, and getting dumped onto the streets during layoffs.

To the junior devs: Passion and enthusiasm are positive attributes for a team's productivity, but they are equally fantastic traits for hiring managers to exploit. Never forget that. From: A very jaded senior engineer who has seen a lot from startups to tech shops to big tech.

dumpster_fireon TabDB: Using browser tabs as a database like only a maniac would

Yeah without the data being added to a blockchain to automatically sync to my multiple devices, I'mma say no to this.

dumpster_fireon A proto-pizza emerges from a fresco on a Pompeii wall

It looks like a round, wooden board being used as a sliced fruit platter to me.

dumpster_fireon Everything that uses configuration files should report where they're located

Wait till you get to template configs that automatically generate fan out config files during build time. You can report it, but you can't find it.

Really enhances the debugging experience.

dumpster_fireon Debris found came from missing Titan sub, says friend of passengers

Bluetooth as the only means of control of a sub that would most definitely kill you if it loses control? The same battle tested Bluetooth that still can't reliably connect to the exact same device despite having done so all the time? The same Bluetooth that disconnects if I were to turn on 2 more Bluetooth devices due to interference?

How about the batteries that are required to power a wireless controller? Everything on a patchwork sub needs to be at least n+2 across failure domains. I wouldn't have gone in that sub even with n+5 and a paycheck TBH.

How much money was he trying to save here? Competitive gamers with a way lower net worth stick to tethered controllers for a reason, low latency and reliable connection.

Furthermore, I can believe a bunch of b/millionaires being duped into paying a non-refundable $250k. But I am struggling with the fact that they saw the abyssal porta potty and the BT controller, and still thought it was wise to enter.

The best case scenario here was an 8 hour trip in a space that's worse than long haul Economy to see Titanic ruins on a TV screen. I really don't get the value proposition here.

That poor kid.

dumpster_fireon Apple Vision Pro – Why It May Be Lousy for Watching Movies on a Plane

I'm torn. Someone wearing a gigantic pair of VR goggles on a plane will indeed look ridiculous. Not too mention how obnoxious it looks.

But on the other hand, if you gave me one on the plane, I'm definitely putting it on throughout a 14h flight. Anything to let me escape the reality of flying long haul Economy.

dumpster_fireon Two years of teaching high school CS

I took CS in the equivalent of a US highschool. The classes were taught by teachers ranging from 2 years experience to 15 YOE.

We enjoyed (and aced) the classes from the teacher with fewer YOE. Maybe the more experienced teacher was more jaded, maybe the younger teacher was more relatable. Who knows.

I have relatives who are educators their entire lives. One thing I've taken away from listening to them complaining about their work, is that there is an abundance of teachers with long YOE, who are totally checked out from their job, and use their long tenure to bully the younger teachers. There's an idiom they use a lot during these complaints: "Using their tenure to sell their experience."

Finally, it's "you're". Not "your". It was difficult to parse your text when you're not doing it right.

dumpster_fireon Dumb and Gets Things Done (2010)

I don't know about this.

What I deem smart or dumb changes over the years. When I was a junior dev, I saw someone totally new to coding create a single static class method that did tens of thousands of lines of if else checks for a state machine. The group of us junior devs shared the code snippet with each other and laughed at how ridiculous it was. The code could've been so much cleaner with proper extraction and abstraction. The bootcamp fresh minted dev was what I had considered as someone who's dumb but gets things done.

Over the years as I worked with more teams, I've seen people do "smart" things like a one liner quadruple nested ternary return. Everyone marveled at how clean it looked. I've also seen smart devs who experimented with Haskell or OCaml in their spare time start using closures in closures in closures. Lambdas everywhere when remotely possible. Anyone who didn't understand what they were doing were too inexperienced and dumb. They were always heralded as the geniuses of the company.

Nowadays, I very much rather debug a ten thousand line static method with if else clauses. It's quick to navigate, and incredibly easy to debug. Stupidly simple is my new smart.

The only thing I've really concluded after so long is that, the only dumb person in the room is always me. I've been told I'm a pretty kick-ass teacher so that pretty much seals my dumbass status.