jenkstom

I could sell my house (not in Canada) for so much more than I bought it two years ago. But then what? All of the houses around here are going to corporations who are squeezing money out of those who can't find a home to buy. Because they've all been bought up by corporations. I'm not "anti-corporate" by any stretch of the imagination, but this is definitely a problem that is hurting families. I would vote for something similar here.

This is the antivax sentiment of the IT world. It's new! It's shiny! Give me some Ivermectin because I know things other people don't! (Yes, I realize you're probably joking. I'm not, particularly.)

And that's straight up a pipe dream that has nothing to do with reality.

Talk about a racket. I have OSA pretty badly and can't do anything about it. These shrink-fit oral appliances would extend my lifespan by years, but I can't afford the thousands of dollars for a sleep study to get diagnosed to get a stupid prescription. Anybody who says the US has the greatest healthcare in the world obviously hasn't had to actually use it or has money falling out of their ears.

Civil rights defenders are there to implement Leninism? What? This probably sounded great in the 80's, but now it just sounds like more disinformation.

I work for John Christner Trucking. We made it (almost, sorta) to the front page of Hacker News!

Reason.com has added way too much suffering to my life to have any positive opinion of. Lies like this are still available on their website https://reason.com/1996/06/01/sick-of-it-all/

Or Pizza.

1) The reciprocity project. 2) Some post on how to find a niche and be a great consultant that I haven't found since. 3) "Respect and outcomes" 4) Findlaw's "What is the Definition of Domestic Violence" in where I finally realized that my ex was not just a painful person to deal with but a chronic abuser who I needed to get away from (as my therapist had been urging me to).

Did the fragrance industry also?

You say that like 234 is supposed to be a low number?

So is that Kowalczyk's Law of Software Design? "Small or fast, pick both."

This may be beyond some people's comprehension, but where I work we're receiving huge amounts of push-back trying to move from green screen to Windows GUI apps. Yes, really. We tried explaining this to a "modern" developer and it's like we were speaking a different language. They couldn't get it, at all.

It works in a very different - and very keyboard-centric - way. Having to touch a mouse slows users down dramatically, and so they keep closing our "pretty" app and opening up another terminal session. Can you imagine using web apps without touching the mouse at all? Or even most GUI apps?

And the speed... the time it takes to navigate from one screen to the next is milliseconds. They'll be typing three or four screens in advance. And they'll have four to six terminal sessions open. There's no GUI app that comes close, and I'm not sure it's even possible.

So yes. Web as desktop is bad. Really bad. Backwards. Unusable. Broken. And the people who work on it can't even understand the problem - that user efficiency and speed are REALLY IMPORTANT. Until "modern" devs understand that sometimes the front-end of choice is "ncurses", we're going to continue to have lots and lots of problems.

"Web" desktop software adds layers of abstraction and complexity to poorly emulate functionality that already exists in order to decrease the cognitive load of programmers learning paradigms they aren't familiar with. It's less about everything looking like a nail when you only know how to use a hammer, and more about not realizing that there's a better tool for the job. One that is less prone to errors and actually easier to learn to use.

That's fine, though. My plan for retirement is to make millions supporting desktop apps that can't be replaced because the "web for desktop" programmers have a ceiling on the level of app complexity they can handle. Line of business apps require 1 to 2 orders of magnitude more effort and so the things written before that paradigm are not economically feasible to replace.

If you thought knowing COBOL in 1999 was profitable, just wait 20 years until only a few old-timers know how to maintain the millions of custom WinForms or VB apps that make businesses work.

Paywalled article.

I gave my daughter a debit card when she was 13 and put some weekly amount on it for the next 10 years. She's now an adult who has the ability to make sound financial decisions even though her mother has a spending addiction and a personality disorder. I strongly disagree that it is a bad idea.

The bad idea is those companies then sharing information about children that should be private and parents should have a say in. Blaming parents when companies have outrageous privacy policies regarding child accounts is ridiculous. We have to teach our children to survive in this world.

My 9 year old triplets all have greenlight cards. This article is very disturbing. But they are learning fiscal agency, which is something my generation wasn't taught at all. When I finally got a job (at 15) it was way too late for me. I spent it all on coin-op video games. That might be reasonable at 9, but not at 15.

The whole point here is that parents should be able to guide their children into becoming social citizens in today's world - which means online. We're here to discuss parental agency and online privacy for children.

We aren't here to discuss how great your parenting skills are. My ex has a narcissistic personality disorder and ... well. Any time somebody brags about how great a parent they are - especially when it's in the context of controlling children - I automatically think they aren't a great parent. That's probably just me and you probably are a really great parent, but I promise you I'm not the only one here thinking it.

"If I had a kid". There you go. Get back with us when you have to actually do the job you are criticizing.

I'm guessing you aren't a parent. How else can they buy those Fortnite skins? Robux? Minecoins?

Set and maintain strong, healthy adult boundaries. If somebody blames you for something that you don't control then call them out on it. You don't even have to be mean, just point it out. There's a lot of legal precedence for "But (s)he allowed me to abuse him(her)!" as an excuse for abuse.

Honestly that's the best thing you can do for on-the-job sanity. I understand that people feel they have a right to abuse others, but at some point you really don't have to take it.

I can't remember where I read it, but I read something along the lines of: "Technical debt is just code nobody can read anymore." A lot of us old timers have seen so many paradigm changes that we just don't care - we are focused on whether it solves the problem and whether it is maintainable.

Switching from the "hot" framework we started using last year to the "hot" framework that everybody loves this year is a step backwards from actually solving any problems. And two steps back from being able to maintain the resulting system. The world of startups is so very "now" focused that I think a lot of people (especially on Hacker News) forget that most programmers are still dealing with code written 20, 30, 40 and in extreme cases 50 years ago.

Better is great. Easier is great. But most old code can't be refactored, only replaced. Which means everything that interoperates with that old code has to either be replaced or it has to work exactly the same way. Sometimes that makes sense. Sometimes that's an absolute disaster.

Something that looks "simple" to you really can be too complex in a greater context. Rant all you want, this is just a fact of life. The software development profession has been so fascinated with shiny new toys for the past 25 years that we tend to forget that the hidden (and dangerous) part of the iceberg is not only in the past, but what we're creating now will just make it all that much bigger and more dangerous unless we're very careful.

But. I know places that are so stuck in the past that they are paralyzed and can't do anything at all. There certainly is plenty of "we've always done it this way" that needs to be thrown out the window. Introducing some new workflows or tools could really simplify things moving forward. The problem is knowing which is which. In order to know which is which you need someone who understands the system(s) at a "heroic" level.

I see us moving that way with things like "full stack" or "devops", but those are mostly only considering newer software. Making 30+ years of IT infrastructure work effectively and efficiently really is an epic task. And not one most CIOs I know of are at all capable of.

Sorry, I guess you triggered a flood of things I've been thinking about this past year. I guess I would sum it up by saying that your own rant is very personal and doesn't necessarily take the context that software is developed within into account.

CPAP: $600, Mask: $150. Oral appliance: $1,800. How is that less expensive?

Tried 3, no success so far.

This doesn't help those who have to work from home because of a disability. Finding excuses to discriminate against the disabled is toxic behavior. So I'm going to go ahead and label this article as "toxic" since it recommends a "solution" without mentioning that it's completely inappropriate for some people.

While I'm all for fixing bad policing (very, very much so), I have a hard time dealing with reason.com. They wrote an article on a medical condition I have (MCS) repeating "research" by a chemical industry shill group and made it that much more difficult for people like myself to figure out what is going on and how to treat it. I'm referring to the "Environmental Sensitivities Research Institute" that promoted "crazy" as a diagnosis rather and conflating it with other conditions like electrical sensitivity than the now well-accepted "inflammatory disease". The ESRI is long gone, but the reason.com article (https://reason.com/1996/06/01/sick-of-it-all/) is still there - from 1996 - making it just a little bit more difficult for people like myself to function in the world.

Hopefully some sanity! But realistically serverless functions.

Digital Ocean, Hetzner, Scaleway, Linode, Vultr, kimsufi.ie all seem to be dependable and solid options. Cost effective too.

Another person with a narcissistic personality disorder. I look forward to the day (I'll be long dead, unfortunately) when our society can recognize these people as evil and deal with them in a constructive way while protecting people from them.

The fact that I have to click "I don't like music" or enter my email address to look at the website is toxic. As someone who was psychologically and emotionally abused by someone with a narcissistic personality disorder for decades I consider this to be psychological abuse. Abusers put you in situations where you can't be honest and then use that against you. Call me triggered if you want, I don't particularly care.

A: Apple. A company that makes the Steve Ballmer Microsoft look friendly, helpful and open.

B: OSX. The OS400 of personal computer operating systems.