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user15672

82 karma · joined December 8, 2016

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user15672··on DuckDuckGo Traffic
If valid criticism is rude, we're all doomed here on HN. The parents point is valid. If you don't like it, that's fine, but rude it was not. Google doesn't know anything more than DDG, so you're just plain old wrong on that argument.
user15672··on In web design, everything easy is hard again
This made me chuckle, since modern Python and Java styles are very, very similar, if not identical in places, to those of 10 years ago. Some of the libraries have changed, but many are the same as well. Shoot, I can still run Python code I wrote 10 years ago on the latest version (yep, that means something originally written for Python 2.3 can run fine on Python 3.6).

And no, that doesn't make Python and Java old hat or redundant.

user15672··on GitLab 10.4 released
You are correct, Google trends is pretty much irrelevant here. You would be surprised by Gitosis (and many others you've dismissed). It's pretty much in every company I've worked in over the last 7 years. It's never well liked, but it works just fine. Most companies don't need bells and whistles that come with GUI based git installs, so they don't waste the money switching away to them.
user15672··on GitLab 10.4 released
Bitrise seem to deal with a niche market (mobile development), so claiming their study shows a general trend in the self hosted git market is a stretch at best. I'd imagine boring old git itself and non-website backed things like gitosis are still a massive part of the overall install base. In any case, the claim that gitlab's on 2/3 market share just screams disingenuous marketing fluff to me and cheapens gitlab as a whole.
user15672··on GitLab 10.4 released
They've been promising to fix performance and the UI for years now, so I wouldn't hold out much hope. It's a shame, but there are better open source products so it's not like there are no other options for self hosted.
user15672··on How a PR Agency Stole Our Kickstarter Money
Looks like replacing the money isn't the issue, it's whether or not D-Cal have screwed over the agency. Over half of the KS pledges were made fraudulently by D-Cal themselves, meaning the money doesn't actually exist and their campaign was a failure. This puts the agency on the hook for any and all refunds if the people who actually put their money into pledges ask for a refund (the agency account is tied to the campaign now). D-Cal have apparently not come up with a proper solution to repay the money if this happens, so Woodshed are not happy about releasing the funds until this is resolved (on their accountants advice). I'd suggest that all D-Cal have to do is finish setting up an account that can be used on KS and the account could be switched and funds deposited. Either that or put enough cash to cover the agencies costs into some sort of escrow.

(https://medium.com/@jeff_52578/how-a-failed-kickstarter-camp...)

user15672··on Workers at Amazon's main Italian hub, German warehouses strike on Black Friday
This really isn't true and I really wish this myth would stop. Sure, if you go into the financial sector or find a startup where they don't know their arse from their elbow about software workers, you can dupe them into giving you more money. But 55k in London is a good wage for a software developer and you're definitely not looking at that if you're mid-level and working for a regular company.

Source: I've lived and worked (and continue to do so) as a software developer, technical lead and CTO in London and have been in several different sectors.

user15672··on Why Do We Still Commute?
Calling the argument contrived is really rather immature. It's not contrived, it's very real and important. Please stop being so quick to dismiss those that you disagree with as it's childish at best.

You speak of cargo cult, but your entire comment reeks of it. Ok, we understand, you like being able to isolate yourself. That's nice, and I'm glad you found a niche, but it's not the same for the vast majority of jobs and people. You call other people lazy, but I think perhaps that's just you. Social interaction and moving above an intermediate level where you can isolate yourself is hard work. Don't be so dismissive of others that strive for more.

Working remotely is great for the unambitious and the antisocial. Please stop trying to put those who do more down though.

user15672··on Slack is offline
Don't see why you were voted down on this, since it's true. Slack working to get things running again doesn't mean they're prioritising your companies particular instance or region. They're likely to be making sure their own region and their own stuff is up and fixed first, so anyone away from the east coast of America is likely to get seen to after that. It would be stupid to do it any other way, since slack employees are likely affected as well and they're the ones trying to fix it. Down voting someone pointing that out is pretty fanboi-esk or really naieve.

Pretty much, if you don't own the service, you don't get to decide where in the queue you are for a fix.

user15672··on Ask HN: What do you care about the most in a tech job post?
I'm guessing from your posts here that you're either very naive and/or too young to have been in a hiring role.

Yes, it does indeed work both ways. Just because you don't understand this doesn't make you in any way correct.

I'm not really sure what your second paragraph means. Are you saying you job hunt while at work? That's not a professional thing to be doing. In any case, writing a cover letter is very easy, so being unable to do that probably means you need to work on your communication skills. Heck, with the amount of posts you've stuck onto HN today alone, you could have knocked up a short cover letter that would suit 90% of technical job applications, so this can't be a time problem for you.

user15672··on Show HN: Professional profile management tool built using React
Please, please, please get rid of the scroll hijacking. It's really horrible to use the site.
user15672··on How to Improve a Legacy Codebase
I hate to say it, but I think the answer is "with difficulty".

From my own experience, it's really hard to know what's bad, what's good and what's an acceptable workaround if you've never seen anything different. Myself, I got lucky and ended up working on a project after the start of my career with someone who could explain the whats and (more importantly) the whys of bad/good/ugly code bases.

Generally, try and get some skill in being able to view a codebase from a high level. Draw it out on a whiteboard in boxes. Perhaps do this on other, pet projects first as it's nearly impossible to do this with a spaghetti-code project. If you can't pick out modular parts, then you have a big ball of mud. If you can, try and work on making and keeping them uncoupled. If you can, try and work on finding the natural boundaries of the other code you couldn't break up, and make those less coupled (you don't need to solve the coupling problems all at once!).

Are there a mix of architectural patterns in the code? This is pretty common when you're working on a legacy project. It's what happens when you get someone who doesn't really know how to architect, or there were a bunch of folks throughout the history of the project who (probably) had the right intentions, but didn't get it finished. Or, and this is the worst, you had two or more team members trying to bend the project to their own preferences without communicating with each other. If this is the case, talk to your team, agree on one and then you can work towards getting the style consistant. You don't even need to pick the best one. Getting a project into a consistant state is better than having an ugly mix and match.

Are there a bunch of mixed up design patterns floating around? Try and refactor those out as much as possible. Design patterns are great, and you should use them where appropriate. But if you find a lot of them nested within each other, it's not a good sign and probably indicates someone at some point swallowed a design pattern book and thought it would be a good idea to implement them. All of them. Nested patterns can more the likely be refactored out to simplify the code. Though again, make sure you understand what they are there for first. Otherwise you may be unpicking something intentionally complex that needs to exist to remove complexity elsewhere.

What does the DB look like? Is it designed around the projects business logic? Is this sensible for your project? Personally, I dislike putting any business logic into the data storage layer but it might be sensible for your particular project, so YMMV. If business logic in the DB is causing nasty workarounds, then you may have something else to refactor there, though this may not be possible.

Never refactor just for the sake of it! If you don't have buy-in for your ideas on how to improve a code-base from the rest of your team, you're going to be creating problems. You may also be missing critical information that your tech-lead knows about and made design decisions based on it. There have been several times I've tried to make things better as a Junior dev, only to find out I'd made some bad assumptions and created a mess.

Don't refactor without tests either. The system may be reliant on strange code, so make passing tests before changing things. That way you at least know the behaviour hasn't changed.

user15672··on DevOps is a culture, not a role
Except in reality we get people who are bad at dev and bad at ops pretending they can do both
user15672··on GitHub announcements: Marketplace, Apps and GraphQL API
Circle CI works well on their free tier, so no, not cost.
user15672··on DevOps is a culture, not a role
If you have the job title "DevOps X", then you've missed the point of DevOps.

The entire thing was brought in to remove the silos between SysOps and Dev. If you have people in the "DevOps" role, then you've just created a new silo, which means you just have traditional SysOps with a new and fashionable, but less meaningful name.

user15672··on DevOps is a culture, not a role
DevOps is a cultural idea. It's supposed to be the collaboration between sysops and dev, in order to break down the traditional silos. Having a "devops" team or role creates a new silo, hence the reason it's BS to have it.
user15672··on GitHub announcements: Marketplace, Apps and GraphQL API
What's the point in GitHub creating yet-another-CI-tool? Travis and Circle CI have had good integrations for years and work very well.
user15672··on Ask HN: How do I switch from being a passive consumer to an active producer?
No to mention the increased input into the local economy.

That allows others who may be doing something more directly for society to continue doing so.

user15672··on Graphcool – Serverless GraphQL Back End
As a decision maker, this kind of dishonesty will ensure I can't do business with you. It's a customer list and nowhere does it state that they just use GraphQL and are not your direct customers. I know you're trying to get some traction and all that, but this makes your whole offering look dodgy
user15672··on Graphcool – Serverless GraphQL Back End
For something like this I'd have thought you'd be better off ignoring services like this and getting a Terraform setup going. Lambda functions are pretty simple to push out and it wouldn't require you to have some additional third party cruft in the middle:

https://www.terraform.io/docs/providers/aws/r/lambda_functio...

user15672··on Web Developer Security Checklist
> Finally, ANY type of input sanitization is wrong way to do security, and should be employed only as an absolute last resort.

Ok, that's just plain wrong and absolutely wreckless advice. Everything from software development 101 classes to OWASP data validation can call you on that. If you don't understand why you're wrong, please, please, please stop developing software now until you can understand it.

user15672··on Web Developer Security Checklist
Some this advice seems to come out of a cargo cult development handbook. That may sound a little harsh, but it's better to have a tendancy to take any article that states "Always do X" or "Never do Y" with a handful of salt.

If you don't know enough about your own systems requirements, lists like this are going to have you doing work that you don't understand, doesn't need doing (or worse, is detrimental) and if you do, you probably don't need to be using checklists like this to do your job.

user15672··on Post-Brexit Britain and the UK’s Shrinking Tech Talent Pool
£850 is quite expensive for London (not outrageous, but above average). Most are more in line with £650-£750 for a reasonable double room in a 2 bed flat share. You can get cheaper if you share with more or go further out / to less desirable areas.

Source: I live and work in London and have done so for the last 5 1/2 years

user15672··on Uber hit by legal setback in Europe
BlaBlaCar seems to be a service to link people going somewhere with other people who happen to be driving to the same place and have space in their vehicle.

It doesn't look on demand, or anything really like a taxi service, so it's quite unlike Uber or other taxi services.

user15672··on Uber hit by legal setback in Europe
> As much as you guys love to hate on Uber, do you honestly want to go back to a world without it?

I work in London, so Uber is not really much use to me. I live on the outskirts of London (technically London but a few miles out and TfL cease to exist. It's bordering on rural) and the local cab companies/public transport work just fine for everything I need. I grew up in a not small, but not giant town and Uber is no more useful or cost efficient than the local taxis (public transport os horrible though).

So sure. If Uber vanish tomorrow it'll make zero impact on my life beyond not having that particular train crash to watch in the media. In fact, I'd prefer Uber die unless they start being lawful/stop being asshats and stop this crappy "but the rules are in our waaaaay!" attitude.

user15672··on Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid
If emails are a part of your core business, you should have a business continuity plan for this situation. That may be to fall back to another service, or even a temporary in-house server.

Of course, if it's that important, then you'd be foolish to not have invested in a better solution, or to not have a proper SLA with a third party.

user15672··on Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid
Same here. I've moved away from paying for a dedicated IP because it seemed a bit redundant.
user15672··on United removes first-class passenger to make room for 'higher-priority' traveler
This is taught so that small kids don't carry on doing things that might be dangerous (kids don't know the difference between dangerous and annoying, so a blanket rule is more sensible here). It's not evil, it's damn sensible. Please feel free to critisise the continuation of this teaching to older kids who can think critically about what they're doing, but don't ask for primary school kids to not do what the accountable adult is telling them.
user15672··on United removes first-class passenger to make room for 'higher-priority' traveler
No, it's not. It's a federal crime to assault a crewmember. It's a civil offence to intefere with a crewmember while they are carrying out their duties. This can be escalated to a criminal offense but this is not usual for just being difficult. Interference is usually in regards to safety.

Bumping a well behaving passenger in preference of a "more important" one doesn't really fall into either category.

Considering the passenger in this story has already consulted legal counsil, I'm thinking the lawyer agrees that he did nothing wrong.

user15672··on Python coding interview challenges
If you've got that much experience and someone asks you how to impliment a linked list, I'd say you should politely leave the interview. Graduate questions like that are insulting once you've got past the junior levels, as companies asking them are either too lazy to put a proper interview together for more senior levels, or not senior enough to know the difference.

That's not to say they can't ask you about data structures, but they shouldn't be asking you to code them up from first principles if it's something the language can do for you.

I find it much more fruitful to have a technical chat with candidates instead of being dogmatic about asking toy questions. It's pretty obvious when someone doesn't know what a linked list is with a 30 second chat. Heck, even drawing a few boxes and arrows on a napkin will suffice.

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