jrockway

14 ms·

211.
by jrockway 1y ago
I'm always a little embarrassed when I go to the doctor and tell them I'm a software engineer. I know your EMR system is terrible but if I had done it it would have been better. Sorry :( (My primary care doctor's office was
212.
by jrockway 1y ago
Yeah, this has always bothered me. I don't really know what the issue is. One possibility is that IT is a "cost center" and so by making it cost as little as possible, you are doing a good job of running the company. I look
213.
by jrockway 1y ago
Some number, absolutely. I don't have that much integrity ;)
214.
by jrockway 1y ago
It was weird. It makes me sad because the startup I worked at was really gelling despite the HPE interference. Then they just laid everyone off one day (multiple senior leadership changes later) for no apparent reason. All the code is Apa
215.
by jrockway 1y ago
Yup exactly. I got my retention bonus and 2 months pay and all that stuff without agreeing to anything, and they offered a little bit more to agree not to disparage them. I'm pretty chatty so decided it wasn't worth it ;)
216.
by jrockway 1y ago
They must have learned from your experience. When we were acquired by HPE they did not let us choose and our director of engineering got an email address that misspelled his name... fixing it involved him being locked out of all systems wh
217.
by jrockway 1y ago
Yeah, we were asked to do this at my last job by some sort of security review. This one doesn't bother me as much. "Display 'network error' whenever a user uploads a file containing 'SELECT *'" is a bad
218.
by jrockway 1y ago
Yeah, and this seems like a common Fortune 500 mandatory checkbox. Gotta have a Web Application Firewall! Doesn't matter what the rules are, as long as there are a few. Once I was told I needed one to prevent SQL injection attacks..
219.
by jrockway 2y ago
This seems to be common for corporate America in general. I used to work at a YC startup. We kiiiiiinda maaaaaaaybe ran out of money (not my department) and happened to get bought by a large investor that also happens to be a US-based har
220.
by jrockway 2y ago
Except for like the last 3 months!
221.
by jrockway 2y ago
This has been my experience as well. I was involved with some payment dispute with the New York Times many years ago. I switched from credit card to Apple Pay and they sent my account to collections. I took no action on this because it wa
222.
by jrockway 2y ago
Collections rarely does anything. I mean they will nag you, but you ask them to only contact you in writing, and it basically goes away. The collection agency could sue you, but it's rare. It involves putting together a realistic ca
223.
by jrockway 2y ago
The last time I tried this, it works on Linux but not on Mac OS. Given all the discussion about launchd, I'm guessing they need it to work on Macs.
224.
by jrockway 2y ago
Reading the error message is a good idea. I try to make the fragments of my error messages unique so that in some error like "foo the bar: get bar: lookup bar source: i/o timeout" you can search for "lookup bar source&q
225.
by jrockway 2y ago
It's kind of the opposite problem as well; huge well-funded companies bringing down open source project websites. See Xe's journey here: https://xeiaso.net/blog/2025/anubis/ One may posit "may
226.
by jrockway 2y ago
Why? You have control over the parts where control yields noticeable savings, and the rest just kind of works with reasonable defaults. Taken to the extreme, Go is still nice even with constraints. For example, tinygo is pretty nice for m
227.
by jrockway 2y ago
GOMEMLIMIT has saved me a number of times. In containerized production, it's nice, because sometimes jobs are ephemeral and don't even do enough allocations to hit the memory limit, so you don't spend any time in GC. But it
228.
by jrockway 2y ago
We like to blame the students, but there is probably some adjustments that could be made to the system. I think people like to start with "college is a place where you become well-rounded", but nobody ever tells you the value of
229.
by jrockway 2y ago
I made an e-ink clock once. The display documentation basically said you'd break the display if you refreshed more frequently than some long interval. I refreshed it every minute and indeed it broke after a year.
230.
by jrockway 2y ago
Interesting. I might have to get this PTP board, as I've never played with that. How much more precision do you get on the client side by eliminating the chronyd <-> network packet latency? There is still switching latency (I&
231.
by jrockway 2y ago
Reproducible builds actually solve a lot of problems. (Whether these are real problems, who really knows, but people spend a lot of money to solve them.) At my last job, some team spent forever making our software build in a special federa
232.
by jrockway 2y ago
Versions built into the code are nice. I think the correct answer is to commit before the build proper starts (automatically, without changing your HEAD ref) and put that in there. Then you can check version control for the date informati
233.
by jrockway 2y ago
Software noise cancellation is actually kind of amazing. During the pandemic when I was doing 8 hours of video calls a day, I paid for Krisp and it eliminated any background noise pretty much perfectly. One time a very loud fire truck was
234.
by jrockway 2y ago
There is an income threshold where driving wasn't viable before. Parking is very expensive in the CBD. Fuel prices are not low. These users were taking public transit before, and now there is money to maintain transit from people that
235.
by jrockway 2y ago
Yeah, I think your explanation is pretty reasonable. I am also old and lazy and still find time to try new tools. I am not sure I have ever gotten traditional "find" to do what I want on the first try, and I've had a lot of
236.
by jrockway 2y ago
My take is that devastating errata is just normal. Most of it is fixed silently and the end users never hear about it, but sometimes you're the customer that gets to find them. Right before I joined an embedded device team at Google,
237.
by jrockway 2y ago
I only want one feature from Siri. When I say "hey Siri, set a timer for 10 minutes" while in my kitchen, I'd like it show up as a live activity on my phone. (You can see it in your phone, but it's buried deeply inside
238.
by jrockway 2y ago
Chromium is kind of stuck with zlib because it's the algorithm that's in the standards, but if you're making your own protocol, you can do even better than this by picking a better algorithm. Zstandard is faster and compress
239.
by jrockway 2y ago
I think it's a ploy. I shared your comment with a friend who works in a call center and agents have been known to resort to shenanigans to get rid of a call (or just take a break). In her specific case they had a combined support&#x2
240.
by jrockway 2y ago
You can trust (in time), but you can't blindly upgrade. Vendor or choose to "lock" with a cryptographic hash over the files your build depends on. You then need to rebuild that trust when you upgrade (wait until everyone el

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