skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think I've seen evidence of this in my lifetime. If anything, legal decisions in the federal court system have been pretty liberal until recently.

My generation saw the legalization, nationally, of gay marriage as well as the protection of personal property rights regarding firearms against government attempts to circumvent those rights for law-abiding citizens. Meanwhile, an attempt to modify the census (a fairly broad executive power) failed to pass muster in the court because someone wrote down basically the only way such a modification could be illegal (blatantly attempting to disenfranchise states along racial lines)... Was their actual intent.

And we probably shouldn't go into the absolute debacle that was the attempt to override the electoral will of the 50 states in the 2020 election.
When someone dares to step forward and speak up, listen. Just be. It's one of the most powerful things you can do. Hijacking conversation doesn't create connection, it breaks it.

I might be in a minority here but I feel a huge sense of relief when someone shares an anecdote that tells me they understand what I'm going through, because they've been through similar things themself.

(I'm probably oversharing, but one of my daughters has some rather severe developmental difficulties and has threatened to kill me, my wife, and our other daughter more times than I can remember. It is oddly comforting to hear other peoples' stories and know I'm not alone).
Older people have the advantage that if they do discard something, they later won't remember that they had it.
Yes, i also think that website developers of many kinds just don't care and didn't even think about power consumption, but more about doing anything... cool or maybe often... easy.
I'm very much outside of the age range mentioned in the article but +100 for crappy audio mixing.

When my family was going through all the Marvel movies at first I tried to control the volume by making it higher during the dialog and lower during the battles etc but it was an exercise in futility, as I'm only human and there would be some delay in volume change and we would still miss what the guy/gal said or my house would start noticeably shaking from the unexpected explosion happening during a scene where a guy was intensely whispering his rescue plan to his compatriots or whatever. Plus it started feeling like I'm working instead of enjoying the movie. So lower volume and subtitles it is.

I have home theater with 5.2 and 5 speakers, all it does is that when stuff in the movie goes boom my house starts to shake.
Hmm .. for anyone that wants to level up here . . .

The Digital Sundial is a thing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrsje5It_UU

Architectural tricks with shadows as time passes in a fascinating area all of its own and possible catnip for anyone with an interest in raytracing and projective geometry.
SOC2, ISO270001, HIPPAA, PCI
> Our compassion can fatigue when we consume a high volume of trauma narratives through the media

I have never thought about this or know if I believe it to be fully true. But it's a fascinating perspective that, if nothing else, has some level of truth to it.

Definitely something I'll ponder as I think about important, real life relationships.
“Before you heal someone, ask him if he's willing to give up the things that make him sick.”
― Hippocrates

You have to have a conversation with the people responsible for this shit, including (and specially) stakeholders, make them aware of the problem, and get them on board with respect to the possible solution. This step is essential before even bothering to do fucking anything.

Most importantly, make it clear that while you are there to help, this is their responsibility, and they have to become a part of the solution by making amends. If they're not willing to own their responsibility and collaborate, get the fuck out of that tech debt mill or it will ruin your life.

If you want to try to redo everything alone in silence, you will have to work infinitely hard, and in the end, three things can happen:

a) you fail, and then the organization gets rid of you. the most likely outcome.

b) you succeed, but now "you know too much", you have dirt on a lot of people that fucked up and become the Comrade Legasov from Chernobyl that becomes the target of important people from the Soviet communist party. They will get rid of you once the problem is gone because now you have no value to them.

c) in the best case scenario, you succeed, but noone will congratulate you because that means that a problem existed in the first place, and since noone is willing to assume any responsibility for their contributions to the problem, noone will say fucking anything. all your contributions will be for nothing. and if you insist that a problem existed, you'll go to outcome b). Otherwise, they will go back to their old ways and create the next fucking mess for you to solve.

Personally, I would get the fuck out. It is clear that nobody there was committed to do the right thing, starting from the hiring process. It is either highly unprepared people, extreme normalization of deviance, or some highly idiotic leadership obsessed with the short-term. Whatever it is, that team is rotten and needs an amputation. If I stayed, I would start by laying off the entire team and then rehiring everyone on a 3-month test period where they will have to completely change their attitude towards development.
“I’m flabbergasted these strawmen I’m attacking exist!”
> This is like a "modern art bad" reddit comment.

No, not exactly, it’s an opinion. If the art is in essence a critique on “what is a city”, critiques of the installation itself as “what is art” is equally fair game.

> Would you know how to judge such a piece of art in general?

How is this a fair question? Would Heizer know how to judge a city?
And the recent heatwave? The last argument with my brother was so over the top it did permanent damage to our relationship. Upon reflection I do wonder how much heat had to do with it.
I know Sonos are not loved here, and other companies probably do it too, but Sonos sound bars allow you to enhance speech and also go into night mode. Night mode reduces the dynamic range - louder quiet bits and quieter loud bits.

I like the tv on quietly relative to other people I know, and continually messing with the volume is tedious.
Anyone else watch on mute without subtitles?
If you've seen the Black Mirror episode "Nosedive," well, that's the answer to this question.
Hire a senior engineer. They would probably 1) put the whole thing into version control, 2) streamline the deployment process so that specific versions can be pushed easily into a sandbox or production environment, 3) begin writing tests, starting with end-end and system tests in this case, and hook them into a continuous test harness 4) do an architectural review to identify major components that can be split off from the monolith in order to reduce the surface area to work off, start with the part that you will get the most bang for your buck, a business critical area for improvement. 5) add unit tests and integration tests for this and the main component. 6) Repeat as necessary.

I don’t believe this is a problem that can be solved with people skills alone. It requires senior technical expertise.
> this code generates more than 20 million dollars a year of revenue

From a business perspective, nothing is broken. In fact, they laid a golden goose.

> team is 3 people, quite junior. One backend, one front, one iOS/android. Resistance to change is huge.

My mistake, they didn't lay a golden goose--they built a money printer. The ROI here is insane.

> productivity is abysmal which is understandable. The mess is just too huge to be able to build anything.

But you just told me they built a $20M revenue product with 3 bozos. That sounds unbelievably productive.

> This business unit has a pretty aggressive roadmap as management and HQ has no real understanding of these blockers

You should consider quitting your job.

As far as the business is concerned, there are no problems... because well... they have a money printer, and your team seems not to care enough to advocate for change. Business people don't give a damn about code quality. They give a damn about value. If 2003 style PHP code does that, so be it. Forget a rewrite, why waste time and effort doing simple refactoring? To them, even that has negative financial value.

From their perspective, you're not being paid to make code easy to work with, you're being paid to ship product in a rats nest. Maybe you could make a business case for why its valuable to use source control, dependency management, a framework, routing outside of nginx, and so on... but it doesn't sound like any of that mattered on the road to $20M a year, so it will be very difficult to convince them otherwise especially if your teammates resist.

This, again, is why you should consider leaving.

Some developers don't mind spaghetti, cowboy coding. You do. Don't subject yourself to a work environment and work style that's incompatible with you, especially when your teammates don't care either. I guarantee you will hate your job.
No source control? There's "it works" and then there's "they got lucky enough to not implode yet".
The problem with people new to the company starting a rewrite from scratch is that they often are poorly informed on why things were the way they were before. If you start big, you can have bad outcomes where the new system might be objectively worse than the old one... but you are stuck trying to get the new thing out for the next 5 years because too many people sunk too much political capital into it.

As an example, I worked at an ad-tech startup that swapped it's tech team out when it had ~100 million in revenue (via acqui-hire shenanigans). The new tech team immediately committed to rewriting the code base into ruby micro-services and were struck by strange old tech decisions like "why does our tracking pixel return a purple image?". The team went so far as to stop anyone from committing to the main service for several years in a vain attempt to speed up the rewrite/architecture migration.

These refactors inevitably failed to produce a meaningful impact to revenue, as a matter of fact the company's revenue had begun to decline. The company eventually did another house cleaning on the tech team and had some minor future successes - but this whole adventure effectively cost their entire Series D round along with 3 years of product development.
Invoking a pretty old video that still makes me smile to this day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ukMXA0SJaM
Many devices have a night mode to help keep the range of volumes small. The Sonos one is perfect for my use case. It changed my evening life when I found this.
Context my friend. Read what OP and I are talking about and note how your post has nothing to do with it.

We're certainly not discussing things which are currently in the realm of unrealized dreams.
> Meetup and any other reasonably sized site at the very least is monitoring their HTTP response codes

Perhaps they should consider taking action based on that information. Meetup's website is hurting, and OP decided to assume it was because Meetup didn't know there was a problem. This isn't arrogant, it's the charitable approach, because the alternative is that Meetup can't keep a website running.

Uber is a perfect example of a company whose support story got progressively shittier as their market penetration increased. They cut out customer support to save a fraction of their budget and they can get away with it because their userbase is fucked without them, not because they're some magical management wizards who have secret access to fundamental truths.

If you can't support your customers you're bad at your business. CS failure is not something to put on a pedestal.
Thank you for so many suggestions. The main issue is productivity within a context where the company is trying to reinvent itself in terms of marketing and business model. This has for consequence that many new big features are being requested and promised by management to headquarters. But in the last years, all bug evolutions have been failures. That's why I've been asked to intervene.
I love the idea of the strangler pattern associated with big unit testing coverage.
> We have no evidence that the incident involved access to sensitive user data (like trip history).

And here I thought passwords or credit cards were sensitive. Why the omission?
It's still a second factor, just one that isn't as isolated as separate physical hardware. It's certainly more secure than a single password, while still giving the user absolute control over it.

I can see this being very useful for accounts which are effectively throwaway, but they still force you to 2FA. The same is true of TOTP generators.
it’s extremely naive to assume politics are the only reason to appoint a judge
Why would those two things be connected?
I mean like “we want to replace X with Y”. Y incrementally starts replacing X, but 100% migration is never achieved, meaning double the API surface area exists indefinitely.

Because the migration doesn’t block new features, that means the org gets tired and reallocates the effort elsewhere before it’s ever done, with no immediate consequences. Rinse and repeat.
Hmmm I like the message but I partly disagree with some of what they are saying in regards to narrative tap out. I’ve found some things no one can truly understand some things that people go through unless they went through it themselves.

I’ve encountered it both ways, and theres just some things that people seem to only be able to understand on their own through experiences.

Opening up to other people is exhausting, they frequently either don’t know what to do or they try and act sympathetic or empathetic but eventually usually aren’t.

I think often about Frodo in lord of the rings. The burden he had to carry alone and how it changed him. I think many people have that one ring they carry around. You have to look at it from a Birds Eye view, the way our lives all run and are interconnected. It’s said that either someone you know directly is going through something rough or that person knows someone who’s got it rough. Thinking of that helps me be nicer and more patient with people.

But i think it’s foolish to expect them to be. I’ve been burned many times putting faith in people I shouldn’t. The only people who usually truly get you understand you because they went through it themselves. Of course this is just my experience, but I’ve found it keeps on ringing true as i get older and older.
Yes, we're going to liquify the earth's crust and efficiently extract all the lithium...
You are under the assumption that Twitter or other platforms will not innovate or attempt to adapt to the new legal landscape they find themselves in.

Give users intuitive filters? Give users the ability to create invite-only communities? Etc.
I'm not a career dev, but I have inherited teams and projects before that were a huge mess...

This isn't going to come off nicely, but your assumption that it needs a full rewrite, is in my eyes a bigger problem than the current mess itself.

The "very junior" devs who are "resistant" to change are potentially like that in your view for a reason. Because of the cluster they deal with I suspect the resistance is more they spend most of their time doing it XYZ way because that's the way they know how to get it done without it taking even more time.

What it sounds like to me is that this business could utilize someone at the table who can can understand the past, current, and future business - and can tie those requirements in with the current environment with perhaps "modernizing" mixed in there.
Partially, but this still blocks many attacks that password alone wouldn't.

I always think of 2FA as insurance against password theft/leaks. If users don't practice good password practices and use the same password for multiple accounts, for example, when ${next web site to be hacked} leaks all plaintext passwords, you can't just turn around and use that password to access ${another site where I used the same password but have 2FA enabled}. Or I'm logging in to a site from someone else's computer and they have a keylogger. [Obviously this virtual 2FA device wouldn't let me log in in that scenario--but in general, this is another case where the 2FA doesn't have to be rock solid, it just needs to exist if you captured my keystrokes.]

A direct attack on my workstation to steal my virtual 2FA device and my passwords isn't protected by this virtual 2FA device, but that's low in my list of worries overall for people's account security.
I’m working on https://atomictessellator.com while employed.

Just be very clear when you interview that you have multiple hobbies outside of work (and show them!) and refuse to sign any non-competes or IP assignment clauses.

If you’ve already signed one it’s probably time to change jobs, that’s the only safe option.
Sorry, no. $80/bbl is a temporary price and not sufficient to drive infrastructure investments which take upwards of 3 decades to pay back(i.e. refineries). You can't expect private companies to invest in these things when states like CA are talking about banning the sale of IC cars in a decade.
This is really good advice. Thanks for sharing this. I think you've probably nailed it on the head about trying to find the reason and it likely being because people are too afraid of the risk of messing stuff up, so they keep adding to the ball of mud.

However, in my experience, it can be very touch and go dealing with people who become so risk averse. I had a job one time where a previous employee refused to give up a computer that had to be at least 10-15 years old at the time (was running Windows 2000 or something like that) and took about 30 minutes to boot up. Because somehow it was the only computer that could run the 3D CAD program he was familiar with or some other "reasons" that it was essential to the project. The only way of moving forward was that he luckily completely washed his hands of the project before I even joined the company, and then I did a full rewrite and redesign of the whole system from scratch (which was absolutely required in that case). Even then, when I asked him about the computer to just be careful and do due diligence to try and figure out why or if it was actually important, he was very resistant of me sending the computer to the salvage department after getting the files off the computer.
I've always thought of this as another perspective on Shakespeare's

"There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio,

Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

To believe otherwise is to have lost the wonder of discovery.
Yeah right. I'm not a mathematician by profession so much of my time has been spent just plugging values into equations. The trouble with that is twofold, first one can forget those less frequently used esoteric tricks one was taught, and second, one can overlook whole swathes of the subject - those parts outside one's normal orbit.

I never seem to have enough time to sit down and do nothing but mathematics for its own sake.
We Aren't Seeing Lower Lumber Prices yet and When to Buy Wood
No. I would rather think its the lack of proper education on how to behave morally, how to have make valid argument, how our choices impact the life of others, and lack of self control training.
First of all start by preserving the application state to the version control.

Then start thinking about replicating deployment of the application. At start it can be a script that compresses and extracts the files to the production environment. This will benefit you to build similar environments or other more experimental development environments.

Once you have a flow of the application state management and deployment under control, you can start building on top of it.

The most valuable work would be to build a separate test suite that documents the most mission critical parts of code or application.

Only after this I would try to reason the changes to the application. The great part is that you have Nginx configuration as an abstraction layer. From there you dissect the application to smaller pieces and replace the application one redirection call at time.

If the application has an expected lifetime of over 2 years. Then these changes will pay themselves back as faster development cycles and maintainability of workers and codebase. This can be a selling point to management for roadmap or recruitment.

Good luck.
> 3. Belongingness & Love needs: while this is something we cannot control, making space and time for actual contact between people might be a good idea. Can be combined with the things in point 1

This is part of what ensuring that panels are representative and do not just consist of the first four or five white males you can think of. Ensure your speakers come from a variety of backgrounds and experiences, and even consider people to keynote who can provide lessons from entirely different professions and walks of life.
Companies Make Millions Charging Prisoners to Send an Email (2018)
Wow hard one to untangle and answer in a HN reply!

I sort of think... if you have to ask this here you might be in the wrong job? Was this a job that seemed like something else then became this? This sounds like a job for an experienced VP Engineering. It is a tough order. Wouldn't know how to do it myself. Lots of technical challenges, people challenges, growth challenges, and managing up and down.

The resistance to change is something you need to get to the bottom of. People are naturally resistant to change if they are comfortable, and we've all been through 'crappy' changes before at companies and been burned.

The solution might be to get them to state the problems and get them to suggest solutions. You are acting more like a facilitator than an architect or a boss. If one of them suggests using SVN or Git because they are pissed off their changes got lost last week, then it was their idea. No need to sell it.

This assumes the team feels like a unit. If the 3 are individualistic, then that should be sorted first. E.g. if Frank thinks it is a problem but no one else does, and they can't agree amongst themselves, then the idea is not sold yet.

Once you know more about what your team think the problems are and add in a pinch of your own intuitions you might be able to formulate confidently the problems, so you can manage their expectations.
Citation needed. Sorry but it takes, more or less, as much energy as that which is stored within the chemical bonds of a petrochemical to make that chemical from raw materials. Also, what? Your comment doesn't seem to fit into the context of our discussion. Where is the energy and raw materials to produce the green energy materials going to come from?
IANAL but have a side business and other projects.

List existing side projects and hustles, in generic terms, on the paperwork when you start a new job.

Use your own time and equipment for all side projects.

Don’t be a jerk about things — keep up your obligations at your day job and work on truly unrelated things for your side hustle. Or quit.

Your job doesn’t actually want to sue you. They want to retain you as a productive employee and move on when you’ve found something new to do.
Dynamic Range Compression. Pretty much every HT system has had it for 15+ years.
having seen several rewrite attempts in my career, none of which were fully successful, here are some thoughts:

- The ultimate reason: it will take too long and be over budget. The business will (rightfully) ask why should they invest x amount of capital just to get essentially the same feature set back. Businesses do not care about whats under the hood.

And here is why:
- the rewriter team usually does not fully understand edge/corner cases that the current mess handles, but obscures it.

- the rewrite inevitably ends up following the same patters that the original did leading to unusual/weird cases

- rewrite teams get too ambitious and attempt to over abstract and over engineer, eventually creating another mess understood by only them