erik_seaberg

It preserves HN and LWN as useful forums for purely technical discussions with high signal/noise, basically. From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html :

> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity.

There's nothing unsavory about HN using a cookie to label your comments with your username.

Cookie warnings are like "known to the state of California to cause cancer" warnings. If not displaying a warning creates serious risks, and there is no compensation for legal costs to prove that the warning wasn't necessary, everyone will display the warning everywhere as a precaution.

Yeah, network logging has latency but it does pack the messages into structs and demux them. The remaining debugger problems are:

- Do you know which service tier has the issue?

- Can you halt one thread that sees the issue, not all of them on an instance?

- When the request times out, do you have to start over and make another prod user sad?

Google had bidets in MTV. Unmetered wifi was probably bad for toilet availability, though.

I learn new tools and platforms all the time, but editing needs muscle memory and I don't want to abandon that every five years for the new hotness. IDEA is just starting to show some longevity for Scala and Kotlin.

Breakpoints are likely to screw up a lot of concurrent user requests, so in prod we debug microservices by comparing pushed logs.

A good employee will want to hand off his projects and take questions, but you need to be ready if he can't.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Ayers won a cookoff and made the Googleplex well known for food. Employees brought their kids for dinner. People from other companies angled for invites to lunch. I once realized I was in line behind Vint Cerf (Vice President of Inventing the Internet). Ayers moved on, but I think Building 43 mid-campus still hosts the enormous "Charlie's Café."

For a while, another building was notorious for serving sushi but only admitted their Android developers, because Andy Rubin was paying for that himself.

The only final classes I can remember are stuff like java.lang.String, which needed to be immutable so a SecurityManager could consume them for policy decisions.

They're usually talking about higher poverty rates in that group, but much of the majority would also be affected.

Why AI water use? It looks like Zambia's problem is mostly having water that isn't potable. If it's too dirty for heat exchangers, wouldn't they use closed-loop heat pumps, maybe some exotic working fluid? I even see a few mentions elsewhere of distillation using waste heat (but you probably get sludge to scrub out and dump).

Syntax-aware tools always have issues when a team extends the base language to fit their problem. Rust has macros. People started using "go generate" for stuff like early generics. Does Mergiraf take EBNF or plugins or does a team fork it to explain their syntax?

There's some pressure towards matching, in that there are penalties if they find only "key" or "highly-compensated" employees have a lot matched or choose to contribute a lot to the plan.

After decades I'm not sure how grading worked, but I don't remember that course being hard. Maybe that's because I enjoyed it so much.

Sometimes Perl uses "0E0" as a value that is equal to zero yet not false. Javascript has even more cases where equality isn't transitive.

You also need to go multi-region with AWS. I liked their AZ story but in practice it hasn't avoided multi-zone outages (maybe deploys?)

One of my favorite tech Twitter quotes:

> time estimates from software devs actually make sense if you think of them as "this is how long it would take me the second time if i did this twice in a row"

Thank you, it had not occurred to me that Node.js and Deno offered that, but of course they do.

My university had essentially a weird-languages course to blow our minds. Smalltalk (everything is a message to an object, back when C++ was the new hotness), Lisp (everything is a sexpr that you can redefine), Prolog (everything is a clause to search for known axioms).

Later: Lisp again, because of closures and CLOS let you program how method dispatch should work and CLCS let you resume from just before an error. Haskell, because you can lazily consume an infinite structure, and every type contains _|_ because you can't be sure that every function will always return a value. Java, back when the language was poor but the promise was "don't send a query, send code that the backend will run securely" (this was abandoned).

I thought LotusScript was a VBA clone, and it was the older Excel-like formula language that wasn't imperative.

When the mouse bricked itself, I was forced to switch to the trackpad. Maybe I could plug the mouse in, if I happened to bring my only cable from home (or maybe from the office) that day. But there was no way of knowing when the mouse was usable again short of interrupting myself to test it. Over time, I decided the mouse wasn't worth the mental overhead and switched full-time to the trackpad, which always works.

Plugging in a laptop is a nuisance, but at least I can do that every time I sit down to start working and it will manage itself all day.

The left don't like the rich, the right don't like remittances, it's going to be hard everywhere. I heard some from a team who gave up on getting licensed.

python3 had no compatibility mode, so everyone needed 100% of their dependencies to migrate. This was so painful that some teams abandoned their legacy python2 code and reimplemented in languages with better back compat stories.

POSIX doesn't forbid new flags or options. It's up to the author to read the spec and test his portability, or else willingly rely on certain distros. Some GNU tools have had strict modes as a courtesy (they used to jokingly call it POSIX_ME_HARDER).

After forty-ish years, the limit on personal storage is ever higher. The sum of every filesystem I ever owned will probably fit on two of today's very affordable hard drives. (I should get on that for pre-cloud stuff.)

And decayed versions wouldn't get the author much mercy from bereaved families.

Information that is known to be useful is sometimes replicated. The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone#Rediscovery was abused and damaged; only four incomplete copies were gradually found by luck after two millennia. There are entire academic fields trying to learn things about our history by digging up stuff that was thrown away or abandoned.

As jwz points out in "The CADT Model," abandoning reported bugs is just telling your users not to bother reporting anything.

Not everything important is equally urgent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Things_Done recognizes the need for a trustworthy "I know I am going to get back to this at the right time" process, so that I don't continually reserve a bit of my brain worrying about forgetting.

If I learned of a old video of my grandparents, but a robot destroyed it, I would be furious. (Photos are what actually remain from their era.)

I don't see how the median voter can be confident in making no mistakes. Not even programmers are willing to write out a list of opcodes anymore.