101–110 of 556 posts
The funny thing is that from a purely technological point of view, Java (even the 5-year-old Java 8 and certainly recent versions) is far ahead of most other stuff hyped on HN (as well as less hyped stuff). Virtually no other platform comes close to that combination of state-of-the-art optimizing compilers, state-of-the-art GCs, and low-overhead in-production profiling/monitoring/management. And much of the cutting-e…
True, but java carries a lot of legacy.
The HN front page is similar to any community. For example, a car site's homepage will be listing the latest supercars, expensive turbos, rims, whatever... while most readers are driving a $30,000 Civic. The best & brightest in tech are working with the best tools on the biggest problems, and that's what gets talked about, regardless of what the mass is doing.
The funny thing is that from a purely technological point of view, Java (even the 5-year-old Java 8 and certainly recent versions) is far ahead of most other stuff hyped on HN (as well as less hyped stuff). Virtually no other platform comes close to that combination of state-of-the-art optimizing compilers, state-of-the-art GCs, and low-overhead in-production profiling/monitoring/management. And much of the cutting-e…
The HN front page is similar to any community. For example, a car site's homepage will be listing the latest supercars, expensive turbos, rims, whatever... while most readers are driving a $30,000 Civic. The best & brightest in tech are working with the best tools on the biggest problems, and that's what gets talked about, regardless of what the mass is doing.
Are we just going to ignore the idea of paying $30k for a Civic? I hope noone is doing that.
> we are listening to complicated set-ups and overengineering systems of distributed networking and queues and serverless and microservices and machine learning platforms that our companies don’t need
A lot of these technologies are talked about not because they're cool or hip, but because they actually increase productivity quite significantly. You can build complex architectures with any stack. But what many new technologies enable is building a company with fewer engineers and fewer resources than what was required before.
That said: it's clearly possible to be very productive with old technologies as well. However, I just don't see new companies which need to interact with "legacy" software being run without using some sort of virtualization or containerization technology.
The funny thing is that from a purely technological point of view, Java (even the 5-year-old Java 8 and certainly recent versions) is far ahead of most other stuff hyped on HN (as well as less hyped stuff). Virtually no other platform comes close to that combination of state-of-the-art optimizing compilers, state-of-the-art GCs, and low-overhead in-production profiling/monitoring/management. And much of the cutting-e…
HN is going to be inclined to take a look at new-ish stuff.
It's a bit disturbing how much people in this industry are focused on tooling. It's a biproduct IMO of working on boring problems or supporting morally ambiguous corps. That thing that you need to keep yourself busy and keep going in the rat race.
Tooling is great for job security. You can be absolutely shit at writing code and designing systems, yet make yourself indispensable because you know Framework X and most other people don't. All it takes is time to memorize trivia of the framework and a bit of trial-and-error to figure out how to work around framework's pitfalls. Unfortunately, this creates a whole host of long-term issues. For example, it create the…
The first time I seen a job title of "Kubernetes Keeper" I died a little inside. It's not that these jobs didn't exist before, and sysadmin is a perfectly good role which I personally don't have the skills or desire to do, but we keep pretending that we've build a way of replacing some of the effort which just moves it around a little.
One of my first projects was helping a Fortune 500 company run analytics on AWS with data sourced from their Db2 mainframe, which had been in production for multiple decades. Most clients are very uncomfortable with Linux, and Microsoft stack is definitely the default. IT usually keeps the corporate network and individual workstations under VERY strict control, so getting new tech onboarded or new processes implemented can be a multi-week territorial battle.
It truly is a different world at most places.
ETA: I forgot to mention that things at FAANG companies may not be as different as you think. I am currently working with a business team at one which is using a few tools based entirely on Excel and VBA.
The funny thing is that from a purely technological point of view, Java (even the 5-year-old Java 8 and certainly recent versions) is far ahead of most other stuff hyped on HN (as well as less hyped stuff). Virtually no other platform comes close to that combination of state-of-the-art optimizing compilers, state-of-the-art GCs, and low-overhead in-production profiling/monitoring/management. And much of the cutting-e…