Hacker News: sianemo

New comment by sianemo in "I Lost Faith in Kagi"

sianemo — Fri, 12 Apr 2024 18:33:16 +0000

The further responses from Vlad may be ill advised, and maybe he should've realized those emails were going to be unproductive, but they aren't combative.

The email Lori sends explicitly asking him to stop emailing is then followed up with some last-wordism "for the record" nonsense. Only on the extremely online internet do people consider someone the aggrieved party after they write a screed against a product or business, then close the conversation with representatives of that business with essentially a don't @ me and some last-wordism. It's terrible journalistic practice. It's a net negative in social and community engagement. I don't see why doing it over online spaces gives the author a pass here.

New comment by sianemo in "Things You Should Never Do, Part I (2000)"

sianemo — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 04:44:10 +0000

That obelisk (we call it the monolith) effect is what led to the approval in my org to take a small team and start work on replacing our nearly 25 year old pile of enterprise Java with a new codebase. I agonized over doing this, tried to fix and refactor and guide effort to just having better code, but in the end the code base has become an inscrutable, angry monolith and it's impossible to know what code improvement appeases it or triggers a series of critical production bugs.

Joel Spolsky is a smarter man than I, but his examples here are table stakes stuff compared to two decades of poorly implemented Java enterprise MVC patterns. And we don't sell software, we sell a service, and that service will continue even if our rewrite team never delivers, so the rewrite can't be more than just an expensive financial boondoggle if I'm wrong.

New comment by sianemo in "Killing VMware"

sianemo — Mon, 26 Feb 2024 00:11:00 +0000

What an aggressively myopic, narrow view of the situation. The reason "this VMware stuff" is a huge issue is because Broadcom are just absolutely fucking up relationships between every part of the VMWare ecosystem: the vendor relationship, the support relationship, the licensing system, the trust in a product reliability roadmap, just everything. This creates chaos in any org relying on them, at any size and efficiency. Chaos costs a fortune. The reasons that any org has for keeping their server operations on-prem and reliant on VMware are not as blithely dismissible as you are indicating. In fact, the reasons are frankly irrelevant anyway, as even the most impeccably managed migration plans to whichever big 3 cloud vendor you'd like are going to be thrown at least somewhat askew by the recent actions from Broadcom. The volume of clear, unambiguous discussion and media coverage that this is getting goes a long way to smooth over the pain of mitigation strategies with nontechnical leadership.

New comment by sianemo in "Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are 'inept' and 'boring'"

sianemo — Thu, 08 Feb 2024 00:42:42 +0000

Pichai doesn't need to sincerely believe what he's relaying here to benefit from it, he needs only believe that by saying these things he can steer employee discontent to back within a manageable margin. Therein lies the ineptitude.

New comment by sianemo in "Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are 'inept' and 'boring'"

sianemo — Thu, 08 Feb 2024 00:30:24 +0000

To my understanding a lot of these managers aren't sticking with the product too far after launch, they're often moving on internally to the next thing. So these managers get to say they were responsible for launching something new, and get to wash their hands of what happens after.

You'd think after all this time senior management, both internal and external, would see through this charade, but that is not apparently the case.

New comment by sianemo in "Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are 'inept' and 'boring'"

sianemo — Thu, 08 Feb 2024 00:09:59 +0000

Outside of ads, and maybe LLM work, what projects are going on at Google that are interesting, to both the top brass and to line level engineers, that might lead people to feel differently? Google has been a rudderless ship cruising on ad dollars for years, with mid level managers launching one unimpressive product after another. Products that get canned by Google months later and only serve to benefit said managers resume. There's nothing apparent in the company to drive any high morale, unless morale is measured in RSUs.

New comment by sianemo in "Woman Got Cremation Ads in the Mail After Getting Chemotherapy"

sianemo — Wed, 07 Feb 2024 17:48:42 +0000

The don't-bother-unless-it-hyperscales majority attitude of tech company funding and growth heavily limits the variety of new things that the tech world at large can offer. There are simply not that many types of tech business models that are capable of scaling fast and quickly without massive infusions of cash, but it turns out that data brokering, large dataset analysis, and profile building are a few of those things, and so the market success of these business looms large in the technology space.

I had hoped that rising interest rates and a tighter consumer market would change that dynamic somewhat but unfortunately for now it seems to be an incredibly well entrenched status quo that doesn't appear to have a clear path away from

New comment by sianemo in "Young men face high risk for gambling addiction as sports betting surges:experts"

sianemo — Wed, 03 Jan 2024 01:02:25 +0000

Dynamics is Microsoft (somewhat poorly) making a Salesforce for people who are all-in on the Microsoft ecosystem. In terms of collective human suffering caused per year of existence I would say it's on par with the rest of the stuff you've mentioned.

New comment by sianemo in "The Tesla Semi cab from the practical POV of someone who drives trucks"

sianemo — Fri, 09 Dec 2022 23:05:57 +0000

It doesn't until there are negative externalities, you know, like labor retention rates, that cause those transport costs to go back up.

Tesla might be able to sell some of these to some companies for a while, because brand recognition and Elon stans in purchasing positions. That's not really a good strategy for long term growth, and Tesla can't just will an automotive niche into existence.

New comment by sianemo in "Apple introduces end-to-end encryption for backups"

sianemo — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 20:16:48 +0000

Do you honestly believe that a malicious actor who can access data storage can also necessarily access a silent mechanism to affect the security internals of a given iPhone? And also the theoretical hacker wouldn't be able to just push said theoretical silent update to your device to just exfil the data anyway?

Really having a hard time understanding the detailed security implications of your scenario beyond this vague notion you're presenting that a theoretical hacker can use theoretical tools to silently pwn any Apple device collected to the internet at any time.

New comment by sianemo in "Cannabis legalization decreases stock market value of major pharmaceutical firms"

sianemo — Fri, 02 Sep 2022 17:51:04 +0000

You're correct about the testing not being a concern. Testing for psilocybin is very expensive and unreliable. Really only one major drug testing lab in the country will even try to test for psilocybin, and that's because you can, for the right price, try to get them to test for just about anything in a mass spec sample. I won't go so far as to say that nobody can ever successfully test you for psilocybin, but it's about as close to never as you can get.

New comment by sianemo in "Ask HN: Do you self-host databases or use a managed service like RDS?"

sianemo — Tue, 02 Aug 2022 23:15:04 +0000

We self-host our Oracle instance because we really, genuinely like Oracle SQL and Oracle Cloud is the only cloud provider (that I'm aware of) that offers Oracle as a service, which is undiserable. Also, in general I personally like the fine control of being able to know the condition of our whole database, including state, deep profiling, and our backup situation, as someone with an old-school sysadmin mindset. However, it's relatively straightforward and well documented[0][1] to migrate to solutions like RDS from existing self-hosted installs if that's what's required.

[0]https://docs.aws.amazon.com/prescriptive-guidance/latest/pat...

[1]https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/hands-on/move-to-mana...

New comment by sianemo in "Robinhood lays off 23% of staff"

sianemo — Tue, 02 Aug 2022 22:35:15 +0000

I'm not going to try to justify how I would act, or how anyone else should act, were I to have a compensation package putting me easily in the top 0.1% of society, but we can collectively dispense with the notion that certain types of compensation (i.e. stocks) must necessarily be prohibitively harder for a CEO to give up than just money.

New comment by sianemo in "Robinhood lays off 23% of staff"

sianemo — Tue, 02 Aug 2022 22:25:58 +0000

He's perfectly capable of giving stock to these employees as well.

New comment by sianemo in "The high-stakes race to engineer new psychedelic drugs"

sianemo — Tue, 02 Aug 2022 20:30:09 +0000

Setting aside the hilarious disrespect of assuming that I'm a drug addict from single comment on the internet, you are capable of realizing that taking issue with people who use a drug only because of the mental and social association you have of people who use the drug is a super tight loop of circular logic, aren't you?

New comment by sianemo in "The high-stakes race to engineer new psychedelic drugs"

sianemo — Tue, 02 Aug 2022 19:01:54 +0000

While I may not be someone you want to be for specific reasons relating to our individuality, I am a long time psych user and I'm demographically and overall culturally someone that is presented as desirable to be. I'm in a reasonably high income percentile, I lack unsecured debt, I'm happily married, I have a diverse social circle and several personal hobbies, I stay physically active, and I enjoy intellectual pursuits.

I'd be very curious to know what specifically about me, or about something you assume about me, would make me someone you don't want to be?

New comment by sianemo in "The high-stakes race to engineer new psychedelic drugs"

sianemo — Tue, 02 Aug 2022 18:25:43 +0000

I have had good trips and bad trips on a variety of highly psychedelic substances, and I've had a lot of those trips. Trying to engineer the trip out of the drug to get a desired psychoactive result free from pesky side effects like not being as grounded to reality for a while is absolutely missing the forest for the trees. Not to say that it can't produce some benefit but it's leaving a lot of unexplored potential on the table, largely in deference to failed puritanical ideals about recreational drug use.

New comment by sianemo in "FBI is hiding details about a raid on Americans’ safe deposit boxes"

sianemo — Thu, 28 Jul 2022 20:25:36 +0000

A congressionally passed wealth tax is not the same as the FBI doing asset forfeiture on secured valuables storage but you already knew that before you posted.

New comment by sianemo in "Ask HN: What blocks you from switching your small-to-medium business to Linux?"

sianemo — Tue, 26 Jul 2022 21:13:08 +0000

Not the owner, but the one of the principal decision makers for this sort of thing. We're an org that just hit 100 employees and prior to migrating our ancient software stack to heavily utilize 365 offerings we looked into Linux, especially for cost savings. The reason we didn't go with it, and the reason we lean so hard into 365 now, is the traditional Office product. Word formatting, Excel macros, conditional document access, basically everything about the Exchange/Outlook ecosystem, all of it is absolutely necessary for our B2B work. The only thing that comes even close to meeting our requirements is corporate GSuite accounts and using Linux as a fancy, and difficult to secure, thin client for those offerings. So we decided why choose the lesser evil and now pay Microsoft thousands a month to not think very hard.

New comment by sianemo in "PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat"

sianemo — Tue, 05 Jul 2022 20:15:05 +0000

I agree that the comments in this thread are uselessly snarky and uncivil, but Lennart Poettering is not just a single person who wrote software people don't like. PulseAudio has, deservedly or otherwise, been the face of audio issues in desktop Linux for coming on two decades now, and the tumultuous changeover to systemd as very nearly the mandatory init system for Linux left a sour taste for many long-time users.