The US govt outsources software development to the big consulting firms. Any one of them would take 5 years and $10B to create an equivalent app. And then it would only run with Microsoft Explorer (not Edge).
Readit Newsgc22browsing commented on Ask HN: Why isn't TikTok owned by the U.S. government? · Posted by u/frozencell
gc22browsing commented on Swallowing the elephant into Blender aras-p.info/blog/2022/07/... · Posted by u/ibobev
> The speedup factor is order-dependent.
This is why it is very difficult to justify optimization work to management. If there are 20 things to optimize that take 10 seconds each, the change isn't really noticeable until you're getting past half-way. And once your processing already takes a few minutes, what's the harm in adding another 10 seconds?
There is a similar effect, but in reverse, when adding interdependent features.
Early ones don't have a big impact, but once you get to a certain point the inefficiencies add up and the program becomes bogged down.
Cache invalidations and memory swapping as you approach the limits are other examples.
gc22browsing commented on Negative incentives in academic research lemire.me/blog/2022/07/21... · Posted by u/ibobev
Man, I wish I could use my real name for this reply, but for political reasons I can't (in fact, I change my username regularly) because I have a lot of insight into this problem, why it exists, and why it probably won't get better barring a complete overhaul of our socioeconomic system and the myriad corrupt institutions that support it.
We live in an age of institutional decline and it is severe. You see this in (trade) publishing. Your publisher no longer builds your reputation; the publisher has pushed that responsibility unto the author. The ones who already have the personal resources necessary to market their books get further validation and credibility; the ones who don't will go unheard. Academia's the same way: universities no longer provide funding for people of excellence; rather, they have put the onus of funding on the professors themselves--you'll get more funding (and published in better places) on account of using their name, and for that they take a cut. The relationship has inverted; rather than nurturing emerging talent, these institutions are nurtured by emerging talent, and this vampirism is sustainable because those talented people have no other choice insofar as all the other institutions are failing at approximately the same right.
Consequently, we have widespread duplicated effort, channel-flooding due to metrics-gaming (gotta get that h-index into the three digits before tenure time) and a corporatized, mediocre culture in which agreeability (negatively correlated with excellence and conscientiousness) matters far too much and salesmen run the day.
Historically, there were nations of priests and nations of warriors and nations of farmers. We've become a nation of sellers; but we no longer have much to sell but our own talk.
I don't know, for sure, how to solve this. Anyone who pays attention can see that capitalism (which invariably becomes corporate capitalism) is a dead end at a 21st-century technology level... but of course the eradication of capital is merely a necessary, not a sufficient, condition for scientific excellence. Going socialist is mandatory if we want to fix this, but alone does not guarantee much--there are a lot of cultural changes that probably need to happen before we can build healthy institutions again.
Academia has become big business. Over a period of 30+ years I have observed that part-time admin roles that were filled by academics are now run by full-time corporate types. Their primary mandate is to increase profits and thus inflate their own salaries.
As for successful grants, I have seen that, now, 50% of the amounts immediately goes to "overhead" and the PI needs to pay for stipends and equipment from the remaining 50%, yet there are further "transaction charges" even those activities.
The publishing, grant winning, etc are simply "KPIs" so beloved by the MBA hordes.
What I found incredible is the lack of push-back from academics against the encroaching takeover by the biznoids. Speaking of whom, they don't give a damn about research, academia is merely yet another territory to which they extend their rent seeking (for themselves) activities.
My team has what we call "the strike team" which is not just on-call but even during the day, your job is basically to make everything more robust (as opposed to what we do normally, which is work on new systems and features). So just last week or so there was an alert on Sunday that I then spent the week to fix permanently. These are also services that my team are the sole developers on so I know when I fix something it will generally stay fixed.
On top of this, we have a rotation so each of us is only on-call one week out of maybe every four or five. And although I agreed to it mostly because it was a condition of the job and I wanted the job more for learning how the team worked than I cared about the money, the compensation for being on-call is actually pretty good even if nothing happens. And if on-call lands on a holiday, we get the holiday time as vacation days to spend later.
So overall, while I would prefer not to be on-call, I feel like our team implements it about as well as can reasonably be expected. I expected it to drive me crazy, but it actually hasn't yet.
I used to work for a small systems integrator. We used on-call mobile phones, the "hot potato" was carried by the on-call engineer. Any actual time worked outside of core-working hours was paid back in the form of time-off-in-lieu. The salary generously reflected the being on-call requirement.
The other factor was that a "call-out" was not completed until the root cause was fixed.
I believe the real reason for the compassionate arrangements was that the owners of the business were former engineers and were even available to escalate calls to them if you got stuck. Our personal phones had everybody else's personal numbers in the address book, but we were never permitted to give them out to clients. Clients only had access to the "hot potato" phone numbers, which also received the various paged alerts, etc.
The problem at the radio frequency level is simply that not only is the 2.4GHz ISM band crowded by microwave ovens, WiFi and lots of other devices, but that one end of a BT device is typically battery powered and transmitting at a tiny fraction of the power of the interfering devices. In a typical office or home the moment you turn on the microwave or WiFi device you are effectively jamming the BT signal. Frequency hopping can hop it all likes and try to pick the least worse band out of all even more over-powering ones.
gc22browsing commented on Ask HN: Going through a traumatic personal situation and HN is my last resort · Posted by u/_78g5
Ok, so X is your brother's sister-in-law. So she is sorta family now.
From your telling of the situation, X appears to have had strong feelings for you. You obviously did many things for her and she benefited from that.
You could move to another city and break all contact. X has support around her and would most likely recover from the heartache with time.
OR you could seek out relationship counselling to resolve the situation. Your explaining "in excruciating detail" suggests to me that you have not entertained any alternatives to your view of what happened.
You being concerned about X being suicidal or falling into depression, shows that you do care for her. I would recommend the professional counselling path to resolve this matter and possibly empower you and X to better deal with life's curveballs in the future.
gc22browsing commented on Reckless Software Construction blog.sidstamm.com/2021/12... · Posted by u/zdw
From a comment on the original post:
> I think this is a great post and I agree with many of the points, but I'm not sure if the people reading this would be in a position to do anything about it. There will always be pressure from upper management to get software out as quick as possible to build the highest margins possible. If this means not researching all of your dependencies, or not documenting the dependencies properly, those will be the first to go.
Sadly we live in times of capitalism's perverse incentives.
Managers push hard to get one more "win" on their CV before skipping onto the next higher paid job. The company board are only interested in maximising "shareholder value" and their already bloated remuneration packages.
Developers are still evaluated on the basis of LoC! If you want your job and a chance at a bonus, then you just do as demanded by the bosses.
Any system of meritocracy based on educational attainments is tainted by the fact that only the wealthy can afford sufficiently high level of education to pass the tests for meritocracy. Perhaps a function might to weed out those who have been afforded the education and have failed the tests.
In China, there are people who sit tests on behalf of wealthy, yet intellectually less accomplished young adults. So how does that truly test for merit. As with all incentive schemes, there are those who game those systems.
Ever since return to office, I walk by the Teslas in the EV lane, and half of them passive aggressively blink their headlights at me and play the throbbing anus animation on the dashboards.
However, I'm still repeatedly shocked by how quickly that company is burning down its brand.
I'm extremely happy with my non-Tesla EV. It has a modern entertainment system (lane keeping/smart cruise are an option), but no touch screens.
It handles ridiculously well, and efficiency is comparable to the best Teslas (range is worse, but it was inexpensive used, and it's for my commute).
People who buy and drive Teslas think they are a gift to humanity, because they are "saving the planet". They glibbly ignore the amount of fossil fuels that were consumed in order to produce their shining homage to their specialness and of course their lord, Elon Musk, on the pedestal.
Nevertheless, if you do need to do so, why not look into using FreeBSD with jails, etc? Alternatively you could spin-up a hosted VM on their behalf and have them use that. But anybody who can program could probably do that for themselves, thus my API suggestion as above.