Hacker News Reader

gaiuson Office 365 is now on Mac App Store

I got my iTunes on Windows via Microsoft’s App Store ironically. It’s seemingly the only way to get iCloud working properly on Windows, they share certain common components.

gaiuson Microsoft acquires Citus Data (YC S11)

Docker the company is a lame duck, and docker the software is being rapidly supplanted by podman and buildah. There would be no point.

gaiuson Hard Part of Computer Science? Getting into Class

My undergrad did that... there were 80 of us on day 1 of term 1 with people sitting on the steps and standing at the back during lectures.

On day 1 of term 2 there were 40 and we fit comfortably.

gaiuson Hard Part of Computer Science? Getting into Class

Getting a weird sense of deja vu... colleges were oversubscribed for CS just before the dotcom bubble burst too.

gaiuson Apple Lays Off 200 Employees from Autonomous Car Unit

non “core” products, they stopped making them because there is not much money in it

The idea of Mac was always “it just works”. You could go to the Apple Store and get everything you needed and know that while it wasn’t cheap, it was amongst the best you could buy. You pay the premium for that experience and you remember how nice it was and come back next time.

Now that experience is broken, you need to shop around and make it work yourself. And if you need to do that then the experience is no better than anyone else’s.

gaiuson Oracle allegedly underpaid $400M in wages to underrepresented employees

Right. If you are doing the work at salary X then you have sent the signal that you are willing to do the work at salary X. The only way to send a new signal is to leave for a job paying salary X+n, then repeat the cycle in a few years.

gaiuson “O Uommibatto”: How the Pre-Raphaelites Became Obsessed with the Wombat

A previous job had a monitoring system called Watcher Of Many Batches And Transactions. The British Army had a Weapon Of Magnesium, Battalion, Anti Tank once too. Wombats fascinate everyone!

gaiuson Australia’s beloved kangaroos are now controversial pests

After losing the War On Emus I can see why the Australian military is wary of taking on the Kangaroo Nation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emu_War

gaiuson Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/20/blind-anonymous-app-data-e...

gaiuson Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

Didn’t they have a de-anonymization incident recently? Signing up with real work address is madness.

gaiuson What I learned from reading over 100 weight loss studies

The Vietnamese parliament is called the Diet but I don’t think it’s etymologically related.

gaiuson Why Don't People Use Formal Methods?

It absolutely does. We studied SSADM in college.

gaiuson Why Don't People Use Formal Methods?

That's just not how software works in industry.

If by industry you mean “webdev” but fortunately “full stack engineers” don’t work on avionics or indeed anything important.

gaiuson Why Don't People Use Formal Methods?

think this is a bit of an overstatement, because it implies an often unrealistic separation between writing specs and writing implementations

Every government IT project that is years late and billions over budget is because of this

gaiuson Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?

That and the fact that amiga was clean room design. IBM Pc was already

Well the PC wasn’t backward compatible with CP/M so that’s an odd critique to level at the Amiga.

gaiuson Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?

more complicated applications on top of these primitive systems is that they would crash the entire system, constantly

That’s chicken-and-egg. Why do modern apps with actually quite simple functionality need all this vast power, the GHz and Gb? Because it’s there. Why does software crash? Because the OS let’s it with nothing more than inconvenience to the user.

Amigas were actually quite usable, they were stable enough for complex software to be developed and real work done. Same for ST’s.

gaiuson Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?

your standards for acceptable software were frozen in time in 1985

Haha in 1985 Amiga had a multitasking GUI desktop in 512k and 7Mhz. Now we have millions of times more computational power and struggle to deliver an experience as crisp and satisfying.

I wish people still made software like it was 1985, that actually used the full power of the hardware for something useful...

gaiuson Saudi Arabia’s Great Run Seems Headed for Trouble

Right, and a guy who was a prince/princess one day isn’t going to be unblocking toilets the next day...

gaiuson Saudi Arabia’s Great Run Seems Headed for Trouble

Or their investment in SoftBank.

It’s got to be pretty weird to work for or in a WeWork and know what sort of regime you are sustaining.

gaiuson Amazon Ruined Online Shopping

Is that even a thing? I’ve never heard that being possible before. I would be willing to pay a premium for guaranteed non-commingled products. But Amazon commingles to make their own internal logistics easier.

gaiuson Amazon Ruined Online Shopping

If a product is a counterfeit then the cost they are soaking up is not that of the return, but that of failing to police their supply chain. And they absolutely should be looking to minimise the hassle to the customers in that case.

gaiuson 30th anniversary of the Macintosh SE/30

The Archimedes never took off unfortunately. If it had been the “standard” PC we would be a decade ahead in computing now, maybe more

gaiuson Ask HN: Why do tutorial writers combine 10 technologies when 1 or 2 would do?

No one writes a tutorial to teach others, at least not for free on the internet. The real purpose is to signal their own expertise (even if they know nothing more themselves than what is in the tutorial).

You see a similar dynamic at work with business gurus giving out free investment advice, ask if they knew so much why aren’t they successful investors themselves? Or middle-managers on LinkedIn handing out their “leadership” technique.

gaiuson Internals of PostgreSQL

Don’t take anything seriously on dba-oracle.com - Burleson is well known in the Oracle community as an expert in self-promotion but his technical skill is mediocre at best.

Jonathan Lewis, Guy Harrison and Craig “the Hammer” Shallahammer are infinitely more experienced and insightful.

gaiuson Company Update

You know, the mines were making a loss and Scargill could have said, sell them to us for £1 and we’ll run them as a collective and prove to you they’re a viable business and more importantly provide an income and dignity for the Workers.

But he did not do that. He betrayed the Workers for his own political delusions. He just wanted to be the one who brought down a government, he didn’t give a stuff about the People. Why do you think the DUM split off from the NUM? That’s why he can never be forgiven.

By the way the previous government to Thatcher had closed twice as many mines as she did, and not a squeak from Scargill. Doesn’t that strike you as a bit odd?

gaiuson Problems plagued U.S. Navy destroyer Fitzgerald before fatal collision

Most people outside of management are absolutely incapable of seeing it

Isn’t it the opposite - that management/officers are oblivious to their own toxic behaviour that led to the rank-and-file distrusting them?

gaiuson Company Update

Some problems I had were that sometimes the car wasn't where it was supposed to be, a couple of times the car was double booked, and quite often the cars had other people's rubbish in them. One time the car was full of sand (clearly someone had been to the beach).

These are not things that Elon will ever personally experience.

gaiuson Company Update

Because positions are made redundant, not people.

gaiuson Company Update

This is a very German solution. A British union would have rather destroyed the company with a series of strikes ultimately costing everyone their jobs. That is why unions have a very bad reputation, but it’s not inherent to all unions, that’s what people don’t understand. It’s just specific to the UK, and that’s why we don’t have a domestic car industry anymore.

If we ever unionised in tech it would have to be along German lines.

gaiuson Malign incompetence of the British ruling class

imposing a patently unworkable timetable of two years

That simply isn’t true - the 2 years is written into Article 50! Any PM would have faced the same timetable.