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shade23's comments

shade23 | 3 years ago | on: Logitech MX Products are incompatible with AirPods

The dongle is compatible with Macs too. Only issue is that you experience some interference if you plug it into a usb-c multi adapter. I resolved this by using a usb extender cable. I've had zero interference since I started using this setup.

shade23 | 7 years ago | on: Ask HN: Why are big companies so much less efficient?

This going to be more obtuse from what you would expect but i can give it a go

this is because efficiency isnt a goal , impact is. you might be efficient enough to iterate 10 times a month. but that is not what a customer wants. planning goes a long way compared to just doing something. as software Engineers we often mistaken efficiency as "getting shit done". which is great but there are too many instances when it is shit. the bigger the org and the user base / affected population, the things you do has an impact . i've known users to shift loyalty due to small mistakes that companies do. as a dev deeply connected to the impact of your product, you realize that decisions make a big difference. you plan ahead and mitigate probable failures. these require time.A good product can go a longer way than an efficient team with no direction. this does not imply that everything takes time. but repercussions of a bad decision can be lasting in a big organisation. you have a large number of stakeholders involved who would want to and can help you achieve your goal. this is however not always good. the greater amount of red tape involved can lead to competitors gaining an edge and also several cases of "i fucked up". the bottom line being. efficiency isnt merely moving fast. its about building things which matter and having an impact. if you look at efficiency in that manner, then big orgs aren't any less efficient than the smaller ones since their reach is much greater. perspective matters

shade23 | 8 years ago | on: How I got to 200 productive hours a month

While I love the advice, my qualm are with the measurement of productivity,I use qbserve too,checking my logs I see 307 hours as an average for the past 4 months.(this includes office and my personal projects and also my studies(distance masters).But not every moment you spend on an IDE,terminal,<insert other tools associated with productivity> .. productive.I know that I spend 20% of time yak shaving.Trying to figure out why something simple is broken.This is not the time I would count as productivity.

Measuring productivity as the completion of goals/output generated per hour spent seems to be a more viable quantity, however goals get modified too.Plus this is a much more time consuming process than just measuring hours.

I find measuring time spent on productive apps to be analogous to measuring productivity using LOC, both are opaque and do not convey the actual meaning of what they are measuring.

shade23 | 8 years ago | on: Kaspersky: The Russian Company That Is a Danger to Our Security

I really do not expect such journalism from New York times,

>But a backdoor is not necessary. When a user installs Kaspersky Lab software, the company gets an all-access pass to every corner of a user’s computer network, including all applications, files and emails.

Isn't this true for all antiviruses.

>The Kremlin hacked our presidential election, is waging a cyberwar against our NATO allies and is probing opportunities to use similar tactics against democracies worldwide

Any proof for this?

Just realized that this was written by a Democratic Senator who took a stand against Kaspersky. That explains the lack of balance in the article and the tone.

Also. I would have a problem with any one having my data, be it Symantec and NSA or Kaspersky and KGB.

shade23 | 8 years ago | on: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

- Downloading a song of youtube, adding meta data via beets and moving to my music lib

- Adding tasks to my todolist client from every app I use(including my bookmarking service when I bookmark with specific tags)

- Changing terminal colours based on time of the day(lower brightness in the evenings and hence dark colours, too much sunlight in the mornings and hence solarized themes)

- Automatically message people who message me based on priority(parents immediately/girlfriend a longer buffer).

- Filters on said messages incase a few require my intervention

- Phone alerts on specific emails

- Waiting for a server which you were working with to recover from a 503(happens often in dev environments) and you are tired of checking every 5 seconds: Ping scripts which message my phone while I go play in the rec area.

- Disable my phone charging when it nears 95% (I'm an android dev and hate that my phone is always charging)

- Scraping websites for specific information and making my laptop ping when the scenario succeeds(I dont like continuously refreshing a page)

I dont think several of these count as automation as opposed to just some script work. But I prefer reducing keystrokes as much as possible for things which are fixed.

Relevant to this discussion:Excerpt from the github page

>OK, so, our build engineer has left for another company. The dude was literally living inside the terminal. You know, that type of a guy who loves Vim, creates diagrams in Dot and writes wiki-posts in Markdown... If something - anything - requires more than 90 seconds of his time, he writes a script to automate that.

https://github.com/NARKOZ/hacker-scripts

shade23 | 8 years ago | on: How I learned to code in my 30s

>ActionScript 2 , ActionScript 3, C/C++, C#, Java, Python, AVR studio....I could wipe out 95% of these skills from my memory and get paid the same.

Yes you're right about this.Programming is quite similar to math in that aspect. Great debugging skills and understanding can replace the requirement for all of this.

But you seem to be missing the point here. There is a difference between learning a language and the frameworks compared to learning _why_ a language and _why_ a framework. This is what ~60% of today's "coders/programmers" miss and are unable to understand.

Learning the why helps you pick up things much easily. The effort you would have to put in to learn any new languages would be considerably much lesser compared to others.

A commonly quoted line in the industry is , "you need more breadth than depth".

And you wipe out a lot of skills on a regular basis. This is not a conscious effort that you make. It just happens to everyone.

I'm not trying to say that the late blooming programmers do not understand the "why" bit, but rather that a lot of programmers do not. I am one of those self taught programmers who loves exploring the why. And it makes my life much easier than those who do not. So revel in knowing that you are capable of picking up new skills much easily compared to others. That IMHO is a much more important characteristic than knowing a million languages/systems/frameworks.

shade23 | 8 years ago | on: When doctors can't afford to feel

You mistake an overview to be the necessary steps. This is a complicated process which has several unknowns that can factor in unknowingly. There is a procedure involved and also guidelines, but the human factor can tend to throw both of these things out of the window.

It is unfathomable because unless you undergo the process (of informing a parent of their child's death), you can only sympathize.

And I think pretty much any process can be broken down as a well defined flow chart.

But as long as you are dealing with emotions and humans, no flowchart is foolproof

shade23 | 8 years ago | on: Maintainers make the world go round: Innovation is an overrated ideology

Wouldnt maintenance lead to innovation analogous to necessity being the mother of invention?

Most of the inventions came up as an easier or better way of doing something which was the current maintainer(to be innovator?) decided to rework/create .

And if the author talks about only maintenance where no development can be done(even those that make the life of maintainer easier). IMHO , Maintenance procedures should also be constantly improved and hence that would lead to innovation.

shade23 | 9 years ago | on: Stop Filing Bugs, File a Container

I think this would make a lot of sense on platforms that undergo massive fragmentation(all fingers pointing at android here). Browsers are also fragmented , but websites like Can I Use It[1] should be able to reduce the problem to a manageable extent. I love the idea of reproducible bugs. Because often the hardest part of solving any bug is first being able to reproduce it followed by finding the source. Since I presume these containers would also help in reliably reproducing those one-off bugs which happen only on first install/ first open / on some other event.

[1]:http://caniuse.com/

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