Ask HN: What's your most unpopular dev opinion? |
Ask HN: What's your most unpopular dev opinion? |
Damn you got me wondering if I can vibe code a Flash app.
"We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%."
3% could pass for often, in the context of something that is discouraged.
2. There is no "best" language for all people or all tasks - not Haskell, not Lisp, not Python.
3. People who answer "what's your most..." with more than one response should learn to count.
Um... oops.
No, it's not affirmative action. No, we aren't hiring black people because they're black. It's mostly outreach and employee resource groups. It's completely harmless and no, it doesn't make white people disadvantaged.
> From what I've seen, it means that the hiring pool for junior developers is locked into programs for disadvantaged minorities (for example black / female). This means that if you want to hire a junior, you must hire from those pools. How this is not a disadvantage for people outside those pools I don't understand.
This rhetoric that black people are being hired and they're unqualified is just not true. There's a lot of qualified people vying for a position, and some of those people will be black and some of them will be hired. That doesn't mean they're hired because they're black.
There's this sort of strange implication that if someone is hired and they're a minority, they must not be qualified. But nobody makes the same argument for white people - we just assume that white people are qualified if they're hired.
This systemic racism is why DEI was implemented in the first place. Merely mimicking that rhetoric is not a stab as DEI - quite the opposite.
If you look at the statistics, black individuals and women make up an extremely small proportion of software developers. White men are not disadvantaged, I'm sorry to say.
For the record, I myself am a white man. The reality is that simply having a white-sounding name makes your likely hood of getting hired go up by over 50%. I'm not going to sit here and act like I'm some sort of victim because some people got together and made an ERG for black engineers. Who cares.
That is not happening. We can hire anybody. Basically, LOOKING at new sources is good! That doesn't mean at all we lower the bar or exclude white men. Of course, for basically all of time it has been a good ol boys club white men hiring their friends up to this point so not sure what the problem even is!
We don't have ERGs for white engineers because, simply put, white engineers do not face any structured disadvantages in the work place. There's just nothing to talk about there. That's why we have ERGs for gay individuals, and women engineers, and black engineers. Because they face unique challenges in the workplace and education and those spaces give them the opportunity to talk about that.
If you want those programs for white people, that already exists - that's called the workplace. It's very hard to claim a minority position when you're so obviously in the vast majority.
Proportional because they are faster to read in general, and the padding makes reading camel-case faster as well.
In the example I initially assumed your font was the Jetbrains example and thought it was ugly and unreadable. Then when I saw the next example I read it with no effort and almost immediately internalized that the mini-space is not and the wide-space is.
Are there any default fonts that do this on most systems? Mac, Windows, iOS, etc. that I can use if I don’t have access to install a font. I am often on shared devices and this would be a game changer if my first experience is what I think it is - easier and more enjoyable reading.
(Going to install it now on my iPhone to experiment it as a default daily driver)
I got used to the padding in a few minutes, the first version had a 1/4 space padding and then I pushed it to a 1/3.
To me, the main problem is tabularized alignment. So I don’t use it for example on nginx.conf
Because that 1/3rd fake space space looks about the same size as the proportionally-sized real spaces you have elsewhere.
In fact, 90% of the bugs in the product of the startup I work for come from the (typescript) frontend, instead of the larger (rust) backend.
What is your definition of AGI? Is natural general intelligence something you think brains are physically capable of, or is some non-physical aspect required?
And yet the brain exists, is it magical? Or is it that Gödel's theorem has nothing to do with intelligence, which is mostly a big pile of heuristics anyway?
as a trade we have gotten lazy and complacent. many of us have figured out how to look the other way while making software that does terrible, terrible things.
we deserve to have our trade destroyed by LLMs.
Using Go has been more fun. Where fun means less surprises.
If you haven't taken professional engineering exams, and passed, you're not an Engineer.
STOP IT! </RANT>
The font size in my text editor/terminal is 22 pt (I think; it might be 24). I want to avoid eye problems when I am older and I believe avoiding strain on them when I am younger will make that more likely.
My lines of code are no longer than 80 characters because reading vertically is faster and less error-prone than reading horizontally. (100 characters is also acceptable.) This has nothing to do with old software except as far as it introduced the 80-character limit at all. However, it is somewhat related to the font size, given a larger font means fewer characters per line, but they are otherwise independent choices.
So while I did confirm the obvious readability of large characters, what you actually want is a small font which is not readable unless your eyes are relaxed and moistened by sufficient blinking.
Although many programming languages try to avoid the problems of C programming language, some of these things that they try to avoid are not really so bad, and they often make it worse in other ways, anyways.
Computer programs should not have too many dependencies.
You should not use one character set for everything.
You should not use computers for everything, either.
ASN.1 DER is not a bad file format (and is often better than using other formats; I think DER is generally better than BER and CER, and is also generaly better than JSON and CBOR and others).
I also think that systemd is no good, but many people believe that (although also many people think that systemd is good).
Furthermore, HDMI is no good, and USB is no good, and UEFI is no good, and Unicode is no good.
X.509 client authentication would handle authentication better than 2FA, WebAuthn, OpenID, etc. (It can also be used for authorization as well as authentication, and this authorization can be partially delegated to yourself and/or others, therefore making fine grained personal access tokens unnecessary.)
TLS should not be mandatory for connections that do not require authentication (e.g. read-only access to public data), but TLS should still be allowed for any connections whether or not they require authentication. If you are only using the connection to download a file, and the contents of the file is not changing, then knowing the cryptographic hash of the data will be better than using TLS, although you can do both at once if you want to (these are not mutually exclusive).
For security within a computer, capability based security with proxy capabilities is a good way to do it, at the level of the operating system (rather than within a programming language or in a single program).
Programmers should not only program in modern computers, but should also program in old computers too.
Popularity matters in the case of advertising. Advertising happens to be Silicon Valley's only "business model". Silicon Valley and software developers in general seem obsessed with popularity.
This is one of the better questions for "Ask HN". Commenters who try to argue against the opinions only serve to support the notion that the opinions are unpopular.
- Commonjs should be actively deprecated
- Dev interviews should have live coding sessions, face to face
Here is a sample folder structure (from memory, not exactly the same):
/Customer/Project/:
./.190 - STEEL - QTY - 3 - CUSTOMER - PART#.dxf
./.190 STEEL - QTY 1 - CUSTOMER - PART# DO NOT ETCH BEND LINES.dxf
./LEFT SIDE BRACKET B.sldprt
./PART 3.sldprt
./PRJ001.sldprt
./PRJ002.sldprt
./PRJ401.sldprt
./ALL PARTS PUT TOGETHER.sldasm
./FINAL ASSY.sldasm
./STEPS ASSY.sldasm
They also have (ON PURPOSE!) a system where they have 3 sources of truth so if any of them don't match we have to stop what we're doing to double check what's actually correct :|
While they didn't take my suggestions on this particular thing, my expertise has been noted for when there's a need for printer troubleshooting...
Security doesn't require making computers unusable, either.
If we had the collective will, we could eliminate cyber-security as a profession within a decade, as an un-necessary thing of the past.
But... that's not gonna happen.
• Modern Java is a good language.
• It's ok not to be polyglot.
• Debugging should not start with the debugger.
• If you can't express yourself clearly you probably can't think clearly.
• HN should support Markdown :)
Some exceptions for all of these, of course.
rewrites are worth it
also: functional programming has never really mattered, and will never matter
Here are some:
1. Pure capability based security doesn't work and such ideas are a dead end. [1]
2. Companies writing eng blogs about trying to to scale Postgres should just rent an Oracle Database instead. [2]
3. There are no approaches to concurrency any better than others. Locks are just as good as actors.
4. Inheritance is a good language feature and languages without it have made a mistake. Exceptions are a great language feature and languages without them have made a big mistake!
5. People should write more desktop apps.
A lot of opinions being posted to this thread are actually quite popular opinions, but I'm sure most/all of the above would be considered obviously stupid by most developers.
[1] https://blog.plan99.net/why-not-capability-languages-a8e6cbd...
And if a person
1. lives in a jurisdiction where the restrictions on the "engineer" label don't apply
2. has a job and the job title in their contract is "software engineer"
what should they do according to you - not use their actual job title out of reverence for the professional standards of people with a different profession in a different country?
I agree that many software developers are not software engineers.
The reason you call people engineers is that they certify/sign off on designs/releases. It's bureaucracy + technical knowledge. For the sake of efficiency they're usually also the ones who create the designs. IME this is what the difference between software developer and software engineer means.
No there's no licensing board, that's probably a good thing IMO, if there was any more policy involved than we already have software would probably be worse.
Also in my state CS grads are allowed to sit for the FE if they want. No one does this of course.
My degree course actually had the option of converting to a BEng from a BSc if you so chose once you'd done your industry year.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37233321
The so-called "software engineer" may not have a university degree. They may have only worked for employers who themselves were college dropouts.
Tradespeople with only a high school education have licensing requirements; they can all themselves professionals. The so-called "software engineer" has no licensing requirements.
Using computers, software and the internet as a Trojan Horse to collect data and provide advertising services, unlike trades and other licensed professions, is mostly unregulated. The behaviour that so-called "software engineers" routinely engage in is the entithesis of professionalism.
HN commenters often express disdain for formal education. Perhaps it is too difficult for them to complete the requirements to become licensed professionals. Generally, liability for use of the "software engineer's" work product, i.e., software, is disclaimed in softwaare licenses or "terms and conditions" attached to websites or mobile apps. The so-called "software engineer" has no meaningful legal responsibility to software users.
How can software today, so-called "modern" software, be so bad and getting worse. Perhaps this is how.
However, "duct tape" is a term that is frequently used to refer to "duck tape", but is surely a misnomer as it's not suitable for use with air ducts (arguably not suitable for use with ducks either) and yet it is waterproof (like a duck).
Duct tape (the non-heat-resistant, flammable type) is in fact used for ducts anyway.