handwarmers

It's a great UI to ffmpeg - I wish they gave it some credit on their landing page.

My main frustration with the person I was responding to is that a lot of the terms we are arguing about are ill-defined, and yet he's arguing them with a lot of vigor.

There is also a time dimension to software. I have been on some occasions the only developer of pieces software that were tackling hairy problems that teams of "normal" developers would avoid. I always wanted to solve those problems in a way that would make everyone's life easier. To do that I had to spend a ton of deep focus time on modeling the problems effectively, and if I was successful, people who were put off by the problem space would come and contribute, because they found the model amenable. Or they thought it'd benefit them to be a part of a project that's picking up steam. A lot of these people would fix small issues here and there, but some of them actually donated a lot of focus and helped take these projects to new levels. The ones making the deep changes always cared deeply about the problem space, or brought a lot of knowledge from another subset of cs, and I wouldn't call them "normal". I think it is a disservice to the sacrifices they made to do what nobody else felt like doing and throw a blanket statement like "teams of mundane contributors do the really important work".

This is not a dig at "normal" devs - I have been the "normal" dev on many projects, but because of my experiences I try to give credit where credit is due.

I also detest the 10x thing exactly for the reasons you pointed out.

The big question is, can we find counterexamples to your model of reality in actual reality. And if we can easily do that, what does your apparent over-confidence about your statement say about you?

E.g. https://bellard.org/

To add to the insult, I'd challenge you to think of how many "great teams" of "normal" engineers, whatever any of these terms means, could pull off most of these projects in any amount of time.

Great professionals exist. They produce great work that is tough to reproduce. Your "helping" them does not mean they couldn't have done it without you.

I don't mind that it has that many points - I actually really like the work that guy did. What I don't understand is why all the comments are so weird. It's like everyone who had a bad day decided to come here and take it out on this his work.

having a bad day on the internet, huh?

I am not sure if you are really young, but you definitely sound like either nothing quite earth-shattering has happened in your life, or maybe some stuff has happened, but you have chosen to be very selective about how you digest it.

Sometimes life hits you like a truck, and you get trapped under that truck for a really long time. Then, once you get flung in the ditch and think you just had the most horrible N months/years of your life, a whole colony of fire ants starts crawling on you and pulling you apart.

So, yeah, sometimes certain actions could be a sign of privilege, sometimes, they could be the tiny thread giving a person a lifeline.

Being able to only optimize for proximity to retirement could be a more "privileged" state to be in, than having 80k in Canada in certain contexts.

can you stop tone-moderating people who are trying to share how they feel about something?

this meme is popular but wrong. nice debate trick tho.

sit down rust boy.

one day someone will rewrite postgres in rust, and i will have to switch to carpentry full time to preserve my sanity.

The blog responds to a very particular aspect of the fallout from the crowdstrike outage. The "Responsibility lies on large numbers of processes, teams, and people" was actually addressed in the article. It makes the case that executives claim that responsibility is correlated to pay. All the author asks in this case is for them to walk the walk.

Go back to middle management.

This thread sums up most reactions to "X, written in Rust" articles in recent times.

Apache Beam?

So what happens when this hypothetical machine of yours, that has enough NIC bandwidth to process the scale of data that needs to be streamed in both directions, enough CPU power to handle millions of concurrent requests in a process or a thread of their own, and enough ram/ fast enough disks to to map and swap all the files that are being converted, goes down?

In 2022, Google Workspace apparently had ~ 3 billion users (8 million of which paying) https://developers.googleblog.com/en/year-in-review-12-aweso... .

Not every solution needs microservices. But also, we have problems today that we did not have solutions for "in the old days".

My assumption is that the comment I was responding to addressed Google Docs specifically (which afaik is web only?). If this is the case, then your options to run locally would be for the conversion to run in your browser, or for you to have some Google agent run on your computer that can handle these requests instead of the Google servers themselves, neither of which is a scalable option in this case (due to browser differences / expecting people to be able to install software locally to their devices)?

What would your solution for 10 million such requests within a day be?

What is often frustrating to me at least is the arbitrary definition of "safety" and "ethics", forged by a small group of seemingly intellectually homogenous individuals.

> FOSS was founded on the principles of openness and collaboration, something that we need now more than ever, as the largest companies of the world have managed to weaken that resolve through slick marketing and anti-competitive practices.

Some of the best open source software was developed, open sourced and maintained by the largest companies of the world.

>Think of what truly open VR headsets, smartwatches, tablets and smartphones etc. would be capable of, the rich ecosystem of apps and capabilities that could exist - but greed is literally holding us back by decades.

Do you think an open source group could build an Apple watch?

> That Linux has not only survived for so long, but thrived, is a true testament to the will, technical expertise, and product vision of community developers.

That Linux is still mostly used as a server OS, and not as a viable OS by the general public is a true testament that there are things that matter to people that community developers don't care about.

>Think of the kids growing up now, forced to be consumers rather than producers. And compare them to the last century, the sense of wonder and expression that the internet and infinitely hackable devices brought.

Techie kids growing up now are on average an order of magnitudes better than their equivalent from last century. As a matter of fact, there are more great and creative coders nowadays compared to any time in history. Just look at the amount of open source projects on github.

Idealism that is as far disconnected from reality as yours is one of the issues plaguing FOSS today. I have no idea how your comment can be as upvoted as it is - maybe selection bias based on the nature of the article. It is still concerning though.

The whole piece reads like superficiality dressed in sophistry to a maddening degree. Like a messy soup of wishful thinking inspired by the style of Georgi Gospodinov

Man stay out of topics you don't understand, or at least don't make ignorant snarky comments.

"no taxes" here was obviously used in the sense of "not enough taxes". Also, reading a 10-K cannot answer whether a company has paid "enough" taxes.

The question of how much is enough is difficult, given how complicated international tax law is, and how legal != ethical/good for society. E.g. https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/google-used-d....

The Unix philosophy has nothing to do with documentation lol. It is actually the exact opposite of your know it all hypothetical "no reason to play fast and loose when you can just do the job right" fantasy :

"Design and build software, even operating systems, to be tried early, ideally within weeks. Don't hesitate to throw away the clumsy parts and rebuild them."

If anything, it is a lot closer to move fast and break things.

I remember reading about PE's involvement in hospice care and it made me feel sick to my core.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32597326 ( When private equity takes over a nursing home)

The Portopiccolo Group got sued, but the lawsuit did not go anywhere. https://www.mcknights.com/news/shuttered-nursing-home-avoids...

they are shady to say the least - https://medicareadvocacy.org/private-equity-and-nursing-faci...

Also see - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36108182 ( Private Equity Is Now Dominating the US Hospice System)

This list is the control freak/micromanager's wet dream.

The future is now, old man.

I agree in principle - Discord can only scale that much - imagine having a discord channel instead of docs for Pandas . Obviously it would be best if there were great docs for everything, a lot of easily searchable Q&As + sample projects, and a forum and some form of live chat for the community to discuss ideas.

But those take a ton of time to create, and a ton of skill to write well, and I feel like up and coming niche projects that need to build a community naturally would emphasize Discord over docs.

Meta comment: HN's knee jerk reaction when it comes to certain topics is becoming quite exhausting. Obviously a lot of the current commenters didn't even read what the article was about and just wanted to vent about the good old days of mailing lists and half-assed docs that at best had a code sample, but on average were just a "table of contents" for the source code that you'd ultimately have to read. I for one wish these projects had BBS-es in addition to Discord, but man I love just chatting with people working on the thing I am also interested in and making friends along the way.

Actual comment: When it comes to Watchy, I found the docs to be a good starting point - https://watchy.sqfmi.com/docs/getting-started . They give you the architectural diagrams, have a few code examples for some of the more common use cases, and do a pretty good job at letting you know that this is very much going to be an "adventure" type project with a lot of surface to cover.

They could expand one day and add links to articles/projects other people have made, but I am not sure many of those exist. It is sort of a niche product.

The criticism of open source software the author presented is a lot more nuanced, and I for one agree with it. Even long before loot boxes etc, the overwhelming majority of "original thinking that used to create interestingly novel experiences" in gaming did not originate from the OSS community.

It is a completely different story when it comes to non-gaming software though.

My point was not to single out the Ottomans as the only bad actors in the historic context - that's what I meant by those times were cruel. The west was still shaking off the last few years of the dark ages when the Ottomans established their presence in Europe, and those times were nothing to be proud of. Even so, all empires' histories are written in blood. Even the more progressive ones - from the wiki article you posted (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_in_the_Ottoman_Em...) :

"For strategic reasons, the Ottomans forcibly converted Christians living in the frontier regions of Macedonia and northern Bulgaria, particularly in the 16th and 17th centuries. Those who refused were either executed or burned alive."

I agree with you about the nuances of history. I also have a gut reaction every time I see a discussion about the "glory of XYZ" empire. I like the art, architecture etc, but those came at a cost, and I think most are quick to hush hush it as a strategic necessity - the history of the USA included.

"At the beginning" there was a war that the Ottomans won. Then, at that very beginning, all of their non-muslim subjects were given the status of rum millet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rum_Millet) - second class citizens with very limited rights, who were also, from the beginning, subject to Devshirme, or blood tax (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devshirme). I am sure there is a lot more of the beginning I am missing.

The point is, those were cruel times in most of the world - today we are relatively better off. However, I think we need to acknowledge the cruelty of the past to avoid it in the future. Rewriting history to make ourselves feel better is likely not the solution.

Ah yes, the hands-off, non-interfering with people's daily lives history of the Ottoman empire. Just like everyone on the Balkans and in Armenia remembers it.