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How many scenarios are there where the rename both matters (beyond taste and philosophy) and is across interface boundaries?

Surely if it is an advantage to rename once in a ginormous, single code base there must also be leaky abstractions, poorly defined interfaces, god objects, etc present at the same time?

Whenever I find I need to rename anything across domains, it's a matter of updating the "core" repository and then just pulling the newest version.

Re:Ask HN: Hybrid/Remote software team rituals on Friday April 08, 2022 @07:19AM (#30955596)
You said you weren't a software development team. What kind of functions do you have?

For me, and most people I've worked with, having an all-day meeting specifically to mimic the open office is not something we'd ever propose ourselves. Was it a bottom-up or a top-down decision? Is everyone happy with it?

This isn't about architecture so much as implementation, though. Would you prefer to look at a sequence diagram there, or actual code?

To me, only the code is real because it can be run and is the product. UML is great for niche cases, but it doesn't represent the truth well, and is usually at least one time increment out of sync with reality.

> Also abusable are the new GDPR requests.

How? Seems to me that if they're storing (and handing over) data that allows trivial account takeover, they have a broken security process to begin with.

Re:Ask HN: Any weird tips for weight loss? on Thursday March 10, 2022 @10:46AM (#30628200)
Five hours a week is no small investment. Focusing on calories/kJ in < out is much easier as it can be done incrementally, such as by not eating past a certain time of day, leaving out especially high sugar snacks, etc. There is no getting around obesity being a dietary issue.

That said, it's definitely not an either/or situation.

Re:How to manage software developers without micromanaging on Tuesday February 15, 2022 @07:16AM (#30345464)
What you're describing is leadership, just not the popular style. To put terms to it, you weren't doing Taylorist command and control, you were doing servant leadership.

In my opinion, yours is the only sane way to lead. With command and control, all you would be doing is creating the illusion of control, providing no actual added value. If your leadership style is adversarial, you're stimulating your employees to see you as a liability.

Re:Discord is a black hole for information on Saturday February 12, 2022 @08:58AM (#30312842)
Mostly, yes, but it comes down to moderation and subreddit culture. Reddit - as a company - doesn't take moderation seriously, as evidenced by it being left to unpaid volunteers.
> I see and hear of GDPR violations everywhere

The legal follow-up could be better. The exacted fines should actually follow the law instead of being softened. With at least 4% of gross revenue in every instance, it would have bite and act to curb the excesses, thereby tackling the root problem. After all, it was never meant to outlaw data collection, just excessive surveillance.

> The annoying cookie banners

The GDPR isn't unclear about what companies can collect, what consent should be asked and how. Those banners are malicious compliance or non-compliance. They're purposefully built that way to get you as a potential consumer riled up about the regulation. And it's working: instead of talking about the companies trying to abuse your data and implementing horrible popups that don't do what the law says they should, you're now upset at the regulators. Classic case of "Don't like what they're saying? Change the narrative".

I think they might be referring to the dark pattern where there are two sets of "Legitimate Purposes":

1. Actual legitimate purposes for core functionality

2. A toggleable "legitimate purposes" under the ads section

Presenting the second option could be construed as malicious compliance or just dishonesty.

On sites where I've seen this, there is no one-click option to disable those, which should make them non-compliant with GDPR.

> except for the extremely strong willed, [...] addicting

Addiction isn't about willpower so much as psychopathology and genetics. It's a coping mechanism.

> getting used to a serene state of mind is [...] kind of counter productive

What is suspect about serenity? Is religion equally problematic as a source? How is it counterproductive?

> such substances are not natural and

A naturalist argument is usually invalid. We can't expand upon the rules of the universe. Plastics are just as natural as anything else. Cannabis also doesn't induce any foreign states in our brains.

Even using the narrow definition of "can't be found in the wild": cannabis is a plant, so it very much does exist in the wild. So do alcohol, caffeine, nicotine, psilocybin ("magic mushrooms") or ergotamine (LSD).

When applied to brain chemistry: to my knowledge, drugs don't do novel things to our brains. They promote infrequent states, but that doesn't make them unnatural. Especially not if you consider how alien dream states, meditative and transcendental experiences feel.

> with unchecked use, might put a whole society in danger

Adding a slippery slope to it doesn't improve your line of reasoning. It does tend to whip the masses into a frenzy, like its cousins "Won't somebody think of the children" and "Why should we help those who won't help themselves?".

It also doesn't conform to reality. Have California or Colorado collapsed because weed was legalised? Have the Netherlands?

> I am ambivalent about the whole movement to legalize it

Decriminalisation seems obvious to me as a solution, if coupled with a sorely needed investment in mental healthcare (across the West). The latter is necessary regardless of how we consider drugs - see homelessness, domestic violence, suicide, burnouts, etc. Decriminalisation works (cf Portugal's results), dries up income sources for the cartels, allows quality controls to be put in place, reduces stigmatisation for users, lowers the threshold for seeking therapy, keeps people out of prison for victimless crimes, creates a revenue source for the government through sales and other taxes...

The alternative to decriminalisation is telling the population "we know best". Looking at the so-called war on drugs globally, it's also an endeavour that's bound to fail, strengthen drug cartels, escalate violence and cause more damage than it prevents.

Re:Is old music killing new music? on Thursday January 20, 2022 @08:23AM (#30008533)
I've just listened to the original version for the first time. What leads you to the conclusion that it's "pretty clear that respect means sex"?

To me, he could mean she gets used to living without him when he's on the road and treats it like her home when he gets there, instead of theirs. If he's going to give her most of his money, at least she could make nice.

Re:Israel police uses NSO’s Pegasus to spy on citizens on Thursday January 20, 2022 @05:29AM (#30007081)
I think we're basically in agreement: neither of us thinks we should be naive about these agencies, as they definitely aren't. Intelligence/security agencies have a purpose, but shouldn't become zealots. And they should be trusted, but verified as the KGB used to say.

> Stay involved in local / state / federal politics.

Not an option for me - I'm geographically challenged. One thing to be envious of with the American system is you guys can affect a great deal, from judge and sheriff appointments to the president. Your post is a good reminder not to take it for granted.

Re:Israel police uses NSO’s Pegasus to spy on citizens on Wednesday January 19, 2022 @05:41AM (#29992023)
> The Security Services has to protect a country

Implied is the statement that the end justifies the means. But how do you weigh the proportionality of measures taken? Do you adopt a utilitarian point of view, looking at, say, deaths prevented? Is anything game, or should agencies be expected to uphold a code of conduct, bill of rights or exclude entire categories of information? How do you assess what is or isn't a threat to a country and thereby something it needs to be protected from? What is a country - the president, the party, the government, its citizenry, businesses?

Second, with the popularity of invoking "national security" as an authority argument, how can these agencies ever be accountable? Who watches the watchmen? Are we to trust agencies reporting on the number of e.g. terrorist incidents prevented, especially if the information sources are opaque and there's an obvious conflict of interest?

Third, given the existence of programs like MK Ultra and Cointelpro, is it really safe to say agencies won't try to overreach? With examples like the Stargate program ("Men Who Stare At Goats"), should we have faith they know what they're doing?

Re:“Chatbots: Still Dumb After All These Years” on Wednesday January 19, 2022 @05:24AM (#29991903)
To be clear, I wasn't putting the blame with IVRs or their designers. I was specifically speaking to the UX that results from businesses programming them and the menu options they set up. Like you say, those are constrained by what the business itself wants, which in turn is constrained by cost management philosophy.
Re:How to put bad habits to good use on Wednesday January 19, 2022 @03:59AM (#29991395)
Aside from the usual Guardian dalliance with identity politics, this article comes across as either nihilistic, or making the case for contentment with what we've got rather than to strive to improve oneself. The latter is perhaps what we collectively need to hear as an alternative to the productivity porn, but it's a depressingly low bar to me.

All of these can be true at the same time:

* holding yourself to a standard

* striving to better yourself

* caring about your own mental health

* giving yourself time to rest/recover

* being kind to yourself when it comes to past failures

The article goes a bit too far with lowering expectations.

> global payment network that is horrible to deal with

With proper regulation, banks can have maximum terms on holding money mid-transfer, limits (or even abolition!) of transfer and withdrawal fees, etc.

It is possible to designate a product as an essential service or utility. It's just that the US government has chosen to not apply that kind of regulation to a lot of essential products like banking and telecoms, much like it hasn't chosen to enforce anti-trust laws, remove tax avoidance provisions, deal with corporate capture or reform the healthcare, education and electoral systems.

In essence, it's a people problem all the way down. Technology is incapable of solving those, which is why blockchain is a solution looking for a problem.

Re:It’s great to be a consultant on Tuesday January 18, 2022 @08:36AM (#29978807)
That's true in the US. For many in Europe, it's the other way around.
Re:“Chatbots: Still Dumb After All These Years” on Friday January 14, 2022 @11:00AM (#29936065)
The same reason companies use byzantine IVR systems (phone menus). To save support costs by making people give up.
Re:Ask HN: Where Is the COLA? on Friday January 14, 2022 @07:58AM (#29933885)
> higher unemployment

Yes, but the US also measures unemployment differently. People are culled from those statistics much faster in the US than in Belgium.

> lower per capita income

True, but that's not caused by indexation of wages (COLA) alone - I'm not even sure it's a statistically that significant. It's down to a combination of factors, such as market size, startup culture, taxation, social welfare...

> These across-the-board mandated policies do impose a cost, they make the economy as a whole less flexible and decrease employment, at the margin.

The Belgian economy is less flexible by default, because it's constrained by three languages, seven governments, a total area slightly larger than Maryland and a population roughly equal to Ohio's.

Whether it's a cost is debatable, if Belgians on average live almost three years longer, on average have cheaper and better education, etc. If you compare the quality of life [0], Belgium is ahead of the US in many metrics except precisely cost of living,, housing size and wage. All I'm saying is: economical statistics don't paint the whole picture.

0: https://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/belgium/

Re:Let's Settle This on Monday January 10, 2022 @04:00AM (#29872126)
To me the stunning part is the assumption the common denominator can decide on what is or isn't quality entertainment. Going by that metric, the Bachelor, Love Island, the various talent shows and the Great British Bake-off are all beacons of culture.

Star Wars is pop culture, knights-in-space, high-octane, good vs evil. Of course it wins a popularity contest. To be clear: I'm not dissing Star Wars. It was just made to appeal to the masses and sell action figurines. It targets broader audiences. Star Trek has always been niche.

Maybe the next big step is creating AI-driven cargo ships that can independently get stuck in the Suez canal.

On a more serious note, I can't shake the impression that would be a logical next step for all long and medium distance freight, be it road, water, air or space. Whether it's a good or mature idea is anyone's guess.

Re:Loving Someone with Depression on Friday January 07, 2022 @08:01AM (#29838595)
> Perhaps someone gets depressed every three months near end of quarter when their hours get cut?

As someone who's been clinically depressed, your examples seem contrived to me. Are they based on any specific evidence, and if so, would you please share with the group?

Re:Hunting Tech Debt via Org Charts on Tuesday December 21, 2021 @11:50AM (#29639212)
Not being able to use the shiniest version of everything isn't tech debt, it's brownfield development or maintenance mode. Using deprecated versions (beyond LTS), ignoring security advisories, and not replacing unmaintaned OSS packages are. It's a bit facile to reduce all of that to developers just being juvenile divas.

In some cases, tech debt is as small a threat to business continuity as IT security is. That is, it isn't a problem till it's suddenly a massive problem. In other cases, it causes development cost to slowly increase over time, at which point it depends whether the organisation/cash flow can bear it. Your proverbial moat, or perhaps corporate momentum.

I would question whether incurring tech debt is generally really part of a greater strategy at the organisational level. It's a symptom of myopia. In any place I've worked, it wasn't a balancing act, but rather being willfully ignorant about the application lifecycle, technology, security implications and knock-on effects. No one said "let's move fast and fix 'er up later". At least not in earnest.

What kind of proficiency do you mean, exactly? To me, the concept sounds too nebulous for a machine to analyse, as it needs precise instructions/criteria.
Re:3 lines of code shouldn't take all day on Thursday December 16, 2021 @03:46AM (#29576325)
Well, if it were fun, it would lose its shine if you're constantly being told it doesn't matter to the business.
Re:You Can't Buy Integration on Wednesday December 08, 2021 @06:23AM (#29483479)
> Being "good" has nothing to do with being a back-end programmer, imho

That's a tough one. As I see it, a lot of the complexity in frontends is in framework feature bloat, subpar tooling and high tech churn as compared to backends. In a word: immaturity. Frontend doesn't guarantee backcompat like backend technologies do, which is also a large part of the (unnecessary) complexity. Obviously, frontends are additionally subject to the whims of fashion in a way that doesn't apply to backends.

In contrast, backends have mature frameworks that can deal with most concerns, allowing the developer to operate on a higher level and with greater confidence in the basic nuts and bolts. Package management is generally sane, to boot.

How much less complex would frontend be if we weren't trying to cram applications into a document model and instead had built-in support for controls/components, theming, data binding and inter-component events? If JavaScript didn't have so many shortcomings or perhaps even gradual typing?

In my experience, frontend skews young whereas backend skews older. That leads to junior class errors in frontends, such as not understanding the benefit of type annotations in a dynamic language and general cowboy behaviour. Perhaps the latter is also down to the general "move fast and break things" approach in JS land.

My own conclusion is backend developers as a group tend to be better, but that's mainly by virtue of having more experience under the belt, being less impatient and taking a longer view.

Would that not by definition be a place the owner doesn't live in?
There's a solution to that. Internal debiting between departments. Without it (as is usually the case now), sales is always seen as a net plus to the company, because they bring in new revenue, and can do no wrong.

With it, sales departments can spend more than they have, because they sell for X and need to pay production, IT and project management Y1, Y2 and Y3. An unrealistic deadline would put them in the negative due to overtime payments, attrition, etc. So would unclear requirements, failing to do their due diligence, selling science fiction...

Re:Are daily standups hurting your team? on Wednesday November 03, 2021 @01:41PM (#29097954)
A lot of developers are of the late chronotype. That has nothing to do with being a diva, immature or lazy, it's just how we're built. There are plenty of reasons developers can be divas, but being a night owl isn't one. Chronic sleep deprivation will drastically shorten one's life span.
Re:What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks? on Friday October 29, 2021 @05:26AM (#29036767)
Based on their example, in practice the decision is between dealing with reality and following management framework dogma at all costs.

Game theory offers amazing insights, but it doesn't really deal with internal company politics, the power of business consultants and the desire to obtain silver bullets.

Could it be that quarterly/annual budgets make one assume participation in a finite game, rather than infinite? That's precisely the kind of thing the author of the tweet chain seems to be describing.

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