emerongi

A type system saves a lot of time when reading code that has been written by other people and has evolved over time. In Elixir, I often end up adding debugging statements to code and running it, just to check the data structures.

A type system also gives additional assurances when changing code that is used from many places. It's so nice to make a change and have additional confidence in it because the type system is happy with it.

I can't think of many bugs that I've seen that would have been prevented by a type system. I'd still like to have a type system though, it's sort of extra documentation within the code.

There's definitely a movement towards simplicity, adjacent to the movement towards complexity. For example Phoenix LiveView, which provides a SPA-like experience to the user while keeping the logic server-side. Making a beautiful, rich web application is definitely simpler than ever, as long as you pick your tools correctly. On the other hand, working in a company with hundreds of engineers, the job is probably harder than ever, as there is a lot of over-engineering going on and you need a ton of knowledge about so many different tools.

Large teams tend towards complexity and it's understandable and frustrating at the same time.

> The AI has no idea how this particular case differs from the sample code it was trained on

It can eventually figure a lot of things out if you provide the correct requirements and examples. However, the caveat with all of this is that you already have to be a good programmer to:

- know what is needed

- know what the solution should more or less look like

- spot bugs in the AI's solution

- describe the problem, examples etc in a way that the AI can work with

If you're already a good programmer, the time spent wrangling the AI could be spent writing the solution yourself.

My feeling is that the most value from AIs will come from when you get hopelessly stuck on a problem. An AI could provide some initial steps or ideas that can get you unstuck, effectively working as a rubber ducky. You're unlikely to copy the AI's solution, but it could provide some random insight that helps you take a step forward.

What I did is that I looked into a couple of forward-thinking pension funds in my country. These are ones that only invest in index funds and have very low fees. From those, I picked three index funds that felt good - one covering Europe, one covering US and one covering the world - and I've been dumping money in them.

To me, this seemed like the most straightforward way to invest in index funds, keeping a comfortable risk level and not requiring any time from me at all. With the recent economic downturns, it has proven to be quite an OK strategy, as the market fluctuations between Europe, US and the world differ wildly, so the three funds sort of balance each other out.

Additionally, I max out the 401k-equivalent pension fund in my country.

> site I'm going to rewrite

I personally wouldn't expect a CTO to spend too much of their own time on building a website. Usually the CTO works more in a strategic capacity, ensuring the company is spending time on things that matter and that projects are on track.

If the website-project does have a very high impact on the business and you're fine with taking this type of position, then you should emphasize the value that you bring. A well-done, on-time project can be very valuable, especially if the business depends on the website a lot and there are competitors with better sites. Your experience can be invaluable and you should be rewarded for it.

If the company doesn't particularly care about the site, nor technology in general - which is the feeling I get from your description - then you might just not have much leverage.

Most importantly, do not make yourself look desperate. State what you want and then negotiate.

Premature optimization is the root of all evil. It's almost always better to start by using a specialized service, even if it's overpriced. Later on you can evaluate much more adequately if you'd save money/time by building your own.

Gitsigns was good enough for my workflows: https://github.com/lewis6991/gitsigns.nvim

Besides showing the git signs in the gutter, it can do staging, diffing, navigation between hunks, line blame, can show deleted lines etc. If you have more advanced workflows, it might not be enough though. I use lazygit quite often as well.

Git is not that convenient to use on the phone.

Personally, I'd like to take notes with vim (or helix), however somehow it's still an unsolved problem to sync files with end-to-end encryption between devices, without also having to use some specialized application.

Obsidian is so far the most seamless way to write and sync notes between Linux and iOS. I'd pay money for a daemon that could do E2EE encryption of any files on my machine and also worked on iOS.

I feel like I take positive experiences as granted and don't feel like they are noteworthy. Negative experiences are something to avoid in the future and I remember them extremely well.

I was looking for Elixir jobs a few months ago. For me the number of opportunities was good enough, since the nature of the jobs was also more unique and interesting to me. Obviously nowhere near what you see with Java/JS/etc, but with those you also have to do a lot of work to figure out if the job would even be interesting to you, making the job search more stressful.

I didn't need to do hundreds of interviews (like I've seen others do) and instead just picked between a few cool companies. It was quick and easy and I found a place that I so far love.

> GNOME is the perfect desktop for productivity

GNOME is quite decent in its current form and the most user-friendly desktop out there at the moment. People who hate on it just have some historical gripe with it, I feel like.

Ideally I'd be using something like Sway, but I can't be bothered to spend time on making things work the way they need to. GNOME gives me everything out of the box and doesn't get in my way. KDE is much more customizable, but less friendly on the eyes. Windows is probably OK if you're used to Windows (I'm clearly not). I have to use macOS at work and it's just a worse version of GNOME - bad defaults, weird design choices, less features, minimal customizability.

It's in your own personal definition of remote work that people should be paid an universal salary.

Gitlab might not be a world leader in salaries, but they might very well be a world leader in providing the best remote work environment to their employees.

What's the problem with that? If Gitlab is not paying top of the market salaries, then they're just going to miss out on top talent, and clearly they're fine with it. It's a free market after all, you don't have to join Gitlab.

Thanks so much! This is super helpful :)

I've tried all kinds of things and even just a couple weeks ago tried out some other tools, but none of them beat simple text files. I push to Gitlab and I can view the notes on my phone. Editing is a bit of a pain, but since it's not often that I edit notes on the phone, I accept it.

For me, managing tasks in text files is the hard part. Recently I added snippets to VSCode to easily tag my tasks and set due dates (the snippets just add searchable identifiers at the end of the line). Greping these identifiers is easy, however for due dates I will need a quick script to pick up all the tasks and order them. Shouldn't be too hard and can even be in a Gitlab CI pipeline to automatically re-order the list on every push.

Re-reading my comment, it reminds me of the legendary "Dropbox is just FTP" comment :D.

> Realize that any reasonably used database will likely outlast the applications leveraging it.

I love this statement. It's true too, having seen a decades-old database that needed to be converted to Postgres. The old application was going to be thrown away, but the data was still relevant :).

With Postgres, you can always just have a JSONB column for data whose shape you're unsure of. Personally, I'd rather start with Postgres and dump data into there and retain the powers of RDBMS for the future, rather than the other way around and end up finding out that I really would like to have features that come out of the box with relational databases.

I think a valid reason for not choosing a relational database is if your business plan requires that you grow to be a $100B+ company with hundreds of millions of users. Otherwise, you will probably be fine with RDBMS, even if it will require some optimizing in the future.

> I'd actually worry if the engineers I work with couldn't pick up a new IDE/text editor, etc. pretty easily and quickly

Once you start making full use of your editor, switching to a new one and reaching the same level of proficiency takes a long time. I can edit code even in notepad, but I can't ever be as fluid in it as my main editor. I've changed my editor multiple times and it's a huge pain every time.

Is there a complete explanation for this somewhere?

Asking for a friend, I obviously fully comprehend what you're talking about here.

bubba_sparks, thanks for this wonderful comment. You have brought clarity to my life with very few words. I hope it sticks for a while in my brain :).

Most people investing in crypto just want to put in $1 and take out $2. Trying to educate people about cryptocoins is practically a waste of time at this point - they just don't care. Events like these are bad for Bitcoin on a pure value basis, for anyone invested in Bitcoin.

That's just my opinion, though.

There's still long-term brand value in just being the biggest ad delivery machine that can bring eyeballs to your ads from any potential customer group.

Once you remove a portion of those eyeballs, you might make more money short-term, but long-term you might end up in difficult conversations with large advertisers.

- render.com

- fly.dev

I'm sure there's others, these are just the ones I happen to remember at the moment.

I'm working through a new codebase with a lot of code jumping and it can be tough to get an immediate picture of all the effects of a module. In my head, I am sort of copy-pasting code from one module to another to get the full picture.

Sometimes I wish editors had a feature to render an inline view when requested, however that is probably a close-to-impossible feature to add.

Moderation is great as it usually keeps a certain essence to a place. The fact that there are users who have a stronger downvote button, but who don't seem to adhere to the same standard as actual moderators, is the issue for me. It needs to be clear and transparent, otherwise trust is eroded.

This is the first time I've seen something like this on HN though, so if anything it might show how good the HN policies normally are. I just wasn't aware that some members of the community are more equal than others; now that it is clear and communicated, I can make better decisions myself.

I think I would very much be dissatisfied as well after finding out that someone can arbitrarily devalue my opinions. The original comment by the author wasn't even that negative in my opinion, it just outlined real problems with Fig. Someone didn't like that though and the author got the hammer for it.

A bit offtopic, but having received a Mac for work recently, I have come to appreciate Fedora and Gnome so much more. Throughout the years I've heard people rave about Apple and I honestly think Gnome is better. The only argument against Linux at the moment is the app ecosystem.

> But if you had abdominal surgery check with your doctor before embarking/restarting that journey, I learn this the painfull way

Would you care to elaborate? I've had open abdominal surgery and am starting exercise once again. I used to go to the gym for a while some years ago and nothing bad happened, but I'm always afraid of a hernia.

Thanks for the great suggestion :)! Wasn't aware of tohla.