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ferdowsion Ask HN: How do you interview for PM when you're a Front end dev?

A typical journey into a Product Manager position would be a lateral move in your current company, under the guidance of a mentor that can support you as you start working as a PM. Certifications are not nearly as important as getting a year or two of actual PM experience under your belt before interviewing elsewhere.

ferdowsion IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

They coast on enterprise lock-in while pretending they are innovative by shoveling money into non-useful blockchain projects.

ferdowsion Five Levels of Hype

Hah I was also thinking how neatly these categories fit into the worst examples of language evangelism. Some are definitely at this stage!

> Examples here are (again) the cryptocurrency scene which has been pretty good at othering critics as “no-coiners” or lately with the phrase “have fun staying poor”.

ferdowsion Golang’s most important feature is invisible

Not really, "invisible" is a fair way to describe complexity that developers never interact with. Especially when most other popular languages forces developers to deal with irritating async/await bookkeeping when it comes comes to concurrency.

ferdowsion Golang’s most important feature is invisible

Well, golang.org does specifically call this out at the top:

> Built-in concurrency and a robust standard library

I think that the joy of Go's async-first design really makes sense most to people who have experienced the awful pains of colored async-await in other languages.

ferdowsion Today in the U.S. we are in the fourth superbubble of the last hundred years

This is the short-term panic-selling mentality my older relatives engaged in after 2008, and now they can't retire.

ferdowsion Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

That doesn't say that Kotick will be gone, it says that he'll be reporting up to Microsoft.

ferdowsion Jodd – The Unbearable Lightness of Java

I really like the Go-like simplicity of these libraries, without the cursed architecture astronomy from the 2000s.

In general it's interesting times for Java. With all of language improvements from Kotlin/Scala, and upcoming Go-like concurrency it really feels like a renaissance for the language.

ferdowsion The Charisma Machine: The life, death, and legacy of One Laptop per Child

iPhone internals are difficult to repair, but they make up for it with reliability. If OLPC had hit that target they could have been successful but it was basically not achievable for a mid-2000s laptop.

ferdowsion The Charisma Machine: The life, death, and legacy of One Laptop per Child

It's interesting to think about OLPC as a precursor to many of the hype-driven internet phenomena that promise utopian gains. It's easy to see similarities in blockchain-mania, the evangelism machines around certain technologies and programming languages, etc...

ferdowsion Poll: Why are people leaving their jobs?

My previous organization has been totally emptied out during the Great Quittening. All of us left for various reasons, including mismanagement, and the eminent impossibility of pay raises that kept up with the hot market + inflation. I was fielding offers at 20% past my previous base salary, plus MASSIVE equity upside, at a much more exciting company. I feel bad for any engineering leaders attempting to retain people right now.

ferdowsion Autosaved: A Go utility for autosaving progress in Git projects

Every large organization I've been in performs a squash merge with the PR description as merge commit summary, because intermediary commits are always noise like "fix tests" and "didn't actually fix, do it now". That's a story not worth reading.

ferdowsion Saving a Third of Our Memory by Re-Ordering Go Struct Fields (2020)

Why Go doesn't do this by default: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/10014#issuecomment-91436...

> It seems fine to me for the spec not to guarantee anything about struct field order in memory. The spec doesn't operate at that level.

> That said, no Go compiler should probably ever reorder struct fields. That seems like it is trying to solve a 1970s problem, namely packing structs to use as little space as possible. The 2010s problem is to put related fields near each other to reduce cache misses, and (unlike the 1970s problem) there is no obvious way for the compiler to pick an optimal solution. A compiler that takes that control away from the programmer is going to be that much less useful, and people will find better compilers.

ferdowsion Simplicity of IRC

I don't see why you couldn't do the same in a Slack command-line program as well? Not hard to find simple examples of that.

https://github.com/csabapalfi/slackcat

ferdowsion IRC technology news from the second half of 2021

https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php?year=2006

Interesting to see how IRC peaked around 2005. The current most popular network, Libera, has a fraction of the users that Quakenet did 17 years ago.

ferdowsion Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?

Agreed. The world is moving past static text content as a medium, which is what RSS/IRC are built for. I want more rich video/media oriented content like what the New York Times is producing, which takes advantage of user interactivity and new Javascript APIs. RSS isn't going to make that happen for me.

ferdowsion Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

I'm loving reading through all of the sickening puff pieces that business/tech journalists put out about her and Theranos.

It's funny to think back to 2015 and the hagiographical void still left in tech journo hearts after Steve Jobs died.

https://www.inc.com/ilan-mochari/elizabeth-holmes-theranos-i...

> How Elizabeth Holmes Became America's New Entrepreneurial Icon

> She represents the part of entrepreneurship that is long-term dedication, when nobody's watching

>... That kind of walk-before-you-talk behavior is refreshing and respectable in today's hype-strewn entrepreneurial landscape.

ferdowsion IETF: The HTTP Query Method ( Draft)

> The QUERY method provides a solution that spans the gap between the use of GET and POST. As with POST, the input to the query operation is passed along within the payload of the request rather than as part of the request URI. Unlike POST, however, the method is explicitly safe and idempotent, allowing functions like caching and automatic retries to operate.

Is this really worth a change to every HTTP client library out there to support this? The limited applications that really need this can easily use POST and document their own semantics around this.

If anything the trend with GraphQL is to ignore HTTP verbs outright because they are limited and inexpressive beyond simple CRUD tasks.

ferdowsion Just 39% of Americans could pay for a $1000 emergency expense

Sound financial advice would be having an emergency fund of several months of expenses. You're doing it wrong.

ferdowsion The Coverage of Theranos Is Utter Bullshit (2015)

The adulation for the "big names" in Theranos's board of directors is absolutely cringey to read in retrospect. No wonder Holmes managed to fool the world, it's too easy to be mesmerized by undeserved clout.

ferdowsion Wrapping Up 2021. Leaving C++

The author seems depressed and is displacing their frustrations onto a programming language.

A programming language isn't going to bring you real joy, that can only come from within.

ferdowsion Why Brahmins lead Western firms but rarely Indian ones

Indeed, literal thousands of years of ingrained social privilege and brutal repression of under-castes would tend to have produced nice social benefits for Brahmins.

It's stupid, silly, old and outdated.

ferdowsion Companies that had successful pivots

Apollo GraphQL (which just raised a $130M Series D) pivoted from Meteor, a company built around supporting the frontend framework MeteorJS.

https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2020/01/17/apollo-graph...

ferdowsion Is It Time for the JavaScript Temporal API?

Ironic because Javascript's Date behavior was also modeled after the original java.Util.Date (which was immediately deprecated, whoops).

ferdowsion The American dream is on life support in the Bay Area

Native-born Californians are a minority of San Francisco's residents. Most people who are leaving are more likely relatively recent migrants to the Bay Area following the tech boom; social connections for these people do not run particularly deep in the city.

ferdowsion Ask HN: What's the Most Interesting Movie You Saw in 2021?

"Judas and the Black Messiah" was a wonderful, uncompromising view into the radical black politics of the 1960s. As I was watching it I couldn't help but compare it to the weak-sauce Sorkin film "The Trial of the Chicago 7" which Sorkin ends by having the government prosecution stand up and clap for the defendants (lol); compare this to the brutal assassination of Fred Hampton by the FBI and CPD. Also compelling was Martin Sheen's heel-turn as a particularly slimy J. Edgar Hoover, given how America knows him as Sorkin's inspirational speech-giving president from the West Wing.

ferdowsion Every DoorDash employee, from engineers to CEO, will make deliveries

I understand why this would be valuable from a team-building perspective (and support it as such), but I'm not totally convinced this is valuable as a way to improve the product.

Typical user testing is monitoring your users as they succeed/fail to use your product. So I could imagine developers monitoring a sampling of Doordash drivers (with a dashcam or the like) as they use their apps in a typical delivery process.

White-collar Doordash engineers/CxOs doing a blue-collar tour for a day would provide insight into some of the initial onboarding struggles for the "new driver" persona, but seems like it would provide limited feedback for the "experienced driver" persona. Even then, app devs/designers are so familiar with getting around odd workflows in their apps that they wouldn't really represent a new driver. It risks biasing product development in a particular way.

ferdowsion Why Is C Faster Than Java (2009)

Is there a term for this phenomena yet?

"if another language is being discussed, Rust must be forced into the discussion, no matter how tenuous the connection"

ferdowsion Goddamn AWS seems to be down again 4th time this month alone

Why isn't there any investigative journalism looking into wtf is happening at AWS? What the point of all these tech journalists writing all those puff pieces for access if they're not going to use it to pierce the NDA shield at times like this?

ferdowsion Three Minor Features in Go 1.18

I enjoyed reading that too. It's great to see the amount of thought that the language maintainers put into design, especially for things like syntactic sugar (which can get overwhelming in other languages).