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Saved by @zmbnski

A thread on HN about bad code in legacy projects both makes me think how little we've learned as a discipline over the years and, honestly, how little credit we give ourselves for some pretty major

 Fun going down this list and thinking: "Hmm, plausible at a well-run modern software shop", "Hmm, possible, but requires implausible tradeoffs", "Literally disallowed by languages", and "If you were to attempt doing that our test suite wouldn't let you merge."
I think we as an industry celebrate (not quite the right word) failure too much and don't celebrate success nearly enough. There is no DailyWTF for competent execution, word of which generally stays pretty local to the source while incompetence passes into legend.
Alrighty let me try to thread the needle on being the change I want to see in the world while not giving away anything that will get me in trouble:
Ruby has wonderful developer ergonomics. Typed languages are easier for machines to guarantee the correctness of. We built a type checker for Ruby (and I believe it is slated for OSS release sometime).

c.f. https://t.co/S5XIDxFUrH
We have an infrastructure at work which allows one to specify an invariant about not just code but e.g. objects or the environment and then have a range of response options if that invariant changes.

(Parallel evolution of code: I wrote a less-well-specified one at last gig.)
Git, continuous integration, and workflow-driven mandatory code reviews are all younger that the Joel Test, at least insofar as them being common features of median-sophistication engineering shops.
It is not astonishing to start a new engineering job in 2018 and have a developer environment which reasonably approximates the production environment available on one's laptop or tested, repeatable ways to spin up and spin down a new server w/o "build it by hand."
It is highly likely that a service which is hard down learns of that fact faster than Twitter can apprise them of it, assuming that service is operated in a professional fashion.

At risk of stating the obvious: this is a relatively novel development.
The industry has decisively adopted:

* a single, common encoding for almost all human languages
* a single, parseable, human-readable data interchange format
* a default protocol for information transport
You can round to "Any new application talking to any application written by a competent team in last 10 years will be talking to it over an encrypted link which neither side had to think deeply about because the technology is reliable, ubiquitous, and uncontroversially legal."
While it's not literally the case that you could replicate an entire modern software company's deployment for zero dollars in software licenses, that can almost round to true, due to the pervasive use of OSS.

This is very good for learners.
You can get a full development environment capable of doing Hello World spun up in your well-supported language of choice in, almost certainly, less than ten minutes of effort (contingent on you using a Mac, sadly).
The majority case for libraries, APIs, and file formats of interest to you will overwhelmingly be "If you Google the thing you want you get exactly what you need very, very quickly."

More from Patrick McKenzie

Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
The payments wars in Japan are heating up and one of the battlegrounds is convenience store coffee.

“Coffee? What does that have to do with payments?” I’m glad you asked.

Convenience stores are low net margin businesses, which sell some high gross margin goods/services but a lot of low ones, and have high fixed costs and a low ticket size. The typical transaction is under 500 yen ($5) and many are about $1.

They need repeat custom.

A few years ago, all of the chains had a good idea for increasing frequency of use: make a minor capital investment in automatic coffee machines. Sell access to them for the price of a cup / ice; customers self-serve with the machine.

The price point is $1 to about $2.

Coffee quickly became one of the most frequently repurchased items at convenience stores, in no small part because it’s the one thing they can sell which is phameceutically habit forming but totally unregulated. (Just telling it like it is.)

But the coffee is not very defensible

The problem, such that it is, is that competing chains are everywhere and *all* of them serve Thoroughly Adequate Coffee at similar prices, so you’re back into the brutal economics of “Who is 3 meters closer to 40 customers at 1 office?”

Enter payment apps.
FINANCE
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
My friends @robwalling and @einarvollset just launched TinySeed, an accelerator for software companies where a successful outcome is a healthy, sustainable business rather than attempting to ride the rocketship trajectory. https://t.co/LSHqZNcVid

I have some thoughts:

As somebody who bootstrapped ~4 companies, I feel like I had to make some clearly suboptimal decisions early in them for lack of what is, in hindsight, not all that much money. But there's a huge gap in the product space for investment options.

It's weird: you can get $25k from Amex trivially, and angels are very willing to write a check for that much, but you have to make representations about your goals/ambitions/market/etc which don't really apply to everyone.

And so you see the traditional angel/VC ecosystem fund companies where honestly the returns are probably not there, and this is knowable pretty early, but the chase of them will wreck what could have been a perfectly happy business.

(To make the math work for traditional VCs the company has to at least have a market-appropriate shot of $100 million a year. There are a lot more $10 million a year companies than $100 million a year companies. That is *not* a bad terminal outcome for founders/employees.)
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Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
FAQ: “How do I get better at writing?”
Me: Write a million words.
Follow up: “Hah but seriously.”
Me: Start with 20,000 words. Everyone gets to that 50 times in their first million.
Follow up: “No seriously.”
Me: Nobody expects 10 Quick Tips To Play Violin At Carnegie Hall.

The Internet is so much better at teaching writing than the traditional educational system principally because it removes an artificial and limiting constraint on output imposed by ability of gatekeepers’ limited time to evaluate output.

(Interestingly in fields where we actually care about performance we’re good at encouraging students to practice when no one is watching but for writing we basically assume all the value is created by the teacher-minute of attention. Teacher-minutes are scarce and rationed.)

If you ever want to be deeply, deeply disillusioned about the state of the world, compare what we do where we care about output quality and what we do where we don’t, and which domains sort into which column by revealed preference.
WRITING
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
Most software founders, particularly in B2B, need to get radically better at sales. @Steli , who is the best person for explaining the scrappy stages in the beginning and then building out a team with scripts and processes, wrote a guide to:

For technical founders it is irrationally, obscenely hard to reverse years of programming (ba dum bum) that sales is a value-destroying activity. Sales is CLEARLY a value-creating activity, contingent on you have a value-creating product.

The world will not drop what they are doing to adopt your work. This is particularly true in B2B, where simply building a better mousetrap won't overcome the activation energy required to get people with additional non-mice problems to prioritize changing mousetraps today.

This is very non-obvious for founders because founders are not often people who *want* to be sold to. We often come from a background where trying out tools is a bit of a fun hobby. We like looking at all the options, making charts, and ripping out partially complete tests.

"This week I unsuccessfully trialed four software options for automating that thing that has been killing us. Our actual production process remains the same as last week. Don't worry; this was a great use of time." is not a thing you want to write in a progress report to manager.
TECH
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
There are a *lot* of software shops in the world that would far rather have one more technical dependency than they'd like to pay for one of their 20 engineers to become the company's SPOF expert on the joys of e.g. HTTP file uploads, CSV parsing bugs, PDF generation, etc.


Every year at MicroConf I get surprised-not-surprised by the number of people I meet who are running "Does one thing reasonably well, ranks well for it, pulls down a full-time dev salary" out of a fun side project which obviates a frequent 1~5 engineer-day sprint horizontally.

"Who is the prototypical client here?"

A consulting shop delivering a $X00k engagement for an internal system, a SaaS company doing something custom for a large client or internally facing or deeply non-core to their business, etc.

(I feel like many of these businesses are good answers to the "how would you monetize OSS to make it sustainable?" fashion, since they often wrap a core OSS offering in the assorted infrastructure which makes it easily consumable.)

"But don't the customers get subscription fatigue?"

I think subscription fatigue is far more reported by people who are embarrassed to charge money for software than it is experienced by for-profit businesses, who don't seem to have gotten pay-biweekly-for-services fatigue.
STARTUPS

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foone
foone
@Foone
you know how Atari called the Jaguar as a "64bit system", because it had two 32bit CPUs? (or because it had a 64bit bus, but let's not worry about that)
we should apply that logic to the current generation of consoles.
So the Switch is a 256bit console. It's the Nintendo 256.

The Xbox Series X? terrible name.
Better call it the "Xbox 512 Blu-ray".
like the Jaguar CD, the Sega CD... the good old days when consoles had their media type in the name.

Boringly the PS5 is also a Playstation 512 Blu-ray, because both of them are using the same AMD Zen 2 CPU.

The Switch one is weeeird. It's built on an Nvidia Tegra X1, which is an 8 core 64-bit CPU, so that should be 512, right?

Well... no. Four of them can't be used. And later documentation doesn't even mention them.

it's some weird system where the system-on-a-chip has four Cortex-A57 cores and four Cortex-A53 cores but only the A57s are usable?
TECH
Josh Constine
Josh Constine
@JoshConstine
Facebook lost another 1 million daily users in Europe and stayed flat in North America as scandals and low engagement with teens come back to bite its business https://t.co/O7tfyIw7Fd tip @Techmeme


Facebook still added 37M monthly & 24M daily users thanks to big gains in the Asia-Pacific region, but those users earn it 1/10th as much as US/Can users


The real story dragging on Facebook's share price is that yearly revenue growth has fallen from 59% 2 years ago to 33% today. It's run out of lucrative Western users and News Feed ad space.


Let's remember that Facebook doubled its security staff & cut back on viral videos/clickbait. That drags on its profits & revenue, but are crucial to society. And while Twitter shares soar, it has made no such commitments to fighting harassment & misinfo.
TECH
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Novid Houellebecq (That's Hollaback)
Novid Houellebecq (Tha...
@GarouGothic
Ok, here is a thread for you.
What happens when you have:
Netflix
Apple
Amazon
WarnerMedia +
Disney+
SonyCrackle (Reboot)
Verizon All Access (after they buy CBS/Viacom)
UniversalSkyMedia
By 2021
Answer? Internet Slows To A Craw and Dies.
Why?
Bandwidth.

Netflix's gets 35% of all internet traffic.
Now we all know Apple Coming to Netflix Corner.
We know that WarnerMedia Planning One
We Know about Disney+
Now how will the net handle 8 Streaming Platforms all at once?
Answer - IT CANT.

But Novid, the speed, the 4K the all everything?
NOOOOO BUDDY.
Even if you could do it and even if AWS ran six million clouds, The Net Will still slow to a crawl. 35%, goes to nearly 90% if any of the 8 or all of the 8 eat at netflix's numbers.

Oh, they wouldn't be running at once.
FOOL. You forget how bad things were when game of thrones season premieres came around. HBO SERVERS FALL DOWN GO BOOM!

Now see if a season like 2021 come around and they air shows on a same day. It gets crazy. AT&T and others gonna realize they cant build out forever. Something will give and it might be your entertainment consumption big time.
TECH
Lea Kissner
Lea Kissner
@LeaKissner
We're kicking off the Privacy Tech session at #enigma2021 with Mitch Negus speaking about "NO DATA, NO PROBLEM—GIVING NUCLEAR INSPECTORS BETTER TOOLS WITHOUT REVEALING STATE

A nuclear catastrophe hasn't occurred... yet. So we need to stay vigilant. Nuclear inspectors go in according to treaties to check what's going on and check compliance with treaty rules.

But as sophisticated analytics become more common, states will only want to share the minimum amount of information necessary under the treaty.

But perhaps we can use MPC -- secure multi-party computation

Yao's garbled circuits were first demonstrated on the millionaire's problem -- figuring out who's richer without revealing actual amounts.

Used for other things like cryptocurrency these days.

Can we use this for nuclear inspection?

MPC can be used to compute anything computed by a computer [but it's expensive!]
TECH
Tagir Valeev
Tagir Valeev
@tagir_valeev
Ever wondered how the JVM debugger 'Evaluate' feature works in IDEs? Long ago I thought that the Java debug interface (JDI) actually allows you to specify the expression and get back its value.


However, this is not quite possible: there's no Java language compiler inside the JVM. When the process is paused JDI allows you to read or write any variables and fields or even execute an existing method with given arguments. But nothing like addition or multiplication.

On the other hand, #IntelliJIDEA debugger allows you to evaluate even statements! You can write there `for`, `if`, `while`, `switch` - whatever. You can even declare local variables. So how this works?


The answer is simple: IDEA debugger has a built-in interpreter for Java! If you access an existing variable or a field, call a method or instantiate an object, it queries JDI. Otherwise, IDE itself does all the calculations.

The amusing thing is that debugger authors didn't bother to make it as strict as Java itself, so the language inside the interpreter is a much more permissive version of Java. For example, you don't need to initialize variables there! Default values like 0 are used automatically.
TECH

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A lot of people don't understand that Trump & his incoming team didn't face a normal transition period, like it was over a in a matter of a few weeks or months.

The DOJ transition period JUST ENDED when Sessions left. Almost 2 exact years to get it there.

Pompeo at the CIA took over a year before he was done and ready to shift over to the State Department.

All kinds of stuff has been going on behind the scenes nobody leaks or talks about.

We only had the barest mention of the fact the Clinton Email investigation restarted

Nobody leaked in a year that Huber was deep diving into the Clinton Foundation.
Keep that in mind as all the usual suspects continue to INSIST nothing is happening/going to happen.
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🌿𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝒔𝒕𝒐𝒓𝒚 𝒐𝒇 𝒂 𝑺𝒕𝒂𝒓 : 𝑫𝒉𝒓𝒖𝒗𝒂 & 𝑽𝒊𝒔𝒉𝒏𝒖

Once upon a time there was a Raja named Uttānapāda born of Svayambhuva Manu,1st man on earth.He had 2 beautiful wives - Suniti & Suruchi & two sons were born of them Dhruva & Uttama respectively.
#talesofkrishna https://t.co/E85MTPkF9W


Now Suniti was the daughter of a tribal chief while Suruchi was the daughter of a rich king. Hence Suruchi was always favored the most by Raja while Suniti was ignored. But while Suniti was gentle & kind hearted by nature Suruchi was venomous inside.
#KrishnaLeela


The story is of a time when ideally the eldest son of the king becomes the heir to the throne. Hence the sinhasan of the Raja belonged to Dhruva.This is why Suruchi who was the 2nd wife nourished poison in her heart for Dhruva as she knew her son will never get the throne.


One day when Dhruva was just 5 years old he went on to sit on his father's lap. Suruchi, the jealous queen, got enraged and shoved him away from Raja as she never wanted Raja to shower Dhruva with his fatherly affection.


Dhruva protested questioning his step mother "why can't i sit on my own father's lap?" A furious Suruchi berated him saying "only God can allow him that privilege. Go ask him"
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The Eye of Horus. 1/*


I believe that @ripple_crippler and @looP_rM311_7211 are the same person. I know, nobody believes that. 2/*

Today I want to prove that Mr Pool smile faces mean XRP and price increase. In Ripple_Crippler, previous to Mr Pool existence, smile faces were frequent. They were very similar to the ones Mr Pool posts. The eyes also were usually a couple of "x", in fact, XRP logo. 3/*


The smile XRP-eyed face also appears related to the Moon. XRP going to the Moon. 4/*


And smile XRP-eyed faces also appear related to Egypt. In particular, to the Eye of Horus. https://t.co/i4rRzuQ0gZ 5/*
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Full technical analysis courses in one thread 🧵

For free which is Worth ₹80k 👇

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You must watch full video 🎥
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Jaya_Upadhyaya
Jaya_Upadhyaya
@Jayalko1
AHOBILAM NARASIMHA SWAMY KSHETRAM: KURNOOL (AP)
#andhratemples

Ahobilam is the place where Prabhu appears in his fierce form, called Ugra Narasimha, who is Svayambhu (self-manifest).
Ahobilam is one of the 108 Divya Desams. It has 9 shrines for different forms of Narsimha.


Ahobilam was the exact place where Sri Narasimha appeared and tore apart Hiranyakashipu to save Prahlad. At that moment, all the Devas appeared and praised him as Ahobala (Aho is mighty and bala is strength). So the place came to be called Ahobilam.


Out of the 9 shrines, most famous is the Ahobila Narasimha Swamy where Prabhu is seen as Ugra Narasimha.
In another shrine, Prabhu appears as Malola Narasimha Swamy. Malola means beloved of Lakshmi. Here Prabhu is in peaceful mudra with his consort Ma ChenchuLakshmi.


Jwala Narasimha Swamy shrine is the actual spot where the fierce anger of Prabhu reached its culmination when he tore Hiranyakasipu.

Ugra Stambham is the pillar from which Narasimha appeared with such force that the entire hill split into two.
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