rickosborne's comments

I've used the audio recorder. Other than the permission to use the microphone, it doesn't use any other permission. It doesn't even ask for general filesystem permissions, and assumes you are savvy enough to know how to use the standard Share functionality to get the files where you want.

The app does exactly what it says (records audio) and doesn't phone home, try to integrate with any services, collect any information about you. It just works.

If that type of thing is important to you, and you have a need for the functionality provided by one of the tools, there's your use case.

> Surely this will filter out ~50% of people who are good but don’t have any public code?

Not OP, but I follow a similar process when I have to do coding interviews. I work around the "no public code" problem easily: "great, then pick an open source library you use regularly and let's go through and look at some of the things you do with it, what you like about the API design, and some things you stumble over or wish were better".

I've had candidates go through everything from jQuery to D3 to Spring to just parts of the Java SDK.

Also, in my experience, the percentage of people who have _zero_ public code is small. Maybe 10%. Certainly not half.

FWIW, your optimizations assume well-behaved SVG handling. This one, for instance, will cause problems:

> In fact, even each z can be dropped, provided no stroke is being used, removing three edges.

While that may be true according to the spec, I can tell you from a practical standpoint that it will break in Lightburn. It's SVG handling does unexpected things with implicitly closed paths, which suddenly go away when you explicitly move/stroke back to your starting point or "z".

I have not looked deeper into why, but if I had to make a WAG, I'd suspect it comes from their implementation trying to bridge the gap between SVG generators (which are optimized for "shape looks correct") and machine control instructions (which target the lower level "here are the steps to make this shape look correct"). You're then having to take something simple like a path and adding in the complexities of making machine control instructions for the practical rendering of that path, accounting for things like miters, etc. Seems like a complex layer, prone to tons of annoying little bugs like this.

I presume YouTube's designers/coders aren't worried about being able to run their UI widgets through a laser engraver, but I tend to chalk up these kind of "missed optimizations" to having some similar backstory of "we found this bug in this implementation, so here's the workaround".

> I don't think SSH keys are things you should share across machines in a password manager.

While I agree with the first half of your statement (don't share SSH keys), I cannot agree with the second (don't put SSH keys in a password manager).

For my home use of 1Password, I absolutely want to keep backups of my SSH keys in 1Password. Because, in general, there's exactly 1 SSH key which can get into my cloud instances, and I've had enough laptops die suddenly that I'm not willing to risk getting locked out by not having a backup.

You could say "well, just have a second device with backup keys" but again for home use, why would I buy another laptop just for that? Or maybe just "well keep an offline backup of your keys". Sure. In 1Password. Where I keep pretty much all of my sensitive credentials and info.

> Using the 1Password SSH agent encourages people to have "one" SSH key across devices, which means that any leaks will disproportionately impact them.

Eh. IMO, people who are inclined to use 1 key across machines are going to do it, no matter the process. I doubt this feature is going to make that any worse. But I guess we shall see.

Looking at the storage on my PS5, the largest game on it is the preload for "Horizon: Forbidden West" which goes live next Friday. It's 88GB. It's an open world RPG with several dozen hours of gameplay.

"Returnal", about a year older and a much shorter game, is the next largest at 60 GB.

Toward the bottom of the list are "Maneater" and "Life Is Strange: True Colors", both clocking in at about 15GB and as many hours of gameplay.

Having said that, your net connect isn't going to help with games. I have Starlink, which generally sits in the 150-250Mbit range. That should have taken about an hour to download 88GB. It took 7. The CDNs for game delivery aren't exactly speedy. (And that's pretty common, in my experience. Even in my last place when I had gigabit fiber, I generally left the console downloading overnight.)

> Hidden downvotes are a terrible idea

First and foremost, I agree that this will probably end poorly.

However, I could see this being a good idea in the right hands, because it _could_ be used as _part_ of a more comprehensive auto-mod tools, including self-shadow-banning.

Imagine you had a human reviewing highly ratioed comments, providing a final judgment on "is this comment actually unhelpful, or is it just being brigaded?". (And let's imagine one judgment option is "unclear, do nothing".) You could then keep a per-user metric of their (mis)alignment with that judgment across all their votes. That metric could then be used to weight the votes of that user.

High alignment then classifies that user as a "trustworthy unpaid mod" behind the scenes, which can then be used as a signal to determine future human reviews. Similarly, if someone has an absolutely stellar alignment, you can use the occasional disagreements to do meta-mod reviews of your mods' judgments. If you go really wild and draw some correlation between mis-votes and hashtag/topic/channel/whatever, then you can use that.

Low alignment could then be used to devalue votes from that user, leading to a slow shadow ban, and potentially even other more visible effects.

All of which can be done regardless of the visibility of the votes, of course. But hiding "down" votes should help to reduce the pile-on effects of brigading ("a ton of other people downvoted it, so I am safe in the crowd") and thus the temptations leading to slowly shadow banning yourself. But unlike completely taking away down votes, like YouTube, you leave enough rope for bad actors to hang themselves.

It's equivalent to the system Slashdot has had for decades (IIRC).

Do I trust Twitter to put in place something with that amount of utility, feedback, and nuance? Nope. And even if they did, they'd throw away the value of having invisible scores for the opportunity to add "gold checkmarks" or some other BS.

It's been a few months, so I went back and checked my story. I definitely never did get the refund, but maybe I was misremembering things. There's one extra piece I had forgotten: the split "release" of the Mac version.

tl;dr: Steam didn't know anything about the devs releasing the Mac version late, so the "14 days from release" didn't line up with my expectation of "14 days from access".

Details for posterity:

The game was set to launch on Aug 17. On Aug 3, the team included a footnote at the bottom of a news announcement which said Mac would be delayed by "about a month":

https://steamcommunity.com/games/1124300/announcements/detai...

(There was also a pinned discussion topic about this at the time, which has since been de-pinned. It didn't have any more details than "see the announcement".)

A month later, on Sep 15, a beta for Mac was announced:

https://steamcommunity.com/games/1124300/announcements/detai...

Another month later, on Oct 21, Mac support was still in Beta, and M1 was still TBD:

https://steamcommunity.com/games/1124300/announcements/detai...

If you want to see the dumpster fire of poor communication and frustrated customers at the time:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/1124300/discussions/search/?q...

I asked for a refund on Sept 11, some 4 days before the beta announcement, and was denied the same day. I followed up via email for details, but was basically told the same "nope, it's been out too long" story in longer form. (At the time, there had been _zero_ word from the devs about Mac support, despite the initial "about a month" estimate, so I lost hope it would happen in anything like a timely manner.)

It looks like people were able to get refunds later that month specifically due to the lack of M1 support:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/1124300/discussions/0/2963922...

I guess I happened to fall right into that dead zone between everyone wanting to believe the devs were running just a little behind, and people at Steam realizing there was a legitimate problem. I was cranky about it at the time, but months later I get that there was probably not going to be any other outcome. I certainly don't ascribe any malice, nefarious plotting, or ill intent on the part of Steam or the devs ... but nor would I say that I think either responded in the interests of the customers.

If I could get Steam to improve from this I'd love for them to track platform-specific release dates, and be more strict about developers claiming support for platforms which don't actually run the game ... but I'm not going to hold my breath.

As for myself ... as much as I believe in the idea that preorders can be used to help fund games, and help keep devs employed by not reinforcing the cycle of crunch-then-layoff, I admit this experience (and other preorders-go-sideways experiences like Homeworld 3, FF7R) has kindof soured me on it. It's fine as an abstract concept, but it's at odds with the reality of date-driven releases (as opposed to quality-driven). These days I'm more likely to just add something to my wishlist and check back some time after release day to see if there are any dumpster fires.

> On Steam if you don't like a game, or if it doesn't work for you, you can get a full refund no questions asked as long as it's within 14 days and with less than 2 hours playtime.

There's a hole here: that 14 days is from time of _purchase_ not _access_.

I preordered _Humankind_ a month or two before launch, because it was listed as supporting MacOS. At launch, it didn't. It didn't get Mac support until 3 weeks later, even though that functionality was barely alpha quality with huge graphics and playability bugs. (Even today, months later, Mac support is barely at beta quality. And if you're on M1 you've got to manually configure the app for being run on Rosetta.)

I waited 12 days after launch before giving up and requesting a refund. That refund was denied, because they had taken my money months before. Steam support was unmoved by my assertion that the developer was flat out lying about Mac playability, and that I literally had no way of playing the game as advertised.

Be careful with your preorders, y'all.

Hello from Philo!

We were seeing drops of a few minutes each day, but as of December we've gone days without even the slightest interruption. We had to really work to get Dishy to not have any obstructions, but since then it's been great:

https://pics.rickosborne.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/01...

We also have Ukiah Wireless, point to point microwave, as a backup. I use it for my work uplink as it has more stable upload bandwidth than Starlink. And when we had those really bad storms over the last few weeks, Starlink definitely struggled more than microwave.

Not OP, but we do the same thing.

We basically keep job listings limited to "we're writing cloud software using Angular, Spring, and relational data". We're a large company, so other teams do it differently, but my team tries hard to not put ceilings or floors on experience or skills. We've hired everything from summer intern to Principal (Staff) Engineer using the same job req. We also don't limit the listings to a specific functional area - we might hire Ops, Front or Back End, Full Stack, Test, Autimation, etc, using the same req. We also actively look for skills we don't currently "need", on the hope they will widen the practical experience of the team.

Honestly, truly, does all that extra detail around experience, "job duties", micromanaged required skills, etc, actually add any value to the listing? Does "Agile experience preferred" even mean anything?

If you haven't already seen it, you may be interested in Introversion Software's retrospective on their unreleased "Subversion" game:

https://youtu.be/1giu6sMnAxY

(That whole series of videos is interesting for anyone who has an interest in procedural generation and simulation.)

Obligatory: My statements are my own and do not reflect the opinions of my employer. I'm not going to name that employer, but let's be honest, I can't stop you from figuring it out if you really want.

> Are there any big shops that have converted to 100% (or almost 100%) GitLab?

We use a combination of GitHub, GitLab, and Azure DevOps across the various SW Eng orgs in our company.

On GH, we split across both GitHub.com and internal GitHub Enterprise instances. There's been some shift to put everything on GH.com, but GH Actions for private repos are kind of busted, and it's really causing us problems. Staying on GHE is less painful for some of our orgs. Some teams use Jenkins instead of Actions, which is, as the kids say, "a whole mood".

Our GitLab-using orgs generally have tighter CD integration. As much as I prefer the GH UX, I have to admit GL has a much smaller gap between "I have an idea" and "my implementation is now CI-ed, CD-ed, and published to Artifactory".

Our ADO using orgs have an even smaller gap. Seriously. If you've never used ADO, you'd be impressed by how easy it is to get a full build pipeline set up in minutes. That is, as long as you stay on the garden path. These teams also have the hardest struggles when they stray off the path. (But my intuition here is that this isn't definitively an ADO problem and might actually come down to the skill sets of those teams.)

All told, we're several hundred engineers across these solutions. By my rough count, the total number using GitLab may be a hundred or so. They really like it, and it suits them very well.

(And before anyone says "omg why do you have so many solutions", the Eng efforts at our company are thoroughly distributed instead of consolidated. And, at least at an executive level, there's currently more faith in "right tool for the job" than in "alignment". For now.)

> I can't say I've seen anyone out of a bootcamp that was a great hire.

My own experience has been that there's no correlation between where the dev graduated from and how productive/valuable/etc they've been at work. I've seen just as many rock-star bootcamp grads as I have complete wastes of space from Stanford/CMU/MIT.

My current job is in biotech, writing cloud software which helps clinicians (and researchers) gather supporting evidence for their diagnoses. The install base is small, so it'd be hard to claim it makes the _world_ a better place. But it's a start.

I'd love to do more with it, because the software could actually help discover and refine the biomarkers which would inform diagnoses, instead of the other way around. But the FDA (and other similar regulatory bodies) have strong opinions on the distinctions between Clinical Decision _Support_ software, and _Diagnostic_ software. I think this job could have a much larger impact, but it's going to take the industry another 10 years worth of iteration to get comfortable with how modern cloud software changes medical device development.

My job before this was in ad tech. Another poster said everything I would, so I'll just say No, nothing in ad tech makes the world better.

Before that I was a teacher at a for-profit university. This is a harder call. I had a measurably positive impact on students, who have turned around and had their own positive impacts on the world. (I regularly see at least one former student here on HN.) But I left the job, at least in part, because the financial burdens the students were bearing wore down my enthusiasm.

Before that, I worked for a company which made office and art supplies. We had some pretty good school supply programs, and I got to see kids light up when we brought in boxes of paints and clays. Arguably, this job made the world better, albeit in a small way.

Hey, they fixed it! It's amazing what 2 months can do. The previous version had some pretty borked handling of public timelines.

Having said that, it still requires a bit of hackery. There's no way to get rid of the home/landing page if there's the one user account, so you have to do a bit of php/apache/nginx/whatever magic to redirect past it to your user timeline.

But it's worth noting that Pixelfed is intended to be your own walled garden - there's no "here's my public photo stream" configuration. It's intended more like a friends-and-family thing.

That being said, it's open source, so there are hacks to make your stream public. But they're hacks, and you're not going to get that out of the box.