Hacker News: neilobremski

New comment by neilobremski in "How to Shuffle Songs? (2014)"

neilobremski — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 15:06:55 +0000

Any shuffle algorithm is fine but the problem is Spotify's brainlessness: it routinely plays songs it just played. If you are any long-term user then you have playlists of hundreds of songs and my guess is that you haven't heard some of those songs in ages which means ... the FEATURE IS BROKEN.

I'd prefer a weighted shuffle based on the staleness of a song in a playlist. That way you eventually get through all of the music but in a pseudo-random order.

New comment by neilobremski in "The Age of AI has begun"

neilobremski — Wed, 22 Mar 2023 01:36:08 +0000

I think Gates is right that AI is the next era (obvious) and wrong about its positive improvements. More convenient productivity has brought about more garbage output and done nothing to release modern anxiety. If anything, AI is going to cause us to waste time in even more stupendously meaningless things because it's doing all our thinking. And anyway it can waste an infinite amount of our time by having us read or watch its infinite output.

New comment by neilobremski in "Ask HN: In what ways is programming more difficult today than it was years ago?"

neilobremski — Sun, 02 Oct 2022 16:31:21 +0000

Programming is now more opaque configuration than it is traceable logic paths. This makes paper debugging impossible.

New comment by neilobremski in "What they don't teach you about sockets"

neilobremski — Tue, 26 Jul 2022 19:27:01 +0000

This article may as well have been about writing to file streams does not block until a read occurs. Maybe the documentation (on sockets?!) could be more clear but at some point more words don't help with conceptual understanding.

New comment by neilobremski in "Ask HN: How do you monitor your young kids' computer usage?"

neilobremski — Tue, 21 Jun 2022 04:01:21 +0000

We tell our daughter what the acceptable limits are. Sometimes she pushes or breaks those limits. We talk to her about it, take away privileges for a bit, and then resume. She is 8 and addicted to her Kindle 3 but so far so good.

New comment by neilobremski in "WorldWideWeb.app"

neilobremski — Sat, 04 Jun 2022 14:57:40 +0000

Reminds me of Xitami on Windows 95 ... I wonder if that project is still around

New comment by neilobremski in "Ask HN: How to learn math from zero for adults?"

neilobremski — Wed, 01 Jun 2022 13:53:07 +0000

I'm 42 and just getting started in ML and "the math" myself. I never got beyond algebra in High School but I have made a successful career in programming. I'm taking it day by day, I dedicate an hour each morning to plugging away. It'll happen eventually...

New comment by neilobremski in "Apple is discontinuing the iPod"

neilobremski — Wed, 11 May 2022 03:20:45 +0000

I'm not sure I ever considered the iPod Touch a music player; Apple hasn't made a decent MUSIC PLAYER in years. They've made a lot of very capable portable computers that sit on your wrist or rest in your pocket but there's a lot more noise than signal coming from them ...

New comment by neilobremski in "Ask HN: How dangerous is it to trust Google?"

neilobremski — Wed, 30 Mar 2022 19:29:54 +0000

Don't get too comfortable with Google or any big cloud provider (including Digital Ocean). They have their own reasons for doing what they do and those reasons are not at all aligned with you or any small/startup company.

I'll paraphrase a comment I saw on HN recently:

"The old advice 'save often in case of loss' has now become 'save often to prepare for when Google shuts you off'."

Use big cloud technology to learn and further your projects BUT DO NOT RELY ON IT (unless you like to gamble).

New comment by neilobremski in "Heroku was Down"

neilobremski — Thu, 24 Feb 2022 16:57:06 +0000

https://status.heroku.com/incidents/2402

(It took a few minutes to get this link to work for me)

New comment by neilobremski in "Why Software Should Be Free (2002)"

neilobremski — Mon, 10 Aug 2020 19:38:33 +0000

The systems I work on tend to be comprised of free software but "business logic" is private. I don't know if this would please the GNU founders but a lot certainly runs on open source and I can't imagine this changing anytime soon. It helps everyone to see the foundation and plumbing but then there's diminishing returns as you move into particulars of opinionated design.

For my part, one of the biggest wins has been freely available and HIGH quality development tools and languages. I still have PTSD from C++ compilers licensing. I'm still hoping that Office tools will get there.

And as for the possibility of "less software developers" ... unlikely! Again, there will be (and are) fewer low-level power-programmers but many many more high-level business coders. You don't want your guru working on that stubborn input field validation but you DO need SOMEONE to do it

New comment by neilobremski in "Wiki Bankruptcy"

neilobremski — Mon, 10 Aug 2020 19:07:30 +0000

Something I'm trying to do on my own team is to make the wiki more of a browsable "table of contents", a glorified list of all the salient things. Searching to find the answers on Slack/Email/Jira/etc is fine and dandy when you KNOW what to look for but otherwise a gateway glossary gives the visibility necessary for a starting point.

For longer prose and procedures (particularly troubleshooting a very specific problem) I am encouraging blog posts with tags that link back to the parent page. These degrade more obviously due to their chronological nature and feel less jarring to prune (which can be done simply by changing the tags).

New comment by neilobremski in "Json-Base – Database built as JSON files"

neilobremski — Thu, 02 Jul 2020 23:18:18 +0000

Didn't everyone do this at some point? Sort of like everyone that started C++ in the 90's rolled their own string class. I remember doing this before "JSON" hadn't yet found its acronym (shaking rake ... get off my lawn!)

New comment by neilobremski in "Time to Upgrade Your Monitor"

neilobremski — Wed, 17 Jun 2020 17:56:50 +0000

And I suppose writers must have a Moleskine notebook and use clear penmanship? Hmm ...

New comment by neilobremski in "Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study"

neilobremski — Thu, 06 Feb 2020 17:59:19 +0000

It's harder to have conversations in an open office because they disturb non-participants. I find myself wasting time booking conference rooms when I could have simply popped into so-and-so's office.

I remember a long long time ago when the company I worked for did a big move and went from offices to cubes. I was young and naive and willing to try the experiment but within a month or two I regretted the change and things haven't gone back since.

I'd prefer sharing an office rather than an entire floor.

New comment by neilobremski in "Chronologic Versioning: No more arbitrary version updates and regressions"

neilobremski — Thu, 02 Jan 2020 18:28:33 +0000

I'll agree with the point that "version numbers are useless to the end user" except when there's an incompatibility. To that end, I'd prefer release tracks to be indicated in the TITLE and breaking (API) changes in the VERSION. Any other number in the version is essentially irrelevant.

Then again perhaps in web apps there's something to be said for this when breaking changes ARE the consistency. I have to say that working in back-end technology, I don't really care whether something was built in 2010 or 2020 as long as it's doing its job well.

Unfortunately, most back-end technology still communicates with web API's at some point and then we're at the mercy of the service's "version".

New comment by neilobremski in "This Page is Designed to Last"

neilobremski — Fri, 20 Dec 2019 22:37:29 +0000

These points look like the old (timeless) guidelines I remember for creating a web page ... solid, good, and as plain as a saltine cracker. I love it and it stores well but convincing the world while we romp through the hype of technological progress is like following a mob through the streets telling them to pick up their garbage.

New comment by neilobremski in "The top bug predictor is not technical, it's organizational complexity"

neilobremski — Wed, 18 Dec 2019 20:41:42 +0000

I think all current and ex Microsoftees can agree (and probably other workers in Big Tech Corp) that this is not only obvious but ongoing and dastardly resilient to getting solved! At some level this must be a sociological thing because humans seem to be hardwired into repeating this mistake.

This happens at smaller companies in smaller ways but the effect is the same.

It's worse than the "Mythical Man Month" in that production is not simply slowed down but it is slowly made rotten until it gets burned, buried, or passed off to out-sourced maintenance.

New comment by neilobremski in "Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud"

neilobremski — Tue, 17 Dec 2019 20:33:34 +0000

I didn't know this either ...

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/12/google-cloud-ceo-thomas-kuri...

New comment by neilobremski in "Coders Programming Themselves Out of a Job (2018)"

neilobremski — Tue, 17 Dec 2019 16:50:21 +0000

Where can I find these people who have automated everything about their jobs? (Assuming their jobs were complex at all) I would like to hire them ...