Hacker News: fortylove

New comment by fortylove in "TextEdit and the relief of simple software"

fortylove — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 21:34:34 +0000

I forgot the editor (maybe TextMate?) that was in vogue during the peak of the Ruby on Rails era, but there was such a feeling of magic to using what was a fairly basic editor that still had syntax highlighting.

Was this feeling of magic purely because I was younger? Or perhaps we did peak in terms of the ergonomics of human-controlling-machine without too many aids?

Fighter pilots used to fly with skill and instincts, but now are assisted by all sorts of high tech equipment that has removed much of the "flying skill" and replaced it with "equipment skill". It's not that fighter pilots are worse now. I'm sure they are better at achieving the outcomes desired, while commanding much more complex equipment. But the perhaps the art of flying is less emphasized.

In the same way, perhaps the era of software engineering is changing too?

New comment by fortylove in "How does fentanyl get into the US?"

fortylove — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 17:37:41 +0000

This sentiment peaked in popularity in urban areas ~4 years ago. Since then I've noticed support for this position slowly eroding, and my hypothesis is that the general population has slowly had enough interactions with someone who is on fent.

New comment by fortylove in "Take the pedals off the bike"

fortylove — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 18:54:15 +0000

The "walking bikes" you mention are extremely common in the US as well, and are referred to as "balance bikes" here.

New comment by fortylove in "Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI"

fortylove — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 18:31:45 +0000

Is this why we finally got darkmode in gcal?

New comment by fortylove in "IBM acquires Kubecost"

fortylove — Tue, 17 Sep 2024 20:11:01 +0000

As someone who used SoftLayer shortly after it was acquired (and it was still pretty much untouched by IBM) - SoftLayer was pretty bad to begin with. And I'm not only comparing it to AWS. It was bad even when compared to RackSpace.

New comment by fortylove in "Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week"

fortylove — Mon, 16 Sep 2024 20:17:12 +0000

I left Amazon a few years back because this ending was the inevitable outcome. Amazon had a chance to reinvent themselves as the scrappy startup that they claim to want, but instead they went full IBM.

New comment by fortylove in "LG and Samsung are making TV screens disappear"

fortylove — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 00:20:28 +0000

The environmental impact of producing a product that needs frequent replacement should not be ignored. Especially when it's proven to be avoidable.

New comment by fortylove in "Temporal Python – A durable, distributed asyncio event loop (2023)"

fortylove — Thu, 09 May 2024 21:10:34 +0000

I find Temporal itself to be effectively a clone of Amazon's Simple Workflow (SWF)

New comment by fortylove in "Show HN: AutoMQ - A Cost-Effective Kafka Distro That Can Autoscale in Seconds"

fortylove — Mon, 08 Apr 2024 06:05:09 +0000

Can you elaborate more on the part where using Kafka as a work queue ends horribly? Genuinely interested!

New comment by fortylove in "Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are 'inept' and 'boring'"

fortylove — Thu, 08 Feb 2024 03:06:57 +0000

With regard to Waymo, it seems it just hit a cyclist: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39296067

New comment by fortylove in "Paris Vote Targets SUV Drivers with Parking Fees Set to Triple"

fortylove — Sat, 03 Feb 2024 19:52:34 +0000

A lot of modern SUVs are actually pretty similar in specs to minivans:

Mazda CX9: weight: 4,409lbs, 199″ L x 78″ W x 68″ H

Honda Odyssey: 4,482lbs, 205″ L x 79″ W x 70″ H

For us, it mostly boiled down to us needing to periodically drive in snowy conditions. Obviously an SUV is not a magical vehicle for wintry conditions, but 4wd is big advantage.

New comment by fortylove in "Paris Vote Targets SUV Drivers with Parking Fees Set to Triple"

fortylove — Sat, 03 Feb 2024 19:44:15 +0000

I'm not familiar with the term "people carrier", sorry. Is this like a minivan?

If so, many minivans are ~similar in size, weight, and capacity to modern SUVs (not all SUVs are a Chevy Suburban :-)). For example, you can compare the Honda Odyssey to the Mazda CX9 and the specs are actually not too different:

Mazda CX9: weight: 4,409lbs, 199″ L x 78″ W x 68″ H

Honda Odyssey: 4,482lbs, 205″ L x 79″ W x 70″ H

Edit: formatting

New comment by fortylove in "Paris Vote Targets SUV Drivers with Parking Fees Set to Triple"

fortylove — Sat, 03 Feb 2024 19:30:28 +0000

Modern SUVs are mostly not on truck chassis anymore. The body-on-frame breed of SUV is growing increasingly rare. Modern SUVs are a lot closer to larger sedans (for example, a Mazda CX5 is not remotely close to a truck).

New comment by fortylove in "Paris Vote Targets SUV Drivers with Parking Fees Set to Triple"

fortylove — Sat, 03 Feb 2024 19:23:13 +0000

Dad with wife, two kids, and a dog here. We are a one car family, and we intend to stay that way due to pretty real parking constraints.

We tried to hold out for as long as we could without an SUV. Ultimately, taking a week long trip with the family became focused around space management, having to play packing tetris and telling my wife "I don't think we have space for the pack and play". Sure we made it work, but it was stressful.

We got a 3 row SUV (3rd row collapses), and the additional space is just fantastic when it comes to packing. And when the cousins or grandparents are in town, the 3rd row comes in handy.

New comment by fortylove in "Zoom CEO says employees can't be as innovative or get to know each other on Zoom"

fortylove — Wed, 23 Aug 2023 23:20:49 +0000

This seems really unhealthy.

New comment by fortylove in "Two men die in Ironman Cork competition in Ireland"

fortylove — Sun, 20 Aug 2023 22:31:21 +0000

Wow. Awful

New comment by fortylove in "Amazon starting to track and penalize workers who work from home too much"

fortylove — Fri, 11 Aug 2023 17:10:23 +0000

Previous Amazon engineer here.

When considering a change, I was told by multiple layers of management that they would be totally fine with me moving away from the office and becoming permanently remote.

But none of them would put that in an email, or ask HR for formal approval. It was always "as far as I'm concerned, it's completely fine". It was never "yes, this is something that we will stand by if it comes under pressure".

I chose to leave in the end, mostly due to the weakness of this promise. And with each new article covering their RTO debacle, I become more convinced it was the right decision. I had great teammates, and a great direct manager. But the macro situation at Amazon is a mess.

Amazon is just a loose federation of mostly autonomous orgs. This is partially why the employee experience there can vary so much depending on the org. And HR at Amazon is just another org that acts mostly autonomously from the other orgs.

Shameful.

New comment by fortylove in "Zoom is making its staff return to the office"

fortylove — Tue, 08 Aug 2023 05:37:55 +0000

Laughable

New comment by fortylove in "Australians fight for the right to work from home permanently"

fortylove — Sat, 05 Aug 2023 22:34:41 +0000

Counterpoint: I work at a major tech company and I feel like our interns have been more productive since covid 19. It's forced them to establish a more diverse network of people to ask help from. Maybe it's harder for them, but they don't seemed handicapped by it at all.

The whole "juniors need easy help and struggle to get it themselves" seems like an artificially concocted narrative to me.

Edit: fixed a word

New comment by fortylove in "The away team model at Amazon (2022)"

fortylove — Sun, 09 Jul 2023 04:42:20 +0000

As someone who did away team work at Amazon, and also hosted away teams: the model sucks in most ways and was unpleasant for everyone. It got the job done in extreme situations, but it was mostly a result of subpar managers taking the term "fungible" too seriously.

Source: was sr engineer at Amazon