Hacker News Reader

neilobremskion How to Shuffle Songs? (2014)

Any shuffle algorithm is fine but the problem is Spotify's brainlessness: it routinely plays songs it just played. If you are any long-term user then you have playlists of hundreds of songs and my guess is that you haven't heard some of those songs in ages which means ... the FEATURE IS BROKEN.

I'd prefer a weighted shuffle based on the staleness of a song in a playlist. That way you eventually get through all of the music but in a pseudo-random order.

neilobremskion The Age of AI has begun

I think Gates is right that AI is the next era (obvious) and wrong about its positive improvements. More convenient productivity has brought about more garbage output and done nothing to release modern anxiety. If anything, AI is going to cause us to waste time in even more stupendously meaningless things because it's doing all our thinking. And anyway it can waste an infinite amount of our time by having us read or watch its infinite output.

neilobremskion Ask HN: In what ways is programming more difficult today than it was years ago?

Programming is now more opaque configuration than it is traceable logic paths. This makes paper debugging impossible.

neilobremskion What they don't teach you about sockets

This article may as well have been about writing to file streams does not block until a read occurs. Maybe the documentation (on sockets?!) could be more clear but at some point more words don't help with conceptual understanding.

neilobremskion Ask HN: How do you monitor your young kids' computer usage?

We tell our daughter what the acceptable limits are. Sometimes she pushes or breaks those limits. We talk to her about it, take away privileges for a bit, and then resume. She is 8 and addicted to her Kindle 3 but so far so good.

neilobremskion WorldWideWeb.app

Reminds me of Xitami on Windows 95 ... I wonder if that project is still around

neilobremskion Ask HN: How to learn math from zero for adults?

I'm 42 and just getting started in ML and "the math" myself. I never got beyond algebra in High School but I have made a successful career in programming. I'm taking it day by day, I dedicate an hour each morning to plugging away. It'll happen eventually...

neilobremskion Apple is discontinuing the iPod

I'm not sure I ever considered the iPod Touch a music player; Apple hasn't made a decent MUSIC PLAYER in years. They've made a lot of very capable portable computers that sit on your wrist or rest in your pocket but there's a lot more noise than signal coming from them ...

neilobremskion Ask HN: How dangerous is it to trust Google?

Don't get too comfortable with Google or any big cloud provider (including Digital Ocean). They have their own reasons for doing what they do and those reasons are not at all aligned with you or any small/startup company.

I'll paraphrase a comment I saw on HN recently:

"The old advice 'save often in case of loss' has now become 'save often to prepare for when Google shuts you off'."

Use big cloud technology to learn and further your projects BUT DO NOT RELY ON IT (unless you like to gamble).

neilobremskion Heroku was Down

https://status.heroku.com/incidents/2402

(It took a few minutes to get this link to work for me)

neilobremskion Why Software Should Be Free (2002)

The systems I work on tend to be comprised of free software but "business logic" is private. I don't know if this would please the GNU founders but a lot certainly runs on open source and I can't imagine this changing anytime soon. It helps everyone to see the foundation and plumbing but then there's diminishing returns as you move into particulars of opinionated design.

For my part, one of the biggest wins has been freely available and HIGH quality development tools and languages. I still have PTSD from C++ compilers licensing. I'm still hoping that Office tools will get there.

And as for the possibility of "less software developers" ... unlikely! Again, there will be (and are) fewer low-level power-programmers but many many more high-level business coders. You don't want your guru working on that stubborn input field validation but you DO need SOMEONE to do it

neilobremskion Wiki Bankruptcy

Something I'm trying to do on my own team is to make the wiki more of a browsable "table of contents", a glorified list of all the salient things. Searching to find the answers on Slack/Email/Jira/etc is fine and dandy when you KNOW what to look for but otherwise a gateway glossary gives the visibility necessary for a starting point.

For longer prose and procedures (particularly troubleshooting a very specific problem) I am encouraging blog posts with tags that link back to the parent page. These degrade more obviously due to their chronological nature and feel less jarring to prune (which can be done simply by changing the tags).

neilobremskion Json-Base – Database built as JSON files

Didn't everyone do this at some point? Sort of like everyone that started C++ in the 90's rolled their own string class. I remember doing this before "JSON" hadn't yet found its acronym (shaking rake ... get off my lawn!)

neilobremskion Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

And I suppose writers must have a Moleskine notebook and use clear penmanship? Hmm ...

neilobremskion Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study

It's harder to have conversations in an open office because they disturb non-participants. I find myself wasting time booking conference rooms when I could have simply popped into so-and-so's office.

I remember a long long time ago when the company I worked for did a big move and went from offices to cubes. I was young and naive and willing to try the experiment but within a month or two I regretted the change and things haven't gone back since.

I'd prefer sharing an office rather than an entire floor.

neilobremskion Chronologic Versioning: No more arbitrary version updates and regressions

I'll agree with the point that "version numbers are useless to the end user" except when there's an incompatibility. To that end, I'd prefer release tracks to be indicated in the TITLE and breaking (API) changes in the VERSION. Any other number in the version is essentially irrelevant.

Then again perhaps in web apps there's something to be said for this when breaking changes ARE the consistency. I have to say that working in back-end technology, I don't really care whether something was built in 2010 or 2020 as long as it's doing its job well.

Unfortunately, most back-end technology still communicates with web API's at some point and then we're at the mercy of the service's "version".

neilobremskion This Page is Designed to Last

These points look like the old (timeless) guidelines I remember for creating a web page ... solid, good, and as plain as a saltine cracker. I love it and it stores well but convincing the world while we romp through the hype of technological progress is like following a mob through the streets telling them to pick up their garbage.

neilobremskion The top bug predictor is not technical, it's organizational complexity

I think all current and ex Microsoftees can agree (and probably other workers in Big Tech Corp) that this is not only obvious but ongoing and dastardly resilient to getting solved! At some level this must be a sociological thing because humans seem to be hardwired into repeating this mistake.

This happens at smaller companies in smaller ways but the effect is the same.

It's worse than the "Mythical Man Month" in that production is not simply slowed down but it is slowly made rotten until it gets burned, buried, or passed off to out-sourced maintenance.

neilobremskion Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud

I didn't know this either ...

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/12/google-cloud-ceo-thomas-kuri...

neilobremskion Coders Programming Themselves Out of a Job (2018)

Where can I find these people who have automated everything about their jobs? (Assuming their jobs were complex at all) I would like to hire them ...

neilobremskion Stop Teaching Code, Solicit Predictions Instead

I have to agree. My wife is going through a bootcamp and I am stuck helping her with the fundamentals after the instructor tries to breeze past them. She's not a "figure it out later" kind of person and wants to know details upfront. Simply throwing a problem at her that she has no tools yet to solve creates a lot of frustration.

neilobremskion Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

Within the company you have to remember that there are greedy executives (as anywhere) built on top of a fatty layer of incurious middle management and mixed in with enthusiastic tech heads. Whether or not the happy chaps working on the Linux support have their work mutilated by the fat cats has yet to be seen ... it's always like this in the beginning of an embrace. And in the meantime I think there's a lot of good being done even if it's just serving as a model for FOSS projects. So as the support fades and the dream dims, there will be things to pop up to continue the legacy.

In the meantime, I'm quite happy to see Microsoft participating feverishly. I much prefer that to the alternative of intentionally making my life hell when not using their software / systems.

neilobremskion Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

Runs ... but not well. It may be different now but I knew an engineer on the Office for Mac team some years back and it did not sound like a pretty port. I have both a Mac and a Windows machine at work and Excel on the latter is lightning fast compared to the former.

neilobremskion When will Google shut down Stadia?

Yay, FastMail! I've been using them for going on three years with no end in sight. Gmail adds all the "cool" features but us old men appreciate not being told how to reply ...

neilobremskion Alan Moore on superhero culture

There isn't much difference between superheroes and Disney protagonists: inherent and unearned talents followed by lying and abuse of them and then finished up with their (usually powerless) friends reminding them how special they are which fills their egos enough to defeat the antagonist.

neilobremskion Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder's 'Facebook rival'

> The platform says it will never sell user data and relies on "the generosity of individual donors" rather than ads

I'd prefer "The platform says it will never sell user data and relies on paying customers rather than ads"

neilobremskion The importance of decentralisation

As someone who works in the domain name industry, I'd like to note that there is ever increasing pressure to police domain name use. When you buy and use a generic TLD such as "com" or "ninja", you are buying a US product and it is subject to sanction laws and other things you may not realize. CC TLDs (two characters long like "ch") are products of that country and have their own laws UNLESS the registry company is located in the US - in which case it is also subject to sanctions.

I point this out because unless you get everyone using your IPv6 address directly, your name is certainly NOT decentralized.

neilobremskion Why Is the Migration to Python 3 Taking So Long?

The upward migration is imminent for ALL CONNECTED applications and not just Python 2 to 3. An issue I've seen with PIP (that must be relevant to other platforms as well) is that version-locked packages are for software that can no longer communicate with the actual SaaS/API because THAT layer has changed. It's really THIS that is forcing conversion of Python 2.7 to 3 because API vendors will stop supporting old software while they continue breaking their own interfaces. The alternative is the end user or FOSS picking up the slack but that's only going to happen for SOME of the API's. In the end it will be cheaper (albeit still painful) for companies to upgrade their code to Python 3.

I have a lot of Python 2.7 code that I wrote years ago which has been running smoothly and my team is generally going to rewrite rather than "convert" because I really don't trust conversions. I'd rather see all bugs upfront rather than hidden in the fog.

neilobremskion Brave launches 1.0

Brave is awesome and I'm happy to see them reaching this point. I've been using this as my primary browser for the past 2 years and my absolute favorite thing about it is the simple profiles switching. HOWEVER that's also the thing that's irritated me the most as this software has changed: it started with person-specific tabs (awesome!) then moved to person-specific windows (okay ...), and now for the third time they've changed the icons available without letting me specify custom pictures (ugh!). Where is my ability to sync these PROFILES AS A GROUP? Setting up half a dozen "people" on each new computer becomes a tiresome exercise.

I tried the rewards/BAT thing for a while but after a few computer changes and losing my wallet through the process, I gave up and just block everything and contribute nothing. I'd like to get back into it but all of those transitions just killed it for me.

All that said, there's a lot of good stuff in here and I'm happy to be using it as my primary browser. Now that they're hitting 1.0 I may actually be able to recommend it to non-tech people.

neilobremskion It’s Not Enough to Be Right – You Also Have to Be Kind

My wife and I have been talking a lot about giving license to make mistakes and that means letting others do what they're going to do without mocking them for it. Be ready to help them with the "right" way if they fail but also for a pleasant surprise if it works out. As a lead at work, I often hear solutions I doubt will pan out and sometimes I can't help myself correct things. But this "fixing" is actually creating long-term problems and undermining responsibility and ownership.

Anyway, this is what I thought of about halfway through the article when it veered off into contemporary politics.