johntdaly · HackerTrans

hace 9 mesesdiscuss

Yes, location is becoming less important but there are differences in locally available talent and money. That’s the main reason incubators are forming in Europe too. If you are in the wrong place you will be starved for money and talent and others can outperform you. That what happened a lot, American companies outperformed European ones and when they needed to expand into Europe they could just buy the companies that are most similar in a few key markets here and expand from there. Being able to grow quickly enough to prevent that is sort of important if we want to own our tech giants.

johntdaly

hace 10 mesesdiscuss

Thank you, this explains it for me. The situation is still stupid tough...

johntdaly

el año pasadodiscuss

1) you need a systems programming language (but not for OS development) that is safe and not too hard to learn

2) you need to run “scripts” but don’t like the hassle of lugging around the dependencies so you go for binaries instead

3) you work on green field cloud projects that run in/on kubernetes

4) you have a team of people that try to use every feature of a language regardless of it it is sensible and need a language that limits them

5) you need to be able to program something that can run in parallel that you can wrap your mind around

That said, I don’t use golang. If you have a hypothetical use for a language you wont get into it, you need a practical use where it makes sense or you will most likely use your preexisting tools because its more comfortable.

johntdaly

hace 2 añosdiscuss

Yea, somewhat disappointing. My mx 3s mouse has problems with the click switches and the mouse isn’t all that old. I’ve also read about others with the problem. I would also like to be able to buy a replacement case for when the rubber starts to come apart. Has not happened on this mouse yet but on all other rubberized mice I’ve had. Replacement key caps for my keyboards would also be nice.

johntdaly

hace 2 añosdiscuss

As somebody working in software startups in Europe, what I’ve seen is a pretty broken system. The companies have a wild west attitude towards sales that leads to irregular contracts unpredictable money flow.

I’ve worked on trying to predict our income based on our contracts and because of a couple of sales people a lot of the contracts where basically inscrutable, we brought two different experts in to “fix” my “failing” just for them to give up and do what I did and predict future income based on billing rather that contracts. That made us less interesting to the more risk shy European investors. It didn’t help that we abused a system that was designed to run an IT shop with because that is what the company started at years earlier.

The other thing is that until you make about 25 million revenue a year nobody is interested in you. To risky, not enough early investment and companies are money strapped. At that point a lot of the companies that come in don’t come in to invest but to buy up the company and those companies are usually American. If you do get investors and those investors are Europeans they are often Vulture investors that prop the company up, make it more presentable and just sell it on to the next investor. In one lucky case the IT startup was bought up by a European company that wasn’t in IT and saw the investment as a way to future proof itself.

The investment for startups and in particular IT startups in Europe is very broken and the companies that benefit from it are often American. It is getting better but I think the US can still snap up European companies for its own growth for the next 10 to 20 years.

johntdaly

hace 2 añosdiscuss

I think those numbers are probably based on source code contributions. I can believe those statistics, what is missing is the why.

Some people just aren’t good programmers. I knew some of those, one turned out to be great at testing instead. Junior programmers, new programmers (to the project/company or language or field) are slow and they might get better. Then you have burnout. There was a story here about a guy that didn’t contribute much because he mentored and pair programmed and did other tasks to make the life of other programmers easy.

There are a lot of good reasons so before you go optimizing on numbers, check the why.

johntdaly

hace 2 añosdiscuss

Now I get your point. That would be a good explanation why the arguments are surface level and regurgitated. This is not really something I want to have to look out for.

johntdaly

hace 2 añosdiscuss

I would guess that Ruby and Python programmers generally know at least some c, c++ and maybe even objective-c. That was the case where I worked. It is also normal enough to install gems with native extensions, if you can’t read gcc or clang compiler errors you won’t get very far.

johntdaly

hace 2 añosdiscuss

Indentation was seriously being used as a point against Python when I came to Ruby and we had lots of DSLs that where indentation based back then. I always felt that do be BS and I think it is meant seriously here too, in this article. I do agree that isn’t an argument I have heard used seriously in a long time tough.

johntdaly

hace 2 añosdiscuss

The argumentation in the article isn’t very good but the Ruby community was never good at selling itself and used similar arguments to the article for years.

The syntax is more elegant. Well yes, but that’s also subjective. Also, the argument doesn’t help LISP to be more popular either.

The indentation argument is old and in my opinion hypocritical (yaml, sass, haml). Also, not getting code you copy and paste from the net to work because of syntax errors based on indentation is the least of the problems in copy and pasting code from the internet.

Selling the larger and more diverse library ecosystem of Python as an advantage for Ruby rather funny. Ruby has good libraries for the web and enough for *NIX scripting but I do wish we had some more stuff to keep up with Python when it comes to math, scientific computing and ML.

I have more fun writing Ruby and that is one of the main reasons I use it. And I think it is an easy enough programming language for a somewhat experienced programmer to pick up. DSLs, meta programming and some other advanced concepts are easy enough to pick up in Ruby and you can figure out the pros and cons for your self quickly. We still have a tradition of fun and quirky projects being done in Ruby. There is a gem to create your own card games and a video on YouTube about somebody building an agi upscaler, that code is in ruby.

My sales pitch would be: “Come join us, we are fun and a bit weird, just like our language. We are also fun at parties!”

johntdaly

hace 2 añosdiscuss

I am a Ruby programmer that came to Ruby as a Python programmer that had do do work mainly in PHP and JavaScript (no jobs in Python where I lived at the time). I sort of liked JavaScript (I know it so well now that I’m ambivalent about JavaScript) and started to really despise PHP (most of the problems I hated back then are gone now but I can’t go back). When I searched for a job that wasn’t PHP or Java based I found a Ruby on Rails job and Ruby really did something for me (and with me). I really liked it and was a bit confounded because I’ve looked into it before and it didn’t do anything for me back then.

Since then I’ve returned to Python for some projects and I find that Python made me better at Ruby and Ruby made me better at Python. JavaScript, Ruby and Python are my main goto languages for scripting and web programming and I think Ruby is getting the short end of the three languages. It deserves better and I think more people, especially web developers and people that need a *NIX scripting language should give it a try.

What I don’t really understand is that we (Ruby programmers) still use indentation for block definition as a reason against Python. Especially since yaml, haml and sass are technologies we helped build and popularize and they are all indentation based. I still agree that Python is the less elegant and more importantly the less fun language.

johntdaly

hace 3 añosdiscuss

I would pretty much remove any sex that doesn’t drive the story in some way and keep it short. You are correct that sex doesn’t hit like it used to hit. I would argue the same for violence and special effects. We’ve seen it all and we’ve seen a lot of it. What we haven’t seen a lot of in some time is good story telling that doesn’t rely on gimmicks.

johntdaly

hace 3 añosdiscuss

I don’t think people mind the sex because of moral. What is bothering me is that I feel they use sex as a filler. To me it is one of the indicators that the story is probably lacking. Sort of like with the old Deathstalker movies where sex was used to try to distract you from how bad the movie was. People get that they are being distracted and react against it.

johntdaly

hace 4 añosdiscuss

I wouldn’t say it is different, but there is a certain amount of stigmatization associated with cheaper cars in richer nations that sort of forces people to pay more than they feel comfortable with to avoid it. And because this sort of thing is going on, most car companies don’t really produce that many cheap cars anymore. In a way, Dacia taking the top position makes sense because they are the only company that focuses on price point. Fiat once produced cheap cars, now they produce “lifestyle” vehicles. VW wanted to become a “premium” brand, worked on that and now it is.

johntdaly

hace 4 añosdiscuss

Honestly most chips in cars won’t have much to do with the infotainment system. One of the first places that chips got added to cars was fuel injection system. Most of the chips in cars are in there to micro optimize the way the engine runs so it runs cleaner and more efficient. That is pretty much why they are roiling back the emission standards because without chips for new cars or spare parts for existing cars those optimizations are going by by.

To your question about security, I’m sure they use microchips for modern braking systems too, so you would loose some security there.

When it comes to price, I don’t think you would win much there either. If you remove chips to make things more affordable you won’t save as much as you might think and have to come up with new solutions to problems that have been solved over the last 30 years with chips. Cheaper cars aren’t really getting produced much because they don’t get bought enough. To many people want to “represent” with their cars and spend more on them because of that. That sort of killed a wider selection of cheaper cars.

johntdaly

hace 4 añosdiscuss

Yes QWERTY works well enough for me, mainly because I’ve been using it for 25 years. (I’ve learned touch typing in school 27 years ago) I often find it harder to find the right key when looking at the keyboard now and my “main” problems are between small differences in keyboard layouts (mac vs pc, QWERTZ vs QWERTY (uk, us, int)).

johntdaly

hace 4 añosdiscuss

The alt keyboard layout thing was once appealing but I’m over it for two reasons.

1) I don’t think it is useful to write faster than I can ‘think’. What I like about writing is that I can hone my thoughts to be sharper than they would in everyday speech by reworking them over and over.

2) I grew up bilingual and learned another language to some degree along the way. Most alt keyboard layouts are optimized towards typing in a specific language and might not be “the best” for me. I am happy enough with an international english layout keyboard that allows me to type any extra character I might need.

This sort of mirrors my view on editors. Good enough now is better than the pursuit of perfection and comfort counts for more than purity.

P.S.: Doom Emacs might be interesting to you

johntdaly

hace 4 añosdiscuss

Vim is more of an investment and I tried to really get into vim over the years but I didn’t. I did get good enough with it to use it when sshing into a server. Sublime just clicked. It worked for me from the start. I bought an IntelliJ license at the same time I got my Sublime license and Sublime just worked so much better for me that I never looked back.

So while you might be right from a “logical” standpoint that learning one editor in and out might be the “better” choice, you overlook that I “feel” way more comfortable in Sublime Text and that matters way more for something you use on a daily bases.

johntdaly

hace 4 añosdiscuss

I used mainly Sublime Text the last years and I know enough vim that it is the most comfortable editor for me on the linux command line. I currently also use Visual Studio Code because my coworkers use it and next month when I switch Jobs I am expected to use IntelliJ.

Using Sublime as my main editor was my choice.

Using vim as my main editor on the linux command line was practical, since it is the default.

Using Visual Studio Code or IntelliJ is a choice that my employer makes for me.

We have so many editors because computers are old and we condensed the number of mainstream operating systems down significantly from what is was in the past so now people that came in contact with various editor traditions are trying to bring those features together in new text editors.

johntdaly

hace 4 añosdiscuss

If I remember correctly we got the weekends we where on call payed like normal work days, adding 2 days a month per dev (4 or 5 of us doing the work and rotated through) if something happened or not. After work incidences during the week where not compensated.

Things didn’t usually escalate, the type of people that called during that time would call during that time anyway. One Project manager abused the system to force us to work on the weekend to get her project done quicker.

I honestly don’t think I would do on call again. It bit into my private time and not even for the type of things I should have been on call for. Some project managers looked at it as “if we pay him anyway, might as well make him work” that in combination with “we pay you only two days more because you are probably not going to work on those days anyway” was a bad deal.

To do something like on call again I would want:

1) Payment for the time if they use it or not (because I can’t plan that time freely)

2) Double payment for the time they do use (this is mainly to prevent them from abusing the system)

3) Extra days off (to compensate for the time I can’t fully relax)

4) Make sure they have a pool of people on call so that I can switch for personal emergencies (death in the family and so on)

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