razzimatazz

I think the post invites a question to all the HN responders: What would it take for the computer [software] you are using to run at its full blazing potential?

The answer is - if every single piece of software was written while already knowing the true requirements, the scope of its use and re-use, and knowing the future bugs and security flaws that would appear, then it could be written one time and be BLAZING FAST.

Many parts would still be written in a 'Clean code' style for the necessary extensibility and testability, etc. But many others would be small and near optimal.

THEN on top of that, if the author or an equivalent talent came along and rewrote or supervised the optimization of the regular software, similar to how the article does, your system would be HYPER INSANE BLAZING FAST.

If we are proponents of OOP or Clean code, we need to acknowledge that fact. (i.e. My code may not be important but it all contributes to slowing down the computing world). And if we think the Author is preaching gospel here, you should also acknowledge that because the future is so often unknown when we write code we often have no choice but to fill it with Clean code that can be easily changed later, and sometimes even 'Shit code' that we thought would never be used by anyone.

How about just Hacker News, expanded with some machine learning to determine the topics I would be interested in. My 'friends' or connections don't supply me with nearly enough of the posts and news items that catch my interest, whereas I trust HN to float up things of interest (and not pure trash), so can I just base my feed on your posts?

Great anecdote that, a real classic - previous experienced engineer couldn't get the cooperation and information he knew he needed to do it properly so barely started. Newer inexperienced engineer wasn't quite sure what was needed but built something to get several processes working and used that to convince everyone to provide the support to complete it.

Key point: quantify the shinyness of the turds, so that HR screen likes the look of the CV, and be prepared to talk about turd shinyness and why it would matter.

"Created a new CMS in python (Based on the old CMS) (With a team of 2 others and one guru who did the design but I wrote his code) resulting in 70% reduction in update times (after we ran it in a cluster with twice the resources but I never could understand clustering so guess it was my coding)" "And didn't have time to write tests, and that project was canned because it took too long actually"

I'm glad my asuss eee is gone now, but in 2011 it was a fabulous travel aid for exploring italy - keeping us out of icky internet cafes and keeping us entertained on the long slow (railpass compliant) rail journeys.

Netbooks became of course the small and underpowered laptop that many rely upon today. They also perhaps provided some of the foundation for iPad's success - giving Apple a clear starting point from which to market a much nicer portable internet device.

You prompted me to think of fitness - as someone who has accumulated fitness I still feel like I am suffering a lot when I run, and I can take that suffering as a bit like winging it. The difference is I am suffering/winging it at a decent pace, I'm accustomed to what suffering/winging it feels like and know that I don't need to give up, I believe I can push on.

And indeed there is always more fitness that I need.

I like it. It still carries a little bit of whimsy and puts a smile on my face (while nodding).

Definitely saving that, translating it to interview-compatible speak, and springing it on future employers.

Actually I need to translate a good 75% of grug's teachings to interview compatible language...

I definitely will need a "Jump to the recipe" button for Twitter notes.

You've found an interesting topic and decided to use that to practice your medium-long form writing - but have you actually discovered anything unique worth discussing?

Fair enough - based only on the couple of super-minor artists I've stumbled upon who have put on an album or EP's worth of tracks at once (4-10 or so).

There are steps missing, perhaps -

Artists with only 2 songs on Spotify are probably fake, there are odds they are the property of Spotify themselves and have been carefully created and placed into playlists to minimize royalty costs to Spotify.

I love to discover a great new song and artist on a playlist, where that artist has a whole bunch of songs for me to try out - such an artist is much more real. And I'm willing to pay a tiny bit more to access real artists because of that.

I like that this is such a wholesome topic we can safely debate on the internet. There are clearly good arguments for and against the change to permanent DST, so I will safely ignore anyone presenting statements of the "You must be an idiot if you think..." form.

There's no disinformation campaigns to worry about, nobody getting 'cancelled' for their poor arguments on the topic, no fraudulent studies being passed around. At least, for the time being...

I've been looking for the comment to explain what I see as the most significant factor in flat earth belief, which would be - missing respect for scientific authority.

It's possible to be a flat earther if you don't see how much your day to day life depends on the work of scientists and engineers - regular people who just focus their energy differently to you. But if you care a little about those brainy sorts, and have enough trust for the prominent ones who communicate well such as Neil DeGrasse Tyson, you would come to accept that there are millions of us who depend on the knowledge of the shape of the earth (almost directly) in our day to day life.

It might be the case that given enough bad science teachers and a lack of decent 'nerdy' people in your life, you never gain that respect, and a flat earth becomes a real possibility.

I would like to hear people's thoughts on how to coach a junior on how to get a 'second brain' (new term for me) going. Plenty of your average new developers won't have the experience to build it on their own, or maybe they just wont know what the topics and projects are that they will be working with.

I think I'm wired with the potential to eat more than I burn because the opposite is dangerous (long-term) and its hard to anticipate future burn when I eat. There would need to be a lot of food 'abundance' for the negative effects of this to ever come to fruition to the point of influencing evolution, and fixing the brain malfunction.

(Maybe I misunderstand your angle).

Yeah but that has to be a side gig, not perfect but it's pretty common for humans to not be perfect. You have to believe he loves stand up comedy, loves the UFC, is blown away by the success of the podcast, and generally loves life. That doesn't leave time to get the Onnit topic quite right.

I enjoy that he asks the stupid questions (or the questions that I would feel too self-conscious to ask) of those experts. It is such an excellent contrast to a stale interview with prepared topics and nothing natural to it.

It's easy to shit on the show for being a bro-science quackery discussion, not worthy of smart people listening to it or being guests on it. And as we all notice just how popular the show is, anything bad about it (it has plenty of that) becomes a good reason to want it _shut_ _down_

My favorite is the times when I have dived in to fix performance of the system, found the place where I or a team mate left in a terribly unnecessary loop or increased complexity, quickly fix that and report back the great success in improving performance! Great indicator there for management.

I think the person/team following such a path does deserve accolades but if their ego blocks them from admitting honestly how difficult the work was, others will sense (maybe not management) the dishonesty sooner or later and problems will eventually develop.

I always give my team mates accolades and offer them excuses when they've messed up: "we were really busy that week", "its easy to forget to bump the minor version", "that manual testing work is tough". If they choose to ignore the offered excuse and go silent with their ego I think it stands out sorely over time. If they accept it then we all know what we have to improve on next time.

I'm pretty sure its about time that Windows guessed what I am trying to do when I am looking around inside a folder. Right-click, offer me the shortcut to create a file similar to what is already here.

They already have the obvious yet brilliant use of recent items in Outlook : compose reply, click attach file -> top of the list is that file I just edited and saved over in Word a few seconds ago.

Perhaps what is immoral is when the volume of advertising and the workload it places on the brain becomes too much.

The coffee shop with far too many flyers or 7 by the same local tutor becomes very hard to handle. With experience you fight through the flyers to read the menu and get to the counter to order that coffee.

There is so much 'opportunity' in the world at any moment for which the provider of the opportunity's ad thinks that it could be relevant to me. I can accept a little of that every day without it being bad, but patience wears very fast.

I agree selective freedom of speech is hard. Probably too hard.

I tend to support selective augmentation of other people's speech - "fact checkers have shown this to be inaccurate" next to a conspiracy fan's latest comment. As long as it is more precise than just downvoting to oblivion.

The GoT analogy continues if we think that as the TV show continued, certain book plot points were missed out, overlooked, or perhaps even negated by decisions made for the show.

Book readers then had ready ammunition to share with the world "the TV series was WRONG, dishonest and false... the dialogue proves X but they changed it in the tv series!"

So they remain gleeful but they need to share their conspiracy(Book plotline) with the masses because otherwise the masses won't understand the same reality that they do.

Imposter syndrome for me is kept in check if I keep within my 'quota' of mistakes. It doesn't bother me if I am the author behind a bug (Normally every bug is an opportunity to understand the software we've built better), but if consecutive bugs come back to my work, then I notice it. And I notice it in others too, and then I want to see them putting effort into improving their skill, etc..

Just to those who downvote - if someone poses a question or argument which you think is easily refuted, by downvoting or removing that question you remove the opportunity for anyone else with the same argument to learn something.

And maybe this is part of the problem with the whole covid discussion - labeling all these simple arguments from all sides as "wot a moron!" instead of presenting them clearly for people to learn from.

It sounds like an honorable goal, doesn't it? But when you build a community that becomes simply a place for shared anger, you allow that anger to be amplified and seem more legitimate.

You are on to something. I interpret it as it is fantastic fun/addictive/dopamine-short-term-win to argue or discuss with someone. Especially if you can afford the hangover that outrage might lead to.

Face to face with people I know or at least recognize as human, not a bot, educated or at least not cartoon-hick-personality - Arguments can be great, because of the ability to see when to pull back and stop something from escalating. We are all human after all.

In internet-powered discussion, where numbers of people observing can be huge, and every username can feel inhuman or maybe even just trolling in an attempt to create a stupid argument - that Argument gets painful. But the dopamine hit is still there...

In NZ, we follow along behind the USA in most things, so getting angry over politics is growing and growing. I see it as a hobby, growing in popularity. But also a hobby you can discourage those you know from getting into, and if the social momentum pulls us away from it then the hobby doesn't take hold.

I think the middle ground can be a great place to work in tech, all it takes is one other person to work with that is willing to care about the things you achieve together.

Typical examples include our dysfunctional regression testing days. Tedium and pain when given the task alone and the person in change is just waiting to hear it's done. Bearable and in fact a shared challenge when you work through it together, with some small elements of process thrown in, and ended with credit given for getting the painful but necessary task done.

Even if a different person sitting near to you is checked out. I actually like to take my job satisfaction and rub it in their face a little.

I propose we introduce a clever new concept we can call your "Fizz". You get a first fizz, and a last fizz. You can change it whenever, but you need to have one. But a fizz can only be ascii characters without case and no spaces. We just need a way to map (with some but not perfect reliability) your fizz to your identity as proven by some authorative third party..

The point being that 'name' is a term interpreted in culturally varied ways... which when I design most systems I dont care about. so to make it clear, lets not use that any more.