zbentley

49 ms·

811.
by zbentley 1y ago
Consider public service software/IT engineering. Contrary to popular belief, in the US there are state/federal government software jobs. They don’t pay as well as the private sector, but it’s only a few steps down, not “get used t
812.
by zbentley 1y ago
I agree with the adjacent commenter: therapy would help with this. As someone who has similar anxieties, I was pleasantly surprised in two ways when getting professional help: Surprise one: the advice for confronting anxiety--specifically s
813.
by zbentley 1y ago
I will, with trepidation and my expectations in the gutter, bite: what does “opting out” or “doing something about it” mean for you?
814.
by zbentley 1y ago
I recommend being very honest with yourself here, whether or not you want to share it in a reply. Is the low chance of bad consequences the only factor keeping you from talking to strangers? There’s a low chance of bad consequences when you
815.
by zbentley 1y ago
> blunt every aspect of your personality that may be an “ick.” That’s not what was meant and you know it. Ten years into a relationship, I sometimes leave my dinner dishes in the sink and wash them in the morning. Had I done that early o
816.
by zbentley 1y ago
Sure, a choice to opt out technically exists. But that common argument ignores two things: First, the massive asymmetry of power involved in making people choose opting in (again and again, to greater and greater degrees). Second, the fac
817.
by zbentley 1y ago
WiFi routers a) do connect to the internet (as many of them are integrated modems as well as WiFi) and b) are often mentioned as “connecting” to the internet as a colloquialism that means “a device on my WiFi can’t reach the internet becaus
818.
by zbentley 1y ago
> If a person wants to pay attention to their lifestyle and health, then in the US he will get one of the best results in the parameters you listed. That is just a fact. Is it? What are some obstacles to a similarly committed person atta
819.
by zbentley 1y ago
You didn’t really answer GP’s point, though. What if a big, strong family is struck by disaster (multiple earners lose jobs or die, or one member develops, say, an illness or huge debt which consumes the entire family’s resources)? Those ki
820.
by zbentley 1y ago
> Rust should have had _only_ panics, and panic objects should have had rich contextual information, just like Java and Python. It could have gone that way, but that would have “fattened” the runtime and overhead of many operations, maki
821.
by zbentley 1y ago
Thank you!
822.
by zbentley 1y ago
What’s this referring to? What drama did I miss?
823.
by zbentley 1y ago
Quality of engineering and longevity of the company producing the engineered product have nothing to do with each other. Evaluated by how useful they are to society at large, many businesses should not exist forever--or even for very long
824.
by zbentley 1y ago
True. Regulatory prohibition has sometimes succeeded at addressing these problems, though. More info on that in my adjacent comment, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44407009
825.
by zbentley 1y ago
Kind of. Those examples are often trotted out as discussion killers a la “regulating these vices didn’t work, so don’t bother trying to regulate $whatever (addictive dark patterns in this instance)”. But that’s not exactly true, is it? Ca
826.
by zbentley 1y ago
Yes. Given that, how can we do what GP suggested and move the perception and legal treatment of these behaviors towards “ethically repugnant” rather than “conditionally (and, as you pointed out, very unequally) socially permitted”?
827.
by zbentley 1y ago
What? No. Piracy is illegal. Fair Use is largely about reproduction (how much of a work you are allowed to copy and use, and for what purpose). It doesn’t deal with the legality of getting the work in the first place.
828.
by zbentley 1y ago
Two options other than aliases: 1. Modify your PATH: export PATH="$(uv run python -BISc 'import sys; print(sys.base_exec_prefix)')/bin:$PATH" 2. Put this in an executable file called "python" earl
829.
by zbentley 1y ago
I’ve met a few people who walked that walk without being assholes … to others. They tended to have a fairly intense amount of self criticism/self hatred, though. That was more palatable than ego, to be sure, but isn’t likely broadly ap
830.
by zbentley 1y ago
But like…this is very telling, no? If major conventions in a language involve runtime debugging/printing actions to just find out where a method is defined (and your approach here is the norm in every Ruby codebase I’ve worked on; th
831.
by zbentley 1y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem https://xkcd.com/1172/
832.
by zbentley 1y ago
> design failures on the part of programmers Many of the points in the article, including some in your examples, pre-date programmers and programming entirely. Still more emerged before widespread use of computer automation in aviation.
833.
by zbentley 1y ago
It’s not forgotten—it’s not even gone! Copied from my adjacent comment ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44208596 ): The example they set, and the systems and processes they put in place, are still alive. In peril? Sure,
834.
by zbentley 1y ago
The example they set, and the systems and processes they put in place, are still alive. In peril? Sure, frequently. But the USDS, and the work they started, goes on, even today. Interestingly, the executive order which changed USDS's n
835.
by zbentley 1y ago
True, but software is slightly easier to restore service to than a razed physical building, for example. The support/staff/operations part still takes time and resources, but it is a little easier.
836.
by zbentley 1y ago
> (paid) user studies Would it count as a paid user study if enabling telemetry for Windows knocked $10 off of the price of your computer? I can’t decide if that’s a neat idea or dystopic. Which, historically, probably means it’s dystopi
837.
by zbentley 1y ago
No, sorry. Testing answers “does the feature work?”. Usage telemetry answers questions like “was the feature a good idea?” and “are enough users successfully using the feature to justify the cost of creating/maintaining it?”. Those are
838.
by zbentley 1y ago
I mean … fair point, but Apple and other companies very much did spend immense amounts of money lobbying and scaremongering against right-to-repair legislation, so that’s worth drawing attention to. https://techhq.com/2024
839.
by zbentley 1y ago
I think this is already covered by a different area of law: false or misleading advertising prevention. If you buy a TPM that won’t codesign your MacBook’s bootloader (or that uses a compromised signing key) and it was advertised as an equi
840.
by zbentley 1y ago
Depends on the part. Non-OEM laptop memory? Fine. The failure/error rate is usually negligbly higher than OEM if at all. Non-OEM laptop batteries? Not fine. These very reliably work less well and fail or lose capacity much sooner. I im

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