herbturbo

I've been using Xcode every working day for over 12 years and on the whole it has been excellent. It definitely has some quirks but it is a feature rich workhorse.

It has integrated docs, simulators, unit/UI test functionality inc coverage reports, live UI debugging, tons of profiling tools, and I can use it to upload my apps straight to App Store Connect. Starting with XCode 13 I also have built in CI/CD. I can build, profile, test and deploy a whole app on multiple platforms from scratch with it. And its free.

It is so cathartic to read this thread and know I am not alone in my disdain for this garbage product. I also got force-updated to the new and improved Outlook today which now looks much worse. I love my job but I hate the infusion of Microsoft's mediocrity into my life.

What I keep hearing in VC land is that founders no longer pitch them, they now pitch founders. So yeah I'd say there's a surplus of capital. That plus the hype probably makes anything that mentions blockchain worth investing in from a VC perspective. Same reason people are buying pictures of apes.

Difference is that gold is useful/desirable in of itself. That's why it gained value in the first place.

Who want to know when they are being promoted in every review.

I am currently a principal engineer and have exactly the work life you described. Maybe in a bigger company the Principal is split from those archetypes but in my smallish team (within a large global org) I am the Principal because I do all of those things.

The whatever you refer to is natural ability. Two people from a bootcamp turning out to be immediately useful developers says more about the people than the bootcamp which is what the original point was about.

  That said, two of our best junior devs (at Arist YC S20) are Lambda School and Ironclad grads respectively, and neither of them had any background in programming and went right from bootcamp into their current positions. So it definitely works for some people.

Isn't that just a case of some students having natural ability where a large percentage do not? If being a good developer was only about knowing syntax and writing efficient algorithms boot camps would work fine.

Steve Jobs said that Picasso said "Good artists copy, great artists steal" so your guy at the bar must be a good designer.

Would love to know how many people's Safari has been used only once to download Chrome. But of course Apple will never tell us that.

Yes some people just need a nudge in the right direction to carry the task through to completion. And some need to be pushed along the entire way. In either case they don't leave the interview feeling humiliated having floundered in the face of smug silence.

It's a good signal for me when I'm presented with silly brain teasers like this in interviews, especially when the technology of the company isn't that great.

I'm interviewing you too, so give me something that reflects the problems you solve as a team, otherwise my assumption is your office is full of white boards containing puzzles of the day and your tech is all 3rd party libs.

Never understood this way of interviewing. I get shit now and then for helping people too much in coding exercises, but if someone has reached the point where they are obviously not going to progress why not nudge them along and see how they respond?

I've found that the ability to receive and act on guidance with a certain degree of humility is a much better signal of someone's potential than how many algorithms they've memorised.

I'm currently implementing Stripe Terminal functionality for an iOS project using the BBPOS Chipper. Does this Stripe hardware do anything that the Chipper doesn't? Or are they simply moving away from generic looking 3rd party hardware?

Dude just loves his life. Doesn't feel like he needs anything else. Lucky him I say.

Right - and how did Drake and Taylor Swift rise to that level? Same way Madonna and Michael Jackson did. Getting radio play and touring, which took a record label. Getting people to actually give a shit about your music is a problem Spotify isn't going to solve for unknown artists.

Yeah I think it's easy for up and coming musicians to blame Spotify for their financial woes, but as someone who was an aspiring musician in the 90s I can tell you it was no picnic back then. Everyone I knew was broke, so the only way to make a record was to get signed, and that involved playing shows in front of A&R people which meant finding venues etc - all on your own dime. If you did manage to get signed and get an advance, you probably used it to buy better instruments and maybe pay rent for a month or two but it didn't last long. Then if you were lucky and the label decided to distribute your stuff, you'd make about a dollar between you for every full length album you sold. Music has never been about making money. You might as well play the lottery if that's your goal.

And as a consumer of music, I am very happy to be paying $14.99 a month for access to a collection that would have been virtually impossible for an individual to assemble 20 years ago. Music has been opened up to people in a way that did not exist before Spotify. Also, a good deal of the music I listen to is stuff I had already bought on CD or vinyl years before, so those artists are getting paid twice for me listening now.

Bottom line is it's always been hard to break through into making money from music. Nothing has changed except the way it's distributed.

I don't see anything in this article that warrants its title. Sure this company didn't properly protect cameras which allowed unauthorized access to live feeds in all kinds of places, and that's definitely bad. And yes some of their cameras seem to be equipped with face/object detection and a few basic classifications, but detection is not recognition, and any IP camera feed with a decent enough resolution can be used to perform facial recognition further upstream. There's nothing anywhere in that article that implies any individual was ever identified. Staggering Scale of Facial Recognition? Hardly.

Yes I learned iPhone development in 2010 by watching Stanford's CS193P course on iTunesU

Main problem facing any app that needs to run in the background is that Apple only allows it for certain use cases - VoIP, audio/airplay, location and BLE being the main ones. That's why since iOS 13 users have been seeing alerts that apps with no reason to need Bluetooth are requesting it.

So I deny most apps use of this, as it's clearly just a ploy to keep their app running when it shouldn't be. Something like the Termius app you cite has a legitimate reason to run in the background though and has to ask for one of those permissions.

It's a weird grey area IMO. I'm sure if you asked the Termius developers they may tell you that they don't even use the location data and that it's just a mechanism to keep the app running. However, the fact that we as users don't know this for sure is a problem that Apple could fix by adding a specific background permission alert.

Useful read. I now have a few additions to the list of places I'd never bother applying to.

What is the biggest existential threat to this company today?

To be fair that's probably a good thing. The BQE and Turnpike are more appropriate places for large amounts of through traffic than SoHo.

Poor people in NYC don't typically drive into Manhattan.

One of the big problems with Lambda cold starts is the concurrency issue, especially if your Lambdas are running inside a VPC: https://hackernoon.com/im-afraid-you-re-thinking-about-aws-l...

Has the author ever visited LA? I'm surrounded by rich idiots here.

My personal path went something like this:

2009: Had an idea for an app, didn't know how to develop it (I was a network engineer). Paid an offshore dev firm on Elance $8k to build it. They took months to give me a shitty alpha build. Even I knew that was bad, so I bought some books and started learning enough to argue with them. In the process of learning I built a better version of the app than them.

2010: Finished building my own app, and put myself on Elance, pointing out in my profile that I specifically wasn't one of these sweatshop outfits, and lowballing on price.

2011: With 3-4 of these gigs under my belt, looked for a real job. Found one with a major news org in NYC. I called it "The job I need to get the job I want". Probably started considering myself "top talent" (and being called that by others) around 2015 as I started my 3rd FT dev gig.

Don't know whether it can even work this way in 2017, but my takeaway is you've got to have a mixture of talent, hustle and luck.

True, but it does seem like a good idea for the type of events that everybody knows will sell out, mainly to scalpers, in a matter of minutes.

Reminds me of a question on the US visa waiver form asking whether you are or ever have been a Nazi. Because everybody knows that Nazis cannot lie, and international terror organizations cannot create dummy social media accounts.

I only got the Dot a couple of weeks ago and for me it's worth the $50 just for playing music. Anyone who thinks it is a "glorified radio clock" might want to just take some time to think about exactly what it's doing. I'm kind of amazed by it.