superswordfish

I wrote a pretty decent reply to this, then realized that posting it here would be utterly self-defeating. The double standard you're pushing here is disgusting, and you know it. Time to find a less negative programming community, or one that's at least a touch self-aware.

I am running Xubuntu on this thing and I hate it so much. Palm detection is so broken that even after tweaking Synaptics and trying libinput (customized it "perfectly" under Arch with no improvement already), I had to disable the trackpad. The pointer nub on new Thinkpads is terrible now that it's secondary, so I have to set low sensitivity.

Colors are messed up with poor contrast. Windows looks much, much better. I messed around with exporting color profiles and importing other users' color profiles with no real improvement. So it's really only useful as a headless machine or in low light. Which leads to the next issue...

External displays don't work properly with lid closed unless you boot with the lid closed. Even then if you suspend, you will wake up with no screen. If you set to "turn display off" on lid close, then when you close the lid the cursor becomes completely erratic and unusable. I'm sure this can somehow be fixed with some arandr and acpid scripting, but seriously fuck that noise.

The keyboard is crap and the form factor hurts my hands. Even my old R500 education line Thinkpad is better in this regard.

It sits on my shelf and collects dust. Every now and then I bust it out because I love programming on Linux, but always go back to the MBP for the reasons mentioned. I want to sell the Carbon X1 and regret spending $1500 on it so hard, but I'm wary of my ability to install Windows and get the right drivers on board (have done it, but also was getting terrible offers for it so decided not to sell at the time). And I'm holding out hope that these issues get fixed some day.

Seriously, just get the Mac. It's sad that the state of Linux on the laptop is worse now than it was a decade ago, when you could get a T4* or T6* and everything worked like a dream. A big part of the problem is that non-Apple hardware is utter crap nowadays (not that Apple's stuff is universally amazing). Going Linux laptop shopping right now is the most depressing experience.

I think it is fair to say that greying is contrary to the customs of HN. Think about it -- one user's disagreement/disgust/whatever immediately renders a comment suspicious. That doesn't seem to be in agreement with any "hacker spirit." I don't have a big problem with down-voting and ranking per se, but the greying stuff is lame. Your comment is grey right now and shouldn't be.

While we're on the topic, please eliminate downvoting, or at least the greying of text. It's antisocial and pointless.

Edit: Point proven. Two upvotes and seven downvotes in 12 minutes. Nothing short of a reply from `dang` will save it now! Bad commenter, toe the line if you seek discussion, lest you be banished to the graveyard of greydom. I'm baffled that nobody else sees how this is a problem.

Fair enough, I found parent's comment flippant because it suggests that HashiCorp's generous open source work is popular due to some hype conspiracy.

It doesn't take an expert sleuth to find things like https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/tags/case-study.html, so your "does anybody _actually_ use the HashiCorp stack" comes across pretty clearly as sniping.

Your limited, proprietary, paid tool? Yea...

GitHub never would have had that problem in the first place if :+1: were not so easy to do. There's no reason to make emoji part of GitHub flavored markdown or for it to be an autocomplete.

Not quite, it's difficult to avoid using votes as a heuristic for post quality. A reader's first impression of a heavily downvoted comment is negative. It encourages groupthink, downvoted comments are unacceptable, and serve as examples to others who might step out of line. Also, there is less pause when downvoting a comment if it is already well in the negative. When you think about it, the whole downvoting thing is antisocial. It's bizarre that almost every popular discussion platform these days allows users to passively shit on each other as a core feature.

Best unintended consequence of GitHub adding comment "reactions" is the redditification of discussions (thumbs up/down brigading). Lovely.

I ran a setup like this for several years but rejected/spam foldered emails were always a pain, plus a well-appointed mail host uses a fair bit of memory. I use Google mail now. It's not very expensive, and instant unconditional delivery to other Google mail users is a pretty nice perk. The nicest thing is not having the worry in the back of your head that just maybe something has gone awry with your setup and you are losing mail right now.

Not all software requires the same degree of rigor in design and implementation. Software has bugs, but it sounds like you'd prefer if such software were never written in the first place. Regarding risk, it's as likely that the super-educated "engineer" drops unfiltered input directly into a SQL query as it is that Joe Programmer has the chance to corrupt data with a concurrency bug.

That list of "cues" is hilarious. Guaranteed you know professional people who hide it from you because, well, you know why. And to reiterate, you need to unwind. Holy crap.

How exactly do you know which of your tenants are using cannabis? Do you drug test your tenants?

> You should not need to live in an altered state, intoxication, and if you are frequently choosing intoxication from pot as 'recreation', something is wrong.

Your comment is ironic evidence for insobriety. Anger, stress and frustration are all palpable, and you may need some help to unwind. Hell, I could use a beer after reading it.

I haven't noticed any reduction in catalog size or variety over the years (US), maybe I've lived around well-funded systems? If anything it's become more varied with time. The only annoying thing is having to filter out eBooks every time searching the catalog.

This logic is full of holes. A robot can, by not needing to rest, be vastly more productive than the same person. The robot can be designed to never make a mistake too. Indeed, automation of all aspects of bread production would increase the bread supply. And the person needed bread either way, so unless you're saying that their death is the alternative, what they do with their day is irrelevant. And about fuel, I guess "burns oil" tugs at more heartstrings than "burns solar energy."

It happened at 4am in Bloomingdale, a recently gentrifying and possibly the robberiest neighborhood in DC right now, during a wave of robberies. The police said there was sign of a struggle, the guy was almost certainly shot in a botched robbery attempt. The conspiracy theories are offensive.

Clickbait is clickbait.

I've had the same experience, but only with embedded developers like you described. It probably has more to do with how talent is distributed age-wise in that field.

It's repayment in kind, .NET shops won't hire backend candidates without tons of .NET experience. So you can see why companies who work outside of that walled garden instinctively avoid people who chose to be in it, as they are more likely to have been exposed to only a narrow slice of modern software development.

You don't need the Oxford Dictionary definition, but any decent engineer who has touched an object-oriented language should be able to explain what polymorphism is. Come on.

D killed itself with the Digital Mars/Phobos confusion years ago. That it uses a GC doesn't help matters.

No, I still disagree with you. Carmack is the outlier of the outlier and not a useful example. To be able to get and keep a team of those people would be the opportunity of a lifetime.

Keep in mind that I'm the sort of person you are indicating already. I sleep little and don't care much about work/life balance. When I've worked on teams that are burning the candle at both ends, I am able to hold out longer than others and usually end up carrying things over the finish line.

That's the point of my comment: Even for those who ought to thrive, things start to break down, and no amount of energy or toughness changes that. We are human. I want to warn/remind other engineers that these practices are unsustainable. Hell, I want to remind myself of that after repeating this work to the bone/burnout cycle so many times.

First of all, the vast majority of us are not John Carmack. Second, his comment discusses the merits of working short versus long hours. That's a world apart from spending every waking hour on work, which is what Mayer advocates here (especially with the mention of all-nighters). Either way, I would've appreciated if you wrote your own reply.

Anecdotally, I've seen out-of-shape couch potatoes to be best prepared for the challenge of sitting all day and coding with junk food and soda. It's much more of a shock to the system of somebody with healthy habits.

Have you ever done nothing but code for weeks on end? 7am-1am usually, though 8am-2am and 9am-3am are popular. You get bathroom breaks, some small parts of your commute when you can't physically be coding or communicating, and maybe some spare moments around meals (generally you work through them though), so you're looking at 16-17 hour days overall. That puts you at 80 hours before you've hit the weekend, so 100 overall is not unreasonable.

At least in my experience, no amount of pride or grit can prevent you from crumbling if you do this for more than a few weeks. The physical aspects are somewhat noticeable but can be mitigated with a little exercise, good posture, alternating work positions, and so on. I found the real price is paid mentally. You lose control of your emotions and work becomes the center of your world to an unhealthy degree. A frustration that impedes your work becomes a mental disaster. You lose a sense of who you are, drowned in the work. You start to take pride in being this code machine. I sleep very little as it is, and can only imagine the havoc this would wreak one somebody who needs their 6-8 hours.

When you surface, the return to reality can be jarring and embarrassing. It happens when the project fails, or is hugely delayed for causes outside of your control, or the business is acquired, or what have you: The reality sets in that you were burning the candle at both ends and getting upset for absolutely no reason. You realize that your pride, your perceived grit, not only was futile with regard to the project, but was really a protective mechanism. Vanity carried the day. That is just plain crushing for your self-esteem, and I wouldn't wish it on anybody.

At the risk of outing myself, it's a strange correspondence based approach. The idea is that we never commit to a repository but instead email changes to each other, making a patch queue. This has the benefit of forcing every commit to be code reviewed. The process is that we get an email to start work on some new ticket, which will be a reply from the "tip" email that we are supposed to base our work on, with a new subject. This is a development branch, so to speak. We have separate email addresses for separate projects, so project management is fairly hands-off. Requirements are hashed out in these email chains. This has the benefit of making all of our code "literate" in that it is adjacent the requirements.

So you're saying he's responsible for 90% of what I hate about software jobs these days (TDD as dogma, Agile, forced pair programming).

Ah, but you get your revenge when it's time to write in an RTL script.

Regarding language, I'm going to guess that you downloaded a localized build that set that locale as the preferred language, or that it is coming from your OS: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/949545

Chrome has this also: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/173424?hl=en

Suggesting an "underhanded user-memory choice" is a serious claim. It might be worth comparing your browsers' language settings.