skytreader

Location: EU

Remote: Yes, EU timezones preferred

Willing to relocate: Depends on the location (but with a strong bias for EU-Schengen/US locations)

Technologies: Java, Python (and variants thereof like Groovy, Pypy) Node/TS | AWS/Lambda Serverless, GCE/Kubernetes | Redis, MySQL, PostgreSQL, DynamoDB

Resume: https://bit.ly/3B3o65M (It links to my CV repo at Github, pinky promise. You can also visit github.com/<hnusername>.)

I'm not actively looking (hence why my resume link is obfuscated like that) but I'm at least interested in getting a feel for the market right now. That said, I'm willing to consider a position with a great fit for my skill set and career goals.

Here's my pitch: I have experience in a multitude of industries and positions. From improving legacy infra and processes in an established telco company to scaling a fast-moving startup from 200K to 2M users. In my free time, I love writing Code That Is Poetry but day-to-day I am not an idealist engineer who doesn't compromise. Well-engineered code is clean and correct but correct above all else.

Oh, also, I'm great at writing documentation. I consider myself introverted but apparently my communication skills are above average for Software Engineers. I also pride myself on my humility and modesty.

I'd love to explore other technical positions in the games industry short of joining a AAA studio because (a) I don't want to crunch and (b) my skill set does not lay that way; other techo-creative industries would also appeal to me! Another particular interest is in B2C businesses where the 'C' is software developers. I'd love to chat and network about opportunities; if you think you have a product that could benefit from my skill set, drop me a line!

Location: EU

Remote: Yes, EU timezones preferred

Willing to relocate: Depends on the location (but with a strong bias for EU-Schengen/US locations)

Technologies: Java, Node/TS, Python (and variants thereof like Groovy, Pypy) | AWS/Lambda Serverless, GCE/Kubernetes | Redis, MySQL, PostgreSQL, DynamoDB

Resume: https://bit.ly/3B3o65M (It links to my CV repo at Github, pinky promise. You can also visit github.com/<hnusername>.)

I'm not actively looking (hence why my resume link is obfuscated like that) but I'm at least interested in getting a feel for the market right now. That said, I'm willing to consider a position with a great fit for my skill set and career goals.

Here's my pitch: I have experience in a multitude of industries and positions. From improving legacy infra and processes in an established telco company to scaling a fast-moving startup from 200K to 2M users. In my free time, I love writing Code That Is Poetry but day-to-day I am not an idealist engineer who doesn't compromise. Well-engineered code is clean and correct but correct above all else.

Oh, also, I'm great at writing documentation. I consider myself introverted but apparently my communication skills are above average for Software Engineers. I also pride myself on my humility and modesty.

I'd love to explore other technical positions in the games industry short of joining a AAA studio because (a) I don't want to crunch and (b) my skill set does not lay that way; other techo-creative industries would also appeal to me! Another particular interest is in B2C businesses where the 'C' is software developers. I'd love to chat and network about opportunities; if you think you have a product that could benefit from my skill set, drop me a line!

Location: EU

Remote: Yes, EU timezones preferred

Willing to relocate: Depends on the location (but with a strong bias for EU-Schengen/US locations)

Technologies: Java, Node/TS, Python (and variants thereof like Groovy, Pypy) | AWS/Lambda Serverless, GCE/Kubernetes | Redis, MySQL, PostgreSQL, DynamoDB

Resume: https://bit.ly/3B3o65M (It links to my CV repo at Github, pinky promise. You can also visit github.com/<hnusername>.)

I'm not actively looking (hence why my resume link is obfuscated like that) but I'm at least interested in getting a feel for the market right now. That said, I'm willing to consider a position with a great fit for my skill set and career goals.

Here's my pitch: I have experience in a multitude of industries and positions. From improving legacy infra and processes in an established telco company to scaling a fast-moving startup from 200K to 2M users. In my free time, I love writing Code That Is Poetry but day-to-day I am not an idealist engineer who doesn't compromise. Well-engineered code is clean and correct but correct above all else.

Oh, also, I'm great at writing documentation. I consider myself introverted but apparently my communication skills are above average for Software Engineers. I also pride myself on my humility and modesty. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

I'd love to explore other technical positions in the games industry short of joining a AAA studio because (a) I don't want to crunch and (b) my skill set does not lay that way. I'm also interested in B2C businesses where the 'C' is software developers. I'd love to chat and network about opportunities but, to be honest, I'd like to emphasize that I am not currently actively looking so at the moment there might be a pretty high bar of what piques my interest.

You cherry-picked my comment to ignore my efforts at less-anecdotal proof. It was very much the zeitgeist to advocate for teaching computer programming back in the era I specified to encourage children to be in tech:

2014: https://thehill.com/policy/technology/226287-largest-school-...

2015: https://thehill.com/policy/technology/256385-chicago-mayor-c...

> Group B is a superset that includes group A!

Come on now, you can't make that claim without clown make-up on. If B is a superset of A, what's the point of your distinction then? ~You just made a stronger claim than mine; now you are also saying _everyone_ in A liked the show too.~

(EDIT: OK, as @defrost pointed out below, your claim is about intended audience rather than people liking the show. But doesn't change my view that asserting B is a superset of A makes your distinction pointless. Nor that using the term intended audience actually carries some burden of proof with it.)

Here's a picture of a superset to aid comprehension:

   +-------------------+
   | Set B             |
   | +---------------+ |
   | | Set A         | |
   | +---------------+ |
   +-------------------+

> the author’s perception has shifted, and as such their perception of humanity has shifted with it

I think your comment is largely anecdotal and is actually guilty of the very thing you are accusing the author of.

For instance...

> I think it is possible that “tech entrepreneur” as a monolithic “cool” category only ever existed inside the minds of that same group.

So, in my very personal opinion, the Best Time Ever to be in tech was in the 2010-2015 era, peaking at around 2012-2013. And in my recollection, that time, being in tech (which I'm loosely interchanging with the author's "be[ing] a tech entrepreneur") was seen as in-vogue even by people outside the industry. My less-anecdotal proof to back this claim is that it was around this time when public figures---politicians, no less---would advocate learning how to code/integrating a bit more CS in basic education.

We were disruptors. We were supposed to change the world. Until we weren't. We are, apparently, the old guard in fancy new clothes. We aren't here to make the world more open and more connected but to capture consumer groups in walled gardens, so that the best buyer can set a price on their data.

> recent events has unveiled some sort of new or previously hidden disdain for self-described tech entrepreneurs.

I really don't think recent events are unveiling any kind of disdain so much as adding another black spot to a long laundry list. The bucket already has water and everyone is just watching for the drop that makes it overflow.

> (It's B)

Again, I don't think you can just make the claim without showing some kind of proof (and having used the term "intended audience" I think comes with word-of-Judge level burden of proof) or explaining how you came to that conclusion.

For starters, I find it disingenuous to divide people like this. Even in my 2010-2015 era (which was also the show's heyday), A and B had a considerable intersection. There's nothing ever stopping you from participating in an industry you are critical about.

In my experience, even people squarely in the A category enjoyed the show just as much as people in the B category, some maybe for the wrong reasons. Arguably, not all in the A category found it amusing but I think that has more to do with whether you can joke about yourself than any sentiment you harbor about the tech industry and SV culture.

In the agricultural corner of the world I consider my motherland, there are banks that cater specifically for farmers and fishermen. Actually, my first bank ever belong in this category, probably the biggest fish in this pond. It's honestly rather inconvenient if you are not in the agricultural demographic; if you live in the urban areas it's next to impossible finding a convenient branch.

I'm not in a position to elaborate how their loans work but they do exist and I'm also pretty sure two million of our not-USD currency is not a prohibitive amount to loan to start a farm. It's a realistic investment people in rural areas can do.

Location: EU

Remote: Yes, EU timezones preferred

Willing to relocate: Depends on the location (but with a strong bias for EU-Schengen/US locations)

Technologies: Java, Node/TS, Python (and variants thereof like Groovy, Pypy) | AWS/Lambda Serverless, GCE/Kubernetes | Redis, MySQL, PostgreSQL, DynamoDB

Resume: https://bit.ly/3B3o65M (It links to my CV repo at Github, pinky promise. You can also visit github.com/<hnusername>.)

Email: See resume or github.com/<hnusername>

I'm not actively looking (hence why my resume link is obfuscated like that) but I'm at least interested in getting a feel for the market right now. That said, I'm willing to consider a position with a great fit for my skill set and career goals.

Here's my pitch: I have experience in a multitude of industries and positions. From improving legacy infra and processes in an established telco company to scaling a fast-moving startup from 200K to 2M users. In my free time, I love writing Code That Is Poetry but day-to-day I am not an idealist engineer who doesn't compromise. Well-engineered code is clean and correct but correct above all else.

Oh, also, I'm great at writing documentation. I consider myself introverted but apparently my communication skills are above average for Software Engineers. I also pride myself on my humility and modesty. ;P

I'd love to explore other technical positions in the games industry short of joining a AAA studio because (a) I don't want to crunch and (b) my skill set does not lay that way. I'm also interested in B2C businesses where the 'C' is software developers. I'd love to chat and network about opportunities but, to be honest, I'd like to emphasize that I am not currently actively looking so at the moment there might be a pretty high bar of what piques my interest.

I've been in this industry for just over a decade now, been interested in tech/computers just a few years more than that. I'm a few decades more away from being a graybeard but I can say with some confidence that all this hype is mostly fluff. I'm not saying it's meaningless---we're probably not headed to another AI winter when the bubble bursts. After this hype cycle I think we will have some valuable concepts to carry down the line, while the investors will just quietly be looking for the next buzzword.

I make this claim with the following observations:

- As with other aspects of life, the conservative forecasts are often closer to the truth than extreme optimism/pessimism, especially in the long run; there is almost always a regression to the mean, so to speak. The technologists fervently burning with an almost religious zeal for all these AI models are making some egregious claims like "Stable Diffusion/ChatGPT IS (human?) learning", "There is no difference between a human learning from an artist's corpus and a neural net training from said corpus", on which they build extremely shaky forecasts.

- Tech and philosophy aside, there are a lot of other hurdles AI must clear for it to be the disruptive technology that it is portrayed to be. Just my least controversial example: people ask if LLMs will replace search engines anytime soon but, notably, ChatGPT can't fetch you the news, and "conversing" with it is an amusing but cumbersome interface. In the future, I think search engines and LLMs will share utility; based on my own experience using ChatGPT for programming, it is great for greenfield projects but horrible for working with pre-existing code. (Also, by saying "AI is not yet disruptive", I don't mean to imply its economic impact will be negligible---some people will definitely be affected but not the people nor in ways we think of currently. Also, my money is betting that the domain experts will be mostly safe from this impact.)

- I've seen this hype cycle before: a new conceptual/business/technological framework shows an amusing/promising use case which is then exploited to death by a wealth of startups and existing products pivoting, making this a "core" value prop. Remember when Google was a mobile-first company, so everyone prepared to be mobile-first too? When everything was social? That lead to toothbrushes and culinary products having APIs so you can build mobile apps for them. Remember VR? Blockchain? Maybe I'm too jaded but maybe I'm correct. Time will tell.

There's this tongue-in-cheek saying that advanced AI is whatever current AI can't do; in other words, researchers will not ever achieve "advanced AI" because the goal posts will keep moving. As a tech enthusiast who even did undergraduate AI research a decade ago, I really feel bad harboring such negative prognoses on progress that is, hands down, impressive. But how I like to think of it is not that AI progress is failing or underwhelming but that AI progress is helping us understand more of our humanity; when we move the goal posts, it's because we see AI (not) doing something that we consider for granted when dealing with actual humans.

In the context of LLM AIs vs. traditional search engines, I tried this one. The results were...hilarious to say the least.

> what is fc barcelona's latest result

> FC Barcelona's latest result is a 2-1 win against Real Betis in La Liga on February 5th, 2023

Half truths, whole lies. Barcelona's last game was in Feb 5 indeed but against Sevilla at a 3-0 scoreline [1]. The 2-1 win against Betis was in Feb 1 [2].

In fairness this escaped me. Pretty close to the truth. What tipped me off was my next question:

> who scored the goals

> FC Barcelona's goalscorers in their 2-1 win against Real Betis on February 5th, 2023 were Ángela Sosa, Rinsola Babajide and Natalia Montilla.

Bro, I've no idea who those people are and they certainly aren't FCB first team members.

(Unfortunately, ChatGPT is at capacity atm so I can't replicate the same experiment. Maybe Perplexity is just a poorly-written/trained bot.)

In contrast, I just have to type "fc barcelona" in Google to get their most recent results accurately; then click on those results to see who scored the goals, accurately once more. It even helps correlate the actual game date to the confusing "matchday" league taxonomy.

My point being, LLMs have been impressive in their current iteration but I don't think they will replace traditional search anytime soon. Maybe it will eat at the market share but I don't think this is an existential threat to Google. Even the fact that ChatGPT is at capacity at the moment says something about the real-world viability of LLMs as search engines. 2012 called and is asking if you are web-scale.

[1] https://www.eurosport.com/football/liga/2022-2023/live-fc-ba...

[2] https://www.eurosport.com/football/liga/2022-2023/live-real-...

Dare I say, you don't know the definition of "cringe" based solely on how you justify the cringeworthiness of these items you are calling out.

Cringe is closer to second-hand embarrassment while your commentary is just being cynical and sarcastic (duh). Those reactions have very little to do with each other.

Cringe is having the audacity to wear Crocs on a summer dinner party. Cynicism is thinking everyone else is an idiot for wearing leather shoes on this particularly toasty evening.

Cringe is the feeling when people gush over Jack Ma's little wuxia short film where not only does he sing the main theme, he also goes toe to toe with Donnie Yen. Cynicism is thinking Ma must've had a spare million or so and Donnie Yen and Faye Wong must be putting a downpayment on a new yacht.

I cringe that this forum has to over-analyze what is, all things considered, a pretty lighthearted and harmless listicle. I cringe that I am writing this comment right now because why the hell do I care so much that someone on the internet does not know the difference between cringing and being skeptical. I'm soooooo embarrassed I hope I don't ever look at this thread again.

Thing is, short of mathematical definitions, everything is subject to some bias, any sufficiently-complex statement is just an interpretation of various signals. Moreover, the threshold for "sufficiently-complex" isn't really so high.

In other words, there aren't really facts (in the sense of being "absolute truths") but just Justified True Beliefs, which means Google essentially has to solve the Gettier Problem (https://iep.utm.edu/gettier/).

Examples:

There is no medical fact that smoking is bad for you but there is medical consensus that smoking shortens your life expectancy. Of course, the consensus does not preclude that there might be some nonagenarian in Fiji or Japan who's smoked a pack a day since he was 20 and is still chopping woods for fuel.

I don't know what exactly GP is saying about Snowden but pre-Snowden, it's a justifiable belief that, among other things, your webcam will only turn on when you tell it to. Post-Snowden that belief might no longer be so justifiable.

A lot of answers already boil down to, basically, superior developer experience. But there's an aspect of this that I want to highlight: resource efficiency.

Around the latter half of the 00s, I had a Windows XP machine with 256MB of RAM and a Pentium 4 processor, with a matching spinning metal-disk hard drive. I could make decent Flash animations and games with it. I could view entire websites in Flash with Internet Explorer 8.

Today, my personal machine is a laptop I bought from 2016. Core i7 (4 cores), AMD graphics card, 16GB of RAM. It's not top-of-the-line even when I bought it but I put in ~200 hours of The Witcher 3 in it, finishing the main quest and the two paid DLCs. That said, modern web dev is a PITA in this mostly because I'm too cheap to upgrade to an SSD. Oh, also, the GitHub homepage that showed live commits on the globe makes the fans scream with Chrome unless I enable hardware acceleration. (In fairness that's enabled by default, but it so happened I had to turn it off and forgot to turn it back on.)

I still can't figure out why my personal machine can't provide a decent feedback loop on a React/Angular+Typescript stack (that's not even doing animations!) just because I don't have an SSD. In my very opinionated opinion, only a database server needs an SSD.

A Phaser+Typescript project (my preferred modern web gaming stack) is just a slightly better experience than React. But, again, I wonder why it needs hardware acceleration at all to function well and I've only implemented very "static" boardgames so far. Maybe I'm just a sloppy programmer but I'm definitely better than when I was making stuff in Flash. This shouldn't be eating that much resources, right?

Hey! Fellow TKD practitioner here. I'm just curious if you found ways to "cheat the rules" so to speak. Mind sharing them?

I know that with the direction the sport has taken in the last decade or so, there are probably a hell lot of hacks right now. I even heard that players would change tactics (ie., rely on certain kicks/strikes more) depending on the hogu brand in use.

But I competed before the advent of e-hogus and the one trick I found is punching just at the upper edge of the chest part of the hogu. That's where the rubber padding ends which transitions to the mere "cotton" padding that fluffs the straps. This meant that my opponent might actually hurt from my punch, while plainly making contact with the protective gear. In an era where punches rarely scored points if at all, this was useful. I felt like I could punish people for clinching too much.

(Needless to say, this was in high school competitions. I dunno if it would've been as useful in higher tiers.)

So did you find anything else? I'm curious! :)

Unfortunate :(

I moved to Germany (and Europe) in 2019. I was planning to attend conferences/tech gatherings like this that were previously prohibitive for me once I got settled in but then 2020 had other plans for the world.

It was a bit late when I realized this year that conferences and big gatherings are back. Unfortunately the ones I would've attended (PyCon, We Are Developers) were in conflict with other things like a concert that I already paid for.

This would've been the first opportunity without a conflict for me. Shame although I can understand (and even sympathize with) the organizers' prudence.

Location: EU

Remote: Yes, EU timezones preferred.

Willing to relocate: Depends on the location.

Technologies: Java, Node/TS, Python (and variants thereof like Groovy, Pypy) | AWS/Lambda Serverless, GCE/Kubernetes | Redis, MySQL, PostgreSQL, DynamoDB

Resume: https://bit.ly/3B3o65M (It links to my CV repo at Github, pinky promise. You can also visit github.com/<hnusername>.)

I'm not actively looking (hence why my resume link is obfuscated like that) but I'm at least interested in getting a feel for the market right now. That said, I'm willing to consider a position with a great fit for my skill set and career goals.

For years, I worked in a fast-growing startup so I'm familiar with scaling patterns for your typical SaaS platform offerings. I'm currently working as a backend engineer in web-based games so I've also had exposure with less-than typical infra architectures.

I'd love to explore other technical positions in the games industry short of joining a AAA studio because (a) I don't want to crunch and (b) my skill set does not lay that way. I'm also interested in B2C companies where the 'C' is software developers.

Hamburger here but if this becomes a regular thing, I could ICE to there. :)

> you can always acquire them later when you actually want to read them

That doesn't track with my experience at all for a number of reasons:

- Smaller bookstores who may or may not be an official part of the publishing supply chain stock smaller amount of copies of a given book. Once an edition sells out, they might not even have the means to restock/order from a new batch of printing.

- Even big chain bookstores have to consider supply and demand economics when stocking their shelves so even them can't guarantee "perpetual availability" of a title.

- Not to mention, books go out of print, even way before they go in the public domain. The best way to get a copy is by accident in a thrift shop. If I encounter one I really like, the best move for me would be to buy it then and there, my current reading queue be damned.

- Admittedly, acquiring books is easier now due to Amazon, et. al., but we are still very from from being able to acquire a book when you actually want to read them. Not all books are available to buy online!

> a monorepo is just the SCM mechanism ... it doesn't prescribe anything other than the code storage location and how branching, committing, etc. works

That's not really the case in practice. When people decide to choose mono vs multi based on their benefits, it's become a workflow philosophy in itself. If you choose a monorepo approach but use multiple versions of the same (in-house) dependency across components, you are just opening yourself up for a world of confusion. Sure, you can do it, but should you? Why choose a monorepo structure if you won't take advantage of its benefits?

> teams that share a dependency version can still develop independently; they just share something in common

My point about team independence doesn't mean they should not share anything at all. But rather, they now _update_ together at the same pace because the "atomic commit" that updated a dependency also updated my team's usage of said dependency, for better and for worse. My team might have a reason not to update just yet.

> You can store code for different purposes in the same source tree. You can deploy something that is built from just one part of the source tree.

At the risk of sounding memetic, the question is not so much "Can you?" but "Should you?". Should you store a monolithic application across multiple repositories? Should you store a distributed application in a monolithic repository?

I agree with @likortera that you should not. And that's because...

> The way you store your source code doesn't have much to do with how your system is deployed.

I disagree with this statement.

Your architecture (monolithic vs distributed) imposes certain assumptions on other aspects of your distribution pipeline. Your workflow (in this discussion "how you store your source code") should support these assumptions, not hinder them.

For example, one benefit of microservices is that cross-functional teams can develop independently of each other. And yet one cited advantage of monorepos is that everyone is on the same version of dependencies all the time. In short, your teams are not independent after all.

Note that I'm keeping the example extremely generic to illustrate this inconsistency, a conflict of interest if you will, that I see people commit in this topic, because in my experience, these questions are not purely technical but involves product/business factors as well. Maybe for most of the people (operative emphasis on "MAYBE", because who am I to judge you), the discussion they need to have first is whether or not they are using the right architecture for their product in the first place.

If you choose to have a microservices architecture, you have to live with the fact that your teams/services will operate at different cadences. If you feel the need to impose a One True Library Version All the Time, then go for a monolithic architecture, and store your code in the same way.

Man, this obnoxious HN arrogance again. And on Christmas Eve too. I specifically added that Not to be mean part because it's simply not fair that people judge your competence based on an unflattering anecdote. But of course, here we are. :(

Look here:

- He was a consultant; not part of the team. It wasn't his platform, strictly speaking.

- That said, Java and JS was created 1995. Google was founded 1998. I'd give two or three years more before the term "SEO" even became a thing. And then a few more years before it became an established sub-industry. My point is, people working in a Web/IT field have been confusing Java and JS far before SEO's time. These people aren't programmers though they may have worked closely with programmers. Does that make them incompetent at their job?

Marketing: Hey we want a tie-in with the release of the first Harry Potter film! (Good suggestion) Can Java make magic spell effects when people click on our website?

Programmer: Heck no, dunce. First of all, you're thinking of Javascript. Second of all, even if we were a Java Applet, that would be difficult. Third of all, our website is basically in Flash so yes we can accomplish that with some ActionScript.

- You know why these people can't distinguish Java from JS? Because the distinction doesn't matter for their job! The job of an SEO consultant, in particular, is to come up with a strategy; this takes a lot of approaches, and technical execution is a small part of the pie. A lot of the companies they would work with won't even have dedicated engineers developing the platform.

The point of the meeting I related, ICYMI, is that our website is basically "code not content" in the eyes of Googlebot so that needed to be addressed. It could've been spewing out Brainfuck and the point of the meeting stands.

----

SEO is really a different kind of beast (I've talked about it here other times before). In that team I'm ready to admit that I, the guy who can distinguish between Java and Javascript, had the least impact; there was a low bar on the programming skills needed and I just happened to be the guy with nothing else on his plate then. I was a "fungible asset" as the cool kids would say nowadays. Shows you how little technical programming details matter for general SEO.

And yet with that guy's strategy we achieved (and this goes on my resume):

- from page nowhere of hyper-targeted keywords we made it to page 1 within a few months. Crept up in ranking slowly with marketing, not technical, strategy. Then from that content we managed to score in less-targeted keywords.

- by the end of my tenure as the "Growth Hacker" we went from 200K users to past the 1M mark with zero marketing ad spend. (We were actually bleeding on ad spend with very little ROI that's why they kickstarted the SEO initiative.) It was slow but steady, not the hockey-stick growth that would've pulled Sequoia Capital on board but enough for our investors.

----

To be honest, this is one long comment too many than I planned today. But what can I do duty calls (https://xkcd.com/386/) even on holidays. Merry Christmas/Happy holidays and a fine new year HN community. I'm pulling myself off-duty for HN comments for the rest of the calendar year.

When I saw that sticker, I immediately wanted to give it to this SEO consultant I worked with several years ago. We had a Python + Angular stack so among our first conversations went like:

Him: Okay your biggest problem right now is that your website is written in Java.

Me: Uhh...no...we use Python. Why is our choice of backend language a problem? (I honestly thought this involves a development in Google v. Oracle that I didn't know about.)

Him: No, no. It's all in Java. Look...(he uses a tool that shows us what Googlebot sees).

Me: Ah...Javascript.

Him: Yes, Java.

I instantly recognized the situation I was in so I didn't opt for pedantry. I adjusted accordingly but I kept using Javascript on my side of the conversation. I dunno if he ever caught on to that or if someone ever corrected him but this has been some kind of inside joke in my engineering team at the time.

I'm hoping if he has this on his laptop lid, it would serve as a "hobo sign" for future software engineers he might have to meet with. (Not to be mean on Christmas! He gave us competent advice, this issue aside.)

I feel like IMDB is also to blame here. Why would it remove spoiler-laden reviews instead of just hiding them behind a UI toggle but keeping their rating part of the computed score?

This is the first explainer in this thread that makes me see the issue. All this time I'm thinking along the lines of "Okay you're, projecting video in a wedding. Now there's an orange dot on the screen. Boohoo."

So, apparently, I gotta dream bigger. Like museum AVP or concert/live performance/DJing type of live visuals. Yeah now an orange dot is a showstopper.

I have two definitions of "fun" but the common denominator is that I find the ecosystem "reasonable" (in quotes because I have no objective definition).

Also, an important factor I feel I should disclose is that my idea of fun does not involve my code being able to run in other people's computers. Though it is important that I can understand myself three months down the line. That said, my definitions of fun are:

1. I'm productive in it. The tech stack would definitely include Python for very subjective reasons. The decisions PSF makes for their batteries-included standard library really suit me. Did you know they now include basic stats functions too?[1] I have a single-file lib that does this which I copy-paste around as a utility script (never bothered to package it properly); I use this whenever I want to do benchmarks or other standard software eng'g/CS stats analysis. Now, I don't need this script anymore!

If I have to design a UI though, I tend to stick with JS, maybe Android if the use-case makes sense. But with JS it's either very vanilla or I'm making a game with Phaser. (My thoughts on Phaser is another post...)

2. It teaches me something new. This is the part where I just learn a new language (Scheme, even Ruby ha!, one of these days Prolog or Haskell). Most of the time I just work through some textbook or maybe Advent of Code/HackerRank.

For a combination of 1 and 2, I program in---drumroll please---C! Good old, restrictive C, though still with a wealth of libraries and real-life examples available. I've been implementing some 1980s-era game listings in C; what I thought was a straightforward exercise (these are text-based BASIC programs) ended up being a deep dive into Linux signals and buffers (I won't pretend I've mastered this). It turns out, these 1980s platforms (ZX, Apple, TRS-80, etc) has some "syscalls" that don't have a direct equivalent in modern Linux (maybe ever?).

[1] https://docs.python.org/3/library/statistics.html

Quicker explanation of how Youtube is doing it is at the source code of pytube: https://github.com/tfdahlin/pytube/blob/bb890af3b271a616bbe1...

This is linked from the description of PR 30184 of youtube-dl but @varenc linked to a specific comment (talking about patching Windows builds, AFAICT) which might confuse some people.

I'll even save you the click:

> YouTube's strategy to restrict downloading videos is to send a ciphered version of the signature to the client, along with the decryption algorithm obfuscated in JavaScript. For the clients to play the videos, JavaScript must take the ciphered version, cycle it through a series of "transform functions," and then signs the media URL with the output.

There are still a lot of things I don't understand here but gotta give Youtube a slow-clap moment for their devious ingenuity.

My goodness was defragging really that mechanically loud or is this exaggerated for effect?

For such a long time (as in, well into the tail end of Windows XP) I was stuck with an old Pentium computer that could handle Windows 98SE at most. Had maybe 2GB of HDD to work with which sounded luxurious to me until my father was issued a 4GB flash drive at work. I defragged this every first Sunday of the month to keep things running smooth. Ofc the effect might as well be purely psychological but hey, as I said it did last me a long time.

The mechanical sounds I remember are finer, not like pop snoring no? :)

I don't care much for this "Web4" proposal (yet) but can we get our terminologies unified? AFAIK Web 2.0 is the era of user-generated content[1] and, IMO, was the most vibrant era of the internet. That's my "good old days" though I've witnessed the tail end of 1. Even if you're not at all a fan of that Web 2.0 era, what's with the overly-cynical characterization here?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0 (and oh look, apparently Sir Tim Berners-Lee has also already defined what Web 3.0 is).

> Better awareness of the code you're shipping.

Then somewhere down the line...

> One of our dependencies that we check in is TypeScript, and every time we update that, the git diff is huge and frankly not worth looking at (beyond the CHANGELOG)

Which I assume is the official attitude towards any dependency of the same magnitude. How are you more aware of the code you are shipping? Okay you managed to give yourself a visual on how much LOC your dependencies are but is that a relevant awareness? Do I not get the same thing with a `du -h node_modules`, with a matching pretty GUI on top?

The one thing I haven't seen addressed so far is: doesn't this make them susceptible to poisoned dependencies? Say they have a dependency to a large well-known library, what's stopping a malicious contributor from adding an HTTP call, thinly disguised to prevent grep, to some server in MiddleOfFucking, Nowhere? Even if they manage to flag this from blackbox testing, they now have a problem that only they have.

I can try to answer my own question: they're Google, they can afford a team scanning for vulnerabilities like this, a team dedicated to analyzing codebases that are found to be compromised, a legal and PR team to handle the fallout if this kind of vulnerability makes it to the public.

In short: horrible advice to follow if you are not Google.

I'm not sure I understand the question so I'll break down the quote from the article:

> It’s figuring out what it sees and dismisses that might still be useful. The dream of any computer-savvy chess player is to discover a string of moves that an engine doesn’t necessarily favor, yet taps into a line that their opponent hasn’t prepared.

The first part ("discover a string of moves that an engine doesn’t necessarily favor") is algorithmically trivial of course. Just print out all the lines the algorithm discarded. At this point I think you can even narrow your options based on a heuristic like, as you suggest, diversity of variations.

But here comes the difficult question: which of the remaining lines is "still useful"? That alone requires massive insight. But of course, tournaments at the GM Level require hyper-specialized preparation; at WCC, each of the two contestants has the luxury to obsess over the other's style. At that point in their analysis, not only are they trying to evaluate what line is still useful but, even further, what line is their opponent likely to take.

This gamesmanship is sort of like boxers studying each other, figuring out their opponent's chin is open after a jab and drilling the hell out to exploit that fact.

(Note: I'm not a ranked player, just an enthusiast. I've dabbled a bit with Chess engines during the WCC 2014 and a bit more beyond but my knowledge is in no way state-of-the-art.)

While we're in the topic of examples, does Usain Bolt count here? I just can't believe the coincidence that the fastest man on the planet would carry that surname. The thing with Bolt is that, not only did he choose that field, he is also biologically gifted to achieve those records. What are the odds, come on! (And I looked it up, Jamaica is an English-speaking territory, though with a creole.)

In more personal examples, in my freshman year, I met a fellow freshie whose name is "Justice", though he is more often referred to with a nickname I now forgot. He was in the Political Science program, on track as a---you guessed it---prelaw degree. He would preempt introductions by claiming his name has nothing to do with his choice of degree program. I don't know if he did manage to enter the bar but "Attorney Justice" sounds as absurd as a superhero name to me. I wonder how he's living up to his name now.