erik_seaberg

6 ms·

31.
by erik_seaberg 2y ago
It preserves HN and LWN as useful forums for purely technical discussions with high signal/noise, basically. From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html : > Please don't use Hacker News for political
32.
by erik_seaberg 2y ago
There's nothing unsavory about HN using a cookie to label your comments with your username. Cookie warnings are like "known to the state of California to cause cancer" warnings. If not displaying a warning creates serious r
33.
by erik_seaberg 2y ago
Yeah, network logging has latency but it does pack the messages into structs and demux them. The remaining debugger problems are: - Do you know which service tier has the issue? - Can you halt one thread that sees the issue, not all of them
34.
by erik_seaberg 2y ago
Google had bidets in MTV. Unmetered wifi was probably bad for toilet availability, though.
35.
by erik_seaberg 2y ago
I learn new tools and platforms all the time, but editing needs muscle memory and I don't want to abandon that every five years for the new hotness. IDEA is just starting to show some longevity for Scala and Kotlin.
36.
by erik_seaberg 2y ago
Breakpoints are likely to screw up a lot of concurrent user requests, so in prod we debug microservices by comparing pushed logs.
37.
by erik_seaberg 2y ago
A good employee will want to hand off his projects and take questions, but you need to be ready if he can't.
38.
by erik_seaberg 2y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Ayers won a cookoff and made the Googleplex well known for food. Employees brought their kids for dinner. People from other companies angled for invites to lunch. I once realized I
39.
by erik_seaberg 2y ago
The only final classes I can remember are stuff like java.lang.String, which needed to be immutable so a SecurityManager could consume them for policy decisions.
40.
by erik_seaberg 2y ago
They're usually talking about higher poverty rates in that group, but much of the majority would also be affected.
41.
by erik_seaberg 2y ago
Why AI water use? It looks like Zambia's problem is mostly having water that isn't potable. If it's too dirty for heat exchangers, wouldn't they use closed-loop heat pumps, maybe some exotic working fluid? I even see a f
42.
by erik_seaberg 2y ago
Syntax-aware tools always have issues when a team extends the base language to fit their problem. Rust has macros. People started using "go generate" for stuff like early generics. Does Mergiraf take EBNF or plugins or does a team
43.
by erik_seaberg 2y ago
There's some pressure towards matching, in that there are penalties if they find only "key" or "highly-compensated" employees have a lot matched or choose to contribute a lot to the plan.
44.
by erik_seaberg 2y ago
After decades I'm not sure how grading worked, but I don't remember that course being hard. Maybe that's because I enjoyed it so much.
45.
by erik_seaberg 2y ago
Sometimes Perl uses "0E0" as a value that is equal to zero yet not false. Javascript has even more cases where equality isn't transitive.
46.
by erik_seaberg 2y ago
You also need to go multi-region with AWS. I liked their AZ story but in practice it hasn't avoided multi-zone outages (maybe deploys?)
47.
by erik_seaberg 2y ago
One of my favorite tech Twitter quotes: > time estimates from software devs actually make sense if you think of them as "this is how long it would take me the second time if i did this twice in a row"
48.
by erik_seaberg 2y ago
Thank you, it had not occurred to me that Node.js and Deno offered that, but of course they do.
49.
by erik_seaberg 2y ago
My university had essentially a weird-languages course to blow our minds. Smalltalk (everything is a message to an object, back when C++ was the new hotness), Lisp (everything is a sexpr that you can redefine), Prolog (everything is a claus
50.
by erik_seaberg 2y ago
I thought LotusScript was a VBA clone, and it was the older Excel-like formula language that wasn't imperative.
51.
by erik_seaberg 2y ago
When the mouse bricked itself, I was forced to switch to the trackpad. Maybe I could plug the mouse in, if I happened to bring my only cable from home (or maybe from the office) that day. But there was no way of knowing when the mouse was u
52.
by erik_seaberg 2y ago
The left don't like the rich, the right don't like remittances, it's going to be hard everywhere. I heard some from a team who gave up on getting licensed.
53.
by erik_seaberg 2y ago
python3 had no compatibility mode, so everyone needed 100% of their dependencies to migrate. This was so painful that some teams abandoned their legacy python2 code and reimplemented in languages with better back compat stories.
54.
by erik_seaberg 2y ago
POSIX doesn't forbid new flags or options. It's up to the author to read the spec and test his portability, or else willingly rely on certain distros. Some GNU tools have had strict modes as a courtesy (they used to jokingly call
55.
by erik_seaberg 2y ago
After forty-ish years, the limit on personal storage is ever higher. The sum of every filesystem I ever owned will probably fit on two of today's very affordable hard drives. (I should get on that for pre-cloud stuff.) And decayed vers
56.
by erik_seaberg 2y ago
Information that is known to be useful is sometimes replicated. The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone#Rediscovery was abused and damaged; only four incomplete copies were gradually found by luck after two m
57.
by erik_seaberg 2y ago
As jwz points out in "The CADT Model," abandoning reported bugs is just telling your users not to bother reporting anything.
58.
by erik_seaberg 2y ago
Not everything important is equally urgent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Things_Done recognizes the need for a trustworthy "I know I am going to get back to this at the right time" process, so that I
59.
by erik_seaberg 2y ago
If I learned of a old video of my grandparents, but a robot destroyed it, I would be furious. (Photos are what actually remain from their era.)
60.
by erik_seaberg 2y ago
I don't see how the median voter can be confident in making no mistakes. Not even programmers are willing to write out a list of opcodes anymore.

More ›