Hacker News: edw

New comment by edw in "Penetration testing and low-cost freelancing"

edw — Fri, 23 Oct 2020 15:23:47 +0000

Can we collectively refrain from making comments like this on Hacker News—or in any venue, for that matter? Is it that hard to read an assumed “In my experience, it is often the case that…” in front of everyone’s comment?

New comment by edw in "A case for using punctuation in Slack"

edw — Mon, 19 Oct 2020 16:36:36 +0000

The care and thought you put into your writing, regardless of medium, says everything about how (and how much) you care and are thinking about your audience.

New comment by edw in "Netflix is creating a problem by cancelling TV shows too soon"

edw — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 21:45:21 +0000

Some cigar chomper transformed The X Files from a beloved show to one where everyone just wanted the damn thing to end.

New comment by edw in "CC Hound: A curated library of free music for content creators"

edw — Sun, 11 Oct 2020 22:38:10 +0000

When I think of royalty free music for “creators,” my mind instantly goes to the sort of cliched, bombastic audio that is used to score “epic b-roll” that serves no purpose in so many YouTube videos. The world needs less of this, not more.

New comment by edw in "Visualizing the textbook for fun and profit"

edw — Sat, 10 Oct 2020 23:11:21 +0000

I don’t know about you, but reading that first paragraph of the organic chemistry textbook was not a drag. It may not have been Carl Sagan’s Cosmos but I don’t understand how any generally curious person wouldn’t find it interesting. For the record I never took anything beyond Chemistry I in college.

New comment by edw in "Spamtoberfest"

edw — Thu, 01 Oct 2020 19:17:39 +0000

Coming soon, if it's not already here in Preview Edition: Eternal Hacktober. Every day GitHub more resembles a gamified social media platform.

New comment by edw in "Toward a “modern” Emacs"

edw — Sat, 26 Sep 2020 11:20:40 +0000

I wanted a monochrome terminal but was willing to tolerate traditional ANSI color. Once you start with 24 bit color you may as well start using a VNC client.

What sapped my will to live was the impossibility of doing a C-u C-x = on the overlays to determine how their contents were styled, forcing me to go into the source code of a ton of different packages to go fishing for face names to coerce to visible values.

Yes it’s possible but it’s insane. Emacs carries around all of this terminal baggage but many module developers seem to have forgotten about terminal users. Additionally, theming is conceptually broken in that it creates an MxN problem with themes and modes’ face names. This could be solved if modes stopped with the proliferation of mode-specific face names but good luck with that.

New comment by edw in "Toward a “modern” Emacs"

edw — Fri, 25 Sep 2020 22:10:31 +0000

I basically gave up on Emacs and switched to a combination of VS Code and old-school vi for Go and everything else, respectively. Finding an effing theme that allowed me to program in Go in a terminal without making LSP’s overlays unreadable was nearly impossible. I spent days trying to make this work. I’ve used Emacs since 1991.

New comment by edw in "You're enlightened – now what?"

edw — Fri, 25 Sep 2020 14:50:58 +0000

And can’t we all get back to the really important work of complaining about the absence of free snacks, the main reason we’re here?

New comment by edw in "You're enlightened – now what?"

edw — Fri, 25 Sep 2020 13:33:16 +0000

Upon reading it my thoughts went to yesterday's Verge article on the audio recordings of Zuckerberg's Q&As. Facebook has many vocal rank and file people who seem to believe they've arrived at Enlightenment and want Zuckerberg to toe the line. His imperfect attempts to walk a tightrope that keeps everyone happy infuriate the Enlightened, who believe tightrope walking is in its very conception a concession to Evil. They conclude that he's an Agent of Hatred and start taking steps to coerce him into compliance with Correct Thinking.

New comment by edw in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2020)"

edw — Tue, 01 Sep 2020 17:44:42 +0000

ICX Media | Golang/Python GCP Data Engineer| DC, NY, SF, LA | REMOTE

ICX Media is helping organizations gain insight into online audiences and act on those insights. Key to achieving that goal, ICX is building a world-class data practice, and we’re looking for people to help us achieve our ambitious goals. We have embraced Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and are building atop it batch and streaming workflows using Dataflow (Apache Beam), Cloud Run, and BigQuery, orchestrated using Cloud Composer (Apache Airflow).

Our preferred languages are Python and Golang. We highly value data science as well as relational modeling and SQL knowledge, skills, and experience. If you’re an engineer that wants to concentrate in data engineering or a data scientist that is interested in making a move to the engineering side, this may be a great opportunity for you.

The ICX data engineering team has embraced a remote-first approach to working and has members that span Eastern to Pacific time zones. This opportunity is open to US citizens and others authorized to work in the United States.

Contact me at work my email (ewatkeys@icxmedia.com) and please reference this post.

New comment by edw in "Nitrokey"

edw — Thu, 27 Aug 2020 20:03:17 +0000

Yes and? If you carry this on your keychain heading into a security checkpoint, expect to receive interrogation++.

New comment by edw in "Nitrokey"

edw — Thu, 27 Aug 2020 18:34:45 +0000

"This (watch|car|toupee|smartphone|encrypted USB key drive) will totally make you more attractive to potential relationship partners!"

New comment by edw in "Nitrokey"

edw — Thu, 27 Aug 2020 18:14:29 +0000

The claimed "plausible deniability" benefit seems dubious. You are carrying a branded device with marketing materials that tout its ability to offer you plausibly deniability…

New comment by edw in "I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action"

edw — Fri, 14 Aug 2020 22:13:53 +0000

SO is the opposite of MDN. If you do not approach any piece of StackOverflow content with the presumption that it could be dangerously not-even-wrong, God bless you.

New comment by edw in "Comments on optimizations around string concatenation"

edw — Fri, 31 Jul 2020 21:28:14 +0000

Preaching to the choir. It amazes me that the ML and Data Science folks have settled on anti-FORTRAN. (Or maybe, put that way, it’s less amazing.)

New comment by edw in "Launch HN: BaseDash (YC S20) – Edit your database with the ease of a spreadsheet"

edw — Fri, 31 Jul 2020 17:31:35 +0000

Django's migration tool is awesome; I can see how people could get seduced by it. It's happened to me.

New comment by edw in "Comments on optimizations around string concatenation"

edw — Fri, 31 Jul 2020 15:04:50 +0000

Assembly code making poor choices can be outperformed by Python code making smart algorithmic choices. The sentiment behind "don't use Python for performance critical code" isn't wrong, but there's nuance. Programmers should make informed choices about space and time complexity regardless of the language being used.

Your typical assembly programmer may be far more aware of their obligation to do so than your typical Python programmer, so in my mind it's more important that languages occupying Python's ecological niche behave predictably. It can be challenging to balance that need against other constraints like limiting the number of abstractions someone needs to master in order to be productive.

New comment by edw in "Launch HN: BaseDash (YC S20) – Edit your database with the ease of a spreadsheet"

edw — Fri, 31 Jul 2020 13:46:03 +0000

Both your and the parent's sentiments are so on-point. And they're one of the reasons I don't like ORMs or the use of in-app constraint checking. The mid-Aughties rise of CRUD-focused frameworks that treat the database as a sidecar to the web app ignored as inconvenient the full power of an RDBMS, in part because MySQL was the not-full-RDBMS that they were often paired with.

New comment by edw in "Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy"

edw — Fri, 31 Jul 2020 12:52:45 +0000

It's not necessarily about money. An engineer can burn through tens of thousands of dollars per month in cloud spend because they have access to the AWS [or] GCP console, but that same engineer may not have the first idea about how to get the CFO's sign-off to purchase a license that will facilitate a halving of that spend. And that same CFO can institute a policy against using credit cards for recurring payments that prevent that engineer from expensing the purchase through a corporate card. And the software company may not offer a bill-via-invoice option — or they may only offer it for amounts greater than the amount the engineer wants to spend.

So much of what happens in sufficiently large organizations has nothing to do with profit maximization. Think confederacy of dunces, not a conspiracy of greedy evil geniuses.