Hacker News: prodigal_erik

New comment by prodigal_erik in "UCBerkeley Will Delete Online Content"

prodigal_erik — Tue, 07 Mar 2017 02:29:45 +0000

Surely the greater good would be dubbing in Mandarin, rather than English subtitles.

New comment by prodigal_erik in "UCBerkeley Will Delete Online Content"

prodigal_erik — Tue, 07 Mar 2017 02:22:41 +0000

An unfunded mandate is entirely punitive. If we as a society valued it, we'd be paying for it.

New comment by prodigal_erik in "Snap Tumbles Below IPO Opening Price as Analysts Say Sell"

prodigal_erik — Tue, 07 Mar 2017 01:11:25 +0000

This company isn't offering voting rights nor planning dividends. What's the benefit of owning shares, other than trying to choose the right moment to sell them to other speculators?

New comment by prodigal_erik in "Gravity: a new programming language and VM written in C"

prodigal_erik — Mon, 06 Mar 2017 23:24:35 +0000

It's a kind of tragedy of the commons. If two languages are basically equivalent yet incompatible, neither of the authors did something wrong, but it's a shame about the missed opportunities and problems that didn't need to happen.

New comment by prodigal_erik in "Go 2016 Survey Results"

prodigal_erik — Mon, 06 Mar 2017 22:27:39 +0000

Reading and writing CPP macros is awful, but it's still not as bad as reading and writing the mind-numbing boilerplate that they replace.

New comment by prodigal_erik in "Go 2016 Survey Results"

prodigal_erik — Mon, 06 Mar 2017 19:32:19 +0000

If you can't build and deploy your own system without a piece of code, you should not be relying on the goodwill of any third party to keep it available for you with no SLA. A good build system is a deterministic function of its input (a commit from your repo) and can run offline.

New comment by prodigal_erik in "I spent three months working full time to get a job"

prodigal_erik — Sun, 05 Mar 2017 22:11:01 +0000

Why do that? If your screening test says they're both qualified, interview them both. Hire them both if you possibly can.

New comment by prodigal_erik in "I spent three months working full time to get a job"

prodigal_erik — Sun, 05 Mar 2017 21:57:03 +0000

What happens when your production system blows up at 3 AM? Does your team have a list of who can and can't be expected to assist?

New comment by prodigal_erik in "I spent three months working full time to get a job"

prodigal_erik — Sun, 05 Mar 2017 21:33:36 +0000

Lots of good vendors offer free trials or guarantees without it harming their reputation. In fact most customers object to shouldering all the risk.

New comment by prodigal_erik in "I spent three months working full time to get a job"

prodigal_erik — Sun, 05 Mar 2017 21:21:53 +0000

I wouldn't hire a frontend-only guy instead of a qualified developer, for the same reason I wouldn't hire a guy who can only mount wall outlets instead of a qualified electrician. Everything he didn't care enough to learn is a risk.

New comment by prodigal_erik in "I spent three months working full time to get a job"

prodigal_erik — Sun, 05 Mar 2017 21:08:33 +0000

> if you already have open sourced a bunch of code

How do I know you wrote it and didn't merely paste your name over some project I've never heard of?

New comment by prodigal_erik in "How we secretly introduced Haskell and got away with it"

prodigal_erik — Fri, 03 Mar 2017 19:21:44 +0000

> It hardly seems worth even having a bug system if the frequency of from-scratch rewrites always outstrips the pace of bug fixing. Why not be honest and resign yourself to the fact that version 0.8 is followed by version 0.8, which is then followed by version 0.8?

New comment by prodigal_erik in "The myth of using Scala as a better Java"

prodigal_erik — Fri, 03 Mar 2017 02:34:06 +0000

Java was adopted very rapidly (as soon as it ran acceptably on commodity hardware) because the industry desperately needed a safe subset of C++. The pain point addressed by Go is mostly deployment and packaging, which is why mostly devops (who have rejected OS packaging for some reason) are excited about it.

New comment by prodigal_erik in "Uber is designed so that for one employee to get ahead, another must fail"

prodigal_erik — Tue, 28 Feb 2017 02:12:31 +0000

The only way to get team cohesion is positive-sum priorities. If I spend more time helping you improve long-term and less time delivering on my own responsibilities, that needs to improve my next evaluation, otherwise I'm pretty much compelled to stop doing it.

New comment by prodigal_erik in "Data on the uselessness of LinkedIn endorsements"

prodigal_erik — Mon, 27 Feb 2017 22:46:29 +0000

I distinctly remember "Homicide", which is actually a specialty intended for attorneys working in criminal law.

New comment by prodigal_erik in "CloudPets teddy bears leaked and ransomed, exposing kids' voice messages"

prodigal_erik — Mon, 27 Feb 2017 22:24:02 +0000

I'd be surprised if the script kiddies attacking world-writable MongoDB instances know or care who owns them. Destroying the data and then lying is a lot less effort than actually copying and examining it.

New comment by prodigal_erik in "Solving for the Last Mile of Transportation"

prodigal_erik — Mon, 27 Feb 2017 20:23:01 +0000

A 20 minute mile doesn't include waiting for walk signals at pretty much every intersection on the route, and the Manhattan distance between the Caltrain station and his office might be larger.

New comment by prodigal_erik in "The Future of Not Working"

prodigal_erik — Sun, 26 Feb 2017 06:10:59 +0000

Whitewashing his reputation for posterity by spending money that has never been rightfully his.

New comment by prodigal_erik in "The power of role models"

prodigal_erik — Sun, 26 Feb 2017 01:26:24 +0000

Our phone screen takes anyone who isn't blatantly clueless; another candidate doing better never hurts you. We'd rather interview too much than triage the top N and then start bouncing viable candidates, because we aren't going to stop wanting to hire anytime soon.

New comment by prodigal_erik in "The power of role models"

prodigal_erik — Sun, 26 Feb 2017 00:58:49 +0000

This must be a generational thing. I hadn't heard of any of them until years after I started and I think most of them are younger than I.