samhuk

How does getting booed at an SF club equal incredibly and generally disliked? I find your extrapolation from an extremely small sample of ~100-300 people to, what quite obviously sounds like, literally 1-10-100 million or more people, very bizarre. How is that logical?

I'm quite neutral to all this political stuff. Instead, it's this mathematical nonsense of extrapolating from extremely small subsets to make extremely general sweeping statements, like "booed (not even universally) at an SF club" => "lots of people dislike Elon", that really gets to me.

Also, Elon has, many times, expressed that he isn't politcally "right" or "left", so to use a very small number (1? <5?) tweets to say that an individual is "authoritarian right" is, IMHO, just the same nonsense as before.

I agree about the statement of being surrounded by yes-people, but how does getting booed in an SF club (which must be pretty much a badge of honor at this point?) link to the "authoritarian right"? Does that mean that SF is, or Elon at least thinks so, predominantly "authoritarian left"? And how is that any better?

On the whole I think that the language from figures like Elon have indeed become too Infowars-ish, but I dont really see your angle of "not SF equals authoritarian right". At least that's what I got...?

See edit. TL;DR: Nowhere did I say that the alleged criminal acts of SBF of JE are "comparable". To say that is an extremely gross and unfathomable misunderstanding of what I was saying. I'm not sure why you would do that, to be very honest with you.

Bernie Madoff was a bit before my time. Was he heavily involved with politics/political figures, to the degree of SBF?

Honestly, one of my concerns is that a figure like SBF has one similarity with Jeffrey Epstein - both was/are highly connected individuals. I fear waking up one day to the sudden reveal of SBF's "long hidden battle with depression", before a strange last-minute relocation, then another strange event, then...

My gut feeling is that SBF won't rat-out any corruption that goes way up to the stratosphere of US politics, and instead will try to go for a deal, perhaps even help with investigations into Binance etc., however my concern is another time where we don't get true justice (the facts become public knowledge, fair trial, etc.).

Next few weeks and months are going to be interesting, I think.

EDIT: Some downvotes, so just wanted to elaborate: Nowhere did I say that the alleged criminal acts of SBF of JE are "comparable". To say that is an extremely gross and unfathomable misunderstanding of what I was saying.

I am comparing their involvement with politics and political figures (unequivocally), and noting how both have either alleged or proven to have been involved in illegal activity. I feel like it's a pretty important and note-worthy point to make, but YMMV.

However, I understand that my wording could have made that more clear for everyone. I apologise for that. Sorry.

I mean poor enough that its easy to get set up but more complex usage ends up requiring support services, by which lock in has started occuring.

FYI dark markets often use XMR (monero) now, due to it's true anonymity. That's why a few governments around the world are one-by-one banning it's sale (see Kraken and the UK government monero situation in september 2021). Bitcoin was figured out by most big governments quite a few years ago, and dark markets are quite quickly moving on to XMR.

Genuinely curious (I don't know all that much about these things): To what extent does the SQLite model incentivize poor documentation since that would drive use of paid support services?

Hi and thank you. The more I think about it, the more I find it kind of nuts that I worked non-stop for ~10 years of my formative life all the while completing a Physics degree without taking a little break apart from annual leave here and there.

All the best with your future!

Then everyone would think I'm just a ChatGPT bot trained on HN ;) /s

Thank you for sharing. You are certainly at a different point in your life and career (I am but only a humble developer), however it was very nice to read your story about spending more time with your children.

I share that feeling of observing the industry. I think that some of the recent sentiments are a bit overblown about the tech industry. Some seem to think that it's all going to blow up because a few thousand FAANG rest-n-vesters got let go. (side-note: I know that not all who got made redundant were of that type, just adding flare!)

Thank you. Good luck with the future. It's a big leap of faith.

Ah, sorry, I have edited my original comment. TL;DR it's a very little server sitting right behind me, and gets easily stressed.

Didn't get laid off but resigned around a month ago after a long stretch of non-stop work since I was basically a kid (worked through college, university, and straight after O_o). Basically for a little break and to focus on doing some real intense OSS. Been a wild, challenging, and rewarding 1.5 months so far. Applied to a couple places that were working on some interesting things, some even related to my own OSS, reached out by AWS but I wasn't willing to relocate to Sweden so I broke that off. I did my first "leetcode interview" a few weeks back and did quite well I think for someone who A) has only done around 5 leetcode problems for fun ~5 years ago, B) comes from a Physics, not CS background, C) is a quick learner and solver, not rote-learning BFS and DFS kind of guy.

7 YOE in web dev, full-stack.

Leaving this here if anyone has any remote work for me :)

EDIT: For anyone accessing my site, I apologize in advance for slowness or crashes, it's hosted in my residence on a puny server sitting behind me :( I've been meaning to cloud it for a while now but I kind of like the DIY of it all.

I have honestly never understood why we allow businesses to use customers for charitable causes. It seems like a huge conflict of interest and essentially co-mingles for-profit and none-profit legal entities. It reminds me of when I worked at a large financial institution that most have heard of that has their tax audit subfirm next-door to their tax consultation subfirm, then promises the government "they definitely aren't doing shady things".

If businesses want to support a charitable cause, why can't they support it? I don't understand how it became normal to mix buying a burger at Mcdonalds with donating to their somewhat shady charity?

This all leads me to the inevitable tin-foil-hat conspiracy that they deliberately exploit this (IMHO) very strange legal void in order to gauge customer price sensitivity and such, as one other comment pointed out.

I suppose if the company directly donated to charity, then they would raise prices to account for that, and then in the end the customer is still donating to charity. So at the end of the day, perhaps I'm just somewhat against for-profit businesses participating in none-profit activities. Is there a better way?

I'm not going against charity in general, not at all and quite the opposite, but rather just very confused how we, society, and the law in general have allowed businesses to access their customers for charitable donations. Am I missing something? Genuinely open to ideas.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=L.B.H.

This reminds me of the "LBH" acronym that I heard about very often when Japanese locals describe typically western, especially American, tourists, who fit quite well into your identity description.

"Loser Back Home"

I didn't even know this stereotype existed until I got into a "so what do you think about all those escapist western tourists in your country" conversation with one of my Japanese friends (I'm from a very international UK area). Goes to show how withheld it really is. You are certainly right about that.

I was going to mention Bun and Deno. The crux of the issue/challenge is that there is so much to do. So incredibly much. JS tooling written in {not-JS} (i.e. Deno, Bun, esbuild, etc) needs developers to buy in to the new language and ecosystem, which has proven pretty much impossible. Just look at esbuild - as far as my search goes, it has not a single Golang plugin, yet >100 JS ones. My fear is that we will keep on getting tools like Bun, esbuild, etc., but the JS community never really embraces it and we are forever stuck in JS-zig or JS-Go or JS-{whatever} interop land for JS tooling.

Oh, quite coincidentally, I just wrote a blog post about what I would dream of working on if I had more manpower available [0]. Short story is that Javascript tooling is sick. It has a pathology of slowness, bloatedness, dep hell, etc. Webpack is a great example. tsc another.

Although these tools are great, after all they have been critical in the development of the web, they are slow! Additionally, many lack good Typescript support for various reasons, so there's often guesswork involved, and there's more problems that would be too voluminous to get into.

So my dream software that I would create would be a collection of Go-centric Javascript tooling, essentially growing what esbuild started. I envisage an npm written in Go (imagine deps installed in 1 second rather than 30), hot reloading dev servers using esbuild all written in Go (imagine ~100ms hot reloading of an enterprise-grade website), SASS parsers written in Go, the whole JS toolchain rewritten in a fast compiled langauge.

Unfortunately, the web development community isn't yet ready for such. I personally believe it's the obvious future of web development, just like how it became silly to use anything other than compiled C libs for python development. I go into a bit more detail in my blog post :)

[0] https://samhuk.substack.com/p/what-im-working-on

I agree with your comparison to Webpack (and also brought back all of my pre-esbuild memories...). I've worked at some places where a simple component library repo has >100 LoC storybook config files and I was always confused why it had to be like that.

Thanks for your feedback. This is helping me a lot towards understanding what we want from a "component workshop" that perhaps Storybook and others (like Ladle) don't either have or do the way we want. :)

Just taken a look. It's very nice to use. It appears a little early at the moment, and I'm not sure, but it would be nice if it had integrated puppeteer integration for e2e testing (I didn't look for very long, so I may have missed it!).

Thanks for your feedback :)

Thanks for your feedback. I agree on most of your points.

I feel like Cypress moving into the component testing arena was an interesting move.

I would say that any software that has 4 billion MAU quite reasonably can be classified as "the world runs on it"-tier software.

If I had to guess, what I think you're doing is you're letting your opinion about the morality of FAANG-like software (ads, tracking, mal-influencing, etc.) be a judge on it's utility.

FAANG-like software is like fossil fuels. Fossil fuels, like much of FAANG-software, have many immoral aspects, yet they have utility to the point of "the world runs on it".

Google, DDG etc. connected the internet. Facebook, twitter etc. connected people on the internet. I'de say that's something of a big deal.

Succinctly:

* Ensure your public persona shows you actually like software development as a trade, via open source software development, etc. - show you have craftsmanship and care.

* Ensure you have been instrmental to at least 2 significant features for your previous role(s) - show you make businesses money.

* Ensure you know easy and intermediate algos. If you score below top ~70% on common software development screening tests, i.e. Triplebyte, you will struggle. (I'm not going to debate whether online code screening tests are ethical/effective, lots of talk there...)

* Ensure you haven't overly focused on one/two technology ecosystems in your career - you will struggle with success if you are a common dotnetter sludge or one of those "F#/haskell/lisp developers who suggest using some fancy tool every 3 weeks".

Those are the some of the first that come to mind.

As most comments seem to say, I think that what you say describes a very bad culture. Although said with many more words, your proposed culture is of secrecy and opacity, where decisions and actions are performed in private in a conniving fashion to avoid "backlash".

Any company that doesn't appreciate honesty/transparency/openness is certainly not one I would ever be a part of.

Most importantly, and it's worth mentioning again because other comments pointed this out, the culture you seem to be a proponent of was critically instrumental in major disasters like the Challenger disaster. When we can't talk about those "inconvenient truths", they get buried until they are forgotten and we are forced to learn about them again, sometimes in the most cruelest of ways.

Like security through obscurity, it will thwart probably a small percentage of the total new bot accounts. The issue is that you are right, eventually people catch on to the obscurity.

I can see how shadowbanning ("bot-bans") is effective against bot accounts, since it's less trivial for a bot maker to write code that detects when their bot has been detected, resulting in a lower rate of new bot accounts. That makes sense. However what seems to have occurred is a widespread blatant misuse of bot-bans to silence different views from the group of moderators.

shadowbanning is obviously a security-through-obscurity measure. Instead of having good bot detection, they seem to just give moderators an invisible-yet-almighty ban hammer with no accountability.

I've personally never used Reddit other than as a lurker to skim the valuable content from subreddits like r/BIFL, etc. I've found the politiking of platforms like Reddit too vitriolic for my tastes :/

Location: London, UK

Remote: Yes or no

Willing to relocate: Within UK

Technologies: Typescript (and JS), React, Node.js, Express, SQL, PostgreSQL, C#, .NET, Docker, Go, few others...

Résume/CV: Request via email or http://samhuk.com/contact

Email: samhughes1701@hotmail.co.uk

GH: https://github.com/samhuk

I'm a software developer who aims to create software that delights developers and users alike. I've worked with modern web technologies for ~7 years. I'm an avid open-source contributor. I've worked in several companies ranging from 15-dev start-ups to large financial organizations, leading the design and development of features that have become integral parts of products.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sam-hughes-024a95119

Interesting question. I have an interesting observation about others, to start.

I worked at my last gig both before and all through COVID, so I got something of a front-row seat to the changes that occured.

One thing I definitely, very particularly noticed, that I found quite shocking, is that colleagues I knew to be on the more extroverted side have had negative personality changes. They have shorter tempers, they actually argue with colleagues in Teams meetings, they are more bitter and angry in code reviews. They get upset with negative feedback about their code/work. I can go on...

It has been really shocking seeing some colleagues that I knew for over 3 years that were great humans, come out the end of the pandemic situation so poorly.

Colleagues that I knew to be more introverted, or had close families (were a father/mother, for example) seem to be affected far less.

This has made me conjecture that extroverted people suffered far more, socially, than introverted people, by the very nature of "lock-downs" literally being an introverted environment. It could all be anecdotal, but it still interests me.

It's actually one of the few reasons why I moved on to other opportunities. When it's your adjacent colleague, you can adapt and deal with the shorter tempers, bitterness, and such. However, when it's a significant proportion of your leadership team, that's another question!

About myself:

* I am far more productive.

* I don't have to look busy.

* I nip out to meet a friend for lunch.

* I have free-er choice when pimping my dev setup.

* Better snacks :)

* Better tea

Overall, I see it as an absolute win for someone like me.

I wonder if Facebook never integrated payments because of the inevitability of scammers setting up fake events to extract down-payments, Fyre Festival style.

Out of curiosity, how does Villagers prevent Fyre Festival-like events?