jongjong

4 ms·

1.
by jongjong 5d ago
People accept a surprising amount of unreliability. For example, I've been using SharePoint to modify excel files at scale. We kept running into issues with cache that we would write to a file, the service would respond with success, b
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by jongjong 5d ago
I disagree that a viable market exists. What set of arrangements exist there may be viable, for select few people, but it's not a market. A market implies that people are allowed to compete on price. If a participant can only compete a
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by jongjong 5d ago
I'm kind of disturbed that it took me 7 years to find out about the Feross incident: https://feross.org/funding-experiment-recap/ This guy is literally a high profile individual from my own niche Node.js open sour
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by jongjong 5d ago
> They sell insurance against the maintainer, when the maintainer is the one person in the chain who can actually make the code more secure, and she gets nothing while a company two layers up gets paid to tell you whether she did. Damn,
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by jongjong 5d ago
The first time I understood there is a systemic problem was years ago when I started attending investor events and was pitching my open source software to tech companies and investors and they were all asking me "But what are you selli
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by jongjong 5d ago
This is why I just advocate for UBI nowadays. It's impossible for certain people to get paid for work they do and value they create and the reasons are numerous and different for every single person. A lot of it is because human attent
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by jongjong 5d ago
The thing is; if your software wasn't offered for free, nobody would use it because someone else would offer their alternative for free. Also, the most difficult problems which software solve are hidden problems. Sometimes critical, bu
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by jongjong 5d ago
When I started to understand how money works, it started to feel like everything I've been raised to believe was a lie down to the foundational principles. Even Hanlon's Razor "Never attribute to malice that which is adequate
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by jongjong 6d ago
The idea of compensating victims proportionally to the value of objects which caused harm is interesting and reveals an interesting mindset. We are so far removed from this mindset nowadays that it seems illogical. But there is an underlyin
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by jongjong 8d ago
You obviously haven't worked on a good codebase. I've worked on both so I know the difference. Same feature on a good codebase vs bad codebase is like 1k lines of code vs 20k lines of code and is worse in the latter case. Not an e
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by jongjong 8d ago
Maybe, but the parts of my brain I'm still using are a lot easier to use. I was dreaming to be promoted to a cushy management role where I could talk bs for a living. I managed to attain 'hands-on team lead' and later an ill-
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by jongjong 8d ago
I would say that 'what not to build' is the second most important decision. The most important decision is what limitations and constraints you are prepared to accept. There are always limitations and constraints but they are rare
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by jongjong 8d ago
This is your intent until I finish implementing and then you complain that it doesn't also work with folders or large files and it doesn't work with any file system. Or you will complain if your colleague accesses your file withou
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by jongjong 8d ago
I've been coding for 22 years, 14 years professionally, so I appreciate AI coding. It was annoying before when I had a very clear idea of what I wanted and yet it still took a whole week to implement. Now, with AI coding, I can impleme
15.
by jongjong 9d ago
>> Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. I feel like the exact same line could be used to argue the opposite point against formal verification. I'm not saying that proof is inherently bad. If it was free, then I agree it w
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by jongjong 9d ago
What if the 'mathematical specification of its functionality' is incorrect? How to prove the correctness of the mathematical specification faster than the underlying environment, code and dependencies change? IMO, formal verificat
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by jongjong 9d ago
This is almost always the case. It's one of the frustrating things about the software industry; because everything is much more complicated than the customer is able to comprehend, a software company can promise anything and the custom
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by jongjong 9d ago
When it comes to software, it's almost never simple. What people think of as simple is rarely so. For example: Requirement: "Just copy a file from folder A to folder B." Minimal translation: "Implement the capability to
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by jongjong 10d ago
I like modern architecture but I wouldn't want to live in it or near it. Modern architecture is depressing.
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by jongjong 11d ago
If we think about public infrastructure in an adversarial way, the same way we think about software systems; we could say that it's full of critical zero-day vulnerabilities.
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by jongjong 11d ago
Rendezvous hashing is so simple and elegant. I implemented a library for rendezvous hashing with skeleton in order to get a similar performance as consistent hashing; it gets much more complicated and IMO loses some of the elegance once you
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by jongjong 11d ago
Sure why not. Maybe we can also abolish private property in 30 years. The work and entrepreneurial achievements which produced it were made in the past so we can just phase out ownership. No incentive problem there, the suckers already buil
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by jongjong 11d ago
People with aphantasia probably overestimate how good it is. I think I have good visualisation ability (based on spacial reasoning tests and ability to visualise complex software systems) but it's not like seeing something in real life
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by jongjong 12d ago
Sometimes I take up the most obscure hobby imaginable and then somehow it comes up on HN months later. I discovered a plant near where I live which has really strong, thin, long leaves and I started twisting them together and it makes stron
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by jongjong 15d ago
The most unethical aspect IMO isn't what they're building but the taxpayer money which those big companies are getting. These are essentially handouts. Taxes are not paid voluntarily but coerced out of citizens under the threat of
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by jongjong 16d ago
I'm surprised that founders still care about all that stuff. They already made tons of money, who cares. None of it means anything. Nothing is fair in this society. They don't mind the system working unfairly in their favor; they
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by jongjong 16d ago
In Australia, house would be at least 50% more, apartment would be maybe 70% more. Beef is cheaper (about half price) and tastier (from my experience). Bread is probably half price and way tastier in France though. Actually, after living in
28.
by jongjong 16d ago
I appreciate the question. It kept getting slightly worse every year since I joined the workforce. My salary is 2x when I started 14 years ago but it buys less than half what it could back then. Most of it goes into rent. It's almost i
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by jongjong 16d ago
Currently, my experience is that spam filters often block non-spam messages and allow many spam messages through. Platform notifications are spam! Yes, even if I signed up for it, I agreed to be contacted by the company, I never agreed to b
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by jongjong 17d ago
As someone who coded professionally in Python, C, C++, C# and Typescript, I disagree. JavaScript is my favourite language. I just avoid the bad parts. Just like everyone else avoids the bad parts of their favorite programming languages. I c

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