News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

ltcoleman

Re:AWS us-east-1 down on Tuesday June 13, 2023 @03:31PM (#36315659)
We are seeing console, codebuild, etc. access issues. Possibly all using Lambdas, foundationally?
Re:Tesla owners protest over drastic price cuts on Monday March 04, 2019 @11:42AM (#19302569)
I can empathize with the anger over a price reduction when you just bought a product. I bought a truck and a month later, the dealership had an additional 5k in rebates. Same happens when you buy an expensive tv, and a couple months later, the price drops by 1-2k. Technology products are constantly becoming cheaper through innovation and to satisfy supply/demand economics.. why is a tesla any different?

If you bought a tesla for resale value, you are doing it wrong. Buying a tesla helps the environment, furthers innovation, and provides a status symbol.

Re:Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble? on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @12:53AM (#18966277)
No. I do not believe we are in a bubble. At least for skilled professions that keep learning, the likelihood is the reverse. As more layers of abstraction make it easier to produce business value, a smaller number of skilled professions will be able to generate more and more revenue with less time.

Programming is different than doctors or lawyers. Programming in terms of value can scale. Doctors can only see a certain number of patients or perform a certain number of surgeries. A lawyer can only take a certain number of cases. They produce value based on their time in each of these tasks. That amount of value is somewhat fixed.

However, a skilled software professional can complete one project that produces a large amount of business value, or the coder can develop a new product that generates a long-tail stream of revenue over time.

For example, a coder that built the Google Ads Platform has helped generate a tremendous amount of revenue for Google, and that revenue keeps pouring in.

The bubble is real, but for IT/SD professionals that tend to get complacent with their skills. Traditional IT is getting abstracted away entirely. SD is getting more and more complex as many more frameworks/knowledge is needed on a yearly basis to do modern software development. Building a simple monolith is no longer acceptable for many companies. One must learn modern distributed systems.

The sad truth is that it will continue to take less and less resources to accomplish the same business goals in the future. One must stay on top of the latest technologies to climb on top of the coding pyramid. Luckily, this pyramid is starting to segment based on Front-End, Back-End, DevOps, etc. which means the truly skilled professions in those domains will rise to the top and command salaries much higher than currently seen.

Re:Lessons learned writing highly available code on Friday October 02, 2015 @08:51PM (#10322153)
I agree completely here. Many of my dev1s want to use the latest greatest stuff, but you will most likely not find those technologies in large stable production systems unless to facilitate some one-off service or piece of architecture that does not need SLAs.

I remember a slew of small tech companies having issues when they decided to build out there app stack with nginx fronting a nosql hotness which inevitably led to overload scenarios because of the lack of constraints/scalability concerns.

Please note : this was years ago, and I know that nginx is a great web server and mongo is a great nosql db, but without a focus on scalability, you can end up with a large headache.

Re:Ask HN: AWS or Dedicated Server on Thursday March 19, 2015 @05:26PM (#9234705)
AWS should work fine for you, but I would spend a lot of time up front going through the AWS security blog to make sure your infrastructure is secure. I was bit by this and experienced a hack within 2 hours of starting up my first ec2 instance. I learned quite a bit back then from that.

AWS can be very expensive depending on what your application will do.

Strangely enough, the first startup that was shown is the only startup from Arkansas that has gone to Y. I am a developer in Arkansas. Creepy.
Re:No Swift for UW's Certificate in iOS on Wednesday July 02, 2014 @03:07PM (#7978970)
From the article : we will present examples in both Objective-C and Swift and will include a few weeks of Swift coverage as part of the second or third course.

A strong foundation of knowledge in Objective-C will still be key to being a strong iOS developer. Since the program is still going to be showing some swift examples, and including some time on the language, I am confused as to why the poster is inferring from the title that not using swift in their certification process is such a big deal.

I would not hire an iOS developer that was only certified in swift. I can see the argument to include swift into the certification process, but I would not assume that universitys will immediately change their process without at least seeing how swift matures.

Re:The Myth of the Full-stack Developer on Thursday June 05, 2014 @05:55PM (#7854838)
Yes, they do exist. I have a whole team of full-stack developers. I gave one an iphone application to fix bugs in and convert from ios5 to ios7. He had no prior objective-c experience and in a week and a half, he had fixed all of the bugs and even dove into a 3rd party framework we were using to describe a problem to me using it with ios7.

A full-stack to me is somebody that can do web development, do server-side development, optimize SQL queries, understand security, scalability, and able to build linux server infrastructures for large software systems. They also are able to take any technology and provide value to a business using it in a matter of a couple of weeks.

Re:How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer on Tuesday April 15, 2014 @12:22PM (#7592712)
From my point of view, this is due to lack of tech education. There just are not enough people graduating/learning the technical skills necessary for medium to large size software companies to employ.

I am a manager/developer/architect at a relatively large software company, and we have to task our developers with devops-type tasks constantly. Not because we want our developers spending time outside of coding, but because for lack of ability to hire the competency needed.

As you stated, good developers can generally perform these tasks so when you have nobody lower to perform them they become a weight on the developers' shoulders.

No it isn't necessarily fair, and yes, I believe in the future specialization will come back as the education system starts to realize there are many jobs in tech, not just a Comp Sci degree jobs.

I really appreciate all of the replies. My main concern lies not at all in the gay marriage debate. It lies in the increased bullying for views that aren't aligned with what individuals believe is right. For example : http://www.campusreform.org/?ID=5506&app=cro

BTW I have no affiliation to campus reform nor do I know what it is.

And for the guy calling the campaign a "hate group".. You should look up SPLC's hate group map, you would love it. And just so you know, that map has allowed "activists" to target institutions for shootings, just look up the Family Research Council.

Once again, I do not affiliate with any of these organizations nor would I because I believe in true love. I believe every human has the right to be loved and listened to in our democracy.

It is when activism becomes violent justice that upsets me.

Isn't the point of a democracy to allow the people to have a voice? It is starting to seem like many progressive groups are trying to vilify an individual's freedom of speech/thought. The Brendan Eich controversy highlights the issue as of late. Do I share all of the values/beliefs that my CEO does? No. Should I boycott my CEO for having conflicting values/beliefs? Maybe. If I am totally against something, then I should stand up for my beliefs. I believe everything starts to collapse when I try to use my beliefs to rally against another individual.

I have the belief that our founding fathers knew America would be a melting pot of religions, cultures, and beliefs and that is why they established state's rights to accommodate the beautiful array of citizens of which would make the United States of America.

If we continue to push one set of beliefs how different are we than North Korea, Iran, etc?

I am not very political, and I have many left and right wing perspectives. I am just saddened to see our country starting to stumble on a slippery slope.

If you are not careful with work/life balance, the hustle of working in the startup world can easily get you down. Also the high rate of failure in the startup world contributes. A startup founder/employee that is working 80 hour weeks has every right to be depressed.

A mentor had a slogan that I try to model my life after : Faith, Fitness, Family, Finance and Balance!

I do realize that isn't the best link, but you can at least see the full session title there.
you need to watch the WWDC 2012 session 211 with teaches NSOperationQueue for touch processing

http://pupuweb.com/wwdc-2012-session-211-building-concurrent...

Re:Build your Valentine a custom iPhone game on Friday February 14, 2014 @05:42PM (#7241550)
Thanks for building this guys! It was fun.
yea, I think it would be a ton of fun. The concern with paint balls may be warranted but with their case it would take an amazing shot to cause phone damage. I think the airsoft angle is the real killer. When I was younger, I always wanted a videogame style play for outdoor play. This could be it.
Re:IPhone app adds COD features to Paintball & Airsoft on Monday December 30, 2013 @03:15PM (#6986634)
This is a great idea! Airsoft is becoming so popular and using augmented reality to bring perks to real-life is exciting.
Re:New Treehouse site launches on Tuesday October 29, 2013 @10:19AM (#6634255)
The new site looks great guys! I have had our dev staff using treehouse for over a year now, and for the devs that get into it, I can see their excitement after each new technology they start to pick up.

Treehouse is AWESOME!

Re:Show HN: Dead simple Hacker News reader for iOS on Thursday October 03, 2013 @11:45AM (#6489732)
It does have pocket integration though. So in summary, a beautiful UI to read HN articles with pocket integration for read later, but no access to comments
Re:Show HN: Dead simple Hacker News reader for iOS on Thursday October 03, 2013 @11:39AM (#6489679)
it does not display comments. I bought it because i enjoyed the look, but looks like until they get comments, i doubt many will install.
Re:10x Engineer on Monday September 23, 2013 @04:19PM (#6433852)
Your words are extremely accurate to me. There ARE 10x engineers but it takes a lot of experience to even have a chance at becoming one. A new grad ( even out of somewhere lik e Stanford ) has no chance to be a 10x engineer especially in a startup landscape (assuming a small startup with few extremely experienced engineers) without proper mentorship. The only people that i would say are 10x have worked at larger companies and have had multiple great mentors across many technologies ( once again the breadth and depth thing )
Re:Gmail service disruption on Monday September 23, 2013 @04:14PM (#6433820)
That announcement at least tells me something is going on, but i am not seeing a disruption. I have a total outage. I cannot even get to the login page.
Re:OkCupid's Awkward Response to Boulder Floods on Monday September 16, 2013 @03:10PM (#6395157)
I am sure their automated email systems sent the same email to people in Florida... So what? Is there any point to this article? Do you really think OKCupid decided to spam people in Boulder during flash floods to try to get user engagement?!

This is slanderous and for no reason.

Re:UX Salaries Compared on Thursday August 29, 2013 @02:37PM (#6297681)
Shhhhh! The east and west coasters haven't figured it out yet wink wink. Good technology professionals in the South live very well. :)
Re:Homeless hackers head to Noisebridge for shelter on Tuesday August 27, 2013 @05:30PM (#6286430)
In my opinion, all hacker spaces, co-working spaces, etc. need somebody to be the "bad cop". Building any size community requires members to participate. Tech people in particular are generally less likely to want to cause confrontation, but for the betterment of the community some policing is always needed. It really goes back to respect. Respect the community, and it will respect you back.

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