porkloin

I have pretty devoutly hated celebrity my entire life, but in recent years I've come to realize that the real "job" of these kinds of "celebrity for celebrity's sake" types is pretty simple:

1. Be society's mirror

2. Be society's punching bag

The Kardashians obviously fill both of these jobs. I don't think it's fair to say they're above reproach – in fact, I hear tons of criticism of them any time their names are brought up around me. They're hardly taboo to criticize.

All of that said, I still think you're 100% right that we shouldn't stop people from hating on them. If we take these two "jobs" away from these sorts of celebrities, then at that point they become actually pointless. As much as I'd like to live in a world without them, at least for now the Kardashians and others are serving their purpose – provoking conversation about what we value as a society.

For some folks, lionizing the Kardashians is a way of saying what they think "perfection" (physically/financially/socially/some or all of the above) looks like in America right now. Others want to look at them and see everything that is wrong with us. For as much as I agree with the idea that criticism of celebrities is fundamental to their role in society, I think it's important to not lose sight of the fact that celebrity has a real social function.

Yeah, it's bananas.

I started a new job last year at a place that has a large percentage of their codebase in Python after many years of working with OO and relatively "modern" PHP. Of course, taking PHP's reputation online to heart, you can imagine my glee! To know that I would soon be working with a language that has a little more respect, clout, and professionalism!

Oh, how wrong I was.

One of the first things I noticed was the package management disaster, along with the virtual environment and local/global package issues. Just shy of a year later, and I'm absolutely flabbergasted that Python doesn't get utterly roasted online for how bad and fragmented some of the tooling is. I could go on about other frustrations I have with the broader Python ecosystem, but I'll just leave it at the point that Python folks shouldn't cast _too_ many stones in the direction of JS or PHP without knowing what the current state of tooling in those languages are.

Seriously! It's really frustrating that people tend to think accessibility features are just for people experiencing disability. The web, applications, and the whole world at large is made better for _all_ people when we build with a mind toward accessibility.

I appreciate the defense, but I don't mind being asked.

Fair enough. I am definitely pretty curmudgeonly :)

That said, I tend to think social/cultural incentives are more than just social programs and government spending. Right now, I feel like I live in a culture that I don't have an affinity for. It's an awful lot like workplace culture – you can't manufacture it entirely by implementing programs or throwing money at people. Those things help, but only if there's a foundation of good culture to back them up. It has to be earned, cultivated, and grown.

In a fairy-tale version of America where I wasn't jaded and grumpy, who's to say I wouldn't want a big family?

>Pandas and white rhinos aren’t the only creatures that are unsuccessful at mating in captivity.

The pithy lede to the article says it better than I can.

I think that's where the idea of ideological incentives come in.

If I don't particularly feel the biological urge to have children (aka drive to spread my genes), I might feel differently if I had more faith that my country's society and culture were worth contributing back to.

I don't feel that way about this country (America).

I've spent a lot of time thinking about that particular question, and the simple answer is that yes, my partner and I may find ourselves late in life wishing we had done otherwise. We also very easily could find ourselves wishing we hadn't. I look around and see many people who also have very poor relationships with their elderly parents - I don't discount the fact that given the culture of America at this particular moment that I could have children who bring me great joy for the 18 years they are with me, who only then become all but distant strangers once they enter into their adult life. This seems increasingly common nowadays. Or they could love me sincerely!

Either way, if I had children, I wouldn't think it right or just to burden them with an expectation that they owe me endless years of emotional, physical, or social support.

Additionally, I think our brains are very good at rationalizing and justifying the choices we already have made, and so I'd mostly suspect that I'll continue to convince myself that I made the right choice regardless of any loneliness that may crop up later in life.

It also might seem callous, but there are simple psychological needs (such as feeling that you're caring or providing for another being) that are easily fulfilled without having children. Pets help a lot. Volunteering helps as well. And, of course, just like your older relative, spending time around other children and young people when you can.

My hope is that between all of these things, I'll lead a happy and fulfilling life. Or maybe I won't – but I ultimately don't have any control over that. And my personal opinion is that having children doesn't assure you a fulfilling life either!

One half of a happily childless mid-30s DINK married couple here. We plan to stay that way.

If the government wants me to have kids, they had better incentivize it. And when I say incentivize, I don't mean exclusively financial incentives. Ideological ones as well.

Right now, the primary reasons for having children are:

1. Personal desire to have children/biological drive to reproduce - so much so that you're willing to shoulder an enormous burden just to have children.

2. Social pressure from family, friends, and society at large - so much so that you're willing to shoulder an enormous burden just to feel like you're making them happy.

Sidenote: Folks from camp #2 often seem deeply unhappy.

Free universal pre-K childcare would help a lot toward sweetening the pot, as would substantial investment in public school systems.

Despite what you may think, this isn't about money or about us being greedy with our time.

I don't have a lot of faith in the idea of bringing a human life into the world as it is, but I also want to see evidence from my government that they're building a country worth living in for my future children. Otherwise, why would I bother to subject them to playing a game where the deck is stacked against them?

By all accounts, a child of mine would come into the world with their own enormous privilege and advantage over other children (white, born into a higher income family of college graduates, etc.) - but can I really stomach that while knowing it comes at the expense of some other child's opportunity? I felt this way before the pandemic and social unrest of recent months. Now I feel it even more acutely.

Personally, I'm completely content with not having kids. But if the government wants me and other people like me to have children, they'd better make the lives of parents easier, lower the barrier to entry, and massively increase my confidence level that this shit-hole country will be worth living in 100 years from now :)

Very nice! I have been working on a triad and inversion practice tool in React and may seriously consider rewriting it to use your component. https://porkloin.github.io/triad-practice-mk2/

Any chance that the fingering indicators can take text or color? I use that a lot in my current tool. Not to rush you with feature requests or anything :p

Most companies aren't exclusively comprised of developers.

If you were to somehow manage to convince exec or director level leadership to implement something like IRC as your main communication platform, I'm sure they'll be more than happy to let you be the person who's full time job becomes fielding helpdesk requests from non-technical users who are struggling to use IRC :)

Tools like Slack and Teams win because they're all-but-frictionless. One of the competitive edges that Teams has out of the gate is integration with an existing account that is tied to your entire workplace identity if you're in a Microsoft-heavy shop.

It's really easy to assume that things that are easy for us as devs are a "no brainer" for everyone else, but they really aren't. My parents recently had to begin using chat apps for work under COVID restrictions, and although both are plenty proficient at general computing, IRC configuration would be an absolute nightmare for them.

Not to mention the bigger issues of security, log preservation, HR compliance, or any other myriad things that a toy implementation of IRC wouldn't offer. What happens if you lose your backups? What happens if your server becomes compromised? What happens if an employee textually assaults another employee through DMs and you need to audit it? These are all very real questions that people ask, and are questions that Slack and Teams have very sleek answers for. It's not just emojis - it's letting someone else handle the headache of maintaining a critical piece of your communication infrastructure.

I don't feel like they owe it to me at all – I'm just being honest about what I think is happening. I know that to some degree they probably even believe that the virus was the cause of the closure. This is my opinion, of course, but to me it seems clear that this is all about them having an opportunity to close that leaves them with a narrative of how it happened that lets them sleep better at night, which frankly I think is something they deserve. They've worked hard - the company has succeeded at times, but in its present form it wasn't ready to handle the relatively minor turmoil we've experienced from the virus thus far, but that's not to diminish how hard the closure is on them at all.

Sorry if I'm coming off as if I'm bitter or frustrated with the ownership. I'm truly not intending that - I just generally have found the whole process interesting, the way in which the narrative has been spun toward the coronavirus causing the closure, etc. I legitimately feel for these people who I have worked for for several years and think of as not just bosses, but friends. I might be letting some of my own personal emotions bleed into my writing since I'm frankly a little stressed about my own situation, so I apologize if I'm giving the wrong impression here.

Totally valid point. I think they were simply surviving by merit of the fact that the market was good, and really any major speedbump would have caused the company to fail. It's an excuse in the sense that they're not addressing that the reason coronavirus has destroyed the business is because it was built on a poor foundation.

Just found yesterday out that I'm being laid off at the end of the month.

Sadly, I wholeheartedly believe that the owners are using the coronavirus as an excuse to close their already-failing company. The company has been in slow-motion dissolution for the better part of a year, and now they're blaming the entire thing on the virus outbreak so that they have a narrative to tell that covers up some of the mismanagement that makes the closure of their company look bad. Now they have an effective smokescreen that shows that the closure was "outside of their control".

I have no doubt that many other companies will take advantage of this opportunity to close without the shame or stigma of having closed a failing company. There is almost no downside to using this as a guilt-free chance to rapidly shut down at a time where employees need stability more than ever.

All of that said, the company was conscientious enough to give us all two weeks' notice, pay out our PTO plans (that might just be required by law, though), and additionally pay out any pending bonuses to employees that had been agreed upon. They certainly didn't have to do all of that (even if some parts are just them following the law), and I appreciate them for taking those particular steps to help all of us transition to new positions.

Luckily, I started looking for jobs nearly a month ago and had begun preparing my resume and materials back in December, so I've already had a good number of interviews and am waiting to hear back about two positions in particular.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed and doing a lot of email refreshing, but if I'm being really honest it seems grim. I've already heard that many other companies are implementing a hiring freeze with the virus outbreak, etc. I can't help but shake the feeling that I should have started applying about a month earlier.

Full Stack Web Developer (10 yrs experience, 3 years remote experience)

Location: Pacific Northwest

Remote: Yes

Willing to Relocate: Yes

Technologies: React, GatsbyJS, Decoupled/Headless CMS, PHP, OO-PHP, Drupal CMS, Docker, CircleCI

Resume/CV: http://bit.ly/2IgoxNG

That's fair, this is probably more brochure to generate buzz, etc. It' still a little ironic, though. I got a chuckle out of it anyway.

Considering that the market for this product is people with subpar internet connections, it might be worth considering building a website that doesn't require nice hardware and a fast, stable internet connection to accurately load the page :)

As a developer who works with PHP a lot I get pretty tired of the "lolphp" mentality, but this was a legitimately grade-a PHP burn. Well done!

Classic HN comment. It's got it all: dismissive, terse, oddly confrontational. Bravo!

Amethyst has stabilized a ton in the last few years, I'd definitely considering giving it another shot if it's been a bit.

It really is pretty shocking that at this point Apple hasn't invested the time in a window snapping situation. Their other window management utilities (mission control, hot corners, etc.) are all very nice, but all incredibly pointer/mouse-centric.

I'd guess that a lot of macOS users don't care much since the pointer inputs (touchpads, magic trackpad) are really quite nice on Apple hardware. On the other hand, I definitely started using tiling WMs because the trackpads on my Linux laptops were always absolute garbage in the mid-2000s and early 2010s. The first time I used a Macbook touchpad I understood why so many people fell in love with those devices - especially back then, the touchpads felt magic compared to the crap being put out by every other PC manufacturer.

Yeah, same here. As someone who used AwesomeWM for a while, the limitation of binary split for both bspwm and chunkwm always felt a little restrictive.

As a tiling WM user coming from Linux, ChunkWM and Amethyst are both incredible projects that allowed me to replicate my familiar and comfortable tiling setup once I had a work-issued laptop running macOS.

For those who haven't used ChunkWM, the closest corollary in Linux is BSPWM. Just like BSPWM, the window manager is a standalone daemon that exclusively handles tiling and window management, and relies on an external hotkey daemon to issue commands to the WM that resize, focus, etc.

Obviously this requires a lot of configuration - if you like the tiling WM idea but don't want to maintain a few hundred lines of config files, I'd highly recommend looking at Amethyst.

Location: Pacific Northwest

Remote: Yes (preferred)

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: React, Node.js, Headless CMS, PHP (Symfony, Drupal), Devops.

Résumé/CV: Available on request.

Email: (my HN username) at protonmail.com

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Hey folks!

Full-stack dev here with lots of front-end experience, looking to escape PHP-land. A few quick notes about me:

- 7 years as a dev - previously cross-trained from a design position

- 3 years of experience with React – recently lots of Gatsby and Next

- Very comfortable with *nix environments, Docker, and devops - my last year or so has been spent implementing as much modern devops as possible for existing PHP projects.

- Rock solid web fundamentals (CSS++)

As mentioned, my experience is primarily with the usual suspect PHP CMS projects, but I am more than happy to start with a new stack and am more than capable of integrating directly into a headless/JAMStack front-end team, as my recent CMS experience has been 75% headless. Also willing to consider PHP work in Symfony or Laravel.

Currently (and ideally will remain) remote, but can consider relocation in Western US, Mountain West, or PNW.

While I do think Composer is an awesome improvement for the PHP ecosystem in general, I still find it insane that you cannot run `composer update` on a machine that has less than 1.5G memory allocated to PHP. It is an absolute resource hog, which is problematic for a lot of reasons.

It seems like calling this "Popcorn Time" for music isn't necessarily a great comparison.

PT allowed streaming playback of torrented movies and was very clearly piracy and illegal.

Meanwhile, this seems like an aggregator for existing free sources of music (Bandcamp, YouTube, SoundCloud).

That said, it looks like a cool hobby project and a great alternative for folks who want/need a multi-source music client. Google Play Music was my go-to service for a long time since I could not only get streaming access but also upload my own local files to their servers for playback anywhere. Most of that local music came from Bandcamp.

Very cool to see more action in the ActivityPub space – one of the nice aspects of the federated model is that more users of the protocol have a function of accumulative user bases, not directly competing with one another.

So in the future when Plume (a W3C sponsored ActivityPub blogging platform) eventually launches, there's no reason for WriteFreely and/or Plume readers to really worry about which platform a given author uses!

Top notch response! :)

>Language evolves - things that start out as misunderstandings or errors become informal usage, then dominant usage, then the correct way.

Yes, language does evolve. For example, American English has evolved in such a way that "beg the question" now means "raise the question" to the vast majority of people in the year 2017.

Forgive me, but I think you're in the minority of people who bristle at the contemporary usage of this phrase, which makes you come off as incredibly pedantic.

Thanks for all your hard work on DrupalVM, Jeff :)

This seems like a convenient time to remind folks that it is incredibly important to stand up against this kind of government action not only when it is conducted against your political allies, but especially when it is conducted against your political enemies. Even if this were a pro-Trump website being subpoenaed, this should sicken you nonetheless. Short-sighted political gain might be had by allowing the government to stomp all over political dissidents you don't agree with, but in a few short years you might find yourself on the receiving end of the same treatment you endorsed. My hope is that those in the alt-right will realize that supporting this kind of action may hurt themselves just as much as it hurts the anti-Trump folks.