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tmlb commented on The age of cargo cult Agile must end   jchyip.medium.com/the-age... · Posted by u/cratermoon
jshen · 3 years ago
So you think it’s reasonable to have no idea what it will cost, or when it will be done, when building software? You think it’s possible to run a successful business that way?
tmlb · 3 years ago
You can have some idea, but it’s not like estimating the time and cost of building a house.
tmlb commented on The age of cargo cult Agile must end   jchyip.medium.com/the-age... · Posted by u/cratermoon
jshen · 3 years ago
This is not true for most. Imagine going to a contractor to get a house built and they tell you that they can’t tell you what it will cost or when it will be done.
tmlb · 3 years ago
Makes sense only if you assume building software is like building a house. Imagine getting an author to tell you when the novel they are writing will be finished?

Or this: imagine seeking an estimate on when a house will be built, trimmed, painted, furnished, decorated, and filled with every item needed practically and for comfort by the homeowner.

It’s a living process that requires continuous reassessment of priorities and scope, and in fact never finishes when you consider the life of the home.

tmlb commented on Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?    · Posted by u/ScottStevenson
tannhauser23 · 3 years ago
Maybe, but that's not what they tested for in the movie.
tmlb · 3 years ago
They sort of touched on this point in the movie:

>No one exceeds their potential. If they did, it would mean we did not accurately gauge their potential in the first place.

tmlb commented on Absurd Trolley Problems   neal.fun/absurd-trolley-p... · Posted by u/sebg
coalpha · 3 years ago
I guess I may have misinterpreted this as a choice between forcing the passengers to go around in circles for literally eternity versus dying immediately. Figured that it'd get awful boring after the trillionth or so revolution, especially if there were no other options. At some point, I imagine the passengers would be begging for the sweet release of death and I didn't want to condemn anyone to that fate.
tmlb · 3 years ago
This is why I thought it was one of the more interesting problems in the list. There’s a lot of potential suffering that can fit inside an eternity.
tmlb commented on Absurd Trolley Problems   neal.fun/absurd-trolley-p... · Posted by u/sebg
JonathanFly · 3 years ago
>Oh no! Due to a construction error, a trolley is stuck in an eternal loop. If you pull the lever the trolley will explode, and if you don't the trolley and it's passengers will go in circles for eternity. What do you do?

50% of people pull the lever?!?

I hereby declare that if I'm ever going to be stuck in a trolley for my entire life, I do NOT want the lever pulled. Toss me a smartphone charger and my life wouldn't even be that different, day to day.

tmlb · 3 years ago
Would your answer change if you were stuck on the trolley quite literally for eternity, rather than just the remainder of your biological life?
tmlb commented on Cool desktops don’t change   tylercipriani.com/blog/20... · Posted by u/thcipriani
tmlb · 3 years ago
I suppose I'm hedging my bets by using vim in VSCode.
tmlb commented on In Asia, short-sightedness is becoming ubiquitous   economist.com/science-and... · Posted by u/kasperni
DantesKite · 3 years ago
Interestingly enough, scientists have been able to induce myopia in all sorts of animals by making them wear contacts.

My suspicion is that staring at objects closely and under dimly lit conditions causes pseusdo-myopia which is later exacerbated by wearing glasses, causing actual axial elongation in the eyeballs through hormesis. Especially since this is what seems to happen in other animals when we dissect them.

tmlb · 3 years ago
> My suspicion is that staring at objects closely and under dimly lit conditions causes pseusdo-myopia

Are you implying that cell phones could be a factor?

tmlb commented on NPM security update: Attack campaign using stolen OAuth tokens   github.blog/2022-05-26-np... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
willcipriano · 3 years ago
I've never had this problem but I thought of a partial solution. Say you have you unit tests and they are using the same auth and logging mechanisms as prod. Create a user with a password like "ThisStringIsAPassword1234" and run the unit tests having them output logs to the disk. Then see if the logs contain that value.

Anybody ever do something like that? How effective it would be probably depends on unit test coverage.

You could also probably just do the same thing in prod with a dummy user.

tmlb · 3 years ago
I've worked on a service that handled credentials where we added tests like this to try to catch if a log statement gets added containing the username/password. We used a few end to end tests rather than attempting to include something like this is the unit tests for every function.

Our tests would set up the app's full context, get a hook into the logging framework to watch for log statements, then make requests to the service containing a set of dummy credentials, like { username: "foo", password: "bar" }. If a log statement containing "foo" or "bar" was detected the test failed.

It's not going to catch every type of issue, but at least some potential footguns can be preventing this way.

tmlb commented on We Built Our Own DNS Infrastructure   blog.replit.com/dns... · Posted by u/amasad
nreece · 4 years ago
Curious to know if anyone's hosting real-world production web apps or APIs on replit, or is it mainly an educational platform?
tmlb · 4 years ago
The article mentioned that the blog itself is hosted on a replit, so I guess that's one example.

This seems like it would be great for rapid prototyping.

u/tmlb

KarmaCake day35December 14, 2018View Original