dcastonguay (u/dcastonguay)

dcastonguay commented on I forced every engineer to take sales calls and they rewrote our platform old.reddit.com/r/Entrepre... · Posted by u/bilsbie

dcastonguay · 3 days ago

> At the end of it, they were sketching a completely different architecture without my "PMing". Because they finally understood who was actually using our product.

I cannot help but read this whole experience as: “We forced an engineer to take sales calls and we found out that the issue was that our PMs are doing a terrible job communicating between customer and engineering, and our DevOps engineer is more capable/actionable at turning customer needs into working solutions.”

dcastonguay commented on Developer Philosophy qntm.org/devphilo... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

dcastonguay · 7 months ago

Some of these items were such elegant distillations of my thoughts and feelings that it made me laugh when I read them. To the author: thank you so much for sharing this wisdom.

The only thing that I've found difficult to reconcile is the push and pull between those that think they're fighting the "you are 90% done" fight and those who think they're fighting the "think about pathological data" fight. Essentially, I've personally found the clash between speed and preparedness/safety to be a difficult one to solve.

dcastonguay commented on Cellebrite asks cops to keep its technology secret techcrunch.com/2023/08/19... · Posted by u/pg_1234

sneak · 2 years ago

It's funny to me that Apple and the FBI coordinated to spin the whole iPhone decryption thing in the media after the San Bernardino shooting as Apple vs FBI (while in reality the FBI had all the access to all the data they wanted, via iCloud, via an encryption backdoor that Apple explicitly preserved for them).

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv...

Now Apple no doubt would love to do some RE on these devices to identify and patch any exploits they use, and many of the local PDs that can get Cellebrite to sell them these boxes probably will abide by these terms, having previously been convinced via Apple/FBI propaganda that Apple is opposed to cooperating with law enforcement.

It's a little bit funny, but I think Apple security will win out in the long run as it only takes one instance of a leak for Apple to patch a vulnerability, and they do have a lot of money (and the cooperation of the FBI/DHS et al). The text of the training quoted in the article makes it seem that Cellebrite knows they are fighting an ultimately losing battle there, as information never becomes more secret over time, only less so.

dcastonguay · 2 years ago

IIRC that's not how any of it went down. The authorities wanted access to the device itself and were asking for a "good guys only" backdoor into the device to obtain anything that might not have been in the iCloud backup; Apple refused to do this and that is where the controversy / news story came from.

Apple was very open about the fact that law enforcement would have access to the iCloud backup, which is even mentioned in the article you provided. And there was no "backdoor explicitly preserved" for the FBI, the iCloud backup was just not e2ee. This was also (somewhat) common knowledge at the time and what was often suggested was to do backups through iTunes because there was still an option available to encrypt the backup.

dcastonguay commented on Slack’s biggest redesign ever tries to tame the chaos of your workday theverge.com/2023/8/9/238... · Posted by u/rpgbr

dcastonguay · 2 years ago

Regarding the rollout, this is from the bottom of their official blog post:

> Starting today, the new user experience will begin rolling out to new teams, and will reach our existing users over the coming months.

https://slack.com/blog/productivity/a-redesigned-slack-built...

dcastonguay commented on Ask HN: What’s a good laptop for software development at around $2k? · Posted by u/kellogs_aran

rootusrootus · 3 years ago

> Why Mac seems to attract so fanatic behavior?

That is a good question. But ...

> They seem to want to push everyone to use Mac, like religious fanatics try to push everyone to their "truth".

As soon as you can adequately explain why there are people that are vehemently anti-Apple, you will have the answer to this question. You make it sound like it's only pro-Apple people that are fanatics.

dcastonguay · 3 years ago

I think there are actually two questions here:

1. Why do some people seem to be so fanatical about their love for Macs?

2. Why do some people seem to be so vocally fanatical online about their love for Macs?

As far as #1 goes, I think it's just about finding something that you have to use every day that you are much happier with. I have found small pieces of software that have made me jump for joy simply because they resolved a small problem; it's not hard to understand why someone would become so fanatical about switching to a a completely new piece of hardware and OS that they feel works so much better than what they were previously using.

I used to have long and aggressive arguments with my college roommate about why Windows was superior to OS X and said that I would never even consider owning an Apple product. I've been using a Mac now for work and personal use for a little over a decade and I dread every time I need to use my Windows machine for certain work tasks.

I think this is perfectly understandable and I don't think there's anything wrong with people going through the process of finding something that changes the way they do something major in their lives.

#2, however, tends to be more unpleasant when it becomes vitriolic/persistent. I think this is just a symptom of the happiness that exists from feeling like you've found the greener grass (and wanting to share that with others) mixed with an inability to understand the negative aspects of aggressively stating to complete strangers that the preferences of others are objectively wrong. I think this is inevitable considering the Mac is still considered the "alternate" option for some reason, and it's paired (inevitably) with those that feel that the fanaticism for the alternate option is unwarranted.

I think the tech sector has always attracted both skeptics and idealists/innovators, and that's bound to create an environment where you'll have groups that feel like it's their duty to inform others of what they feel is the better way and groups of people that feel like it's their duty to temper unwarranted fanaticism.

dcastonguay commented on Game “While true: learn()” for free in Epic Store epicgames.com/store/en-US... · Posted by u/freemint

fonix · 4 years ago

What is with people and not wanting to install EGS on their pcs? Is it just the hip thing to do, they've seen it plastered all over reddit so they've decided to jump on board? It's another game store... they have 1-2 free games every single week, and they're not junk games. Get the free games on the website and when you come around to installing it someday you'll have a huge library. There was backlash against Steam when it first came out too, look now.

dcastonguay · 4 years ago

For me it’s just because I don’t want another piece of software on my machine that adds essentially no value on its own running in the background that I also have to manage to ensure that it’s not running in the background when I don’t want it to.

I’m resistant (and I think this is the case with others as well) to the idea that games must exist inside of their creator’s special portal; it’s a level of abstraction that I wish did not exist. Every modern desktop OS has some way of directly installing applications and many of them also provide their own stores (Mac App Store, Windows Store, etc.). The only thing “game store competition” is doing is creating a “now you have [x] standards” problem where the pitch of “all your games are located in one place” ends up becoming “all your games are in a bunch of places which you’ll be able to access after you’ve installed several different applications”.

dcastonguay commented on Mise-en-place for knowledge workers fortelabs.co/blog/mise-en... · Posted by u/ingve

kortilla · 4 years ago

> Either redefine the project

This is why the analogy is shit. “Redefining the project” as done when it was 95% there is the same thing as it being good enough.

dcastonguay · 4 years ago

This isn't my understand of what the parent commenter is trying to communicate. I think the point that they're trying to make is this:

A chef could originally decide that a dish is only complete if it is garnished with a terribly rare ingredient that costs an enormous amount of money; this would be analogous to a dev team lead deciding that a new feature will only be considered complete if it covers non-primary use cases or specific pieces of functionality that will add a substantial amount of time to the overall development estimate.

The parent comment is saying that defining that 100% is part of what will impact your possibility/rate of success or failure; the 100% is not predefined or intrinsic, it's a place in time / level of progress that you need to carefully define. If rarity and cost keep you from obtaining the "finishing" ingredient 80% of the time that you make the dish then you're setting yourself up for failure. If you define the feature as only being finished when it covers nearly every sub-feature you can think of then you're setting yourself up for failure.

There also seem to be analogies between quantity and quality. You can get 80% of the way through a feature and decide it's "good enough". The leftover 20% could either be bugs that needed to be fixed or additional features. I don't think leaving out some additional features would be considered skipping the "finishing" phase, but leaving serious unresolved bugs almost definitely would be. An undercooked dish is nearly useless, but one missing a garnish is not.

dcastonguay commented on The Lightness of Windows stratechery.com/2021/the-... · Posted by u/ingve

gjsman-1000 · 4 years ago

Calling the presentation "playful and light" is not how I, or most of the internet, would describe it. The presenters felt like they were on the verge of tears, it was strangely off-putting, and the corporate emotion in the presentation was cringeworthy. And that's if you could even watch it without the stream crashing.

dcastonguay · 4 years ago

I enjoy watching Apple's keynotes with the presenters delivering extremely polished and scripted rundowns of each new product and feature; they come across as having tailored their emotions to fit the desired tone of the presentation. It's very different to me from the way that Panos comes across when he presents things.

I must be in the minority here, but I actually find it very refreshing to watch him speak in these sorts of events. I'm guessing that you are mostly talking about Panos when you mention that "presenters felt like they were on the verge of tears" since the other presenters seemed to me much more relaxed and "normal", for lack of a better term. From my own perspective he comes across as genuinely being excited about the work they're doing and doesn't seem to have a problem falling into his own rhythm while presenting.

Intellirogue's comment mentioning his facial expressions also made me realize that his presentation style might just be closer to what I see in myself; I find myself in situations quite frequently where I am genuinely excited about something and those around me think that I'm feigning excitement. Whether or not his delivery style is universally more palatable to people, I personally feel more connected to it and there is something about it that ends up coming across to me as more relatable and sincere.

I also think it might be a positive thing for us to leave open the possibility that some of these execs are as passionate about these things as anyone on HN would want them to be. I would love to have people at Microsoft and Apple and Google creating things that they feel are so incredible that they're on the verge of tears.

dcastonguay commented on In the Name of Equity, California Will Discourage Students Gifted at Math reason.com/2021/05/04/cal... · Posted by u/mhb

dcastonguay · 4 years ago

This proposal seems to me like it's centered around a false dichotomy:

- Acknowledge the presence of natural talent, put naturally talented kids into advanced levels of math, and create inequity.

- Denounce the belief in natural talent, keep all kids at one level of learning, and help resolve inequity issues.

It doesn't seem to leave any space for kids who are just more interested in math or more dedicated to their pursuit of mastering it, as well as kids who have little to no interest in math and are not as dedicated to their pursuit of mastering it. I can't see the potential gains of this proposal outweighing the results of stifling the ability of many kids to explore the areas of academia that they're interested in. Isn't that one of the most beneficial aspects of the learning experience?

dcastonguay commented on Budgie Is Worth a Try rentry.co/9nxds... · Posted by u/thastings

ragnese · 5 years ago

A couple of people are here mentioning bugs they've encountered, etc. So I'm responding with them in mind (not necessarily arguing with or against them).

I had grown increasingly pessimistic with my personal computing choices. I'm into the philosophy of truly owning and controlling my stuff, so I run free operating systems exclusively on my personal machines, including my phone (to the extent that it's possible with the firmware blobs, etc).

But all Linux desktops are pretty rough around the edges. It really disappointed me that I've never had a Linux machine that just worked perfectly. It was always something- xmodmap would just stop working in Plasma, settings wouldn't stick in Xfce, GNOME's sloppy focus doesn't work consistently, etc.

I started to get bummed out until I've been working on this Macbook Pro for work. The stupid thing can't even keep the background images correct. First of all, you can't just say "Please use this same image/color for all desktop background on all screens." So you set every background to the same thing manually, like some kind of animal. Then you plug your laptop into your two monitors at home and one of them has the default wallpaper! Okay, so you set that one to the image you want. Great. Then you go back to the office and plug into those monitors again and one of THOSE is somehow back to the default wallpaper! It happens every time I plug back into a different set of monitors!

Now I'm not pessimistic anymore! Nothing works. It's great. We're all equal. A trillion dollar company can't even make an OS that sets the wallpaper correctly (or prevent bugs where anyone can login as root, or write a calculator app that works correctly).

So yeah, go give Budgie a try. It probably sucks. But you might find that it sucks in ways that are tolerable!

dcastonguay · 5 years ago

I alternate between a Razer 15 and a MacBook Pro that I plug into a 3 display setup and this is one of the things that is very aggravating / comically short-sighted about macOS with multiple displays.

While I largely prefer using macOS, the way that Windows 10 handles desktops is much better in my opinion. I can't understand why macOS does not let you display your menu bar on all displays if you don't have "separate spaces" enabled. It seems so strange to me that throughout the entire development process no one thought it was kind of ridiculous that the user would not be able to access the menu bar of an application from the same screen the application is on.

That said, I basically cross my fingers now every time I win+tab in Windows 10 because about 10-15% of the time the entire UI locks and I just have to wait 1-2 minutes before I can use my machine again.

So yea, "sucking in ways that are tolerable"!