Hacker News: greaseball

New comment by greaseball in "Demand for Ruby on Rails is Still Huge"

greaseball — Wed, 20 Jun 2018 16:01:39 +0000

Static typing alone won't save you from creating monolithic code that's hard to maintain. My current employer has been slowly decoupling their 20 year old core product written in .NET into microservices (mostly Java, some Node) for years. The legacy .NET codebase has tons of tightly coupled dependencies, logic heavy error prone stored procedures spanning thousands of lines, and laughably slow startup/deployment times.

New comment by greaseball in "When the bubble bursts"

greaseball — Tue, 05 Jun 2018 13:34:59 +0000

I get the sense reading this article that the main concern raised is whether or not enough value is being generated by companies and researchers that "use machine learning to solve problems related to X" to justify the investment. The author doesn't touch upon whether using ML could be exacerbating the very problems these implementations are trying to solve. Inappropriate implementations of classification algorithms and predictive analysis that create false positives has the potential to inflate this sort of a bubble even further.

New comment by greaseball in "Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub"

greaseball — Mon, 04 Jun 2018 12:51:11 +0000

Apple being the acquirer wouldn't change the potential conflicts of interest or the trend towards monopolization, which is what a lot of people are upset about. Animosity toward large corporations isn't unique to Microsoft.

New comment by greaseball in "Canada facing ‘brain drain’ as tech talent leaves for Silicon Valley"

greaseball — Fri, 04 May 2018 20:37:37 +0000

No worries, happy to help.

New comment by greaseball in "Canada facing ‘brain drain’ as tech talent leaves for Silicon Valley"

greaseball — Fri, 04 May 2018 20:02:51 +0000

Might be obvious, but the biggest thing you'll give up in this market compared to cities like Toronto or Montréal is selection. There's some larger companies with satellite offices here (IBM, Salesforce, etc), but not too many startups.

One word of caution about real estate in the Fredericton area; don't buy any property too close to the river. There's usually flooding in the spring from the snow melt up stream and this year was especially bad. I was lucky enough not to be affected, but there's lots of homes taking flood damage right now.

New comment by greaseball in "Canada facing ‘brain drain’ as tech talent leaves for Silicon Valley"

greaseball — Fri, 04 May 2018 19:39:39 +0000

Developers in Toronto are getting a raw deal. The cost of living is orders of magnitude higher than the rest of the country and devs aren't making the difference up with higher wages.

So glad I made the decision to move from Toronto to Atlantic Canada this past year. I'm actually making more money in New Brunswick than I did in Toronto and can afford to own a 4 bedroom house instead of renting a 600 square foot condo.

New comment by greaseball in "SailsJS 1.0 – Rails-like JS Framework"

greaseball — Wed, 04 Apr 2018 01:22:28 +0000

My team used Sails for a project about 3 years ago and can confirm that your description fits the framework to a t. We were sold on the premise of a Rails-like experience running on Node, but experienced all the shortcomings you described.

I'd also add that we probably underestimated how much using a less popular framework negatively affected our pace of development. Having a large community helps a lot when you're trying to get junior devs up to speed.

New comment by greaseball in "Physicists Still Don’t Know What Puts the Curl in Curling"

greaseball — Thu, 15 Mar 2018 16:27:53 +0000

sigh it's not a Saskatchewan Ricky, it's a Samsquanch!

New comment by greaseball in "Developers love trendy new languages, but earn more with functional programming"

greaseball — Tue, 13 Mar 2018 15:42:34 +0000

This sounds like the most likely explanation to me. The only programmers I've personally worked with that wrote code in a functional language for their day jobs were data engineers using Scala for an Apache Spark data pipeline. They weren't paid well because they wrote functionally, they just filled more of a niche role with a higher barrier of entry than a typical web developer.

New comment by greaseball in "Ask HN: What product/service would you be willing to pay for?"

greaseball — Wed, 27 Dec 2017 14:29:44 +0000

This looks promising. Although, it seems they only offer NFL, soccer, and tennis coverage currently. Hopefully some day they'll add NHL and NBA games as well.

New comment by greaseball in "Ask HN: What product/service would you be willing to pay for?"

greaseball — Wed, 27 Dec 2017 13:40:50 +0000

I'd love to see a SAAS product for watching sports. Similar to Netflix in terms of UI and pricing, but also with the support for live content. I know this probably won't happen any time soon since major US telecom providers have exclusive broadcasting rights to major sports games.

New comment by greaseball in "Motel Living and Slowly Dying"

greaseball — Tue, 05 Dec 2017 14:00:20 +0000

As a Canadian who's spent a few years in the southern states, I can say that the difference in infrastructure here does help reduce the risks of road accidents when there's snow. In the south the entire city shuts down because the people there don't have the snow plows, road salt, and winter tires to deal with it. However, in a really bad storm the reduced visibility and slippery roads can still make your drive very dangerous.

New comment by greaseball in "Visual Studio Code 1.14 released"

greaseball — Tue, 11 Jul 2017 18:53:10 +0000

I really like what they've done here with the update notifications. It's much less disruptive than the alert messages at the top they had before.

New comment by greaseball in "Tabs, spaces and your salary – how is it really?"

greaseball — Tue, 20 Jun 2017 21:21:01 +0000

Based on the survey results it looks like devs using PHP are paid significantly less on average.

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017#work-salary-a...