Live data from Hacker News

"We ran out of columns"

jimmyhmiller.github.io

551–560 of 588 posts

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows Updates are free.

I am not talking about Windows updates here. But even if I was, there are things wrong with it. One example, that frequently bites me on my gaming OS: Windows 10 by itself decides: "Hey, I'm going to replace your installed graphics card driver with some other version, that I will find myself online!" Then next time I start this OS, I get crashing graphics card driver and need to go and look on AMD website for the cor…

>and need to go and look on AMD website for the correct drivers

That's why nvidia has an app for that.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#552

This made me think of my first job. I was the sole developer on a project because the old developer left. Nothing was documented and nobody knew why things were designed the way they were. We had no code reviews, no design docs, no tests, nothing. We made the changes the way we thought they were right and would git pull them onto the production server. After I struggled to get productive for the first four months, my…

> my manager went on a four-week Christmas vacation. Is that kind of stuff common? People checking out on Black Friday and coming back for New Year's?

>Is that kind of stuff common? People checking out on Black Friday and coming back for New Year's?

Happens the further up you get in management, especially if you are in an industry that already takes a long break around christmas/newyears.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#553

Wow, this is exactly how I felt with regard to my first job as well. This old codebase no one wants to touch but works somehow. The quite nice later-on additions. Even the "build a pipe-separated string using reflection and a 150 classes hierarchy" rings something. The old codebase was an hairy ball of scala using a very outdated version of a (now) infamous actor framework. Before they figured out that untyped messag…

It’s refreshing to hear that last paragraph. Honestly, sounds like the difference between hobby programming and professional engineering.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not talking about Windows updates here. But even if I was, there are things wrong with it. One example, that frequently bites me on my gaming OS: Windows 10 by itself decides: "Hey, I'm going to replace your installed graphics card driver with some other version, that I will find myself online!" Then next time I start this OS, I get crashing graphics card driver and need to go and look on AMD website for the cor…

>and need to go and look on AMD website for the correct drivers That's why nvidia has an app for that.

I think AMD has that too in its app, but if your graphics card driver is crashing in windows, your screen is freezing. Windows might try to restart the driver or so, getting the screen working briefly, but then it crashes again and ultimately it fails completely, you can only press the power button on your machine then.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#555
post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Git[‘s] UI is atrocious. Well, that’s in the eye of the beholder. Yes, I hate the ‘program command’ syntax (“git add”, “git commit” etc) but I just call git-add etc and for me those commands are pretty clear. But I understand how git works. I imagine most people treat it as a black box and then its behavior probably is rather obscure. I don’t think it was intended for that use case.

>> Git[‘s] UI is atrocious. […] Over time, I taught non-computer people who used Windows all of CVS, Subversion, and Mercurial. > Well, that’s in the eye of the beholder. […] I would say it is not. Usability testing is a thing, and products can get better and worse scores when trying to do the same task / reach the same result. I'm not aware of any published studies on the topic, but I would not be surprised if Git g…

I am unable to do anything with Photoshop beyond starting it and exiting. I have no idea how or even what it does beyond somehow modifying photos. That’s not photoshop’s problem, it’s that I don’t know what I’m doing. So I just don’t use it.

I only hear git complaints from people who don’t have an internal model that reflects what git is doing (I’ll agree that it uses a couple — but only a couple — of terms in a way that might violate some people’s intuitive model). But if you know what you want to accomplish the command line is pretty unremarkable.

But when you don’t know how the tool works you easily get snarled. And when you blindly resort to various “cheat sheet” sites it’s a crap shoot whether you “fix” your problem (how would you know?) or make things worse. That’s like me with photoshop.

I used to see this with CVS too

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#556
post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Git[‘s] UI is atrocious. […] Over time, I taught non-computer people who used Windows all of CVS, Subversion, and Mercurial. > Well, that’s in the eye of the beholder. […] I would say it is not. Usability testing is a thing, and products can get better and worse scores when trying to do the same task / reach the same result. I'm not aware of any published studies on the topic, but I would not be surprised if Git g…

I am unable to do anything with Photoshop beyond starting it and exiting. I have no idea how or even what it does beyond somehow modifying photos. That’s not photoshop’s problem, it’s that I don’t know what I’m doing. So I just don’t use it. I only hear git complaints from people who don’t have an internal model that reflects what git is doing (I’ll agree that it uses a couple — but only a couple — of terms in a way…

> I am unable to do anything with Photoshop beyond starting it and exiting. I have no idea how or even what it does beyond somehow modifying photos. That’s not photoshop’s problem, it’s that I don’t know what I’m doing. So I just don’t use it.

As stated up-thread:

> Over time, I taught non-computer people who used Windows all of CVS, Subversion, and Mercurial. They got each one and why things were better. The first time they had to recover something, they really got it. Source control got out of their way and was generally fine.

Seems that things only got hard(er) teaching people with Git.

> I only hear git complaints from people who don’t have an internal model that reflects what git is doing

Yeah, every time someone says that:

> git gets easier once you get the basic idea that branches are homeomorphic endofunctors mapping submanifolds of a Hilbert space.

* Isaac Wolkerstorfer, https://twitter.com/agnoster/status/44636629423497217

In the past I have used RCS, CVS, and Subversion. I never had to learn any kind of internal model for any of them.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#557
post #350
post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Git is not a natural development at all. Obviously, it is a standard right now. Most standard tools we use today are not obvious to beginners nor would they be the first thing that beginners reach for. But senior developers can understand the problems that they claim to address, and why they are important and common problems.

You wouldn't believe the amount of crap I take whenever I introduce very basic version control at the various 3 to 6 man shops I find work at these days. I'm 100% sure that once I left that the devs went back to remote server crash and burn FTP development...they couldn't be bothered with the "hassle" and unneeded headaches of git.

There was a new hire who was told to make a small change in a piece of server software, found the repo, read the docs, made the change, ran it in testing, and pushed to prod. Cue the 'senior engineer' screaming bloody blue murder because he'd been directly monkeypatching the servers for 3 years with no vc and no backups.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#558
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you say more? I’m interested.

Databases have pretty robust access controls to limit (a sql user's) access to tables, schemas, etc. Basic controls like being able to read but not write, and more advanced situations like being able to access data through a view or stored procedure without having direct access to the underlying tables. Those features aren't used often in modern app development where one app owns the database and any external access…

I think supabase leans quite heavily into this, although I haven’t used it myself.

Row level security has been wonderful for multi tenancy in my experience though. I would highly recommend it.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#560
post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This could have been written and 2014 and 2004 (hi, it's me). There will always be people who don't use it and others who won't remember a time when they hadn't used it :P

Add 1984 to that list of dates. We used PVCS on MSDOS By 1994 I had moved to other companies and a NeXT equivalent to svn with a good GUI - and then ClearCase.

Hello, fellow old person. I was just remembering PVCS (Polytron Version Control System) since it was the first I worked with back in the 80s. Now I see that it's still out there, with the latest release in 2021. Which is insane.
Post reply on HN