Hacker News: jdewald

New comment by jdewald in "Absolute truths I unlearned as junior developer"

jdewald — Fri, 07 Jun 2019 18:42:12 +0000

I think the parent's point (though I could be reading my own thoughts into it), is that the things you mention only matter to the user if it directly affects them. An end user couldn't care less what the maintenance costs are if they aren't passed on to them in some way. If they are, then its completely in the interests of the company to have easy to maintain software. Or if changes are time-sensitive and the company is unable to keep up which change requests. If all that's invisible to "users" (or internal stakeholders), it really doesn't matter how much the boots on the ground hate the software.

But I think also the "code doesn't matter" really means, that ideally there is no (new) code, because there is in fact an existing solution but the person asking for the solution doesn't know it. This is likely more the case with internal stakeholders that ask for something to be built that does X, not realizing that there is readily available software or libraries that does X (or something close to it). So part of our role is to know the landscape of what part of the domain really needs new (potentially bug-ridden code) to be written.

New comment by jdewald in "A Decade of Remote Work"

jdewald — Sun, 19 May 2019 17:53:23 +0000

> People working remotely may have health or social issues on a greater average.

I don't know any reason that working remotely would correlate to health/social issues. Is this a known statistic from somewhere? The social thing perhaps correlates to working (remotely or not) in a software field, but I'm not sure why remote workers would be statistically any different than non-remote workers. (I happen to be a remote worker)

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

jdewald — Thu, 15 Mar 2018 18:30:55 +0000

Oh I don't find sports interesting at all either, though I would argue that people do in fact try those sorts of competitions in coding. My beef with parent is the notion that this stuff is objectively pointless somehow just because _we_ don't find it interesting.

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

jdewald — Thu, 15 Mar 2018 16:43:48 +0000

Who cares what some author or poet decided to write? Who cares what some scientist found? Who cares what food tastes like? Who cares what article someone posted on Hacker News? Who cares about the bug you fixed? Who cares what software exists?

We can all live without any of this, but why?

New comment by jdewald in "Cloudflare Reverse Proxies Are Dumping Uninitialized Memory"

jdewald — Fri, 24 Feb 2017 21:07:58 +0000

CF-RAY isn't internal and will show up in any CloudFlare hosted site's response headers.

New comment by jdewald in "Beyond Light Table"

jdewald — Wed, 01 Oct 2014 15:20:06 +0000

I prefer not to think of unit tests as a write to reason about the code you're writing now, but to let the system confirm that your current reasoning doesn't contradict with your previous reasoning (about other parts of the code).

New comment by jdewald in "Backend Teardown: Muut"

jdewald — Tue, 05 Aug 2014 13:47:05 +0000

They gave a "sponsored" talk at Velocity along with a company that provides an ad bidding platform. But also had not heard about it otherwise.

New comment by jdewald in "How to Write 225 Words Per Minute With a Pen"

jdewald — Sun, 29 Jun 2014 17:57:19 +0000

I thought that at first as well (about the potential confusion), but then recalled that most of the "possible" alternatives aren't real English words:

"bah" is really only a sort of exclamation and the sound of a sheep, not something you'd really have appear in an interview.

As you pointed out, "awa(h)", "ga(h)", "sla(h)" and "sta(h)" aren't English words [1] that you'd confuse in context so "away", "gay", "slay" and "stay" are the only possibility for them. The "y" really is not necessary.

I really want to learn Gregg now...

1 "gah" like "bah" ends up being an exclamation, and "slaw" as a food... but I can't think of a case where it would be confused with "slay" in context.

EDIT: Clarification on gah, awa, etc

New comment by jdewald in "Harry Eng – Master Bottle Filler"

jdewald — Sun, 08 Jun 2014 05:15:02 +0000

Jeez the amount of time I spent on E2 in high school and college was stunning. So many open tabs as I followed those links. Even wrote an app to find the "shortest distance" between two randomly selected ideas.

New comment by jdewald in "Google's XSS game"

jdewald — Fri, 30 May 2014 05:15:35 +0000

Escaping the ';' works on that one

New comment by jdewald in "Any Android app can read your WhatsApp database"

jdewald — Tue, 11 Mar 2014 21:42:56 +0000

Reading the article, the data the "exploit" looks at is only if the user has turned on the backup feature (disabled by default).

New comment by jdewald in "Frameworkless JavaScript"

jdewald — Thu, 09 Jan 2014 18:40:33 +0000

I've never seen a non-trivial application that is "application code only".

Most frameworks weren't built out of thin air, but because of real application needs. Sure they have more than is necessary, but it is often the case in any non-trivial application that you end up writing a bunch of custom common "framework" code which duplicates the work that readily available frameworks (that you avoided using) had.

Any new developers then have to learn your new "lightweight templating language", "lightweight database mapper", "lightweight MVC layer", and what have you (which now you have to support even though it's not core to what your application does, but is just a support layer).

Though I guess the best part is most of these frameworks being discussed came about because an internal team wasn't happy with what was available and decided to roll their own, which eventually became big enough to release as a standalone unit.

New comment by jdewald in "FastImageCache – iOS library for quickly displaying images while scrolling"

jdewald — Tue, 22 Oct 2013 07:37:07 +0000

I was under the impression that ARC simply inserts the retain/releases into the code essentially write before the compile, so in theory would be equivalent.

New comment by jdewald in "Beginning Game Programming for Teens with Python"

jdewald — Wed, 07 Aug 2013 06:22:20 +0000

It's a bit confusing that near the beginning it says that on a Mac Python is already installed (yay!), but as soon as you get to the meat where PyGame is installed, it basically says you'll need to re-install Python if you're on a Mac. So the "already installed" bit isn't all that useful, or did I misread?

New comment by jdewald in "Go read: fast Google Reader clone in AngularJS with Go on App Engine"

jdewald — Thu, 27 Jun 2013 20:16:33 +0000

> "...enjoyment out of the presentation..."

I think you nailed it there. I don't really care about the site presentation, just the content. It's interesting when the content that I'm reading in my feed reader mentions the "new design... working out the quirks" which obviously doesn't translate to the version that is on the reader.

I'm also lazy though... and often can't be bothered to even click on the "read more" when only the brief summary is contained in the syndicated version.

New comment by jdewald in "Go read: fast Google Reader clone in AngularJS with Go on App Engine"

jdewald — Thu, 27 Jun 2013 20:13:18 +0000

Login-wise I feel exact opposite... I became quickly annoyed when I need to create yet another login. I prefer seeing "Login with Google"

New comment by jdewald in "Is Wine Bullshit?"

jdewald — Tue, 25 Jun 2013 20:07:22 +0000

Young's Double Chocolate Stout is both incredibly tasty and not particularly expensive (relative to other "craft" beers).

New comment by jdewald in "Aspartame and formaldehyde"

jdewald — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 15:21:54 +0000

I touched a bit on excitotoxins in the article, but decided to leave that for another one if there was enough interest. The major issue is that the biggest proponent of the excitotxin theory is Blaylock (based on some initial ideas from JW Olney). I do not see Blaylock as being at all credible and it was actually during the research for the article that I first stumbled on upon that idea.

By far most people are worried about the formaldehyde and mood/headache effects, so that's what I ended up reducing the article to.

New comment by jdewald in "Aspartame and formaldehyde"

jdewald — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 15:16:48 +0000

There's obviously no way for anyone to claim that you specifically don't, but one of the studies I looked at (and there have been others) specifically used patients who believed they got headaches from aspartame. They turned out to be more likely to get one from the placebo control than from aspartame.