Hacker News: xauronx

New comment by xauronx in "Thirty Tesla crashes linked to assisted driving system under investigation in US"

xauronx — Fri, 18 Jun 2021 12:37:15 +0000

Coming from a higher end Subaru… the Tesla system is a god send. I have complaints with my model Y, but that doesn’t even register (autopilot on the other hand, definitely tops the list).

New comment by xauronx in "Tesla owners asking what happens if 'full self driving' isn't real"

xauronx — Mon, 05 Apr 2021 14:28:48 +0000

I’ve never heard a leaf come up in conversation. I know a handful of people with Tesla’s, and have had my dad ask me about them.

New comment by xauronx in "American Airlines confirms UFO contact over New Mexico on Sunday"

xauronx — Wed, 24 Feb 2021 08:32:14 +0000

I was thinking some startup was a possibility. There’s obviously a ton of money to be made by making something go really fast. “Tesla sky teleport can get you from LA to Portland in 40 minutes.” Just sit in this cylinder as we launch you in your personal ballistic missile.

We saw a lot of recklessness with self driving vehicles. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a similar attitude while developing tech like this.

New comment by xauronx in "American Airlines confirms UFO contact over New Mexico on Sunday"

xauronx — Wed, 24 Feb 2021 08:14:38 +0000

Yeah, that’s my question. I’ll assume someone (whether the US government, Elon Musk, or whoever) was testing a rocket of some sort. Why the hell was it in the same area as a commercial flight? I’ll add another stupid human error to my list of things to be afraid of while on a plane.

New comment by xauronx in "U.S. Capitol Locked Down Amid Escalating Protests"

xauronx — Wed, 06 Jan 2021 21:31:30 +0000

I think the double standards are despicable.

Ask HN: What can I do with the source code of hundreds of enterprise projects?

xauronx — Thu, 24 Sep 2020 16:05:12 +0000

I'm in a somewhat unique situation of having access to about a decade of git repositories for enterprise projects. Nothing illicit - we're a consulting company and I can access this code. I have two questions:

1) What ways can this data be used to benefit my team or company?

2) Are there any tools on the market for evaluating huge amounts of source code?

I am the indirect manager of around 200 developers, and I'm an engineer myself, so my mind tends to go to improving development practices. Some things I've thought of:

1) Gather basic stats about the team for fun. (eg. How many LOC were written this week, how many LOC are we the stewards of, etc)

2) Look for patterns and identify opportunities for reusable modules. If 20% of our projects have a class called "PhoneNumberHelper" and no one has pulled it out into a reusable component... do that.

3) Look for missing platform features and sell that back to our vendor. If we show "of the last 200 projects we did, 50 of them (your biggest customers) had to custom build X". That seems like valuable information they may only gather through word of mouth right now.

4) Do some sort of organization wide code quality evaluation. Potentially (hopefully) show improvement over time as we've matured our practices.

It seems like a pretty crazy resource that we do nothing with as of now (other than on an project-by-project basis).

Note: I understand this is a security and IP minefield. I'm in a "theoretical" stage right now.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24580018

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by xauronx in "Traits of good remote leaders"

xauronx — Thu, 10 Sep 2020 15:58:54 +0000

In my experience the "loudmouth" in-person is the same way on a video call. They always get their two cents in, and are sure to jump in regardless of whether or not another person is patiently waiting their turn.

New comment by xauronx in "A Dropbox account gave me stomach ulcers"

xauronx — Sun, 15 Dec 2019 16:16:15 +0000

I worked for a small company right out of college and we had some monsters under the bed too. Unfortunately the manager would rather new code written than cleaning up technical debt or resolving risks. So I would have to double my estimates and use my “spare time” to try to work toward some level of sanity... but there were still plenty of things that I felt guilty about and would be evasive about if someone asked.

New comment by xauronx in "The Banana Trick and Other Acts of Self-Checkout Thievery (2018)"

xauronx — Sun, 28 Jul 2019 08:02:44 +0000

There are countless people in this thread (which concerns me because I generally think of HN as a pretty highly educated and moral group) who see errors like that at the register and walk away thinking they won a prize.

New comment by xauronx in "The Banana Trick and Other Acts of Self-Checkout Thievery (2018)"

xauronx — Sun, 28 Jul 2019 07:57:45 +0000

So you admit openly to stealing, just to put it plainly. You chose to shop somewhere, you chose to use a self checkout, you knew there was an error, and proceeded to leave with things you didn’t pay for. No matter how you justify it to yourself, you’re a thief.

If you can justify that you can justify stealing from your employer (hey I’ve been under paid for a while, taking this unsecured device is like making up for a bit of my salary), etc.

New comment by xauronx in "$1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes"

xauronx — Tue, 18 Jun 2019 17:35:24 +0000

I was actually doing research a couple of days ago to support more remote workers for my company and... unfortunately almost all of the research I found was backing co-location. There are degrees of remote work, but it seems that for most teams and most products being co-located provides the most productivity.

There are a lot of shades of gray there, like, if someone commutes for 2 hours through stressful SF traffic to get to a campus where they jump on a Google Hangout since their team members are spread across 3 buildings... yeah, I don't think productivity is going to get much of a boost. However, our team is in a suburb of Cleveland Ohio where you can live within 30 miles, get here in 30 minutes and have dirt-cheap housing. I'm having a hard time coming up with collateral to support my "modern" viewpoint on the benefits of remote workers.

New comment by xauronx in "Superblocks: Barcelona’s plan to take back streets from cars"

xauronx — Tue, 18 Jun 2019 17:07:16 +0000

A really small town near me shut down their main street and built a parking garage in order to make it a more walkable area about a decade ago. Unfortunately, all of the shops there closed up over the years because of a lack of foot traffic and they just reopened the street to traffic this year.

I think this type of thing would require a ton of compact living area nearby (apartments, etc) where people almost use the area as their "yard". The small town I mentioned is mostly suburbs where everyone has a small slice of backyard.

New comment by xauronx in "Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B"

xauronx — Mon, 10 Jun 2019 18:13:08 +0000

I thought the engineering behind some of that stuff was pretty cool too. Unfortunately, a system that prides itself on handling millions of records a second AND has no version control AND is sold as "no technical skills needed" is just too scary for me to recommend to anyone.

New comment by xauronx in "Amazon’s Alexa Has 80k Apps and No Runaway Hit"

xauronx — Wed, 13 Mar 2019 00:32:47 +0000

Try customizing your daily briefing. Really nice for a curated news briefing while you’re getting ready in the morning, or making dinner.

New comment by xauronx in "Amazon’s Alexa Has 80k Apps and No Runaway Hit"

xauronx — Wed, 13 Mar 2019 00:29:51 +0000

Amazon constantly runs “hackathons” with thousands of dollars of prizes to the winners and free echos just for playing. When I did it there were probably a hundred projects that were along the lines of “hi Alexa my name is John” “hi John I like you” (or similar effort). And all of them got into the store and all of them got free echos.

New comment by xauronx in "Amazon’s Alexa Has 80k Apps and No Runaway Hit"

xauronx — Wed, 13 Mar 2019 00:26:35 +0000

I use the flash briefing thing every day. I suspect most people don’t know about it. I wake up, stumble into the shower and say “Alexa play the news” on the way. By the time I finish brushing my teeth I got my curated news read to me. Pretty nice.

New comment by xauronx in "Amazon’s Alexa Has 80k Apps and No Runaway Hit"

xauronx — Wed, 13 Mar 2019 00:25:00 +0000

The thing I’m missing is location within the house. If I’m in the bedroom I should be able to tell my bedroom Alexa “turn on the lights”, and the same for the kitchen Alexa. Having to repeat the same incantation over and over is frustrating.

New comment by xauronx in "Elon Musk Unveils Boring Co's First Tunnel"

xauronx — Wed, 19 Dec 2018 12:45:32 +0000

Uber buying a major cities metro system and making it not shitty would be pretty great. NYC subway is basically what taxis used to be, dirty and hostile toward the user.

New comment by xauronx in "67% of workers earning over $100k see themselves quitting in the next 6 months"

xauronx — Sun, 21 Oct 2018 13:18:32 +0000

And the older middle managers get salty because they had to work for 20 years to make $120k so why should you get it “so young”?

New comment by xauronx in "Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?"

xauronx — Mon, 06 Aug 2018 02:59:57 +0000

That’s how consulting usually works. You scope out stories and commit to the number of stories in a sprint. Even if you wanted to add more to the sprint you’d just mess up the allocated time of QA and add more stuff for the dev ops team. That’s why more than one person (and people who know the system) should be giving estimates.

Otherwise, if it takes half the time use the other half to test, or train yourself to be better at your job. IMO