alnayyir's comments

I think Zed lucky-stiff'd him.

Which is the proper punitive measure for anybody that actually teaches the usage of JDBC.

He's making recompense for making JDBC part of the first exercise in a Python book.

He'll return from the self-flagellation in two years after some time spent at a monastery.

I fully expect his enlightenment will bring much into the world of programming.

Verizon has HSDPA service? I thought their "4G" equivalent was LTE and that HSDPA was for the GSM carriers.

But is the 4g support included with Verizon service? 3G is my main dislike of my iPhone 4.

The 10,000 hours meme is something a bad author made up to fit his pile of anecdotes.

It's not a fact, it's a number he pulled out of his ass.

He never made it about deliberate practice, he used the Beatles jamming and fucking around for 10,000 hours as an example.

Stop talking about 10,000 hours IT'S BULLSHIT. You might was replace-string it with "SIX-SIGMA CERTIFICATION", it means nothing!

>It might also result in fewer jobs to go around. But I don't think so.

It would result in more wealth and efficiency, not more jobs. Capitalism says nothing about jobs, only wealth.

We don't really (in western society) have a mechanism for transferring wealth beyond trade, labor, and government fiat. In the absence of busywork created by government fiat, we're going to have a hard time socially speaking midwifing an increasingly efficient world where redundant jobs get replaced with technology and processes.

This will continue the trend of increasing wealth stratification as whomever has control over the means of production will be subject to the will of others less and less, and be able to keep more of their profits.

Incidentally, this means it'll be fantastic to be a programmer, and terrible to be a laborer.

If a novel solution isn't found, the best many could hope for is a service job or medieval-style patronage of arts as production and maintenance of product pipelines requires fewer humans.

OTOH, perfect can at times be the enemy of good.

You have to weigh the value of immediacy against permanently enshrined qualities and perform your own cost-benefit analysis.

This is called critical thinking, they introduce this around age 12 in most western societies. You don't have to pick a religion and stick with it, you can just make a judgment call on a case-by-case basis.

Works great for me, fyi.

You're No-True-Scotsman'ing a subject/concept that was dead on arrival.

Stop pretending the 10,000 hours thing is a "real thing" or somehow fact.

It's not. Fucking stop it. It's the fantasy of a bad writer who makes up shit based on pure anecdote.

And to use your own bullshit against you, he never said it was deliberate practice in the book, he explicitly used the example of the Beatles, whose "10,000 hours" was them jamming in public and fiddling around privately, not hammering at chord progressions.

The 10,000 hours meme is bullshit. Stop propagating it.

Good for a 6am-because-I-stayed-up-all-night laugh though.

The post is devoid of any information that is actually useful and seems like a medium for pointless meme comics.

Why do I care about this? You need to answer this question within the first paragraph, if not sentence.

This is the polar opposite of good copy.

I will use this anti-example in my next discussion of copywriting with my employers/clients.

SAAS/PAAS for PHP/Windows programmers? The punchline writes itself.

Automation of internal infrastructure is good, but you're not really going to be able to improve upon or otherwise differentiate yourself from any of the existing providers.

>Disagree. I don't think 95-98% of programmers are idiots.

I didn't say that.

> It takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to become good at something,

People need to stop re-hashing this. 10,000 hours of deliberate practice is likely but not necessarily going to make you an excellent programmer. I know plenty of programmers in their 40s and older who have that much time in or more that are frankly, garbage.

Investing time is necessary, but insufficient, and there is no one grand unified number that defines all professions for what is necessary to become excellent for every individual.

I know a 60-something whose code output terrifies me and he has a great deal more than 10,000 hours invested in programming.

OTOH, one of the programmers I most deeply respect is a 50-year old woman.

It's hit or miss. In my experience, passion counts more than anything.

>but that's not because our industry is has 20+ idiots for every decently smart person.

Work at a major insurance/something-not-directly-related-to-software company. That's an optimistic ratio.

>Eh, I appreciate that, really, but I don't want to stop caring. I want it to be better.

Corpses write no code. shrugs

> If it was just one company that consistently produced crap software, it would be easy to say that there's probably something broken at that company.

Anything below the top, say, 2-5% of software is guaranteed to be shit because all the programmers below the top 2-5% are shit. There is no grand movement or methodology to be had here.

It's a people problem.

>For example, I might be writing a Jooma migration tool right now to fix the stupid 1.5->1.7 issues, and I'd be happy to release it and even support it for as long as people need it, but first I have to figure out what the hell is wrong with the wireless drivers in Linux on the new laptop...

This is why I use Linux for workstations where it seems more comfortable, and my Mac for my mobile machine as it's more tolerant of network/display disruption. I'm not trying to troll or be a Mac fanboy here, I prefer working in Linux as I am simply more productive and it's my production OS. But, a laptop that is on the move plays to the strengths of OS X sufficiently that I am travelling right now and using my Mac instead of my Linux laptop.

You're going to have to accept that if you use the wrong software for the wrong problems, you're going to keep getting poked in the eye. You're using bad hammers and complaining about how bad hammers are.

There's a distinction to be made, an important one.

>Now, here's the other half of it: support people are not your janitors.

Open source projects don't have "support people", they have contributors and devs that volunteer their time. I worked for a MOTU and volunteered in the #ubuntu channel on FreeNode for years. I've done thousands of man-hours of support. I know exactly how bad software is, and how bad the situation is.

I'm on your side here, but until you start solving the problems one at a time, nothing changes.

My apartment gets cleaned one trash bag at a time.

>The harder my job gets, the less likely I am to contribute.

Something's gotta give. Stuff like Joomla registers as shitware in the circles I go in.

Complaining about things like Joomla, PHP, Drupal, Outlook, etc. doesn't really register with me.

Might as well buy a Kia and complain about how terrible the state of automobiles are. The author had much stronger points than you have. You work with some terrible stuff, period.

>allowed_users

You can pay someone to implement this, as well as any other missing AD features, then open source it so no-one has to implement it again.

The original devs that did much of the reverse-engineering work on Samba have since moved on to much more rewarding work. That work will essentially never be done again, nor be improved upon until financial incentives are introduced. Much of the work on Samba since has been bug fixes and pushing your food around on your plate.

We are not your servants, we are people. Give value, get value. Open source is not your custom-fit panacea.

>"So build your own version."..."Why are you reinventing the wheel? That's already been done."

Probably two different groups of the people, the latter group is likely harried contributors to a project you're asking for help from who doesn't have the benefit of the context for the work you're doing. It's a common thing in mailing lists and IRC.

>So Western Digital's backup software interferes with Outlook in funny ways?

We're dipping into two different pools of shitware for examples of bad software now.

>So everybody's decided to abandon sane software versioning altogether and make the support end of things even more nuts?

It's gotten more standard in some respects, thanks to SemVer. I can't speak for companies that have decided to treat it like a high score, much like the Linux distributions of the late 90s and early 00s.

>Software used to be fun.

Still fun for me, after ~15 years of coding, 5 of them professionally. Sounds like you're just grumpy and unwilling to invest in swatting any of the gnats flying in your face.

That or you should take up buddhism, seriously. I'm an atheist but there's some benefit to learning when you should and should not care about things.

Guz! I worked on HN Office Hours with you! How are you doing?

I think the actionable takeaway here is eliminating all friction that prevents an individual pushing the product forward. For GH, this meant automating everything possible, and providing accessible visibility into their data. How Hubot contributes to speeding up the onboarding of new engineers is worth thinking about too.

These sorts of posts make me want to work at GitHub, which might very well be the objective. Taking a shot at a position there might even be worth learning Rails. (I have a primarily Python oriented background.)

Are there any other companies that have a culture/process like this?

>What am I missing here?

vimtutor or Emacs info-pages so you're no longer dependent on commercial entities for the cornerstone of your tools.

This man speaks the truth.

Not too sure why I got downvoted for wanting a corporate entity to handle all my firearms transfers though.

The bile makes people think twice before making assertions about things they know nothing about.

Truth and how it gets publicly propagated is more important than either of our egos.

Spend some time on Wikipedia, and you'll see what happens when ego wins over truth.

None of those things have ever been said. Cf. my other comment.

>"Have you played Scrolls?" most people would realize you were talking about ES.

False beyond imagination. You're clearly not a gamer or a fan of the series, I've been playing it and involved in the community for the ES games since Daggerfall (1996).

Not once, in any forum post, usenet post, or BBS have I ever seen someone refer to the series or an individual game from Bethesda as "Scrolls", nor has it ever been part of their marketing or branding.

This is like Microsoft claiming you can't use the word "soft" in your product because someone might once have referred to their brand as "Soft" without the "Micro".

Just ridiculous.

up for me