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phatbyte

1,155 karma · joined July 31, 2009

Senior Software Developer
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phatbyte··on How babies and young children learn to understand language
I can chime in.

My wife is from Germany, and I'm from Portugal, we both speak English with each other which is easier (DE is very hard for me to learn), but she talks DE with the little one and I talk PT with him.

He can speak perfectly DE, PT, and English depending on which language he listens to, which is quite impressive for me as a parent.

He can even maintain a proper conversation and do translations between languages.

Sometimes he adds a word from another language in a phrase but he seems to know what that word is in the correct language.

phatbyte··on Windows XP Activation: Game Over
Never had problems installing any major Linux dist, but 15 years ago I still remember the boring and time consuming on patching the kernel with custom patches so that my wi-fi card or gfx card could work.

I stopped trying to use Linux as a desktop OS since then. But recently I tried for fun installing Ubuntu and everything just worked out of the box.

I still feel Linux is too fragmented, too many package managers, too many UI managers etc...but that's part of the beauty of it I guess.

phatbyte··on Show HN: Filmbox, physically accurate film emulation, now on Linux and Windows
And at a reasonable price. Thank you for sharing this.
phatbyte··on I don’t believe in sprints
I think the author completely misses the point or never worked in a proper agile team.

Imagine running a marathon without mile markers. Sprints are like mile markers they help you know and adjust your velocity and capacity to reach the end goal.

Without these sorts of tools you are just running without any sense of achievement or tuning to your teams performance.

phatbyte··on I hate what video games have become
"...you are watching Avengers End game in Netflix and they ask you if you wanna pay 5 dollars more to watch Captain America use his well known outfit instead of regular clothes?..."

For the love of whatever-god-or-not-you-believe, don't give them ideas

phatbyte··on Ask HN: Why doesn't HN alert users in some manner to new replies?
No thanks.
phatbyte··on Do Dev Careers Die at 35?
The article mentions the usual path is from junior dev to product manager. In all my almost 20 years of experience I've never seen a developer go to PM as a natural career progression.

Its not even a technical role at all, no idea where this came from

phatbyte··on I was let go for refusing to deploy a dark pattern
> They had no version control.

Had to read this two times and check the year of the article to make sure this wasn't from 2001

phatbyte··on Mark Zuckerberg's Ponzi Scheme (2019)
I don't understand the correlation of PHP in this case. It's not about the stack but about the time vs opportunity.
phatbyte··on Facebook Container for Firefox
While I appreciate this kind of solutions, in my brain all I can think is: what the hell is wrong with the web today?

I mean, what did we do to ourselves? How the hell did we ruin the web experience this much?

Looking back in the 90s, the web wasn't the most pretty thing but how simple it was. You went to a news website and that was it. Click, read, the end.

These days however:

- Go to a news/content website

- wait for the 40MB of useless CSS and JS "minified" crap to download.

- Agree with 2 or 3 huge popups to allow collect your data

- Get a new popup to make you disable your ad-blocker plugin. And if you disable it, you need to refresh the page all over again.

- Get a "subscribe to our newsletter" popup

- Get tracked by amazons, facebooks, etc...

- And once you finally click on an article.... get another popup to subscribe to their premium paid content...

Seriously, we broke the web, and now we are trying to fix it with putting more plugins and tools on top of this problem. I just feel the web is fighting against us and our browsers, and in the end everyone will loose.

phatbyte··on Hiring Without Whiteboards
I see Ableton on that list, is probably one of the most used DAW applications used in music production, everyone who's in audio production, engineering know these guys. I'd take a job with this company any time instead of working for a Google/Facebook as another code monkey
phatbyte··on Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
I'm pretty sure no-one from the future will have a way to plug his/hers mini-USB-XC or whatever the usb name will be at the time in the future (USB standards are just a mess).
phatbyte··on Show HN: Create a Deep Fake Video from Any Image
What are you doing with the data collected? I don't see anywhere a privacy policy, gdpr or anything
phatbyte··on Remote working – Bringing sanity to mind and lessons worth learning
Have you tried a co-working space? For me it helped me a lot
phatbyte··on Slack enables customers to control their encryption keys in enterprise version
Which free alternatives?
phatbyte··on Boeing’s Flying Car Has Taken Off
I never understood the appealing of flying cars. Not only it looks much more dangerous than cars in case of accidents, but also picture yourself living in a city with millions of these flying around, always covering sun light, noise, just visually horrible
phatbyte··on pH7Builder: An Open Source Social Dating CMS
Are people still using the web for dating? I thought mobile was taking all the pie.
phatbyte··on Why I didn’t fix your bug
> -2h private (eat, exercise, shower, read, girlfriend, etc.)

How to manage to do all of this in 2h? Just for Gym it's always around 40-50m, not counting the time to get there and back. Eat unless you always order out it takes also 40-50 (prep and eat).

phatbyte··on Show HN: A game my 12-year-old daughter wrote
Awesome art style, but I wish the toolbox had labels, after I watered the plant, it transformed into a pumpkin and gave an unknown item. No idea what to do with that :X
phatbyte··on Britain Moves to Criminalize Reading Extremist Material on the Internet
This is just ridiculous. Where do you draw the line? Today is religion, tomorrow maybe a technical paper on hacking or whatever.

We need to discuss this as a society, not hiding it.

phatbyte··on My Father the Werewolf
Fascinating read, there's so many taboos and misconceptions when it comes to mental illness.

Hopefully articles like these help us understand more what is like.

phatbyte··on How to Live Without Google
I live fine without FB, Twitter etc..

But I can't find any good replacement for Google services unfortunately.

Tried Duck Duck Go for a full month, but the returned results weren't as accurate as Google, I missed some of functionalities the search automatically gives to you. I could switch to bing, although I don't know if that would make a huge difference, privacy wise.

phatbyte··on Sedentary Behavior and Mortality in U.S. Middle-Aged and Older Adults
The funny thing is, since I started my energy levels increased. I can sustain much more time focused on a subject than before I didn't do any exercise. So, the first two or three weeks will be painful (physically), but afterwards, trust me, you will feel with so much more energy and less tired after work.
phatbyte··on Sedentary Behavior and Mortality in U.S. Middle-Aged and Older Adults
I baffled by how many tech guys/girls don't understand this. This is so obvious it hurts. At my company's last year medical checkup the results were just absurd, specially for men above 30 years old. Abdominal fat, high cholesterol, diabetes, etc..Yet, nobody gives a damn, almost no one changed their habits.

Guys, just get up and move. 30m-40m a day, you can fit this into your daily schedule, don't come up with excuses. If you can fit your TV shows/gaming or your accumulative time on social media, you can redirect that to your health instead. And the output will have a major impact not just to your health, but to your appearance and your confidence.

Eat healthy, exercise and go to bed on time. You don't have to go to a gym, you can buy some gear and follow a plan from your home. Trust me, the change can be quite dramatic.

Before work, or after work, pick a time, have a working out plan, track your progress, create the habit. After two months it will feel like not taking a shower if you skip it.

phatbyte··on Divorce and Occupation
It's all good and dandy until they start fighting about spaces vs tabs, or OOP vs FP ;)
phatbyte··on Delete Facebook Account
I'm also getting these emails. Deleted (not deact) my account 8 months ago and recently started getting notifications that someone is trying to sign up. If this comes from facebook just makes me not want to touch anything related to the brand anymore
phatbyte··on How the GDPR Will Disrupt Google and Facebook
I believe that's what EU is trying to achieve:

> “A purpose that is vague or general, such as for instance ‘Improving users’ experience’, ‘marketing purposes’, or ‘future research’ will – without further detail – usually not meet the criteria of being ‘specific’”

phatbyte··on AdNauseam – Clicking Ads So You Don't Have To
I can see your side, but unfortunately the vast majority of these ads are tracking my webpages visits and selling them to third party for top dollars. So no, not going to happen.
phatbyte··on As Coding Boot Camps Close, the Field Faces a Reality Check
This was more than 2 years ago, I don't work there anymore. But to my best recall, the interview process was pretty straightforward, mostly revolved around basic programming knowledge (we knew we were aiming at junior devs). Basic programming questions (what is an object, an array, etc..), a few question on to approach a particular problem and lastly they were presented with vanilla JS file, with bugs and things that could be improved.

No algorithms, or data structures or complex problems to solve. Something that I would include if these were fresh college grads or senior developers with extensive background.

Again, I didn't mean to call anyone dumb, I don't think these people are dumb at all, they were just bad/fast trained.

phatbyte··on As Coding Boot Camps Close, the Field Faces a Reality Check
I didn't mean to say ALL of them obviously, I just meant to say that a lot of devs who only learned to code in college, usually don't code for fun, just code to get the job done. By no means are they bad programmers, in fact they are good coders, they just lack curiosity and some creativity. Is like IBM vs Apple in the 70s if you know what I mean :P
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