shanemhansen

Everything old is new again.

So in the old days there was a way to supply a binary rather than source code. That binary could be fast starting. There was even an open standard for connecting those binaries to different web servers. The standard used unix patterns such as reading stdin and writing stdout.

Sometimes it seems like people have created an insanely high learning curve to run their CGI programs. Sometimes it seems like most of the magic and value add of some of these platforms is that they reduce some of the overhead they added.

I'm surprised. It seems like for the last several months I've been noticing fitbits on the wrist of several prominent people.

Maybe their product is just too simple and does it's job too well. Judging by trends in the market, people won't be satisfied until their watches have about 8h of battery life and are privy to all the 0-days of android.

Ignore my grumbling, I'm just an old fossil who wants phones to at least be phones and watches to at least be watches. Call quality on my phone seems to drop every year, and my wife's $500 smart watch barfs on syncing her music library.

Honestly I think that school is state sponsored babysitting. Once you understand that, the rhetoric teachers are often spouting about "misbehavior" "defiance" and "insubordination" all makes sense. At school a child's job is to not make a stir.

I also think free public school is critical to having an educated productive populace.

There's an apparent disconnect between my first opinion and the second. That disconnect is, and I know this will sound trite, questioning authority and facts. It's a critically important practice that schools actively discourage.

Maybe you need to work on your communication skills? I realize that's a snarky sounding answer, so let me expand on that. Face to face communication is nice and has benefits. But there are tradeoffs. It's clear that your company has decided that when making a decision between having certain team members be remotely part of the team or not at all, the choice is clear. So maybe the appropriate course of action is to accept the benefit of continuing to have access to those individuals and work on adjusting your communication style to support distributed teams. Protip: a remote first workflow also improves documentation and communication if you have more than one office.

Personally, I welcome the chance to work with a group of minds that isn't restricted by the filter of "lives within x hours of office". The world is full of amazing projects created by people around the world working together.

I think your observation is valid, but in my experience the drawbacks of remote working are dwarfed by the benefits.

> need constant whipping to stay on track

> The threat of your manager sticking their head round the corner is a stick that keeps on-site employees grinding along.

I would appreciate it if you'd share your current company/team, I'd imagine some other hner's would appreciate the heads up too, so they can avoid it.

It was 100% cloudy when I was there in Sep, then at 2am in a crappy cabin outside REK we had a clear night and took some amazing pictures. Don't give up hope!

I'm learning rust now, this isn't even my first attempt. I know Go really well and C reasonably well and I can say Rust is much harder. If you want specifics: I can tell you that I've found changing a type from HashMap<String, u64> to HashMap<T: Hash+Eq, u64> within one of my projects to be extremely hard. I've read the rust documentation, and had to resort to reddit several times. I'm stuck dealing with mutable/immutable borrow issues to accomplish relatively simple tasks like searching for entries and removing them. In go these issues don't exist. I'm sure I'll figure them out eventually, and I'm a fan of rust, but it's a confusing frustrating grind.

My understanding is that the rust team has put 2 priorities ahead of everything else: zero cost abstraction and safety. Given those constraints they've done a fantastic job in the area of ergonomics, but I don't know if it will ever be easy. Maybe rust is as easy to use as it can be.

> Later in private several people were disgruntled and claimed the person only had to do so because they had messed it up before despite being told to use a different approach repeatedly.

This sounds like every tech company ever. I used to excitedly watch youtube videos about the extreme measures startups took to scale to "massive" amounts of traffic while undergoing huge growth spurts.

Now I just kind of roll my eyes and think "Yeah, obviously a message bus in a relational databse using rails wasn't the optimal solution for scaling that app".

In the real world emergencies happen. The unexpected happens. But the truth is that if you actually prepare and have been around the block once or twice, they don't happen all that often. And when they do, there's usually a handy little knob to ameliorate the issue.

I've often been shocked at how a theoretically rational profit seeking business will happily throw millions down the drain rather than compensate an individual based on value. Ultimately I've concluded that although they may be greedy, most businesses don't make rational profit seeking decisions. They make decisions that stroke their ego, and sometimes their ego can't accept the value that certain employees bring to the table. They are just coders right? /s

Nowhere was this more apparent than at my first big job. The company's first full time engineer was still working there, and still extremely essential to the operation of the business. (It was actually bad that he was so essential, but that's another story). This company made several hundred million dollars a year. Online. And almost daily this individual used their tribal and historical knowledge to keep the site up. He left. I doubt he was paid a million dollars, but I have no doubt that paying a million dollars to keep him around would have been a cost saving measure.

That's odd. It would be nice if branches could be tested with the build bot.

Am I reading this right? They are implementing transactional memory support in C++?

https://gcc.gnu.org/projects/cxx-status.html#tses

http://www.open-std.org/Jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2015/n451...

To be honest I don't remember the last time I filled out a PDF form. Every form I've had to work with in the last 5 years was either fully online (docusign) or required me to print it out and sign it.

According to the website python,tcl, and javascript can be used https://irssi.org/modules/

While python2 may be the past, I think that for many python3 is not the future.

Huh. Work firewall won't let me access. I'm assuming that the problem is the domain: "patent sex piringtoday.com".

> It also looks like they've so far deployed exactly 1 of these setups in the real world and haven't even really started producing units for sale. Right now this venture is a complete pipe dream and feels awfully out of touch.

So what you're saying is they posted it to the right forum? Not making fun of hacker news, but it is literally a forum for not-yet-validated startup ideas.

As always there's a relevant xkcd. https://xkcd.com/519/

lisp: It excels in "key algorithmic techniques such as recursion and condescension". http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-m...

> And being a meetup organizer for two different meetup groups means I'm forced (a good thing for an introvert) to see other people in the area who work in the same area.

Funny you should mention that. I'm a co-organizer of a pretty active meetup. The first tuesday of the month is the highlight of my social calendar.

Overall a well written article with some valid criticisms. After 2 years working remotely I observed roughly the same facts, but have a slightly different spin on the whole thing.

Like everything in life, working remotely has tradeoffs. One person's pro is someone else's con.

Pro: I potentially gained hours of my life back every day. I know many people who work for similar companies who spend more than an hour commuting every day. They take less-desirable jobs and leave behind their coworkers just so they can get an hour of their life back and reduce their commute from 2+ hrs to 30 minutes.

Pro: I can disassociate my COL from the company's choice of office location.

Pro: I can cook food in the crock pot on a regular basis without worrying about my house burning down.

Pro: I can walk my dogs during my lunch break (or pick up food from the grocery store or run some other errand).

Pro: (subjective) My coworkers competence is higher than what I typically observe from companies that limit their hiring pool to people who live within a few minutes (or hours) of one office building.

Pro: I can and have worked from a hammock, a camper van in a state park, a car on a road trip, and a cafe in Paris.

Pro: No requirement to waste literally hours of my day in bullshit pre-lunch planning, post-lunch coffee, etc. When I'm onsite I'm happy to spend lots of time on watercooler talk, but I'm not obligated to do it every work day.

Pro: I can go hiking on my lunch break.

Con: I don't see anyone but my spouse. I have to go to additional meetups in order to make up for this.

Con: Not as much face time with execs. This can matter politically and for your career.

> In Go I can only write libraries for Go programs.

That's not true. It's quite simple to create a loadable shared object in go and call it using anything with a c ffi.

As someone who worked in the restaurant industry, and who's immediate and extended family worked in the restaurant industry, this feels like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_difference...

I've worked at pretty nice restaurants and while attitudes like yours were pretty pervasive, the only real difference between bussing and waiting was that wait staff was over 21 and thus able to serve alcohol.

I can also tell you from years of experience that waiters are the most stuck up classist poor people I've ever seen.

I think I understand what you are saying too. I've personally worked on 2 alexa top 100 sites for the US that are using go on the public internet. They see a fair amount of malicious traffic. I actually find Go and net/http to be a pretty solid base for defusing layer 7 attacks.

I can't comment on the nginx codebase, but I've been running golang production-facing golang servers for a long time and I feel safe in saying I have mostly resilient http services.

I've worked with more than one company handling over 100k requests/s on the public internet with Go. Go's networking model combined with the work that's gone into fuzzing the stdlib combined with the benefit of hindsight when it comes to data structures and security combined with lots of love from google web people has resulted in an extremely mature web stack.

I noticed they default to creating a main function that runs os.Exit(0). I recommend not doing that because it stops any potential deferred actions from running. It's not required for their simple main() func to run correctly, but I feel it's a good habit to get into.

There is a widely accepted difference in the US: the PE exam. Other countries make it flat out illegal to call yourself an engineer without the proper credentials.

I once attended a talk by a man who developed software for autonomous submarines that balanced immediate short term needs analogous to breathing with higher order missions like searching for mines. It was called hafscript (hierarchical autonomous framework). The author still seems to be active online.

http://samuelsmith.org/projects/publications/

I think there's a fundamental mistake the author is making. Sometimes complaints about frameworks are not directed at framework authors, but at users. Sometimes people need to be warned away from bad software.

Specifically the author references a NG2 article that is trying to warn developers, not bash maintainers. https://meebleforp.com/blog/36/angular-2-is-terrible

I think they are both copying the stdlib terminology https://golang.org/pkg/net/http/#ServeMux

Historically gophers haven't minded the occasional namespace collision: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/9

I live in Utah and I can tell you exactly what happens when oil is no longer in demand. They offer numerous tax breaks per well to encourage exploration and increase production. I believe the term is "corporate welfare". One of the tax breaks has a stated goal of providing tax relief when oil prices are low. https://oilgas.ogm.utah.gov/pub/Publications/Lists/tax_incen...

This is the same government attempting to roll back solar tax credits because they insist that the solar industry needs to stand on it's own 2 feet and compete in the "free" market.