<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: shantly</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=shantly</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Tue, 07 Apr 2026 08:34:18 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=shantly" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shantly in "Writing Software to Last 50 Years"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> How would you write your code today if you knew it would of been your last commit and still in use in 30 years ?<p>Generally: minimize dependencies. External library or API dependencies? Versions can drift, the system can change out from under you in incompatible ways. That goes for the OS, too, of course. Data dependency that you aren't 100% in control of? Same. All are forms of state, really. Code of the form "take thing, do thing, return thing, halt" (functional, if you like—describes an awful lot of your standard unixy command line tools) is practically eternal if statically compiled, as long as you can execute the binary. Longer, if the code and compiler are available.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 14 Jan 2020 19:43:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22048464</link><dc:creator>shantly</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22048464</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22048464</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shantly in "Show HN: I wrote a book for engineers that want to become engineering managers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>FWIW I've given up on trying to gauge my own performance. I've plainly been disappointing people when feeling like I'm working about has hard as I could. I've (over, and over, and over) been complimented on both the quantity and quality of my output when I feel like I'm half-assing it, at best. There doesn't seem to be a much relation between how I <i>feel</i> like I'm working and what others perceive.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 14 Jan 2020 17:57:22 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22047324</link><dc:creator>shantly</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22047324</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22047324</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shantly in "Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Right—that significant amounts of labor (=human life) go into this kind of waste that everyone involved knows is a joke, and that the <i>non-joke</i> variety is rarely treated much differently, both contribute to what's scary about it.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 14 Jan 2020 15:27:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22045593</link><dc:creator>shantly</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22045593</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22045593</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shantly in "Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'd put the desirability hierarchy something like this, best to worst:<p>1) mixed labor (mental, physical)<p>2) moderate, varied physical labor<p>3) jobs that are mostly just being present and don't make you pretend to work most of the time<p>4) mental labor<p>5) jobs that are mostly just being present but <i>do</i> make you pretend to work most of the time<p>6) repetitive moderate physical labor<p>7) repetitive sedentary labor<p>8) hard physical labor<p>With 8 being at the bottom mostly due to typically being high-risk and coming with major mid-term harm to health.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 14 Jan 2020 15:01:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22045264</link><dc:creator>shantly</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22045264</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22045264</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shantly in "Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Good work if you can get it, but all the interview questions plumbing the obscurest depths of Newtonian physics are pretty tough.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 14 Jan 2020 12:17:05 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22044082</link><dc:creator>shantly</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22044082</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22044082</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shantly in "Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> In other words, while I considered what the accountant guy did to be a rather low-effort incomplete job, he did exactly what was expected of him by the bank and what I needed to get my deal done.<p>The degree to which <i>everything</i> runs on this sort of system is kind of horrifying, once you're exposed to enough things like this for that to sink in.<p>Relatedly, I guess my contribution to the broader thread would be:<p>Almost no-one knows what they're doing, let alone is much good at it—so few, in fact, that society and the economy (and everything else) basically run on a massive and super-serious game of playing pretend. Yes, even that big important organization (public or private) where you expect <i>everyone</i> to be pretty damn competent. The difference between them and some normal place is that 5% of their people are <i>impressively good at their jobs</i>, rather than 2%.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 14 Jan 2020 12:08:51 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22044025</link><dc:creator>shantly</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22044025</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22044025</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shantly in "Oceans warming at the rate as if 5 Hiroshima bombs were dropped in every second"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Aldrin gets mentioned in the same breath as Armstrong often enough I bet quite a few people could pull that one out. You'd lose a bunch with "who's the guy who stayed in orbit?" and almost everyone with "name any Apollo 12 astronaut" or even the more-generous "name any Apollo astronaut who at least reached Lunar orbit and wasn't on 11 or 13". Most of the people who get that second one would probably just luckily guess Alan Shepard without actually knowing for sure he was on an Apollo mission, just the first famous space-program-guy who came to mind who wasn't Armstrong or Aldrin (and in fact the Apollo part of the career is not why they know his name).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 14 Jan 2020 11:53:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22043929</link><dc:creator>shantly</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22043929</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22043929</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shantly in "What to do if you’re stopped by the police"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Guessing there were drugs in one or more pockets.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 14 Jan 2020 04:20:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22041819</link><dc:creator>shantly</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22041819</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22041819</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shantly in "US colleges struggling with low enrollment are closing at increasing rate (2019)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If there’s a real downturn we’ll see the big boys cut jobs—maybe a lot. Or even just some regulatory changes (especially reigning in spying and fruits-of-spying monetization) without a broader downturn. Wages downmarket would suffer a ton with all those top-comp folks with (by definition) above-average résumés and work history suddenly looking for a job. Probably upward mobility (into lead/senior/et c.) will suffer a lot. Doesn’t take more supply, lower demand is something we <i>will</i> see again.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 14 Jan 2020 04:00:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22041731</link><dc:creator>shantly</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22041731</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22041731</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shantly in "Healthy habits add up to 10 disease-free years to your life, study reveals"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I eat mostly vegetarian (I'm not a principled vegetarian so I'll eat meat in some circumstances, just <i>way</i> less than most people) and that's pretty easy, but milk is really cheap & convenient (chemically) for so much cooking, eggs are like a nutrition-on-a-budget cheat code and also chemically useful in lots of cooking, and I love cheese. Going vegan would hurt.<p>[EDIT] if there's one modification I'd really like to make to my diet, it'd be to add fish once or so per week, ideally the fatty, oily, low-on-the-food-chain sort that're supposed to be so heatlhy. I need some kind of guide for how to work up to enjoying fish when you didn't grow up eating it. I can <i>tolerate</i> larger fish when cooked & seasoned very well, but don't really enjoy it at all, and have no understanding of what even to do with the smaller, healthier sorts that isn't stomach-turning (to me) to even consider. Though for some reason I love sushi and calamari, so, go figure.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 13 Jan 2020 22:59:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22039699</link><dc:creator>shantly</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22039699</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22039699</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shantly in "Maybe You Don't Need Kubernetes (2019)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is kind of what I'm talking about WRT the cloud being more trouble than it's worth if you app sits somewhere in between "trivial enough you can copy-paste some cloud configs then never touch them" on the one end and "so incredibly well-resourced you can hire three or more actual honest-to-god cloud experts to run everything, full time". Unless you have requirements extreme/weird enough that you're both not-well-resourced but also <i>need</i> the cloud to practically get off the ground, in which case, god help you. I think the companies in that middle ground who are "doing cloud" are mostly misguided and burning cash & harming uptime while thinking they're saving and improving them, respectively.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 13 Jan 2020 20:08:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22038071</link><dc:creator>shantly</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22038071</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22038071</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shantly in "Maybe You Don't Need Kubernetes (2019)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Just.... just... no. First of all, nobody's got good backups. Nobody uses tape robots, and whatever alternative they have is poor in comparison, but even if they did have tape, they aren't testing their restores. Second, nobody has good alerts. Most people alert on either nothing or everything, so they end up ignoring all alerts, so they never realize things are failing until everything's dead, and then there goes your data, and also your backups don't work.<p>But you should test your backups and set up useful alerts with the cloud, too.<p>> Third, nobody needs push-button re-deploy-from-scratch unless they're doing that all the time. It's fine to have a runbook which documents individual pieces of automation with a few manual steps in between, and this is way easier, cheaper and faster to set up than complete automation.<p>Huh. I consider getting at least as close as possible to that, and ideally all the way there, vital to developer onboarding and productivity anyway. So to me it <i>is</i> something you're doing all the time.<p>[EDIT] more to the point, if you don't have rock-solid redeployment capability, I'm not sure how you have any kind of useful disaster recovery plan at all. Backups aren't very useful if there's nothing to restore to.<p>[EDIT EDIT] that goes just as much for the cloud—if you aren't confident you can re-deploy from nothing then you're just doing a much more complicated version of pets rather than cattle.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 13 Jan 2020 16:16:18 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22035689</link><dc:creator>shantly</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22035689</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22035689</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shantly in "Maybe You Don't Need Kubernetes (2019)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p><i>In practice</i> I see a lot of breakage (=downtime), velocity loss, and terrible "bus factor" from complex Cloud setups where they're really not needed—one beefy server and some basic safety steps that are also needed with the Cloud, so aren't any extra work, would do. "Well designed" is not the norm and lots of the companies are heading to the cloud without an expert at the wheel, let alone more than one (see: terrible bus factor)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 13 Jan 2020 15:44:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22035412</link><dc:creator>shantly</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22035412</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22035412</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shantly in "Maybe You Don't Need Kubernetes (2019)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>An awful lot of server systems can tolerate a hardware failure on their one server every couple years given 1) good backups, 2) "shit's broken" alerts, and 3) reliable push-button re-deploy-from-scratch capability, all of which you should have anyway. Lots of smaller shops trying to run to k8s and The Cloud probably have at least that much downtime (maybe an hour or two a year, on average) due to configuration fuck-ups on their absurd Rube Goldberg deployment processes anyway.<p>[EDIT] oh and of course The Cloud <i>itself</i> dies from time to time, too. Usually due to configuration fuck-ups on their absurd Rube Goldberg deployment processes :-) I don't think one <i>safely-managed</i> (see above points) server is a ton worse than the kind of cloud use any mid-sized-or-smaller business can afford, outside certain special requirements. Your average CRUD app? Just rent a server from some place with a good reputation, once you have paying customers (just host on a VPS or two until then). All the stuff you need to do to run it safely you <i>should</i> be doing with your cloud shit anyway (testing your backups, testing your re-deploy-from-scratch capability, "shit's broken" alerts) so it's not like it takes more time or expertise. Less, really.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 13 Jan 2020 15:15:40 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22035094</link><dc:creator>shantly</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22035094</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22035094</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shantly in "EU: Call to introduce common charger for all mobile phones"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> But even Apple has started using USB-C ports to charge their laptops and tablets now<p>“Even”? I still hadn’t seen a usb-c anything in the wild when Apple switched their MacBooks to it and dropped all other ports.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 13 Jan 2020 13:33:46 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22034286</link><dc:creator>shantly</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22034286</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22034286</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shantly in "War Is a Racket (1933)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> it's hard to shake the impression that the majority of our bloated military budget is a federal make-work jobs program<p>The majority of it is <i>precisely</i> that. It's the only jobs & wealth redistribution program Republicans are willing to fund (though they never call it that). Pity it's so inefficient for that purpose.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 10 Jan 2020 22:43:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22016425</link><dc:creator>shantly</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22016425</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22016425</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shantly in "Women now make up the majority of the U.S. labor force"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Decent (read: donated to by people with money) thrift stores are a great place to find one's sizing. Go in with a few brands in mind and an understanding of how their sizing works (they may have cut variations in addition to just small/medium/large, like trim/slim/regular, for instance) then just start trying on anything from those brands until you narrow down your correct sizing. If you get very close you may be able to guess for e.g. online sale orders from that brand (say, a pair of chinos at the thrift store is a <i>tiny</i> bit too tight but looks alright otherwise, so you're very confident 1" more in the waist would fit well, so you catch the next sale from that brand and order their chinos in the size you're <i>almost</i> sure will fit)<p>Difficulty: you have to know what to look for in fit so you can diagnose what's wrong with a given article if it's not quite right.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 10 Jan 2020 22:15:37 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22016207</link><dc:creator>shantly</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22016207</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22016207</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shantly in "Women now make up the majority of the U.S. labor force"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It takes <i>some combination</i> of time and money. On the high end of the money side you know nothing about fashion and pay someone to dress you well. On the low end you have to learn a bunch and spend serious time so you can buy pieces via thrift, sales, and seconds, that'll actually fit, look good/appropriate, and last.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 10 Jan 2020 22:10:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22016153</link><dc:creator>shantly</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22016153</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22016153</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shantly in "Women now make up the majority of the U.S. labor force"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Men's fashion is truly horrible compared to women's fashion. Men basically have the choice of either a stuffy suit that look like it hasn't changed in a century and is completely impractical, or baggy pants and a baggy hoody. Women get all kinds of choices in clothes, including lots which show off their bodies, while men's clothes are basically designed to hide our bodies completely and look as boring as possible. I guess that's helpful if you're fat, but if you're athletic and toned, it's really not.<p>Strongly disagree—you may just not have been exposed to all the options in men's fashion. There are tons, without even deviating <i>too</i> far from traditional/normal.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 10 Jan 2020 22:07:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22016128</link><dc:creator>shantly</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22016128</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22016128</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shantly in "13.3" full color ePaper display"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Could work like an electric typewriter. Keep the little LCD for the current line (or maybe 3-5) and let the E-ink be your “paper”.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 09 Jan 2020 05:00:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21998696</link><dc:creator>shantly</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21998696</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21998696</guid></item></channel></rss>