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Normalization of Deviance (2015)

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Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#151

Post by DiggyJohnson »

chaps wrote: post #114
DiggyJohnson wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who are you to decide what others are comfortable sharing on here. It is quite literally as simple as the person I replied to choosing not reply to my comment. Why is this issue a concern to you? > I don't have a dog in this fight politically one way or the other Neither do I. > people don't need to identify themselves IRL here I don't think they do either. Why are you assuming I "needed" this information?

Can you not? They're right.

Can I not what?

Why won’t either of you respond to my core argument: GGP does not need to respond to my comment if they’re not comfortable.

Me asking the question is not me demanding a response.

Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#152

Post by lmm »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #76
namaria wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find quite interesting that people will prefer a highly malleable language like Python, and then orgs have to adopt testing to get around all the inconsistencies caused by absent type system. And then people will write libraries to get around the pesky tests to get their flexibility back. It's fascinating really... Complex systems are always in partial failure mode and that applies to collective optimization challe…

Type systems do not replace testing, and if a test works after retrying it then it is probably not something that a type system would be able to catch.

> Type systems do not replace testing

They're a good substitute for many of the use cases of testing.

> if a test works after retrying it then it is probably not something that a type system would be able to catch.

Type systems are pretty good at catching incorrect concurrency logic these days, and getting better all the time.

Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#153

Post by DiggyJohnson »

lmm wrote: post #144
DiggyJohnson wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this ain't the place to ask Am I double-whooshing here? How is a Hacker News comment thread not the right place to respectfully ask questions in response to interesting comments. I know I'm not entitled to an answer, nor do I intend to start a flame war. Sheesh

There's nothing respectful about asking something that someone has very blatantly made a deliberate decision to leave out of their post, for completely understandable reasons.

On the contrary, I don’t think there’s anything respectful about assuming that the OP doesn’t have the agency to decide for themselves whether they want to respond to my question or not.

Additionally, I don’t have a lot of respect for anyone with the ego to assume they know what information was withheld “deliberate”ly or not in a discussion like this. How do you know that?! How do you not see that the OP can make this decision for themselves?!

Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#154

Post by lmm »

RoddaWallPro wrote: post #97
whats_a_quasar wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't think that's what he's saying. You are assuming a great deal of malice, rather than positive intent. What he's saying is that there isn't hard evidence that shorter lines are more readable, so he made the style choice of longer lines. You're claiming that most people prefer shorter line widths, but again present no evidence that most people actually have that preference, other than vague references to…

Yeah, that's probably true. He also at least allows people to set their own reading width by adjusting browser. My frustration stems from the fact that I find the argument "there are no papers with sufficient evidence" to be pedantic bullshit. Like yeah, sure, you aren't even wrong, but absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. I've never seen anyone claim to like 180 char lines, whereas I've seen hordes of peo…

I prefer longer lines, and hate sites that force a narrow line length.

Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#155

Post by 77pt77 »

riffic wrote: post #65
chaps wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We weren't able to reliably install security daemons on a client's machine because the entire automation system didn't account for autoscaling. The issues were raised well before I joined and the project head legitimately didn't understand it as a problem that needed solving. The hosts were for a presidential candidate's webserver, and they noticed the webservers were missing security daemons days before the election…

are "security daemons" truly necessary though? this whole thing sounds like a troll with enough convincing language to seem plausible

Without the security daemons you risk a flux capacitor overload and that leads to it being exploitable via pointer wraparound.

Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#156

Post by KMag »

tablespoon wrote: post #142
KMag wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More importantly, I think more accurate nukes along with good satellite multispectral and signals intelligence means that top generals carrying out orders for nuclear first strikes can be more certain that they're signing their own death warrants. Hopefully this results in any leader ordering a nuclear first strike getting deposed by military coup rather than starting a nuclear war.

> More importantly, I think more accurate nukes along with good satellite multispectral and signals intelligence means that top generals carrying out orders for nuclear first strikes can be more certain that they're signing their own death warrants. How would you do that? In the event of a nuclear war, my understanding is they'll mostly be flying around on special command and control planes. I don't think nuclear int…

Ahh, yes, the flaw in my optimism is that those doomsday planes do in fact have direct radio links to send the PAL codes and authenticated launch orders directly to the silos, submarines, and standby bombers.

The tier of generals just not senior enough to have a seat on the doomsday planes isn't in the emergency line of command to the nuclear weapons. So, regardless of how powerful a small coalition of those generals is, they cannot reliably prevent a nuclear launch. (They'd need a pre-existing conspiracy to quickly and efficiently turn their own air defence batteries against their own doomsday planes... at which point it seems very likely they'd just launch a coup long before a nuclear strike was ordered.)

So, I guess our last hope is that a small conspiracy of generals just under the doomsday plane tier would stage a coup once the nuclear sabre rattling reached a sufficient magnitude, before the nuclear first strike order is given.

Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#157

Post by jacquesm »

aj7 wrote: post #107

“Let's say you notice that your company has a problem that I've heard people at most companies complain about: people get promoted for heroism and putting out fires, not for preventing fires.” My first day at work at big-laser-company. Manufacturing engineer for a laser (then) so complex, it required a PhD to solve problems to get units out the door. The product was a ring laser. What that means is that the laser bea…

One of the key questions in my due diligence practice is whether people are allowed to 'be negative' and to literally stop the line to avoid shipping a defective product.

This one question tends to separate out a very large fraction of companies that take unacceptable risks and allows the ones that don't to be justifiably proud of their attitude towards risk. These are not trivial things either, medical devices and software used in medical diagnosis, machine control and so on where an error can quite literally cost someone their life or a good chunk of their healthy life-span. Companies where people can not or won't speak up tend to have a lot of stuff that's wrong wiped under the carpet.

Kudos to you for speaking up, and irrespective of who got to be called a hero (that part isn't all that relevant to me) also kudos to your employer for acting on your input.

Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#158

Post by MikePlacid »

Jtsummers wrote: post #131
aidenn0 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Like, how does the new hire (or anyone else) know the difference between "learning the complexity of the new system" and "internalizing/normalizing the deviance of this culture"? If a new hire can't checkout, build, and test the software on the first day, then there is likely something either wrong with the hire or the infrastructure. A sufficiently old and arcane software system might take weeks before a new hire…

Along with this "how long to spin up the new hire" issue, one of my first (if not the first) questions when trying to help people improve their processes related to software is: > If the user/client asks you to make a small but not trivial change, how long would it take to update and deploy the program? I have had answers ranging from "A couple hours" to "A year" (yes, they were serious). Most were in the 1-3 month r…

Not sure how speed of the change is related to batches. The “batch” is related to “due this week”, there never was a single item in this list. “Speed” is related to “due which week”, that depends mostly on the priority of the change, not on how easy it is.

Upd. And “change menu items order, fast” is a sign of a problem. We found Mac Cube in ski vacation rental home once. It ran MacOS 10.2 or something. All the menu items were in the places we expected them to be! You think carefully first, then you implement menu items order. Upper Apple -> About this Mac. We managed to break their network config in like 5 minutes!

Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#159

Post by charrondev »

aidenn0 wrote: post #48
jkaptur wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to give a different, concrete, perspective (and push a hot button HN issue), I've spent a fair amount of time working on extremely large web applications, and by far the #1 "WTF WTF WTF" thing that new hires say is "what do you mean you aren't using $TODAYS_HOT_JS_FRAMEWORK??" Once you get away from "should we use version control" and into actually difficult software engineering questions, it's not clear how to…

> Like, how does the new hire (or anyone else) know the difference between "learning the complexity of the new system" and "internalizing/normalizing the deviance of this culture"? If a new hire can't checkout, build, and test the software on the first day, then there is likely something either wrong with the hire or the infrastructure. A sufficiently old and arcane software system might take weeks before a new hire…

For us the setup is:

- Install docker - Setup GitHub SSH credentials. - Pull the main repo. - Run a script that will pull down related repos, install dependencies, start up a bunch of docker containers, and then run health checks on the app. - setting interactive debugging takes a bit longer, but not too much more.

Unfortunately I’ve routinely dealt with our IT department being slow to give credentials to new employees or shipping them under provisioned or just incompatible systems. No you can’t give our new senior developer the same cheap crap laptop running an ancient version of windows on that you send to the junior marketing person doing cold calls all day.

Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#160

Post by chaps »

DiggyJohnson wrote: post #153
lmm wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing respectful about asking something that someone has very blatantly made a deliberate decision to leave out of their post, for completely understandable reasons.

On the contrary, I don’t think there’s anything respectful about assuming that the OP doesn’t have the agency to decide for themselves whether they want to respond to my question or not. Additionally, I don’t have a lot of respect for anyone with the ego to assume they know what information was withheld “deliberate”ly or not in a discussion like this. How do you know that?! How do you not see that the OP can make thi…

Man, you're pushy. Yes, it was deliberate to exclude that information, and yes they were correct in their assumption.
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