HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

ikusalic

77 karma · joined August 19, 2012

http://www.ikusalic.com/
submissionscomments
ikusalic··on The role of a Senior Developer
I think that seniority is closely correlated to understanding tradeoffs. Where a junior and a senior can make from time to time the same decision, how they do it is different. For junior it's often the only option he sees, or doesn't even realize he's making the decision that will have consequences. Whereas senior will think of the context and what are the possible options. All of them will be suboptimal and tradeoffs will be involved. And he'll pick the one that makes most sense with limited information from the context (tech properties, people impacted by the decisions, effort vs importance etc.).

...And senior's decision will unfortunately often be suboptimal as well, but that's what it is. He at least tried to understand the consequences and didn't have access to more information to evaluate it better. But he tried and will reflect on the failure and hopefully do slightly better next time at least in similar context.

ikusalic··on Ask HN: Which SSL certificate
Thanks for the explanation. To my understanding, that's only necessary when I actually use the certificate, not as the part of certificate validation. I assumed the validation would happen with me setting some DNS record with particular value they can validate or something similar.
ikusalic··on Ask HN: Which SSL certificate
Thanks. I'd actually prefer to by through Namecheap as well. I saw RapidSSL and PositiveSSL certs, but I thought they are not suitable if I want both w/ and w/o 'www' subdomain.

So if I buy RapidSSL or PositiveSSL through Namecheap for www.example.com, they will automatically come with example.com in SAN?

Also, why do they have "You also need to have a dedicated IP address" in the requirements? Is this used somewhere in the validation process? I'm asking because the website runs on top of AWS S3, so I do not have dedicated IPs.

ikusalic··on Ai Weiwei Is Living in Our Future
Beautifully written and expressing most of the concerns that bother me in today's world.

If you liked the article, I'd also suggest [1] by moxie. I really liked how he dismantles the I-have-nothing-to-hide argument. Scary, but so true.

[1] http://www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/we-should-all-have-somethin...

ikusalic··on Ai Weiwei Is Living in Our Future
I've moved completely away from Google. DuckDuckGo for search, here.com for maps, fastmail.com for mail (using my domain, so I'm not locked in), Firefox as browser.

It was not as hard as I expected.

I guess the email was the hardest one do to. I needed to change quite a few addresses for different accounts. I've also put a permanent vacation responder stating that I use new email. It was definitely worth it. And the best: even from usability perspective, I like fastmail.com better than Google.

ikusalic··on Language choices for long-term projects
Seriously one of the worst posts I've seen on top page in a long while.

Disclaimer: from here on I'll also be a bit opinionated, hardly can be worse than the post. And yes he did write the disclaimer, and no, still doesn't help at all.

Just LOL.

What's the difference between Python and Ruby and the conclusion?

Scala doesn't get him excited? Well, can be if he's "not clever enough to program in Haskell". (Not a bad thought-terminating cliché btw)

The best: "limited compile-time safety (you can lint and unit test)" of node? And is offset by "not creating a large codebase!" ?!

Half the languages he mentioned are less verbose than JS.

Oh, and he didn't mention the coolest feature of JS: weak typing, which works perfectly for long-term projects.

On the other hand Lisp? Ah, I'll stop here.

He could have just written "here are the languages I'm currently interested in" and be done with that.

ikusalic··on Scala – A post-functional language (2010)
I've heard it said that Scala is the new C++. But to me that doesn't sound bad at all. Sure, you can shoot yourself in the foot, but you can also design beautiful things, the choice is yours.
ikusalic··on Google+ broke our trust
"Only" gmail? But isn't email the most important part of your online life? I moved away completely from Google. Fastmail.fm instead of gmail was one of my first moves. And I never looked back...
ikusalic··on LAPD adds drones to arsenal, says they'll be used sparingly
This. The point is you can introduce all the changes you want if you do it slowly and never aggravate significant percentage of the population.
ikusalic··on From Gmail to Fastmail
I have the same experience. I find the interface just beautiful and pleasure to use. The same is true when using it from phone.

One of the best tool-related decisions I ever did.

ikusalic··on Bob – A Tarsnap GUI client for OS X
Tarsnap is really great service. It's obviously targeted at tech people, but if you are one, just check it out. I do not feel the need for any wrappers as the CLI is quite nice, but your mileage may vary.

What I'm backing up are a few true crypt containers. Not out of paranoia (well...), but because I use TC anyway to separate different kinds of context (by usage and importance). The nice thing is that incremental backups feature still works great. Compression is not really useful though. Currently I have ~70gb of data, ~20gb being unique.

The service is also priced quite reasonably. Highly recommended.

ikusalic··on The compiler is always right
Here's one absurd bug in Java that really surprised me:

Math.abs(-2147483647); // 2147483647

Math.abs(-2147483648); // -2147483648

When you know this behavior, it's kinda obvious why, but still...

ikusalic··on Why I won’t work for Google
To be fair Google is a great company. But because of some actions they have taken they are not so outstandingly appealing as they were few years ago. Of course that's natural given their size. Many big companies are way worse. But still, they are now just another company that's good to their employees (many of whom are still quite passionate about it). No more, no less, that's all Google is.
ikusalic··on Using Vim as a writing environment
vimroom (mentioned in the article) is really great.
ikusalic··on Using Vim as a writing environment
Thank you for this link. vim-wheel is just pure gold, I needed that for a long time...
ikusalic··on Go Continuous Delivery is now open source
If you want to try it out painlessly, I've written a post [0] and implemented Vagrant playground where you can experiment with go. [1]

[0]: http://www.ikusalic.com/blog/2014/03/12/using-thoughtworks-g... [1]: https://github.com/ikusalic/vagrant-go

ikusalic··on Libcloud: One Interface To Rule Them All
I hope libcloud gets some traction.

The problem is, currently it's not really mature enough. The whole idea is to use one interface so you don't end up with writing special cases for different IaaS. The problem is that it simply isn't fully-featured and that the interface for different platform differs even when it's not really necessary.

I've been using it to interact with AWS and OpenStack, but still end up with lots of special cases and even falling back to boto for some AWS features (e.g. CloudWatch).

I really hope they fix the interface issues and cover more features of specific platforms in future.

ikusalic··on Google refuses to pay French privacy fine in a battle of company versus country
Just to clarify: in continental Europe and USA billion means different number. [0]

I'd guess USA billion, as it's about taxes and taxes can't be bigger than what Google is worth...

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales

ikusalic··on FBI Checks Wrong Box, Places Student on No-Fly List
Wow, just wow...

The inability to admit the error and fighting back is the proof that the system doesn't work. Intentionally.

But if you like the statistics and probability, what is the probability that this is the only case?

To help you along the way, consider the fact that the clerk here was not even aware he was doing it wrong...

ikusalic··on FBI Checks Wrong Box, Places Student on No-Fly List
This is the real issue. They want more power while claiming it's in the good hands, so you shouldn't worry. Your private data is safe. Your rights are respected. Your have nothing to worry if you are not a bad guy.

Government constantly shows that it shouldn't be trusted with anything sensitive. It makes stupid mistakes, but never admits that. How many cases happen that nobody ever realizes, because they are swept under the rug?

In the end we all should believe that they are "good" and competent. In spite of them proving us wrong all the time...

ikusalic··on 3 Enemas Later, Still No Drugs
Exactly, though depending on the subject's intelligence I also like to provide Moxie's excellent post [0].

[0]: http://www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/we-should-all-have-somethin...

ikusalic··on How the Drug War Disappeared the Jury Trial
How can anybody still defend the justice system in USA. The "justice" part from "justice system" is missing. I'm currently living in EU (Germany, natively Croatian) and everything looks completely broken from here. So much that I often think that someone is joking. How can Americans consider this norm?

I'm losing any desire to go to USA. Not just working, even visiting. Even if the chances of events such as this happening are relatively low (?), why risk it? I do not like idea of being raped by police and doctors and getting the bill [1].

I'm just wondering how can this be real. Where's the punchline?

[1]: http://www.conservativeactionalerts.com/2013/11/police-abuse...

ikusalic··on Irish politician calls for crack down on "open source Internet browsers"
So much here that is wrong...

But what does he mean with "Law enforcement agencies in the United States have recently taken action to address this issue (open source browsers)" in the last paragraph?

ikusalic··on The Criminalization of Everyday Life
How about Germany. I'm in Berlin, although I even thought about moving to USA in the past (I also had a few decent job offers in Vally). As a side note: I'm not German.

USA looks increasingly like a place that must exist and I'll need to visit from time to time, but I'd prefer for all the conferences and everything else to be somewhere else if possible...

ikusalic··on Discussion invitation: "Testing confusion"
How do you write a good test? What characteristics should it have?
ikusalic··on Vagrant: Development Environment, Part 1
Cool idea. I like that you added demo account to look around. Hopefully it takes off after github integration.
ikusalic··on Lavabit founder turned over the private SSL keys as an 11 page printout
Even if futile, beautiful example of civil disobedience. If only there were more people that at least tried as he did. I'm supporting his rally[1] and hope more people will.

[1] https://rally.org/lavabit

ikusalic··on Inexperienced doesn't mean stupid
I guess that is probably the easiest route, but definitely not the only one.

Work on a couple of projects, alone or with friends. Learn new stuff on your own. Be confident. From my experience this works like a charm.

ikusalic··on Don't be evil: Moving everything off of Google
Keeping GMail invalidates almost all the other efforts. That is the frist element of Google addiction that needs to go away. GMail is tying you down to Google and is unfortunately hardest to break free from. My choice (at least for now) is Fastmail.

Disclaimer: I feel strongly about this topic [1] and think that most of HNers should too.

[1]: http://www.ikusalic.com/blog/2013/06/04/case-against-google/

ikusalic··on How three pacifists were convicted as terrorists
I think those are actually supporting each other. One is about getting more power. Other is the demonstration that they are not to be trusted with that power.
Page 1 of 2Next →