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Ask HN: What are your contrarian views?

• throwaway7033 5y ago
  Software development managers don't need to be technical; soft skills are more important. Avoid engineering practices from Facebook or Google. Both companies have monopolies, an army of developers and can afford to rewrite software on a whim.
• jjgreen 5y ago
  Neural nets are a dead end. Fitting a new model to some problem advances our understanding of the problem not one jot, the best that you can do from there is stumble around hoping for a better fit.
  • formercoder 5y ago
    You can’t get to the moon climbing progressively higher trees.
    • rcpt 5y ago
      Ok but there's nothing on the moon
      • JohnWhigham 5y ago
        Classic HN taking analogies literally.
  • jstx1 5y ago
    - they're not used for understanding a problem, they're used for getting accurate predictions (more accurate than alternative methods) - they can be useful on their own without providing a path to something much more advanced
  • oneoff786 5y ago
    What if a problem is just an incomprehensibly complicated series of differential equations and a formal breakdown is simply impossible but a neural net adds value in parsing it?
  • chrisseaton 5y ago
    > advances our understanding of the problem not one jot Do they claim to do this?
    • rileymat2 5y ago
      I suspect the hangup is they are seen as part of artificial intelligence or machine learning, where intelligence and learning are words with existing baggage for many people.
  • hwers 5y ago
    Long terms we're almost certainly going to replace NNs with more robust first principles ideas for the things they solve, but short term you can't really argue that they're not solving things in computer vision that weren't possible to reach a few decades ago.
  • ogogmad 5y ago
    Hot take: No one knows what the future holds in AI. 15 years ago, people thought that neural nets were dead, but they've come back vindicated and with a vengeance.
• fartcannon 5y ago
  • rootusrootus 5y ago
    I would call that a matter of perspective. Most things, of course, are exactly the same. I see a huge amount of anti-Apple rhetoric on HN, to the point where I think I could sometimes make an argument that Samsung and Google are paying people to post here. But probably it's just the usual -- the keyboard interface removes the filter on people's thoughts and opinions.
    • fartcannon 5y ago
      As someone who dislike all the big guys, and only really likes positive Linux/FOSS news (if I'm honest), I have tested it thoroughly. Apple is the most protected brand, followed by Microsoft. Google, Amazon and Facebook don't seem to have any natural supports or shills... that I've seen. They probably do though - why wouldn't you? Edit: it should be clear that I'm speaking anecdotally, right? I obviously can't say for certain.
      • rootusrootus 5y ago
        I don't see that Apple is more protected, I just see stronger opinions in both directions. I think some folks just need to be contrarian, and they perceive the world to be filled with Apple fanboys. So they have to be the antifanboy and balance it out. Same thing happens with Tesla. Microsoft to a lesser extent. The recent AirTags discussions have really exposed the phenomenon. The amount of disinformation is pretty incredible, which in turn brings out the pro-Apple folks who feel like they need to correct the facts. So it gets pretty heated.
        • deleted 5y ago
          [deleted]
        • fartcannon 5y ago
          Is that how you see it? I think you're giving Apple more credit than they deserve. They pay people to promote their stuff.
• johnx5c 5y ago
  Embedded systems: Rust, checked C and other languages or methodologies designed to act as a "safer" alternative to C will see little real impact in the near to medium term future. Code running on microprocessors in medical, industrial and automotive devices will continue to be C99 (at best) for a very very long time.
  • adrianmsmith 5y ago
    I have the feeling you're right, but why do you think this is? As someone not working in those industries, it would seem an obvious choice to move to a safer language, so there must be something I'm missing?
    • oriolid 5y ago
      Tradition and machismo. Also, cost savings if there is a slightest chance that C or assembly produces smaller code. Source: I have worked with embedded software specialists. Including the type who just writes the whole thing in assembly because compiler can't optimize the first C effort.
    • johnx5c 5y ago
      It's a combination of things. The first is the lack of expertise in existing companies and lack of available hires. Rust is new and has a steep learning curve. I work in a company with 7k+ engineers. Our Rust interest group has less than 20 members and most are beginners. I have never seen Rust mentioned on CVs even once when hiring for Embedded positions. The second reason is lack of tooling - specifically Functional Safety toolchains that can be used for ISO26262 projects. There are plans by Ferrous to develop one, but it will take years to gain any adoptions [1]. [1] https://ferrous-systems.com/ferrocene/ https://ferrous-systems.com/ferrocene/
      • scruple 5y ago
        I agree with what you're saying completely and have said so on HN in the past. It's my opinion that Rust won't break through the embedded world until the toolchains are there and I don't see an incentive for the vendors to do that work in the first place.
• recursivedoubts 5y ago
  hypermedia is the right way to build most web application: https://htmx.org https://htmx.org javascript is a bad front end scripting language for light use cases: https://hyperscript.org https://hyperscript.org
  • codazoda 5y ago
    I like htmx but there are a bunch of things that seem wasteful. Maybe I just haven’t learned them yet. For example, if I just want to calculate the values from two fields on a button click, I don’t want to make a round trip to a server app for that when a single line of js will do.
    • e67f70028a46fba 5y ago
      I think that’s what something like hyperscript (or alpine or vanilla js) would be recommend for
• bilal4hmed 5y ago
  Data portability > decentralization. The recent trend towards decentralization of tech is great, but if data is not portable then its just a different centralization. For ex. Matrix/Element is great as an example of decentralization, but since you cant do much with the data if you want to go to something else, its still lock in.
  • mawise 5y ago
    I think of Matrix with it's many bridges as relatively portable. This might be chat-specific as I don't think of chat as requiring long term storage of messages. For example, slack search is basically a joke.
• farmerstan 5y ago
  We will never achieve true fully autonomous driving cars in our lifetime.
  • redytedy 5y ago
    I don't think this is that controversial within the HN crowd. Every company but Tesla is working to drive safely only within a monitored geofenced area.
    • clairity 5y ago
      it isn’t so controversial now. as someone espousing a similar stance for at least the last 12 years, it’s only been the recent couple years that folks wouldn’t try to shout you down for noting how far out self-driving seems to be.
  • amelius 5y ago
    Indeed, because deep-learning typically has only up to 95% accuracy, and this simply doesn't cut it if you need to make several decisions every second (times fleet size). You can do a lot with LIDAR, but you can't recognize e.g. traffic lights with absolute certainty.
  • dalbasal 5y ago
    Remember that autonomy and "intelligence" aren't necessarily related. We could probably have a fully autonomous auto fleet with current/available technologies, if we adapt the roads, rules and such. Human-like autonomous driving might not happen but getting from a to b doesn't strictly require that.
• shoto_io 5y ago
  People hate me for this one :) But, I think that companies don't need product managers if they have great UX and tech people. PS: I am saying this as a former head of product management...
  • ramoz 5y ago
    This one I struggle with. I feel like captain obvious stating that someone needs to represent the business/mission objectives and manage accordingly. That’s a completely different swim-lane than most tech/UX folks are focused on. (Not that everyone shouldn’t share similar perspectives).
  • jjgreen 5y ago
    I can't really agree with this, possibly for the wrong reasons: What I've always appreciated most about (good) product managers is that they act as a buffer/filter between management/sales and development, "one of our important sales wants this easy feature ...".
    • jka 5y ago
      Having a sales team incentivized to the extent where it can demand engineering time for features that are specific to one customer -- and not benefit the product and customer-base long term -- is not too dissimilar to an organizational software security vulnerability. You have to build the organization to be resilient to the types of incoming requests that it will receive. Some sales leads could -- intentionally or accidentally -- lead your organization and product down a path that limits future potential or causes cultural damage. One of the ways to counter this is simply to spend more time collecting requirements and discussing the topic both internally and externally. Benevolent partners shouldn't want to rush to determine the shape of a feature. Another slightly-less common counter would be to make the entire process more transparent. That could be difficult for some partners who might want to collaborate on the basis of creating a unique advantage that they'd like to achieve ahead of competitors. However, increasingly, I think that the cost to hide or obscure such plans is becoming greater than the benefits. (and yep, none of this suggests anything about whether product manager roles are required or not: I think that's more to do with the size of the organization and whether specialization is required. my point is mostly that, regardless of scale, the organization needs to guard itself against misaligned incentives)
• beardedetim 5y ago
  HTTP status codes are important.
  • cphoover 5y ago
    So are verbs! GET requests should not modify server state outside of caching and should be idempotent!
• atulatul 5y ago
  (non-tech view) Fooling yourself is easy. (Contrarian because I think we are taught otherwise when young.)
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• preinheimer 5y ago
  IPv6 is way further out thank people think.[1] Sure, things can work okay server side if you're with a top 10 cloud provider, but support gets abysmal quick as you move further from the top. [1] I'll define this as "the majority of home users perform the majority of their day to day web actively almost exclusively over IPv6"
  • idatum 5y ago
    In 2020 when my provider still gave out a /64, I recall (via Ubiquity router stats) at least 60% of our household traffic was IPv6. Not "exclusively", but a majority. Most traffic overall was streaming services. Now I have better service (reliable 1gb fiber) but no IPv6. Once providers are better motivated, I predict a jump. Agree with issue on server cloud provider support though, sadly.
  • mariusor 5y ago
    I think you need to narrow down your definition of "home users" to computer users, as most mobile devices have an ipv6 stack that works pretty well and transparently for their users.
• silisili 5y ago
  'Microservices' are a terrible idea.
  • goodpoint 5y ago
    Microservices are a terrible idea when they are "micro". 1-team-1-service is good.
    • silisili 5y ago
      Agreed re: terminology. The term micro makes everyone attempt to make too many tiny services. Gotta be micro!
  • psion 5y ago
    I will agree to a point. "Micro" isn't the way we should go, more of a "Macro" approach. Instead of a small service that handles one function, give me a medium service that handles a specific domain, e.g. OAuth, data retention, marketing concerns, etc. And with that said, lumping everything into a single monolith is a bad idea.
  • recursivedoubts 5y ago
    "Let's take the hardest thing in programming: factoring your system correctly, and place a network connection in the middle of it." -t.thoughtLeadersInTech
• logicalmonster 5y ago
  A more pedantic thread title is "What are your contrarian views that you feel comfortable sharing?" People probably aren't going to share the truly interesting insights that deletes a business competitive advantage they have or say something that risks getting them cancelled.
• snovv_crash 5y ago
  Quadcopter-style drones won't be useful for much beyond carrying cameras. The applications will basically stop at military reconnaissance, search and rescue, and mapping. Some applications in the film industry, but as a percentage this is tiny. Other applications are like trying to stick a round peg into a square hole.
  • antisthenes 5y ago
    Is that really contrarian? Are there people who think quad-drones will be used for literally everything you can imagine, including flying cars?
    • mawise 5y ago
      I think they can deliver burritos. But legislation in the US means that if I was starting a burrito delivery company I would focus on ballistic delivery methods.
      • otikik 5y ago
        Just make sure the burrito launcher looks like a gun.
    • snovv_crash 5y ago
      Maybe the bubble has popped and this isn't such a hot take any more.
• LVB 5y ago
  Sky high salaries in tech aren’t justified by the industry’s absolute contribution to society. Related: pushing the message that folks should constantly be looking for more money and switching jobs is a net harm.
  • petermcneeley 5y ago
    Let me take this one on. Salaries are determined by competition but lets ignore that for a second and focus on the ever elusive concept of Value. With a few clicks I can deploy code to billions of people. This impacts is historically unprecedent. The only historical parallel I can think of is extremely famous authors like Mark Twain. Its like the difference between being a farmer with a plow and having an army of farming robots. The productive multiplier is astronomical. To gain an appreciation for natural productive multipliers you could play games like Factorio.
  • kerbs 5y ago
    Well the good or bad news is that nobody is paid based on their contribution to society. They are paid according to the market. Bless, or curse, capitalism.
• BoumTAC 5y ago
  front end development is 99% of the time useless. We would be a lot better with using the old school way with html generated on the server.
  • v-erne 5y ago
    I almost wants it to be true, but then I remember who is paying for server perfomance and who is paying for js working its magic in browser. I firmly believe that in world of SAAS You are leaving a lot of money on the table if You are not using users spare processing power.
• breckenedge 5y ago
  Excel is an adequate replacement for most enterprise crud apps.
  • v-erne 5y ago
    Thats backwards - most of enterprise apps tries to replace excel spreadsheets that already exists (90% of my work starts with "we have this home cooked execel over here - can You make the data more accessible for managers ...")
    • breckenedge 5y ago
      That’s probably true from your perspective, but not backwards from mine.
      • v-erne 5y ago
        I agree that perpective matters - what I wanted to say here is that from my perspective the enterprise applications that You are thinking about are like this because they are somehow direct or indirect descendants of excels. The proper ones (old school ERPs from SAP, Oracle or MS) would crumble under their own weight if implemented in excel (and I have seen stuff done by "Citizen Developers" that tried to achive just that and it was a sight to behold).
  • hodgesrm 5y ago
    This. I would add that Google Sheets is even better. It's less feature-rich than Excel but makes up for it by being shared. It's the most powerful business management tool I've ever used.
  • TigeriusKirk 5y ago
    I used to know a guy who made a living making Excel VBA apps for small businesses. In terms of what the business needed, it was as good as any other approach would have been.
  • jka 5y ago
    A few SQL statements + ad-hoc spreadsheet analysis can also potentially be way more achievable and powerful within a couple of spare hours than using weeks+ of engineering resources to build in-house reporting tools (that frequently end up over-fitting to specific requests).
• rr808 5y ago
  Remote working is a temporary blip enabled by covid and a shortage of tech workers. Next recession you'll see people return to the office for at least 3 days/week.
  • mrjay42 5y ago
    Yep, sadly, I totally agree with you. Some/Many employers are really attached to controlling their employees -> so they want to see them on time, at their job etc. Nobody will rebel, when told to come back at work and stop remote working. A lot of people are already so dependent on the system that they will fight to protect the idea: "Oh but it's important for social life to actually go to work". As if, it is literally impossible to meet people in other places than work.
  • awb 5y ago
    Why? Remote saves money. I bet next recession companies extend their life by ditching the office and in extreme cases laying off staff and replacing with staff from lower cost of living areas who can work remote.
    • MaknMoreGtnLess 5y ago
      > I bet next recession companies extend their life by ditching the office and in extreme cases laying off staff and replacing with staff from lower cost of living areas who can work remote. Bingo. Remote working is a cost cutting measure. Only those companies that can afford to return to the office are doing so.
  • MaknMoreGtnLess 5y ago
    > Next recession you'll see people return to the office for at least 3 days/week Next recession you'll see even more companies go remote as the recession forces cost cutting and rent/commute and their related insurance costs are cost centers that can be removed. Remote working is a cost cutting measure. Only those companies that can afford to return to the office are doing so.
• zabzonk 5y ago
  - C++ is a good and powerful language - Managers must also be programmers - Managers should set timescales for projects, not the people under them
  • awb 5y ago
    > Managers must also be programmers Probably one of the biggest factors I’ve seen in predicting the success of a software team.
• pryelluw 5y ago
  Working for FAANG means you are directly contributing to a lot of the socioeconomic issues currently afflicting society.
  • goodpoint 5y ago
    This is a contrarian view only on HN.
    • dang 5y ago
      It is not a contrarian view on HN. That's one of the problems with asking people for their "contrarian views".
• moron4hire 5y ago
  There is zero marginal utility to Git commit messages beyond two or three words.
  • Gunnerhead 5y ago
    "WIP".
• 9oliYQjP 5y ago
  Apple's move to Swift and away from Objective-C won't be viewed as the no-brainer obvious decision with positive results 10 years from now, at least when both technical and business merits are considered. It will be compared in a similar light to Microsoft's big push to .NET in the early 2000s where they lost their way for more than a decade. Apple's shift to Swift has caused a lot of software to be rewritten. It's not obvious that the reduction in software correctness bugs which Swift provides offsets the kind of bugs that are the result of rewriting software. Apple's software rewrites have introduced very little tangible benefit to the end customer while creating lots of software gremlins which are very annoying to them. Worse, focussing engineering resources on rewriting existing apps in Swift vs pushing the apps forward in terms of UX and features have allowed competition to catch up and surpass Apple in several areas that do matter to customers. In hindsight, there will be a lingering question of if it would have been better for Apple to have continued to evolve Objective-C further in ways that could have provided similar technical benefits to Swift's introduction. At best the shift to Swift will have been seen as a necessary evil that exposed Apple's flanks. At worst, it will have been considered an unnecessary technical exercise that may have been started as a way to retain top technical talent, but even failed long-term in that respect.
  • scottiebarnes 5y ago
    I don't know anything about the business results of Swift, but as a developer I love writing in it. And thats pretty important too, keeping devs happy
    • 9oliYQjP 5y ago
      Agreed, but there's a higher baseline mental overhead due to increased complexity of Swift that Objective-C doesn't have, at least once you get past the weird square bracket syntax. This is mental overhead that distracts from the actual problem needing to be solved. Swift isn't alone in this respect. I think TypeScript is another example of a language which started out claiming to offer a better experience than Javascript only to become very complex. I'm sure that this added complexity helps some programmers some of the time. But just like CISC was a dead end and all computer chips are essentially RISC-based today, I suspect the pendulum may have swung too far in terms of adding features to some of these developer-friendly languages. But, it's a contrarian view for a reason. I'm just somebody who fell in love with the simplicity of Objective-C almost 20 years ago, before the iPhone was a thing. So I may be looking back at things with rose tinted glasses.
• awb 5y ago
  An undergrad degree is no longer a good investment. Specialized training, certifications and real world experience are a better use of time and money.
  • MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
  • V_Terranova_Jr 5y ago
    > An undergrad degree is no longer a good investment. In any field, or just for people that want to develop software?
    • awb 5y ago
      Good clarification. I’m only familiar with the tech industry (software, marketing, design, etc.).
• varjag 5y ago
  Any piece of technology meant to enable personal liberties and privacy ends up with scammers and criminals as its primary use case.
• jart 5y ago
  Address Sanitizer brings 85% of the memory safety that pure Rust offers without having to rewrite your C/C++/FORTRAN in pure Rust.
  • jka 5y ago
    Can you link to an example case where Address Sanitizer has been used to find and resolve a bunch of memory safety issues in a codebase? (it seems likely true, and with a success rate like that, improvements rather than migration of existing codebases would make sense. just keen to find some supporting success stories :) I found some cfengine ASAN examples but nothing hugely conclusive yet)
    • jart 5y ago
      > The Chromium open-source browser [1] has been regularly tested with AddressSanitizer since we released the tool in May 2011. In the first 10 months of testing the tool detected over 300 previously unknown bugs in the Chromium code and in third-party libraries. 210 bugs were heap-use-after-free, 73 were heap-buffer-overflow, 8 global-buffer-overflow, 7 stack-buffer-overflow and 1 memcpy parameter overlap. https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/37752.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...
      • jka 5y ago
        Nice, thank you!
  • josephcsible 5y ago
    Doesn't it only work at runtime?
• happytoexplain 5y ago
  I think labeling one's own views "contrarian" often gives them an underdog appeal that may lead to irrationality in defense of them. Of course, one should not consider one's opinion being in the minority as evidence that it may be "wrong". Ideally, one should not let having a minority opinion sway one in either direction - it simply is what it is. Is my first sentence a counter-consensus opinion?
• Hnrobert42 5y ago
  The most contrarian view I have is that my views are not contrarian but those of my peers are.
• MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
  PHP is still a good language to learn.
• csdvrx 5y ago
  The geeks of today like centralized power structures, and like to shove their values down people throats. The values themselves don't matter much (whether it's about being carbon neutral, or getting vaccinated/wearing mask, or UBI): they like the power.
• xwdv 5y ago
  Diversity initiatives are bad for fast moving tech companies.
• madhu27 5y ago
  World would be better if it was governed by an AI
  • otikik 5y ago
    This one takes the cake, for me :D (It's funny because I used to think the same when I was younger)
• petermcneeley 5y ago
  http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
• hwers 5y ago
  The HN comments section is far less knowledgeable than generally perceived. (I realized this after seeing comments made on some topics I think I've reached domain expertise on and realizing there's a lot of confident opinions thrown around that's just plain incorrect.)
  • v-erne 5y ago
    This sounds like more specific version of my view - that most people, even the ones that are supposed to be the most knowledgeable, most of the times really don't know what are they talking about (and really its not their fault - the system is just too complex for any single one of us to understand what is really happening). For me this is especially true for any kind of social or economic topics (Feynman expressed this point of view wonderfully: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkFPCTwPlkU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkFPCTwPlkU)
  • version_five 5y ago
    I typically avoid much discussion in my area of expertise for exactly the reason you're saying.
• robga 5y ago
  That many so-called contrarian views are alternate conformist views or denialist views rather than contrarian views.
• reflectosaurus 5y ago
  Docker, Kubernetes and Istio are not the future.
• notacoward 5y ago
  "Move fast and break things" is itself broken. Before long, "move fast" will stop being possible. I prefer "slow is smooth, smooth is fast" and lots of up-front thinking.
• alexmingoia 5y ago
  Software can be delivered on time, and deadlines are beneficial for software (and creative work in general).
  • v-erne 5y ago
    That intresting, I believe this too - but only if the deadlines are for others (because I hate them personally). This is this as a classic conflict between whats good for all and whats good for you.
• polote 5y ago
  - Seed investors don't care a lot about the team. They care only about the traction or that they have friends in common with the founders. - Building what your users say will make you create a product that nobody wants to use. People don't know what they want or need. If you want to create good products, listen to your users but don't built what they say
• jzellis 5y ago
  There's more value in making tech cheaper than making it better. VR and AR are still not ready for primetime because the hardware required isn't cheap enough to be commodity yet. Most of the stuff we make is trivial, a lot of it is actually harmful to the world and shockingly little is really worldchanging or meaningful. Things like Webpack and Babel make life harder, not easier, and so do most frameworks, because you end up spending half your time trying to get around the stuff that's made for large-scale - a lot of React is like trying to use nanotech to make a coffee table. Almost all social networks are garbage and make the world awful and are very bad at their stated goal while being very good at their actual goal, which is creepy, invasive marketing. We probably peaked as an industry when Google Reader came out. :-D
  • hwers 5y ago
    > Almost all social networks are garbage and make the world awful and are very bad at their stated goal while being very good at their actual goal, which is creepy, invasive marketing. I don't think that's much of a contrarian view though.
• squeaky-clean 5y ago
  I actually like MongoDB :O
  • v-erne 5y ago
    Who hurt You so badly :) (Oracle ?)
• JohnWhigham 5y ago
  The Internet, while being humanity's most impressive invention thus far, has caused more harm than good. I don't think it will be our downfall, but it will continue to rapidly degrade society; I mean fuck, look what happened in the span of a decade. We didn't evolve to be in a global community, we simply can't handle it. To expand on the above a little: it's not nostalgia, the Internet was better when most of the general populace didn't have access to it. Gatekeeping works. It was better when people had to dig a little and learn the mores of a community before joining it. Mobile phones and easy access to the Internet destroyed all this.
• vidanay 5y ago
  AI/Machine learning is simply a digital pachinko machine.
• tenpies 5y ago
  Reddit is just Facebook with user names, and filled with older Millennials that don't realize they are now old, boring, and generally all think the same.
  • emptysongglass 5y ago
    Where are the post-Reddit people sharing wisdom?
    • jl6 5y ago
      The boring contrarian answer: In the real world, in private. It was always techno-Utopianism to think that mass access to communication would correlate with propagation of wisdom.
      • MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
• jl6 5y ago
  Innovation/genius/vision is overrated and most of what drives progress is lots of hard work on mundane tasks by lots of people. Waterfall is a perfectly good methodology in many cases. China and Russia aren’t trying to take over the world. We are under-treating some mental health issues as an over-correction to historical bad treatment practices. Some important cultural glue has been thrown out with the bath water as traditional religion has declined. Quality of life is generally great and getting better all the time.
  • fartcannon 5y ago
    Isn't Russia literally trying to take over part of the world right now?
    • GoodJokes 5y ago
    • jl6 5y ago
      Well, it’s all speculation until they actually do something. But I don’t think their plan is Ukraine Today, Tomorrow The World.
      • fartcannon 5y ago
        Why not?
        • jl6 5y ago
          Taking over the world just seems like a cartoonish plan with no basis in reality. Maybe the old USSR had that aspiration in the form of spreading their ideology, but I don’t see it in 2020s Russia. Much more likely is that they are trying to establish/maintain a buffer of weak/client states between themselves and NATO - and possibly to redraw borders around majority-ethnic-Russian regions of their neighbours in pursuit of some kind of nationalist goal. And since my comment also included China, I see their assertiveness in their region (e.g. blue water navy and island building) not as a prelude to world domination, merely regional preeminence, driven by defensive security concerns. I’m not condoning it, I’m just saying I think they are playing the same bully game that every large power has done historically.
• fartcannon 5y ago
• psion 5y ago
  Blockchain technologies are great when few people use them, are dangerous when many people use them, and are utterly dangerous and stop being decentralized when nearly everyone uses them.
• mindvirus 5y ago
  These probably aren't contrarian here, but in general they are based on how software companies seem to run. - Slack has an enormous cost on productivity by having everyone exposed to way more communication than is necessary across an organization. There has to be a significantly better way. - Relatedly, tech companies in general should be doing significantly more to protect their engineers' time, and the ones that get good at this are going to have outsized impact, but it requires top down leadership from people whose job it is to be in meetings all day. The default at most companies seems to be to have days filled with meetings as a senior+ engineer, and it's swimming up river to fight back against this.
  • v-erne 5y ago
    >> tech companies in general should be doing significantly more to protect their engineers' time, and the ones that get good at this are going to have outsized impact I have just watched history of The Secret of Monkey Island (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9F9ahZQ7oP0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9F9ahZQ7oP0). What struck me was how relatively cheap it was (if I remember correctly it costed 130000$ and main team was only 3 people). I now that it was a different time, but even if You take the inflation (of money and requirements) into consideration its still a miracle. And one of the reasons given for this project success was that Schafer and the rest was left alone to do their thing - I would not say they were protected, but at least nobody important enough paid attention to them to start messing with their creative process. This is somehow consistent with my general observation - that in knowledge based work only small subset of people do the real work.
• emptysongglass 5y ago
  None I feel comfortable sharing, even under a pseudonym. I will say that HN is becoming more of an echo chamber than I experienced even a few years ago. I downvote and upvote but I'm starting to feel sick of myself every time I do because the observed effect is that it largely makes people feel bad or radicalizes/entrenches the opposition. Perhaps my most contrarian view I feel comfortable sharing is that I think almost any form of cancelation is a net negative for society: it sends the canceled group or individual underground where any extremist views are amplified more than they would resident to whatever platform canceled them. I think we as humans don't realize how badly we're doing in the hyperconnected world. Our brains can't cope. No one is forced to sit in the same room with someone different so tolerance (actual tolerance, interpret that how you like) is in the gutter. I think the only way we can really do this thing, survive and prosper in kindness, is by retreating to dramatically smaller communities with local networks. That's my dream.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • 74B5 5y ago
    I agree with your notion, that we reciprocally amplify our cognitive deficiencies but i don't get how smaller communities would be a solution, considering global issues like climate change, which could still occur in such a world, combined with different biases like diffusion of responsibilities. Cancellation or isolation does not help. I my opinion, education (or proper dialog) is the only option we have.
  • mcphage 5y ago
    > it sends the canceled group or individual underground where any extremist views are amplified more than they would resident to whatever platform canceled them. Independent of whether cancellation is a net negative or not, I don't think the data backs this up.
    • JohnWhigham 5y ago
      Here's another thing that is unbelievably annoying about HN: people asking for "studies" or "data" for every single fucking claim. Not every statement in life needs a triple-blind peer reviewed study.
• notacoward 5y ago
  Depending on the audience: (a) Markets work. (b) Markets fail. Yes, it's possible (IMO rationally necessary) to believe both. Yes, both ideas will draw predictable attacks.
• hwers 5y ago
  Tech innovation is stagnating and what excites people who are making money right now is mostly zero sum theft from one population to another.
• emeth 5y ago
  In addition to programming, I'm a huge church history buff. So here's a contrarian view in a slightly different direction from many in this thread: -------- Protestantism is dead, it just doesn't know it yet. Protestants have a Bible that differs from Catholics/Orthodox - it excludes the Deuterocanonical books (like Maccabees). The central tenant of Protestantism is Sola Scripture - that the Bible is to be the determining factor on whether a doctrine is biblical or not. John Calvin (one of the founders of Protestantism) says in his Antidote to Trent that Catholics added the Deuterocanonical books to the Bible as these books prove doctrines like Purgatory and exorcisms. Or to put in the inverse, that IF the Deuterocanonical books were in the Bible, doctrines like Purgatory and exorcisms would be biblical - but the Deuterocanonical books are NOT part of the Bible. The problem Protestantism is facing is that their justification for their canon (excluding these Deuterocanonical books) has fallen apart with the findings published concerned the Dead Sea Scrolls in the last 20 or so years (especially by DSS researcher Emanuel Tov). Protestantism's justification for excluding the Deuterocanonical books tends to boil down to one of two arguments - pointing back to Jerome or pointing back to a Jewish canon prior to the time of Jesus. Jerome's arguments for excluding the books boiled down to two things, since disproven: 1) That Jesus and the Apostles quoted exclusively from the Proto-Masoretic text (which excluded the Deuterocanonical books) against the Septuagint (which included the Deuterocanonical books) whenever the two texts differed, and thus Jesus affirmed the Proto-Masoretic as original. However it's now universally accepted that Jerome was wrong and Jesus and the NT authors vastly preferred (and quoted from) the Septuagint [e.g. Matthew 21:16 and Psalm 8:2], with only a handful of the 300+ NT citations of the OT preferring the Masoretic. 2) When comparing the Hebrew text in Jerome's day (AD ~400) to the Septuagint text, Jerome noted many discrepancies. Noting that the original text of the OT was Hebrew, Jerome asserted that the discrepancies must have been from errors in translation of the Septuagint - that the Septuagint was a poor translation of the Hebrew text of his day. The Dead Sea Scrolls prove the existence of multiple ancient Hebrew text traditions, including a Proto-Septuagint Hebrew text, showing that the Septuagint was a good translation of this Proto-Septuagint Hebrew text, not a poor translation of the Proto-Masoretic text. And the Jewish canon argument has no standing on anything. There is a lack of evidence of when the Jews finalized their canon - specifically their "writings" section. All existent evidence among rabbinic writings indicates it did not finalize until after the Christian era (when the Christians had already settled on the Septuagint's canon). Many Protestant scholars (see Sundberg) and Dead Sea Scroll researchers (see Tov) have written much on this, as the DSS provide further evidence of the lack of an established Hebrew canon at the time of Jesus. Protestants are in for a reckoning. They insist on their scriptures having ultimate authority, but which scriptures? Their justifications for excluding the Deuterocanonical books have fallen apart, and there really aren't any substantial arguments remaining. Eventually they will have to deal with this - their doctrine of Sola Scriptura, and their innate push to seek for truth, demands it.
• V_Terranova_Jr 5y ago
  The current batch of commercial supersonic aircraft companies will fail (commercial hypersonic aircraft even less credible). There is a big bubble in commercial launch. "Urban Air Mobility" is another bubble. The problems we have in developing and acquiring military technology have nothing to do with "innovation" or a lack thereof.
  • fluorinerocket 5y ago
  • JaceLightning 5y ago
    Why?
    • V_Terranova_Jr 5y ago
      Which one(s) of these would you want me to explain?
• mnd999 5y ago
  Full self driving cars will never work beyond highways. Eventually Tesla fans will get fed up and there will be a lawsuit.
  • JaceLightning 5y ago
    Ok, finally one I agree with. In order to have a full self driving car, you would need to be able to read any road sign and comprehend it better than any human. That will never happen in our lifetime.
• smoe 5y ago
  Not really domain specific, although I think more common in web application development: I disagree with the sentiment that technology is moving incredibly fast and that you have to be constantly on your feet to keep up. Well it certainly moves fast, compared to other industries that have been around for 100s or 1000s of years. But I feel technology is moving fast mostly on the surface, whereas what is beneath has changed much much slower if at all during my career since 2005. If you have solid fundamentals, you can just ignore and let the surface waves pass by until you need something and only then pick it up. There is no need to constantly keep up with the framework/library du jour, better invest your precious time to deepen knowledge somewhere.
• Eddy_Viscosity2 5y ago
  One space after a period. Not two!
• jordemort 5y ago
  JavaScript should not be used outside of the browser.
  • thomassmith65 5y ago
    JavaScript also should not be used in the browser.
• irvingprime 5y ago
  You want contrarian views? I'll just give you one. I see LOTs of job listings for "full stack developers." I believe this is another way of saying, "We're too cheap to hire a good team. We just want one person who can hot dog their way through the work FAST. Screw quality. Just give us some crap that sort of works." I've known lots of people who called themselves full stack developers. I've only known one person who I would trust to do full stack development well. And he calls himself a mobile developer.
  • MM9KdBd9 5y ago
    My contrarian view is that there are way too many people who want to become "full stack" developers for the money. The bootcamps are guilty of making them think that programming is easy, but they only teach web development. I should probably add that I have met a lot of those developers who wonder what they are doing, and cannot do a simple Google search about the topic they are supposed to learn. I'm scared of what will happen in the next few years for the companies who employ them. As an example, if you're learning Python, the first task would be to install Python and read the doc instead of being confused in various forums.
  • akvadrako 5y ago
    I think that's odd since most good developers I know are generalists - frontend or backend doesn't matter.
• awb 5y ago
  > What do you think is true in your domain that most of your peers don't? “In your domain” is the important part. OP, thanks for including this so as not to start a flame war. For those expressing contrarian views about social issues, foreign affairs, etc., OP isn’t looking for armchair opinions.
• lamontcg 5y ago
  We give way too much credit to well-sounding contrarian arguments, specifically because it makes us feel like we know secrets and strokes our ego.
  • rr808 5y ago
    Yeah the real contrarian views have the most downvotes. You shouldn't be reading the most voted post.
    • lamontcg 5y ago
      I'm not even addressing that, I'm addressing the intellectual fetish with contrarianism, and the assumption that contrarian takes are correct and more intelligent and people seek them out and aren't actually capable of doing due diligence on them. And then there's the flip point that unpopular opinions usually garner lots of popularity in the right groups and it isn't typically courageous to hold them. One point is about correctness, the other point is about social popularity. And to reinforce that, your assertion that reading the most downvoted comments are worth your time and implicitly where the correct views are is poor.
• hodgesrm 5y ago
  I believe the current rush to the cloud is a transient phenomenon and we will see a return to companies operating more of the applications themselves, especially for large data services with stable workloads. * Enterprises don't like being locked in to single, large providers. (See examples of IBM, Oracle) * New providers will attack the high margins of AWS and others, expanding the market. (See Cloudflare for such a provider) * Building applications in the cloud by combining lots of SaaS services delivers faster time to market but results in complex integrations that are costly to manage and difficult to reduce costs. They also have serious drawbacks related to data privacy. (This looks like a new form of tech debt.) * Kubernetes abstracts out platform differences and lower switching costs between cloud and self-managed models. As Kubernetes runs in more places it will open up more choices where to operate. In summary the current cloud land-grab will change. I would bet on new ways to enable self-management and diverse economic models of software operation.
• johnea 5y ago
  Really an amazing lack of breadth in the issues raised. Does anyone here ever walk away from computers for a minute? Here's a contrarian view that's sure to piss off almost everyone here: Keeping and manufacturing animals for the purpose of human emotional support is a mental illness.
  • notacoward 5y ago
    Well, it's certainly contrarian. ;) Point might be better made, though, if you didn't use "manufacturing" in reference to living beings.
  • MaknMoreGtnLess 5y ago
    > Keeping and manufacturing animals for the purpose of human emotional support is a mental illness. What if a solution to the homeless drug addiction problem is to give them animals to take care of and be responsible for?
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• freedom2099 5y ago
  NoSQL databases are just throwing money to a problem
• smitty1e 5y ago
  Here's one: humanity is not one large family. "Loving one's neighbor as oneself" does not mean ceding money and power to distant, unaccountable bureaucrats who tend toward corruption over time. Humanity is grappling with the benefits of piling up large "pattern of life" databases. Technical people love to optimize, but humanity is all about the entropy in the system. The need to balance the conveniences to which we've grown accustomed without Big Brother (public or private sector) squeezing the humanity out of everything is perhaps THE issue of the 21st century. The various other concerns, e.g. climate, are peripheral.
• jdrc 5y ago
• jdrc 5y ago
  We are all here because some rich people are here and we believe in cargo cults
• AndrewDucker 5y ago
  The amount of evidence we have for a historical Jesus from within 100 years of the theoretical date of his life is so small that we wouldn't accept it for any other person.
  • ksaj 5y ago
    Including Shakespeare and Muhammad.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• mywaifuismeta 5y ago
  Let's go. Give me your downvotes. 1. The best approximation for writing maintainable and fast code is to be a craftsman trying to write beautiful code. To find joy in the art of coding, not race towards making something that works. 2. Machine Learning and AI is significantly overhyped and overfunded, even more so than crypto. 3. The current iteration of the internet, speficially social services, was a great technological advancement for humanity, but it was a step backwards towards making our lives happy and fulfilling. We did not evolve to deal with this technology and we're becoming more and more miserable. This thing may be our downfall. 4. Related to 3. I think the internet and its power of communication had a negative effect on science. Science is now mostly social and status game. This has always been true to some extent, but the ability for instant global communication and comparison has made it worse. It's regression to the mean when everyone wants to work on the current global hot topic, which has only been possible in recent decades. 5. The whole gender equality movement and cancel culture from the US is a bunch of BS and just people trying to make careers out of it, or people frustrated with themselves and their own lives. And a great way to exact revenge for emotionally unstable female persons. 6. Cars suck and should be abandoned worldwide outside of car racing for fun. 7. In a few hundred years we will look at today's science the way we're looking at religions today 8. Crypto is good, even it's just a big global casino. I believe we need a big global casino and gambling should be legal and fun. But people should be educated about gambling and probability theory. 9. Probability Theory and Bayesian statistics should be the most important subject in middle/high school 10. Governments and countries make no sense. Nobody would come up with this stuff if we were to design to system from scratch today with the internet in mind. I could go on, but let's stop here.
  • yucky 5y ago
    >Cars suck and should be abandoned worldwide outside of car racing for fun. Spoken like a born and raised urbanite.
    • mywaifuismeta 5y ago
      Or like someone who didn't grow up in the US.
• l0b0 5y ago
  The vocal detractors of TDD have never seen it in action. After some 10 years as a developer I met the first person who actually knew how to practice TDD. It was eye opening how fast they could produce quality code.
  • v-erne 5y ago
    Any idea where can I see it in action? (maybe some Youtube channel where someone streams himself coding and is using this method) And are You sure that You was able to properly distinct between methodology and man himself doing the magic? (I'm asking because there are people that can make anything work through their sheer brilliance).
    • l0b0 5y ago
      No idea if you can see it in action anywhere, but I haven't been looking for it. But you're on the right track - you have to learn from seeing it in action (ideally pairing, like we did at that job), the process isn't visible in the end result (except as good quality code, which you could arrive at by other means with IMO much more effort). I can't be sure, but what they did was reproducible (albeit slower) by all of us at the job, and I've been trying to learn it properly and get to the point where I can teach it ever since. Not there yet.
• ksaj 5y ago
  A very large percent of infosec consultants don't really know what they're talking about, and only succeed because of the hand-holding their automated and semi-automated tools afford them. Most of them refer to themselves as Advanced after taking their first course, even if they have no practical experience on anything other than the type of systems they have at home. "I just treat it like a black box" really means "I'll just run Nessus and call it a day."
  • awb 5y ago
    I’ve been privy to contracts that specify that the only necessary security implementations are those flagged as medium or high priority vulnerabilities by automated code evaluation tools.
• josephcsible 5y ago
  HiDPI displays are almost never worth the cost (not just monetary: also increased power consumption and slower rendering). I'll stick with 1920x1080.
• jaybrendansmith 5y ago
  We don't understand our cultural operating system. The western version has been built over millennia like a Jenga stack, and in our post-modern world, we are randomly removing bricks with very little thought or understanding of what that brick does. Put in a more software development-friendly way, we are refactoring our cultural OS using search and replace with no idea what the consequences will be for this huge, world-spanning Rube Goldberg device we call the modern world.
• jacknews 5y ago
  I'm not sure if this is necessarily contrarian to HNers, but most appliances and gadgets with 'smart' features are garbage and should be avoided. 'The market' seems to think these features are desirable or even essential. The UIs are terrible and limiting, the smarts become obsolete or will fail faster than the rest of the hardware, and will be costly if not impossible to repair/replace. And then there's the ads, surveillance, locked features, and so on.
• ulisesrmzroche 5y ago
  Electron is awesome.
• sifar 5y ago
  1) Rationality has become the new religion. 2) We are drowning ourselves with the need to measure everything and killing ourselves by ignoring what we can't measure. 3) Efficiency is the bane of technological systems.
• sleepingadmin 5y ago
  Climate change is real: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record but the 'climate change will kill us all in ~10 years' is absolutely idiotic.
• otikik 5y ago
  All crypto, not only NFTs, but the whole thing, is a big scam.