jaabe

I think google is guilty of a lot of things in Asia, but it’s not like windows in China is like windows in Denmark either.

I haven’t heard about google products being used to organise genocides though, but Facebook has.

Google hasn’t committed the same evils Facebook has. They’ve been smarter about handling personal data in the west, and their platforms haven’t been used to attack democracy.

In Asia their platforms haven’t been used to help countries commit genocide.

I mean, you could make the case for breaking up google for monopoly reasons, but google has mostly just done business the way amazon or Microsoft has. And unlike Facebook, google has been branching out of the advertising business for a while with their cloud services, hardware and paid software.

If I want a privacy secure add-free gmail, I can actually get that by throwing money after google.

I’m probably bad but I honestly can’t get slack to work with all the different communities I’ve been invited to. Discord basically works like IRC, except almost every channel I’m in is by invitation only, making it almost impossible for new people to join.

In my opinion IRC is still the best tool out there and I really, really wonder why we stopped using it.

If you want to do android development, Kotlin.

If you want to do multi platform development, flutter.

I think flutter will be an amazing tool for smaller teams, especially in non-tech-primary organisations. I work in the public sector of Denmark, we do in-house development, our main focus is the public services we provide though. So there is just no way we can do mobile, desktop and web without something like Flutter, or severely increased funding. The latter won’t happen, but flutter might.

I have an iPhone XS, but I’d probably downgrade to a pixel 3a and give my wife the XS, if google sold them in Denmark that is. They don’t even sell the pixel 3 yet though, so there is a fat chance of that.

Anyway, I like Apple and have been a long time user of their phones since my Samsung S2 died to planned obsolescence. I pay google to handle my email though.

After years of trying everything, outlook, iCloud-mail, tutanota, protonmail, fastmail, Runbox and a bunch of others I ended up buying a GC account instead because google is just better at it.

So my calendar is google, my mail is google, I have space on google drive, I use google docs and of course I use google maps. So I kind of feel silly on iOS.

I upgraded to the XS from a 5S when the smaller screen size started to annoy me, but the truth is that I don’t need the power and the XS is too heavy for my weak hands. :p

It’s getting silly indeed, it’s also getting unproductive. You have to spend too much time thinking about tooling instead of just building things.

Is your code really clear though? What are a and b? What types are they? What if they, or one of them aren’t that type? Why would you call the function? When would you call it?

I mean, I get that your example is directly related to the point you are making in verbosity, I don’t even necessarily disagree with you, but your example isn’t very clear to me.

In the analytics departments of enterprise sized companies and organisations sits a lot of mathematicians, economics and statisticians. These are the people who are going to use ML to change the world, because business intelligence, prediction and analytics live in these departments.

Not a lot of these people can program.

I know a lot of programmers who want to work with ML, but in my experience, very few programmers are good enough at math or statistics to do so, and even fewer have the business skills to actually translate their results to management in non-tech based organisations.

I’m sure a lot of programmers will make excellent data-scientists, but I’m not entirely convinced why I would bring ML to my programmers rather than my people who have degrees in applied statistics and organisations.

I work in the public sector. One of the reasons ML hasn’t found it’s golden case yet, is largely because no one have figured out how to use ML in a way that is better than the decades worth of data-related work we have already done, and part of the reason behind this, is that companies who sell ML are programmers. They know how to use ML to identify, but none of them, not even IBM seem to know how to use ML for something they can actually get us to buy. And lord knows both sides of the tables have tried, I mean, even our political leadership has heard of the ML hype, and want us to use it. So I’m rather hopeful these tools for non-programmers will bring ML into the hands of people who will know what to use it for.

I agree, configuration was just part of the “bullshit”.

I had to manually disable the dedicated graphics card in my laptop or it would get ridiculously hot while idle. This is probably not an issue if you buy a laptop with preinstalled Linux.

I do a lot of presentations. Getting Linux to work with various projectors wasn’t great. Maybe that’s better in 2019, but it’s never been an issue with my Mac. The lack of ports have, but buying a converter solves that.

Updates broke my software and I had to spend a lot of time sorting it out. A more stable Linux distro might have been better.

My external displays never really worked without problems.

Having used a MacBook trackpad makes it really hard to use non-MacBook trackpads.

It’s a range of stuff like that.

I’m sure you could get Linux to be better, even for me, but I don’t want to use a single second on making it happen. I did when I was younger, that’s why I turned to Linux in the first place. I’ve spent my time building gentoo, but the older I get the more I want things to work out of the box so I can spend my time on other things.

It has to have a usage though. We ran a long proof of concept on voice recognition as in voice-to-text, for office workers and had good results once the software learned to recognise correctly.

I think the best cases were 20-30% increased productivity for a single worker, but it was ultimately useless because we use open offices, so the project got scrapped.

The touchbar is crap, and being a Danish programmer hitting those {} keys really sucks on a mac keyboard.

Everything else has been miles better than Linux though. I mean, when I left fedora 21 for a Mac I had close to a hundred scripts for modifications to make it tolerable. On my Mac I have 0.

> I don't have any obsession with distros. I want one that works.

This is why I became a Mac user. After 15 years of Linux I was just done with all the bullshit, but I guess I could look into Pop!_OS.

It’s always been like that, hasn’t it? I seem to recall it being one of the reasons why liberalism has had such staying power.

It was how the Dutch became a powerhouse on the line of Spain, England and France in the colonial age. Because they let their people be, and didn’t take their wealth, it became an attractive haven for rich families who then did business.

I’m not sure the latter is as beneficial as it was then, as you can now turn money into more money without investing in local business, but the former is going to remain true forever. People who have the means to do so, will always chose the freer country.

I understand your concern, but I think you can avoid a lot of the negative sides by only writing about things you like. It’s really hard to piss people off if you’re sharing experiences about things you love, especially if you stick to just your experiences and never try to tell people what the “right” way to do things is.

Political views have never been much of a problem for me. I’m strongly opinionated, but I also work in the public sector, which means I leave my personal political views completely out of my professional life. That is certainly a form of self-censorship, but even though it it’s forced upon public servants, I can’t think of a single time I regret keeping my political opinions to myself. There are certainly political movements I wouldn’t work for, but over all it rarely seem like a good idea to get into politics unless you actually want to make a career out of it.

Some of the most interesting things online are people writing about things they are passionate about, for the sake of writing about them. At least in my opinion, so it’s fair to say that I agree with the author.

I think it’s an equally delightful experience to journal about things though. I do it from time to time, when some subject just needs to get written down, almost as though the journaling is me thinking out loud on something. I could certainly do this in an old fashioned journal, or keep things to myself, but in my experience, I’ve learned a lot about something by having to write about it in a way that anyone could read. Which includes explaining things that are obvious to me, but not to you.

I know it’s not for everyone, and I respect that, but if you do think out loud, then do us all a favour and share the things that are most important to you. I think it’ll help keep the internet much more interesting in the age of social media.

If we can find it anyway, with google down-prioritising personal blogs.

The agile revolution never happened because it’s just not how people buy things. Hell, I don’t even think it’s how we build them.

I love the analogy of a burger joint and ordering a burger with fries, because from a buyers perspective, that’s exactly how we want to buy software. We point out some items on the menu, and we expect them to be delivered together, on time and to our specified demands. The person taking our order, and making it happen is the project manager who makes the different cooks do their stuff in coordination and also the person who puts shit together on a tray.

That’s exactly how people buy software, or at least how they expect to buy it. Only software is more complicated, and developers keep failing to deliver the ordered project on time. Agile was supposed to help on this, but it hasn’t. I mean, it’s anecdotal, but I work in the public sector, we track and benchmark the hell out of these things for a bureaucracy that probably never reads the reports. Anyway, agile suppliers fail as often as non agile suppliers, and they have the added problem of wanting to sell us promises.

I mean, a true agile contract can’t specify requirements, cost and time at once, but how the hell can you ever enter a contract that doesn’t? So they typically end up mixing non-agile sales with agile development. I’d like to note, that we have actually entered into truly agile contracts. Being a digitisation unit in an organisation that largely doesn’t understand digitisation gives you a lot of freedom after all. Only agile wasn’t better, in fact it’s been a lot worse, every time.

In our decade long experience, the only thing that truly works, is when management or project management knows how to make the damn burgers. Which unfortunately means that you need to promote a few developers into unhappiness.

Until you want to read a book that isn’t currently available. Maybe it’s different on the American Netflix (and similar), but currently none of the streaming services in Denmark have all seasons of x-files.

I prefer buying things to renting them, but of course with modern digital distribution you often end up renting them even when you “buy” because of DRMs.

Maybe I’m old, but I just don’t get modern media consumption. I mean, if we look beyond DRMs (and maybe you can crack Amazon’s), then you’ll own 120 books in 10 years as opposed to the Netflix model where in 10 years and the same amount of money, you’ll own 0 books.

I think it’s unfair to say that just because there haven’t been legal action, there has been no action.

I live in Denmark, our data-protection agency has only recently gotten cases to a point where they could roll out fines. And that’s just for the small-scale offences that were legally easy to handle.

Some of the larger breaches will take many years to handle before a case is strong enough to be brought to the police. It’s also worth noting, that breaches of the GDPR don’t automatically lead to legal action. It’s only if organisations systematically abuse data or if they fail to fix whatever problems a GDPR audit points out to them, that legal action is the end result.

If you have a breach, like if a supplier forget to exclude an API key from their GitHub repository and I it leaves your employee names vulnerable to the entire world. But you find it, report it, fix it and tell the affected parties ie comply with the GDPR procedures. Then you’ll have breached the GDPR, but won’t have broken the law.

Well some of us think webpack/react and the rest are even worse and that a page-reload never killed anyone.

I don’t work in a tech-focused business, because I work in the public sector. That means our funding is fairly limited, even though 90% of our workforce spends 5-8 hours a day on some for of smart device or pc. Because we’re limited, however, we need to be careful about how we spend our resources, and that means we simply can’t keep up with the modern frontend environment.

If all you do is angular, then the transition from AngularJS to angular 2 might have been smooth, but it sure wasn’t for us, and neither would the big react-versions be.

We also can’t really take advantage of the package/library environment because we’re not as fault tolerant as others. We can’t have security issues, but we also can’t code-review 70 packages/libraries every week because there was an update.

As a result we’re back to using the old MVC frameworks that don’t change every day and have solid standard libraries. We did buy a frontend “platform” so we can have things like editable grids without constant page-reloads, but in general, JS is something we add to a specific component only if it’s absolutely necessary.

I am looking forward to when Flutter finally has the ability to build websites. Because then we’ll have both mobile platforms, web and desktop frontends covered in one tool. Which is frankly exactly what we need to be productive in 2019, that or we’d need to hire 2-3 people, and the latter is just not happening.

Cool! Does flutter do web apps/frontends yet? I think when/if it does it’ll be really interesting for small tech teams in non-tech businesses.

I work in a municipality and we simply can’t keep up with different frontend stacks for web, mobile and desktops or even the pace of which modern JS framework versions become obsolete.

What good is a developer who can’t deliver outside of a debugging/development environment?

I mean, I get what you are saying, but who can afford people who are that specialised?

I’m amazed that it’s 2019, and we still haven’t figured out a good way to share interesting content.

The portals worked for a while, then came google and Facebook, and now we have nothing. I mean, if HN stopped how would you find anything interesting on the internet?

I completed the MIT and Harvard introduction to computation courses on EDX. I did it for fun, but both turned out to be truly inspiring on the subject on how to teach CS.

It depends on what you’re teaching though. If it’s bringing a new hire up to speed what works best for us is to give them access to a portfolio of how we do things and let them hack away at a problem on their own. If they have questions we help, and their mentor makes sure they aren’t stuck and afraid to ask.

The sad fact is that 95% of our learning curve is figuring out how the damn toolset is used, and it only 5% of what’s hard is actually programming. I’m sure it’s different if you’re a PhD at google, but in our shop we rarely invent new CS concepts, so it’s mostly about learning how to make tools work. We’ll get people who know JavaScript and .Net who have no idea how to deploy it on our IIS servers, or how to setup the config file so only a specific AD group has access to a specific API, stuff like that. I’m not sure where it all went wrong, but it did.

EV are still too expensive and Tesla ridiculously so. That’s not a problem if you can’t keep up with demand, but competition creeps up.

Why would you buy a Tesla when you can buy a Hyundai Kona for a lot less?

We need better leadership though. I live in Denmark where EVs aren’t very widespread because of taxes. In Norway more than half of new vehicles sold are EV. Norway has more money than us, but they didn’t really need it for this transition and nothing they did are things we couldn’t have.

They simply had better political leadership than we do. I know some Americans might call free market, but we have 150 years of history to show that big advances in society are driven mainly by the public sector if they are to benefit all and happen quickly.

I find the opposite to be true. We’ve been a C# shop for decades, but with python and JavaScript creeping in, we’re just so used to clis.

Visual Studio does a lot of things, but the truth is that we never use them. Well except for Linq-To-Sql which is ironically removed from the standard setup because Microsoft considers it bad practice. Five years ago we downgraded from Enterprise to Professional, exactly because what we do 95% of the time is to build from an empty project without using any of the bling. To be fair, some of the bling like GitHub and docker integration have gotten fairly good, but because they were so bad for so long we simply got used to using them outside of Visual Studio.

I suspect that in 5 years we’ll be going from Professional to Visual Studio Code. I hope so, but things like intellisense just isn’t there yet.

Which is honestly what they need to do, to make .net core truly next level. It was such a drag to so C# on non windows machines, and it’s becoming less and less so.

Visual Studio still has some perks, but with the dotnet cli it’s actually decent enough to use .net core on a Mac.

What I don’t get is why they aren’t focusing even more on VS Code, I mean, why bother making Visual Studio for mac when you have an all-platform alternative?

The only bad thing about VSCode is that it has made me really, really hate the dark-theme in visual studio because the code one is so much better.

Our of all the tech companies that lobby, I wish Apple did more. They are the only major privacy concerned tech-giant and they produce the least environmentally damaging hardware.

I agree it shouldn’t happen, but if politicians have to listen to money, at least listen to the lesser evil.

Not in my country.

I had heard of him but because no one uses Erlang where I live it was kind of easy to ignore. I wish I hadn’t though.

Watching some of the talks he’s given on the problems of software in the wake of his death has been a real eye opener. The physics approach to building a language which tries to break the laws of physics as little as possible is truly brilliant.

I don’t know how much time and effort we could have saved ourselves from wasting if we’d gone with Erlang’s take on concurrency and messaging, but it’s a lot. Just today I scheduled a meeting where we need to talk about how to handle messages not making it all the way through a few REST-based sevices.

I doubt we’ll start using Erlang though, it’s just too risky when you can’t hire anyone, but you do feel a little stupid fighting problems Joe solved before your youngest hires were born.

My better half uses one, but after the birth of our first child she had to use pads for a while. This was the first time I got to buy them. They are insanely expensive, it’s truly mind blowing that more women aren’t using the cup. I mean, I know it doesn’t work for everyone, but it’s frankly as though women have some sort of “life-tax” attached that we men don’t, with pads being so expensive by comparison.

I don’t remember the prices exactly, but it’s the range of a year of cup coverage being cheaper than one pack of pads.