231–240 of 371 posts
Try criticizing capitalism or "free markets" sometime.
Or Apple, or libertarians, or Rust, or any other similar darling. Or suggesting that absolute free speech comes with issues when coupled with the global reach and pseudo anonymity of the Internet.
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One of the [few] advantages of becoming a crusty old fart™, is that we tend to waste a lot less time, worrying about what others think of us, and just do what we need to do, to get the job done. I was just talking about this, to someone, yesterday. I'm often accused of being a "killjoy," or a "dreamkiller," by today's yutes. This is because I say 'orrible things, like "Have you considered what happens if..?" or "We t…
> and my work is generally focused around the endless practicalities and compromises, necessary to get products out the door. This hits too hard. I’m still in the “acceptance” phase of grief over the death of my ideal that there’s a “right” technical solution for every problem. And I’m in my 40’s.
It starts by accepting them, right off the bat, then using the time that I'd otherwise spend in fruitless pursuit of shiny, doing things like testing and documenting the codebase.
Experience gives me the ability to see them, at the start of things, other than waiting to run into them, later.
I think what the author says is true. The mass of digital workers use older, established and unfashionable technology, and are neither vocal nor particularly curious about the work. But there's an implication of moral purity at play. Are those who just quietly "mind their own business" a good, wholesome but misrepresented group? On the contrary, I think that in matters with far reaching consequences, which computing…
It happens at the company level too. You end up with a lot of decisions being made by the minority that (1) feels strongly and (2) is willing to speak up. It's an interesting dynamic. I've been on both sides in my career. Silent is much easier but doesn't get you recognition & promotions.
...and don't forget to include the wonderboy/girl from the overpaid consulting firms that come in and tell the CEO they are doing everything wrong and should move everything to: (pick the latest technology fad)
and then 2-3 years later they come back and convince upper management to move to the next big thing...
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The silent majority are mostly corporate devs building internal tooling. Microservices are a fantastic method for building distributed, horizontally scaling, dynamic services in a way that's sane. But the overwhelming vast majority of services would be perfectly ok with a simple monolith that occasionally gets a VM spec bump.
> horizontally scaling I have never seen services (of any size) succeed in a place that wasn't using them to do vertical partitioning of a system. I imagine you are probably talking about horizontally scaling each of those vertical partitions, but the phrasing is really confusing.
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I disagree only on your last paragraph. It heavily depends on what the startup is selling and it's customers. I would only take Java for a B2B onprem app. For anything else, I'd go with other languages.
> only take Java for a B2B onprem app What's your reasoning? Java has one of the best ecosystems with lots of libraries and frameworks, especially for high-perf distributed applications (see Hadoop, Kafka, Ignite, Cassandra, etc). And there are plenty of developers to hire. So it is a good choice for most backends. As a developer I prefer C# (IMO the best general purpose language these days), but from the business pe…
Yes, it has a lot of good libraries, and bad frameworks. The focus on code generation, distributed systems, and high complexity environments are all on the wrong side of starting something up. (One of those may be right after you are big, but then, Java isn't the best choice for any of it.)
The one large selling point of Java, that is to help you enforce a minimum level of quality on code that lots of people change, is completely meaningless for a small team starting up.
>While browsing HackerNews, I sometimes get the feeling that every developer out there is working for FAANG Bubbles on HN; Entry level Web Developers are getting $200K per year working in FAANG or Big Tech. Non-FANNG are getting $150K anyway. Ruby may be dead, but PHP is even more dead. Java may rule the enterprise, but you should not mention Java. No one uses Oracle or MySQL, why would you want that? Postgres is the…
> Usually, the comments on HN/Reddit are polarised by a single group of people who have the same opinion, Can't speak for Reddit, but that's not at all the case here. For example, I often speak of my hatred of microservices here. I'll get some upvotes and agreement, some people telling me it's a dumb opinion, and some people telling me we're doing it wrong and explain their right way. Believe it or not, I learn a lot…
I don't think microservices are silent majority. They seem like more of a blogger architect who likes to tinker with stuff thing. I would expect the true silent majority just uses monoliths. If it works and doesn't make people complain every day when they work on it, why use a microservice? That's more work. Everyone likes to think of microservices as a modern high tech thing, but to me it seems like old fashioned un…
It's exactly this for me. Unix has been around longer than I've been around and will outlive my career if not my life. Components have been successfully updated and replaced mostly without significant disruption. Unix is a model for producing and maintaining complicated systems.
made me think of a thread here recently, can't remember which one exactly, that had the general tone of "who even develops on Windows?". People in the .Net ecosystem at least it seems like are very underrepresented here given how large of a platform that is.
I know quite a few companies that develop on .net, mainly in C# instead of Basic of course. But I rarely see any discussions about it. Wouldn't know where to ask in-depth technical questions.
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Throughout human history someone being wealthy almost always meant someone else being exploited - from obvious chattel slavery to less obvious trading networks That these exploitations often created empires that created institutions that themselves promoted higher efficiency in trade (like protecting from piracy and brigands) was a good thing. But trade, whilst always a win win, can be and for empires always was stru…
This is why those that benefit from the current status quo are trying to dismantle and destroy education, right? We can't let the people read, know, or think about what you wrote. It's destabilizing and "dangerous" to their way of life.
Elite education, and especially luxury education for the children of the elite, was about learning to read, know, and think - mainly because it was still tied to an earlier humanistic and scholarly tradition where those things were important.
That lasted a short while, say until the 70s.
Now, even elite education is not about that kind of learning anymore, as those in power don't really need or appreciate those skills.
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> If you ever find yourself about to say that Nixon did something that a non-evil person would do, you’d better triple check your facts. Actually Nixon did several things "a non-evil person would do", Nixon as evil is a carricature. Like giving back Native American lands, or green-lighting the first major environmental protection legislation, or to get talking with China. And of course the Vietnam war itself was esca…
> to get talking with China. What a waste of time that was.