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ipsento606

886 karma · joined August 22, 2023

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ipsento606··on I was interviewed by an AI bot for a job
> Instead use an inside source, an employee you know at the company you are interested in

I have been reading this advice for a decade, and I have been working as a software engineer as a decade, and I don't know anyone who got a job this way.

I'm not doubting it happens. It's just interesting that this obviously seems very common in some software engineering circles, but is virtually unheard of in others.

ipsento606··on I was interviewed by an AI bot for a job
LLMs are biased. Human interviewers are biased. Are LLMs more or less biased than human interviewers, on average? I have no idea.
ipsento606··on MacBook Neo
Seeing as it's the A18, are there any concerns about third-party "desktop" software not running on this new platform?
ipsento606··on Use the Mikado Method to do safe changes in a complex codebase
Presumably you mean me, and every current and former team-member I've ever had? If so, you're talking about hundreds of engineers.
ipsento606··on Bars close and hundreds lose jobs as US firm buys Brewdog in £33M deal
being fired and being made redundant are very different under UK law

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

ipsento606··on Use the Mikado Method to do safe changes in a complex codebase
I've been working on react and react native applications professionally for over ten years, and I have never worked on a project with any kind of meaningful test coverage
ipsento606··on Coding agents have replaced every framework I used
> Software engineers are scared of designing things themselves.

When I use a framework, it's because I believe that the designers of that framework are i) probably better at software engineering than I am, and ii) have encountered all sorts of problems and scaling issues (both in terms of usage and actual codebase size) that I haven't encountered yet, and have designed the framework to ameliorate those problems.

Those beliefs aren't always true, but they're often true.

Starting projects is easy. You often don't get to the really thorny problems until you're already operating at scale and under considerable pressure. Trying to rearchitect things at that point sucks.

ipsento606··on 'Askers' vs. 'Guessers' (2010)
Human relationships are not computer code

Eliminating ambiguity from human relationships is neither possible not desirable

ipsento606··on Capital One to acquire Brex for $5.15B
Credit cards are many products rolled into one.

Despite the name, many people use "credit cards" simply for rewards and enhanced purchase protections, with only incidental use of the credit facility.

In the US market, it is surprising that someone would choose to use a debit card over a credit card (if they have the choice) because they are giving up the rewards and enhanced purchase protections, which are available at effectively zero cost.

If I used a debit card over a credit card, I'd effectively be paying ~2% more for most things I buy, for no benefit.

ipsento606··on On Being a Human Being in the Time of Collapse (2022) [pdf]
The problem with the housing issue is that real solutions to it are extremely unpopular, even amount people who agree with the scale and intensity of the problem.

The regular voting public doesn't even agree that there's a connection between increasing the supply of housing and housing becoming more affordable.

Their position is, roughly, "there's plenty of housing already - it just needs to be more affordable for regular people". Sometimes this even manifests in support for self-defeating demand subsidies like help-to-buy schemes for new homeowners

This is a position that can never be satisfied because it is fundamentally disconnected from reality. It is equivalent to the meme of the dog with the stick in its mouth who wants you to throw the stick for them, but not take the stick from them.

ipsento606··on Find a pub that needs you
As property prices increase, developers are more incentivized to build new properties and increase density.

The increase in supply then lowers prices.

The problem comes when local laws and the planning permission system make it hard or impossible to increase the supply of homes. Then there's no balancing force to bring prices down when they go up.

ipsento606··on Google: Don't make "bite-sized" content for LLMs
can anyone link to reporting on that?
ipsento606··on Calling All Hackers: How money works (2024)
> Some web searching suggests that only about 2% of home mortgages have prepayment penalty clauses.

It's clear (to me) that you're talking about the US specifically, but it might not be clear to everyone.

Residential mortgages are highly idiosyncratic to the country you're talking about. Try getting a 30 year fixed rate mortgage in the UK.

ipsento606··on I'm just having fun
To me, writing in full, formally correct sentences, being careful to always use correct punctuation, starts to feel a little pretentious or tryhard in some contexts.

It doesn't feel too much like that here on HN. But on reddit, I use less formal structure most of the time, and that feels natural to me.

ipsento606··on Go ahead, self-host Postgres
> If your database goes down at 3 AM, you need to fix it.

Of all the places I've worked that had the attitude "If this goes down at 3AM, we need to fix it immediately", there was only one where that was actually justifiable from a business perspective. I'm worked at plenty of places that had this attitude despite the fact that overnight traffic was minimal and nothing bad actually happened if a few clients had to wait until business hours for a fix.

I wonder if some of the preference for big-name cloud infrastructure comes from the fact that during an outage, employees can just say "AWS (or whatever) is having an outage, there's nothing we can do" vs. being expected to actually fix it

From this perspective, the ability to fix problems more quickly when self hosting could be considered an antifeature from the perspective of the employee getting woken up at 3am

ipsento606··on Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship
I would say something like 95% of the code I have been paid to write as a software engineer has 0% test coverage. Like, literally, not a single test on the entire project. Across many different companies and several countries, frontend and backend.

I wonder if I'm an anomaly, or if it's actually more common that one might assume?

ipsento606··on A $1k AWS mistake
the pricing page says it comes with "Always-on DDoS Protection" but not "Advanced DDoS Protection"

I have no idea what these terms mean in practice

ipsento606··on A $1k AWS mistake
https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/ says that the $15-per-month plan comes with 50TB of "data transfer"

Does "data transfer" not mean CDN bandwidth here? Otherwise, that price seems two orders of magnitude less than I would expect

ipsento606··on Is Software the UFOlogy of Engineering Disciplines?
you don't even need a degree to be a software engineer, let alone any professional accreditation

the idea that all, or even most, "software engineering" is real engineering is laughable

ipsento606··on Amazon strategised about keeping water use secret
Almond milk is not dairy milk, but it is absolutely "milk", in the sense of a white liquid derived from plants - a definition that has existed in English for hundreds of years.

The name "almond milk" has been used since at least the 1500s.

ipsento606··on Why is everything so scalable?
> they didn't have any way to scale beyond a single low spec VPS from a budget provider

they couldn't redeploy to a high-spec VPS instead?

ipsento606··on For centuries massive meals amazed visitors to Korea (2019)
13 pounds of potatoes is about 4600 kcals. That's in the range of what an NFL athlete consumes in a day.
ipsento606··on Quantification of fibrinaloid clots in plasma from pediatric Long COVID patients
after reading more - you're right, I'm wrong
ipsento606··on Quantification of fibrinaloid clots in plasma from pediatric Long COVID patients
Edit - this comment is incorrect

---

The title should be edited. It sounds as if the test is 94% accurate at detecting long covid, but in fact it's 94% accurate at counting microclots

> We estimated a 94% accuracy for the microclot count using the devices, significantly higher than the traditional counting of microclots on slides (66% accuracy)

ipsento606··on Show HN: Whittle – A shrinking word game
August 4 is not solvable with the given wordlist. There is no way to get to a word below 3 letters ("set")
ipsento606··on CSS's problems are Tailwind's problems
I've been working on a nativewind [1] app for the last year or so, and all these complaints resonate with me, and then some.

It feels like I have to have a mental model of CSS, tailwind, React Native stylesheets and nativewind-specific conventions to actually accomplish anything. It's terrible.

I agree with the author that the only actually good part is having a single, easy-to-use list of global style constants.

Everything else sucks.

[1] https://www.nativewind.dev/

ipsento606··on Game Hacking – Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC)
even if everyone only tried it for a week, that still means there will always be a certain number of cheaters in games, because new players are always joining
ipsento606··on The Grug Brained Developer (2022)
I've been doing this professionally for over a decade and have basically never used a debugger

I've often felt that I should, but never enough to actually learn how

ipsento606··on WeightWatchers files bankruptcy
> It just doesn't seem to work with everyone

Without a very precise definition of "work", these discussions quickly degrade to near uselessness.

There is a very large difference between "telling patients to exercise more and eat less doesn't result in long term weight loss" and "exercising more and eating less doesn't result in long term weight loss"

The former is true, and the latter is not.

I agree that from a clinical perspective the former definition is more relevant than the latter.

ipsento606··on Brush (Bo(u)rn(e) RUsty SHell) a POSIX and Bash-Compatible Shell in Rust
as a heads up https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2021/01/why-a-new-shell.html links to https://www.oilshell.org/release/latest/doc/idioms.html ("Oil Language Idioms") which is a 404
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