Readit News logoReadit News
uraniumjelly commented on WhatsApp introduces ads in its app   nytimes.com/2025/06/16/te... · Posted by u/greenburger
ezst · 2 months ago
It matters even more that Signal doesn't tolerate you using the client of your choice (like, one that doesn't push dark patterns and crypto in your face), or risk having your account suspended. It's time for people to wake up to the centralised platforms not having their users' best interests at heart.

(And yes, my comments history has me extensively promote XMPP, no big secret here.)

uraniumjelly · 2 months ago
We always need more XMPP shills around :).
uraniumjelly commented on Notes from an Interviewer   devwithahammer.wordpress.... · Posted by u/thunderbong
nomemory · 2 years ago
I am also doing lots of interviews, and I try to stay away from theoretical questions about SOLID, OOP , the difference between a GET and a POST, what is an inner join, or similar.

Most of the seniors I interviewed were acing questions like this (they probably answered them tens of times before), and there's no way to differentiate them, once you get perfect answers. As the author of blog post mentioned, some of them don't even listen the question till the end before reciting manual phrases about Single Responsibility.

Some people would disagree but for us there are a few factors that predict if the candidate would be a good fit:

* The ability to solve easy and medium leetcode-like challenges and explain his choices. Nothing fancy, no dynamic programming or graph theory. This tells us if the candidate knows how to write code, which in most cases is at least 50% of the job.

* His academical record. It's a good predictor, because people who actually did good in school and finished their homeworks have a good work ethic. Of course, we are not recruiting PHDs to do backend work, but people who did decently well in school are usually nice to work with. There are brilliant dropouts, of course, but they are not the norm.

* We test how opiniated the candidate is when it comes to technology by asking outrageous questions (relative to the Status Quo): Why dependency injection is bad. We like people with opinions, but we find difficult to work with "evangelists".

The rest is commentary (at least in our case).

uraniumjelly · 2 years ago
> * The ability to solve easy and medium leetcode-like challenges

What about Fermi estimation problems? The internet seems to have turned on them in recent years, but they are a good test of intuition and general problem solving skills.

uraniumjelly commented on Notes from an Interviewer   devwithahammer.wordpress.... · Posted by u/thunderbong
mooreds · 2 years ago
I'd add:

* Do some research on the company and ask a question showing you did so

* prep your coding skills with koans or similar, depending on the job and your recency of coding experience

* Have a good reason why you are looking at this company, instead of any other

uraniumjelly · 2 years ago
> * Have a good reason why you are looking at this company, instead of any other

I don't like this sentiment. Are people not allowed to be looking at other companies at the same time? Your company is probably not so unique that people will have legitimate reasons to have a significant preference for your company over other ones (sans the salary). I feel that it's out of the interviewer's line to expect interviewees to have an answer for that, when it's not like the interviewer is looking at a specific interviewee instead of any other.

uraniumjelly commented on Keep your phone number private with Signal usernames   signal.org/blog/phone-num... · Posted by u/Josely
dijit · 2 years ago
Yeah, nah, it might be fashionable but I'm not 100% convinced that it's not an operation intended to be a lightening rod for "private" communication.

Given how tightly they control development, disallow third-party clients, disallow federation, disallow self-hosting servers, have a history if disallowing use without google play and have hid huge development features from the public (mobile-coin) despite being open source. etc;

The idea that it's a great undertaking of our time is so bombastic that it's guaranteed to be false even if you truly believe that they are completely altruistic (which I'm willing to believe but it's not coming easy to me based on the above).

"What's better"? Matrix. Which seeks to solve all of my points, the only thing lacking is market share which honestly is partially caused by these "easy to use" services which trade off everything else, which also consumes developer mind-share even if you're unwilling to acknowledge that. (devs are motivated to solve issues for friends, family and themselves if they are exposed more frequently to systems and services that are sub-par).

uraniumjelly · 2 years ago
XMPP cries in a corner. I wish XMPP had more accessible (to the general public) desktop clients. Conversations is great, but speaking from experience, people aren't going to want to use Gajim because it looks like it's ten years old (even though that's a good thing ;). XMPP needs better clients in general. The last time I used Profanity it had very annoying bugs about sending and saving OMEMO encrypted files.
uraniumjelly commented on That Old NetBSD Server, Running Since 2010   it-notes.dragas.net/2023/... · Posted by u/michelangelo
no_time · 2 years ago
What made you stop hosting your email?
uraniumjelly · 2 years ago
I realized I wouldn't use it for anything serious, and I didn't renew my domain name. Maybe someday I'll get a domain for ten years and then get google to host the actual email. That way it doesn't matter too much if google decides to nuke my account.

I was also sixteen when I did that, so I mean, of course I wasn't going to do anything serious with it.

uraniumjelly commented on That Old NetBSD Server, Running Since 2010   it-notes.dragas.net/2023/... · Posted by u/michelangelo
MengerSponge · 2 years ago
The main application of small self-hosted email services is getting your messages blocked by Google/Microsoft as a service.
uraniumjelly · 2 years ago
That ideally shouldn't happen if your dkim, dmarc and spf check out, though. I hosted my own email for a couple of years and I can't remember a single time when my emails to my friends ended up in spam.
uraniumjelly commented on EU Advocate General: Technical Standards must be freely available [pdf]   curia.europa.eu/jcms/uplo... · Posted by u/layer8
immibis · 2 years ago
Yeah. Because in capitalism you need to have a way to make money if you want to continue existing. Therefore all the developers who exist have ways of making money. It's not rocket science.

In not-capitalism, there's a possibility this might not be true. Open source developers MIGHT NOT need to earn a living doing something else.

uraniumjelly · 2 years ago
Let's say everybody gets a UBI or whatever the heck. A standards organization would still need someone to give it that money to function/exist. This would be true in any economic system.

>there's a possibility this might not be true

Zero, zilch, nada. People will not do grunt work for free because it's not fun.

uraniumjelly commented on EU Advocate General: Technical Standards must be freely available [pdf]   curia.europa.eu/jcms/uplo... · Posted by u/layer8
bawolff · 2 years ago
> If we lived in an economic system that didn't pay those organizations, they simply wouldn't exist.

Weird comment to make on the literal internet, where all the standards (Whether IETF, W3C, or WHATWG) are freely available.

uraniumjelly · 2 years ago
Weird comment to make when the OP is literally about standards _not_ being freely available. IETF and those standards organizations are funded by other people BTW, they don't consist entirely of individuals putting their own money in.
uraniumjelly commented on EU Advocate General: Technical Standards must be freely available [pdf]   curia.europa.eu/jcms/uplo... · Posted by u/layer8
geysersam · 2 years ago
> regardless of the economic system we lived in.

Nitpick: if we lived in an economic system with universal basic income it's not unlikely people would decide to work on standards anyway.

> People aren't going to do that work for free.

Counterexample: all open source software.

uraniumjelly · 2 years ago
People will do some stuff for free, sure, but not everything. Not everything is mentally gratifying or intellectually stimulating enough for someone to take up as a hobby. To quote pg:

>Will people create wealth if they can’t get paid for it? Only if it’s fun. People will write operating systems for free. But they won’t install them, or take support calls, or train customers to use them. And at least 90% of the work that even the highest tech companies do is of this second, unedifying kind.

I think there are very few people on the planet, if any, who would consider writing a standards document for some medical equipment to be fun enough to do free of cost. In fact I doubt it's even possible to make standards documents for physical things like medical equipment free of cost. It's an entirely different ball game from software standards.

uraniumjelly commented on EU Advocate General: Technical Standards must be freely available [pdf]   curia.europa.eu/jcms/uplo... · Posted by u/layer8
themitigating · 2 years ago
:No. Because it costs money to run these organizations. They are either funded by the government (which means taxes, which means us), membership fees or other activities. Last I checked everyone needs to feed themselves or their family. This "it's because it's capitalism" thing gets old pretty quickly.

What's the difference? What you described is capitalism.

uraniumjelly · 2 years ago
But standards organizations would need some way of making money regardless of the economic system we lived in. People aren't going to do that work for free.

If we lived in an economic system that didn't pay those organizations, they simply wouldn't exist.

u/uraniumjelly

KarmaCake day22November 20, 2021View Original