bmhin (u/bmhin) - Readit News

bmhin commented on Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts macrumors.com/2023/06/15/... · Posted by u/stalfosknight

brucethemoose2 · 2 years ago

Discord, where everything will be siloed off and then enshittified again :(

bmhin · 2 years ago

That is my prediction as well. It's unfortunate as we'll enter the unindexed web where all that helpful content you can find by appending "reddit" onto any search will no longer be getting produced. All of it hidden in discords, out of sight.

Who knows, maybe there will be an easy way to get stuff published out to the proper web. Things like community FAQs or guides that would be broadly of use. I think the loss of the conversations about minutiae will just be a fact though if that migration happens.

bmhin commented on Some WFH employees now live in another country vice.com/en/article/4ax4g... · Posted by u/ghuntley

galangalalgol · 3 years ago

For countries they have visas to go on, but moving between states or within the eu zone, how would they even know? If I have a po box or perhaps even a street address in WA or TX (no state income tax) but live in an airbnb somewhere in CA, how can the state figure it out? The employer probably can't either since you could run their vpn over your vpn.

bmhin · 3 years ago

I mean, taxes are a real thing and you have to pay them based on where you (the employee) live and do work. In the US for state income tax, it's a confusing mix of both lived location and worked location in various amounts by governments with a "claim" and with plenty of exceptions to go around. Consulting companies have had to deal with it forever (and states have "handled" forever), because you live in Miami, doing work for a company based in LA, and you travel to your client in NYC for 3 days a week for the whole year (60% of your income "generated" there). This is now a complicated Florida, New York, California scenario.

So the choice isn't Big Brother companies who want to know where you are at all times and respectful companies who allow you to get your work done how you want. It's between companies who are following the applicable tax laws or those who are not. A company that is structurally opting to not follow laws seems untenable. A company is a legal construct in many ways. Whether or not the employee can commit something like tax fraud is perhaps a less interesting question, because, yeah, you can probably cheat on your taxes.

bmhin commented on Elixir – Phoenix LiveView Native native.live... · Posted by u/lefrenchy

veg · 3 years ago

Have led multiple teams on Elixir projects across a few companies. And while I still love the projects, the community just isn't there anymore.

I hope this project sparks some renewed interest in Elixir!

(That said, the linked site has basically zero information or examples)

bmhin · 3 years ago

Elixir was one of the few languages I saw in companies (albeit, infrequently) that wasn't like Java, C#, Python, or JS (Scala here and there). Was always curious about it as perhaps something that could be reasonably pitched as having some nominal uptake.

Pure anecdata there also. Literally just ones I have personally seen on clients or heard about from coworkers.

bmhin commented on On Corpspeak goodreason.substack.com/p... · Posted by u/signa11

bmhin · 3 years ago

> Maybe it bothers me that using ask as a noun is passive voice, like the request is disembodied. I'm not asking, the ask just appeared there!

I think the latter is the key to corpspeak as a whole and it has ramifications beyond just stripped emotion. It always erases causality from the communication. Everything is just "appearing" with no thought to how or why things are the way they are. Businesses are really, really bad about asking "Why?" at times and this kind of language reinforces that. There is no "Why?", things just materialize into existence and are and you (have to) deal with them.

The emotion part makes sense, because often the answer to a "Why?" is because someone has made a mistake or done something dumb and it provides cover. However, it also leads to rote, wasteful, inefficient behaviors. It doesn't necessitate that there is no reason "why" things are being done, but it does mean that a reason isn't required either.

"Why are we having this sync meeting?" "Well, to sync of course!"

bmhin commented on Naming microservices needs to be trivial, not cryptic (2018) theiconic.tech/naming-you... · Posted by u/arthurjj

stevebmark · 3 years ago

AirBnB doesn't allow you to name microservices descriptively. It makes sense because it doesn't scale. After the 10th "SMS Service" is created, no one knows what any of them do. And that's kind of the point of microservices, you have lots of them. It's inevitable there will be overlapping functionality.

There's plenty of other reasons too.

Silly names are fine, it takes just as much time to learn what "Ernest" does as it takes to learn what "shipping" does. For both services, there's 30 seconds of learning, and then everyone knows what both names mean.

The anti-silly-service name dogma is misguided.

bmhin · 3 years ago

> After the 10th "SMS Service" is created, no one knows what any of them do

Yeah, that's always been my concern. "Descriptive" is a very precarious strategy because it takes very little to go from maybe descriptive to generic and confusing. Multiple variations of the same "descriptive" name are another common issue. I see often a lot of very similar named services that are the bane of naming in my opinion. Someone made a User Management Layer and then someone else made a Person Data Service and next thing you know you see a User Data Service and now it's just confusing. Factor in that each one of those things gets called the UML, PDS, and UDS and it just gets worse (did I mention they each connect to the Person/User Data Store/base).

bmhin commented on Ask HN: Experiences with low-code systems? · Posted by u/alphalima

bmhin · 3 years ago

It's hard to think about because I feel like when they work I don't think about them at all. And when they don't work I think about and stew about them excessively. So the good cases I forget about completely and the bad ones are stuck in my memory.

SDLC is a frequent pain point. Often non-existent or hacky, e.g. export this giant XML doc and you can re-import it if needed. If any step requires clicking on buttons it generally leads to that kinda pain. Almost fundamentally, if I need to go copy paste or click on something for the product to work, I won't be able to automate it. Hence, it needs to be completely automatable. Similarly, if the config / set up / customization one does is obfuscated after it is specified it can be a headache to try to work around. Also maybe not the end of the world but many also decide to "handle" version control on your behalf, which can maybe be fine, but will also then almost by definition be divorced for your usual approach and processes.

On the last question, I think this boils down to how well can one operate at the surface level. It is not uncommon in these low code apps to have to understand in detail what is happening below the hood. So yeah, the top layer abstraction might be very simple in practice, but if working with it frequently necessitates me knowing how that abstraction will be executing it leads to an extra layer of complexity that has not abstracted anything. In a way they often function like a second language going through a translator: if I have to be considering the Spanish version the no-code cares about and also how and what it will be translated to in English under the hood, it's just extra confusing for perhaps little gain. What makes it extra pernicious is you can be operating entirely off intuition for what that under the hood English really is, rather than some open spec you can at least drill into.

Worst part here is I feel like this is really often something that will come with using the product. Often the use cases documented and sold really seem like all you'll need.

bmhin commented on Collaborate with kindness: Etiquette tips in Slack slack.com/intl/en-gb/blog... · Posted by u/sendilkumarn

commandlinefan · 3 years ago

> Never send a direct message that just says “hey” or “hello.”

I first started hearing people suggest this recently (within the past month or so). I never really understood why these message bothered people so much - they never bothered me and always actually seemed a bit more polite than just barreling forward with a question. But I guess if even Slack themselves are saying don't do that, it must really get on other people's nerves.

bmhin · 3 years ago

It likely depends on the broad culture behind it. If someone sends a "Hey" and then is a fast enough typer and immediately can get the context going as I look, that's not a huge deal. Sometimes it's an opening to a more synchronous conversation and then it's less of a big deal because we're gonna be going back and forth with quick messages. Part of the irritation is you can still just always open a message with "Hey, something something something" and keep it all in one.

The problem is people who send a lone "Hey" and then... nothing.

Some will wait for you to say respond with your own greeting (which is all you can respond with because you don't know what you're even talking about yet). Other's don't wait but do delay and the initial greeting was just a warning or something that a "real" message is incoming. I've had folks ping me the "Hey" and then I respond immediately with a "Hey" (to stave off the above "permission to speak" people) and they get distracted and say nothing else for 10 minutes.

Some will message you while you're busy, so you don't respond to their "Hi". You then respond to it a half hour later with the only thing you can say to that contextless message: "Hey, what's up?". Only now maybe they are busy, and they respond again to you a half hour after that. You've had a conversation "opening" for an hour for what purpose?

Some will immediately begin typing out a gigantic block of text and you are sitting there waiting while the "XX is typing" message unwaveringly sits at the bottom. Bonus points here if they were editing and revising as they went and you get an eight word sentence after what appeared to be 3 minutes of continuous typing.

Some will do all of those things so you end up having your attention taken multiple times for minutes at a time for a message that realistically might take you a couple seconds to read, parse, and respond to if it had been sent all at once.

bmhin commented on I have quit my job bitspook.in/blog/i-have-q... · Posted by u/bitspook

falcolas · 3 years ago

> What money is the US spending in order to worsen it's own citizens basic needs?

Here's one that bugs me occasionally:

Gatekeeping who is allowed to benefit from societal help. Welfare, specifically. There's so much bureaucracy around identifying who gets welfare and who does not (not to mention the identification and enforcement of the "no" people who find ways to get the money regardless) that it takes a legion of employees to manage.

bmhin · 3 years ago

Even more relevant to the question: it introduces complexity that harms citizen's basic needs by putting in place knowledge inequities. You can make the tax code as complicated as you want, and the hyper wealthy will still be able to pay for people to understand it and squeeze out every drop of value because the absolute amount of money in play makes it feasible. Spending $200k to "save" $1million is a good deal. That's maybe a couple full time employees. If you wanted to save $100 instead, throwing $20 at is isn't gonna get you anything.

So all those people who can't "subcontract" their way through the complexity with specialists are left to their own devices. And they don't have the time or expertise to navigate it themselves. So the tests and checks and processes and discoverability weeds out deserving people constantly just in the hopes of preventing some "undeservings" from having access.

It'd be like writing an algorithm and every branch of logic you put in you have to do a random roll and throw an exception some percentage of the time. Each new branch compounding to filter more and more while also costing more and more to facilitate. But that execution reality is ignored so that the pure logic can be focused on in a vacuum.

It's all like the opposite of Blackstone's ratio regarding crime that "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer". Social programs are designed such that they would often rather let ten innocent people suffer than one guilty person benefit.