skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you are approaching this from your own particular, engineering and possibly introverted, biased viewpoint.

As a counterpoint I would say MANY MANY people love and thrive in small talk and as is referenced elsewhere in this discussion, particularly engaging in that at work.
For our team, we just do a weekly biz/dev meeting, then break into a pure dev meeting every Tuesday morning. The process takes about 30min - 60min a week and we can go into depth when needed. Plan the week and go do what we do. It works great for our small 5 man team.

Daily meetings seem excessive to me, even if they only last 5 minutes.
In India, we got water from groundwater, which was over polluted with minerals, so we bought an RO filter. It's basically a must there, and all the other houses I visited there had one. If we don't fix water pollution here, we will have a similar situation on our hands.
Interesting perspective about “real” coding. The purpose of software for me is to solve problems for people. Infrastructure-leave code doesn’t directly help users, though of course it does indirectly. But I think the low level stuff is fun for people who are interested in how things work, and completely inconsequential from an external value point of view.

So I see a real argument for the code that builds an application in the simplest way possible being the “realest” form of coding.
If people are working on completely unrelated things, what do you get from a stand-up other than a group status update?
You've hit on something there as well, but essentially it comes down to forced rewrites and flexibility. We tend to choose the more flexible systems to avoid forced upfront work when changes are needed even when it's the wrong choice for the project in the long run.
I have been way more productive. Hard to imagine going back to worse performance.

And it takes less time overall too.

Total win!

I do go to the office when physical things have to happen. Our business is a mix of software, hardware, service.

And I time shift physical stuff to o'dark 30 in the morning, so there is some overlap, but not much. And sometimes a whole day is needed, or a long one.

Frankly, I no longer care because most days are home days and I have a nice place to work setup just the way I like it.

The biggest benefit, outside the commute savings and other easy items mentioned here is no longer worrying about an emergency or crunch of some kind.

Shit happens. Ok fine. We all just step right up and deal. Whatever it takes. And we are ready for it, nicely charged up, ready to nail it.

On the social front, a bunch of us in my industry ended up on Zoom. We miss all the shows and some of us miss the travel (I don't and was high travel), but we connect now more than ever!

SMS, Skype, Zoom, email just work!

Frankly, I know my industry peers way better than I did before and things like mentoring or being mentored, help finding everyone a gig, all are improved.

Like I said, net win for my niche. I rather doubt there will be much of a discussion about a return to before, other than travel.

And on that front, I poured a lot of time into eliminating the need for it. It will prove to be a killer investment and the time freed up made doing it possible without also cutting into home life.

And the little things matter. We have a young one in our home again. One of my kids fell into drugs. Sucks. I am raising my grandchild.

Normally, I would find that depressing, but I can interact a lot more, be present, and those things do not take much time, but also may need to happen at the right time.

Which 10 minutes can have a huge impact! At best, it all is a modest time shift and or longer work day when needed and balance is good otherwise.

Count me as a fan. Who knew! I went into this pandemic very critical and a bit depressed and worried. Many shut down.

We have thrived. It is good.
I need to suck up to my boss and coddle him or her - so I need to work at the office. I just got fired in-spite of exceptional work but I think working remotely had something to do with it.
While you have a point, it's not that rare for someone to be blocked on a hard issue for a day or two, even having talked to someone, then bring that up at the stand-up. The one you talk to may not always have the solution, and it may be someone else in the team at large.
So, crime then.

Crime is still illegal, the blockchain is public and visible to everyone, it's easy to deanonymize now. So what, an express train to prison?
It shouldn't take something big to reflect on what went well and what didn't. Or suggest a change.
Pure water by definition is neither basic nor acidic.
Oh god, I hate the PM abbreviation. Product managers and project managers have a bit of overlap (as the former also do
project management to an extent, just like engineers), but they are different and having them provides different benefits. Why do we abbreviate both with PM? I never quite know which is referred to.
It’s estimated that your average worker is only putting in 3.5hrs of work a day. It’s unclear whether or not “time theft” (a term I despise) is worse in remote jobs, or if managers are responding to the inability of workers to fake being busy.
Every time I mention the goodness of pencil and paper I get downvoted by so many youngsters.

Some people will always disagree about some points. It's in their nature.
Well then how would I make my ametuer rockets?
If anything, having such a long runway could cause the issue of people not migrating. 12 years presents no urgency in software, code is regularly rewritten every few years.
I keep things really simple to be honest, normally I exclude wp-content/uploads and wp-config.php in .gitignore. And set the perms so WP can't write to the filesystem on production, except for the uploads directory. We install and test updates on a dev environment first then commit everything and pull it in on production.
Interesting. I imagine what may have to happen is someone will (perhaps for profit) do all of the heavy lifting here so companies can use their server for old packages.

I get expecting that everyone will do this on their own, I just don’t think it will happen that way.
Hey Man,
I love your post and its really inspiring. I would love to know how did you came up with the idea.
what was your process like when finding the problem you tried to solve with your SaaS solution
Yet another reason to not let them normalize mass surveillance.
So instead of agreeing that there are extra costs to the employees working from home, you argue that they should move to a cheaper city in order to afford a home office. That's definitely... an option. But consider that this is a tradeoff, given that people choose to live in big cities for other reasons than being close to work
It requires subtle thinking. Instead what I see a lot of the time is the "rule" of DRY applied with religious fervor, and it produces the kind of code I enjoy working with the least.
You (mostly) don't have to deal with data migrations with statically typed languages. Releasing a new version of some code is usually easier than making structural changes to a database that's in active use.
Yes, it already uses a reflective blanket. https://www.scienceabc.com/nature/universe/is-it-hot-or-cold...
My understanding is that Pip uses PyPI so, yeah, if PyPI changes their APIs/URLs, this last version of Pip that supports Python 2 will stop working and then deployments will start breaking.
Yes. I was Russell Crowe's hand double. If it wasn't his head showing it was me.

He got the idea of acrylic nails to make his (our) hands longer like Nash. I'd be out in the village drinking with friends, and they'd point out my hands, describing the story. No one bought it. Then I'd say I was a Barbra Streisand impersonator. That I could sell, there was probably one in every bar down the street.

I got my nails done at the same NJ salon that Edie Falco used for the Sopranos. The woman who had promised to do the work was on a Caribbean cruise, so she phoned in. She asked me if I was doing anything else on the film besides being Russell's hand double? I told her I was also his love double.

"Will you be needing an extension for that too?"
Some people want Unicode support.
Self contained containers (like singularity) have come up to fill this gap. Since a few years back we have started investing in creating these containers at the end of every project, as it is becoming increasingly hard to depend on dependencies remaining available online indefinitely.
It would mean shipping 2 interpreters and libraries.
College is not a javascript bootcamp.
I disagree. The best medium is a whiteboard or a blackboard :p.

(Really though, something about paper makes me afraid to "commit" things which make the pieces of paper no longer usable. Something made to be erased seems to be the trick for me).
> 1) If you're writing anything that's not a script with a few lines, and you care about your software not being terrible to maintain and change for other people in real production settings, typed languages wipe the floor with dynamic languages (excluding ecosystem moats, just judging the languages).

I really hope the typed-vs-not-typed debate is over... types > no types. However... I used to believe that types were essential. I now believe that they are more like a luxury. Good tools are a luxury, not fundamental—it’s way more important to have good software design, and the core of good software design is really tool-independent. It requires deep understanding of whatever problem you’re trying to solve, not a deep understanding of software tools—-unless you’re unlucky enough to be building some horrible middleware.

I also like to dabble in photography, where you see a similar phenomenon. When I take a really great photo, people sometimes remark, “wow, you must have a really great camera!” No, actually, that’s the least important part of the equation. There’s a reason why Canon’s top-of-the line lenses are the “L” series—the L is for luxury. They make the job a little easier, but they’re not really essential.
The rate was not sustained because the books have been cooked. How the US measures has been periodically tweaked to keep the 2% story going. Using the early 1980's metric of inflation we've been at roughly 10% annually since the turn of the millennium: http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts
will a fridge filter, filter this stuff out?

I've been drinking tap water from the fridge filter for a looong time now, so getting worried...
To those of you who were cheering and clapping when these social networks started banning people like President Trump, or those who questioned the election results, or other right-wing people. Welcome to your new world. Now it's your turn to get silenced for wrongspeech.
It never ceases to amaze me how easily the attitudes of finance folk so easily leak out. It seems performing a worst-case O(log N) lookup and spitting out the resulting 100 bytes over UDP counts as harder than Twitter, parent comment clearly has no idea how much work Twitter needs to perform for every tweet (URL previews much?)

Meanwhile, could have simply said you work for NYSE.
The point is it can be engineers pushing back against managers. Not just managers pushing back against engineers.
Or if you opened something far off your normal preference, such as a bottle of white for me.
Agreed!

Stand ups are a teather play to make the client believe a project is moving forward, while team members use their own private channels to talk about the real work.
> AIs don't update

Currently.
It's not? Why do you say that?
Deionized water is often acidic as protons are introduced to replace the other ions. Co2 also dissolves immediately from the air forming carbonic acid. Regardless I don't think it's bad for your teeth it's not concentrated or buffered.
To those who prefer the office due to a feeling of isolation. Do you think WFH during an international pandemic influences your preferences?
Agree about retrospectives. It's such a waste of time. Most of the time it's just there so that the scrum master can show off their new game and try to justify their usefulness.
Hardware accelerated crypto on AMD Puma cores
i think there's a balance. i agree that having friends outside the workplace is important, but i don't see why that means making friends in the workplace is bad. we have friends that we see during the workday and occasionally see outside the workplace, then we have friends for all the other time.
The whitehouse probably needs a fast way to publish. this is why they used wordpress. They are fully cached behind Akamai CDN. So u can hit this website with any load u want.
The performance of wordpress is excellent if you dont have many plugins. It is super-easy to design. you can see the results before you publish and You dont need a developer to publish.

So if u have a static wordpress website, just add a CDN in front (not using a plugin like many do, but by editing your DNS)
Most teams are silo'd like it or not. A backend guy or two, a frontend guy or two, layers of management, product, qa, ops people.

If I'm a backend person, I'll talk to the backend guy person if we messed up. If the frontend guys are lamenting among themselves, I find myself not really caring and time being wasted.

There's zero reason that teamwide changes can't be proposed for discussion via email or slack.
> Standups are useful for communication between a team in general, if kept brief.

Just once I'd like to work for a company that tries to stay in communication without so many explicit/manual/sync check-in gates.

* No stand-up, engineers required to write a 250-words or less blog post 2+ times a week.

* No announcing PRs, reviews &c to each other. Make watching the board a habit, one you "pull" rather than that is pushed to you. Or use a company provided chat-bot/tool to help surface changes as they happen, if you need that. The issue tracker should better dashboard whatever activity is happening, in general- indicate branch updates, pr changes, &c, clearly, across the board.

There's some value to using social processes to radiate all the changes happening, but I'd really like to see some camp out there that makes a go at mechanizing themselves. I think there are a lot of interesting possibilities, more enduring & valuable forms of communication that we have failed to even begin to explore.
I don’t have a problem ideologically with the maintainers doing this since 2.7 is EOL, but making a breaking change like this over the weekend was kind of cruel.
Are you aware of a database of everyones gait to match against?
I'm curious. How did Free Pascal make you a better programmer?
I think this is an important point. Recently I was reading a post that talked about how one belongs to a community. Which on one hand means you are accepted and identify with it, but also that the community has a claim back upon you. People within that community depend on each other and that dependencies offers opportunity to connect more deeply.

In the article he blocks out a longer excerpt from O Pioneers! by Willa Cather, with this bolded bit:

> Freedom so often means that one isn't needed anywhere.

https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/the-convivial-soc...
Making friends in the work place isn’t bad; I didn’t say that and such an assertion would be obviously silly.

Depending on work for social interactions is bad. That is what I’m seeing more of, and that is something I think should change.
Ah thanks for clarifying. I actually didn't know that.

So IIUC, UK liberals are kinda like US libertarians?
Joe Biden’s First Day Began the End of Girls’ Sports
To those who prefer returning to office due to feeling isolated. Do you think your preferences could be influenced by the pandemic as well? Have you thought about how WFH could feel different with normal freedoms that come with a world without COVID-19?
Millenial or not, those friend networks are still how you'll be able to find the better jobs when you're older.
Don't listen to the others. The fact is, once you hire N programers for O(n) internal services you now have O(n) problems.

It's an accidental complexity pump.
Broken windows policing believes that abnormal behavior creates disorder, so all minor infractions must be heavily punished and "problematic" neighborhoods have to have heavy police presence
Pen and paper are extremely useful for me, but I'm one of the only guys I know of that use pen and paper often.
Co2 will carbonate the wine.
Sure, but I’d like to have friends at work and friends outside of work. Nothing wrong with job hopping either: if you make a good friend, you’ll keep on connecting even after you switch jobs.
Thanks for that. Gives a lot more perspective. Is it usually high maintenance to maintain the farm i.e. do you have people taking care of it - how hands on do you have to be for that.

I would expect GP to be a lot more involved and not less as the post title suggests but I was curious.
There are static site builders for Wordpress so you can use WP only as an admin tool and deploy a package to s3 or whatever. Build times are relatively trivial unless you have 10s of 1000s of pages.
They could opt to pay for it out of tax revenues. Or they can issue new bonds to repay old bonds. They can print money, but the optics are bad.

The loss of confidence in the value of the dollar is as much a cause of hyperinflation as the actual money supply. Loss of confidence in the value of the dollar can rapidly increase the velocity of money, which means that less money supply is needed. This causes more inflation, which further weakens confidence, increasing the velocity further, causing prices to spiral out of control.
Locking Down Signal
That dotjs is for user scripts (ie a chrome extension) not for the thing their talking about which is php for node.
https://www.fuselink.co/c3Qwgv
Our area publishes the water quality tests. Not sure how that would really depend on the EPA you can also easily just get it tested as you said
The Big Bend
right! pip 20.x will support py2 for ever!
Yes, I failed to state that, as I felt it obvious, and you're right. Over-optimizing is just as bad as under-optimizing.

I will not spend 4 hours to save 5 users 5 minutes per year.
For me that's been Elixir. It's made me appreciate some of the more functional aspects in Python, like generators, map, filter and the functools library in general.
Based on the contractors we've hired at various points, you get what you give. Most of the contractor code worked, but had poor maintenance characteristics. Which makes sense: they weren't going to be maintaining it. Their job was to generate a lot of code quickly.

So, a future where that happens will require either very tight managerial oversight (pipe dream), or will lead to a bunch of stuff that is brittle as hell.

Doesn't mean it won't happen. But God helps us if it does.

I suspect that would lead to just subcontracting whole business functions to more stable vendors.
Japan has been well above 180% for years. [0]

[0] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/267226/japans-national-d...
The Boss Would Like to See You in Her Remote Castle
That doesn't mean it's a vacuum inside. Just that it's lower pressure than outside. The question is how much lower :)
Outside of mere observational contribution to this topic, are you playing devils advocate because it is easy, or do you actually believe that this is a real excuse for the python community?
It's good list. Except the TDD rant.

TDD can be reframed as codified specifications with test verifications. Then, the TDD purists do have a point.
WordPress is definitely the Jenkins of the CMS world. Easy for a desktop user to set up, absolutely trash for literally every best practice, but nobody's made anything better [for free] yet.

If you are trying to deploy WordPress today with DevOps best practices (version control/12 factor app/etc): set it up with Bedrock (https://roots.io/bedrock/), manage dependencies with Composer, and use environment variables for the runtime configuration. Then use Phinx (https://phinx.org/) to do database migrations. A custom db migration script will be needed to change database settings based on the environment you're deploying to.

Containerization is pretty annoying, because apparently php-fpm will not serve non-PHP content (without creating security concerns). So you need a web server to serve all the static content that comes with Wordpress/Plugins/etc, and php-fpm to serve the PHP. This means you have to either 1) duplicate the static content between two different containers, 2) duplicate the static content into some other storage medium (S3?) and serve it using some web server, or 3) create a frankenstein's monster container of both php-fpm and a web server, and pick your poison on how to make that suck as little as possible.

I have opted for #3 as operationally it's the simplest. You build one container with all the dependencies, static content, and sql migrations, and deployments therefore become just a single container with a single port (http/https) and passing in the env vars. I'll probably upload it somewhere if somebody wants it. It's a docker-compose configuration, plus the Frankentainer, and some scripts, and it all fits into a Bedrock install. I haven't hooked migrations up to it yet, but once that's done, it will actually not suck very much to maintain a WordPress install.
Hopefully the White House has access to someone who knows how to set up WordPress without shooting themselves in the foot.

The fact that WordPress.com doens't get hacked all the time means that there are definitely people who know how to do it.
What a delightful anecdote! Such a rich set of experiences. Is your last name also the name of a major German pharma corp?

> I told her I was also his love double.

In stitches right now. Did you get to hang out with Russell Crowe, Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly? Must be fun being a celeb :D

EDIT: you are in the pen ceremony as well! Wow I need to rewatch this urgently, it's definitely one of my favorite movies and I'll be on the lookout for the cameo :)

EDIT: I was born in 1992, watched it in theaters when I was 9. Time flies.
Regarding testing, I've noticed that every time I've thought I've done enough manual testing (and I do a lot of that before I push to QA) and I can add the automated tests "later" due to time crunch or whatever, I've found issues when I got around to adding them. This experience has fundamentally changed how I view automated tests.
#1 is because Americans spend way to much time at work, so much time that it's difficult to find time to socialize out of work. People are social animals so they'll increase their interaction there (also lowering productivity in office).

I think WFH coupled with reduced hour days or 4 day weeks would be a much better combo for high productivity in the office.
> 'agile' / 'scum master' driven waste of everyone's time

please don’t correct this spelling
Yeah, god helps if a higher up is a zealot about a technology. They will try to suggest that at every opportunity and arguing against it makes you stand out like a sore thumb that after a while you wonder why you even bother.
People make a big deal about cell phone tower ping data, but compared to the "anonymized" meter-accurate GPS and sensor traces that GLS uploads 10 times an hour and the massive datacenter power that Google has dedicated to storing this location data, this is complete chumpchange. They can track your footsteps and know which room and which floor you are on. They have been quietly building indoor maps of millions of buildings.

If you use Android, turn off "high accuracy location" and do not agree to any setting that prompts for sharing "anonymized" data. If you can, just uninstall Google Play Services.

If you work for Google, read the GLS privacy design doc and lobby them to improve anonymization and/or shut down this completely dystopian data collection.
Check out HawkEye 360. They use a cluster of three satellites to triangulate AIS and radio transmissions (CB/UHF/etc) and do a bunch of ML to detect people where they shouldn't be.
Strange, I kind of assumed people on HN would know