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Related to this, I know someone who got fired because of innocent activity on LinkedIn.
I don’t remember his exact dates, but he put something like “June 2009 – November 2010” on LinkedIn and “June 2009 – February 2011” on his CV. He started a new job and got caught in “the lie”, but it wasn’t. His last day of work was in November, but his severance period continued for three months.
He did nothing wrong; but he was fired anyway, because his new company didn’t want to be stuck with someone who’d lost a job in the past.
It’s an evil world where workers have no power and surveillance of us by employerfolk is ubiquitous and easy. Unless you get into the 0.1% who becomes a YouTube celebrity or a bestselling author, you shouldn’t want any public reputation; it can only hurt you. I realize that there’s some apparent hypocrisy in me, of all people, saying this; but hear it from someone who’s suffered.
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I almost lost a job offer because of something like that. I worked for a university group that didn’t really have a “home”. For a while my paycheck came from the associated research foundation, later it came from the University itself. My team/boss/work never changed. I put it as one job on a resume and was called out on it. I had to get a former boss to take a call on vacation to sort it out.
Glad I didn’t take that job. When a company gives you a peek into how they do things: believe them.
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I’m curious about your opinion of _why? He took the approach of being public, without sharing any details. His success ultimately led to a deanonimzation, reversing everything.
I guess the question is: how do you actively participate in conferences, and other valuable learning opportunities without building a public reputation? And, of course is there a way to go back to that? Seems highly unlikely.
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I couldn’t tell you to the month when I started/stopped most of my past jobs. Some of them I couldn’t even tell you the year.
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Best way to play this is to keep your story, whatever it is, consistent. The thing to remember about HR Mooks is that they can’t tell who’s lying and who’s not, and they assume most people are lying (because, well, a lot of people lie). So, your best bet, if you’re on severance or “gardening leave” is to consistently treat the severance as time you were employed.
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Definitely agree there, HR stuff can really be eye opening when you realise they’re there for the company rather than the human. I’m not sure how on the wording/employment contracts for severance in the US work but in the UK if you are placed on gardening leave, you are still employed and not able to start at a new place of employment. Which can be great or very stressful depending on your circumstances!
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What was the reason behind the 600MB tracking pixel?
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Protesting by harming the visitors of the page is very odd. You are not abusing new functionality, you are abusing peoples trust into the website. Also, you haven’t harmed lobste.rs, but its visitors.
Maybe people protest because tracking doesn’t make lobste.rs worse then any other page they visit, but burning mobile bandwidth of that size is rather unusual? That’s a direct economic damage and people on visit outside of their country might suddenly be caught with no data. Just sayin’.
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Slightly off topic: I see people complaining a lot about Electron, with Slack being a prime example.
I think the success of Visual Studio Code means that it is possible to build excellent apps using Electron. And that the performance of Slack app is not necessarily representative of all Electron based apps.
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I think it’s possible. But VSC is literally the only Electron app that doesn’t blatantly suck performance-wise. Is that because Microsoft just actually put in the effort to make something good? Or is it because Microsoft has built best-in-class IDEs that scale radically better than any alternative for a long long long time?
Now no one get me wrong, I’m a UNIX guy through and through, but anyone who claims there’s anything better than Visual Studio for large scale C++ development has no clue what they’re talking about. C++ as a language is complete bullshit, the most hostile language you can write an IDE for. Building an IDE for any other language is child’s play in comparison, and Microsoft is proving it with VSC.
I don’t think it’s currently possible for anyone besides Microsoft to make an excellent Electron app. They took a bunch of internal skill for building huge GUI applications that scale, and built their own language to translate that skill to a cross platform environment. I think they could have chosen whatever platform they felt like, and only chose to target Javascript because the web / cloud is good for business. We’ll start seeing good Electron apps when Typescript and the Microsoft way become the de facto standard for building Electron apps.
But I also haven’t slept in 24 hours so maybe I’m crazy. I reckon I’ll go to bed now.
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but anyone who claims there’s anything better than Visual Studio for large scale C++ development has no clue what they’re talking about.
JetBrains CLion might actually be a bit better – but they started building addons to improve development in VisualStudio (e.g. the amazing ReSharper) originally, and only expanded to build their own IDE later on.
I fully agree on all other points.
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CLion definitely has a great feature set, but I’ve found a lot of it to be unusably slow, at least on our large codebase. Lots of us use Qt Creator even though it’s objectively worse and has some sketchy bugs, because it’s at least fast for the stuff it does do. I look forward to the day I can comfortably switch to CLion.
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I don’t think I can agree on the hype thingy here.
Background: I hate developing on Windows, been using Linux for god knows how many years, but I do have a Windows work(play)station at home where I sometimes do development and I don’t always want to ssh into some box to develop (or in the case of creating Windows applications, I can’t)
I’ve been using eclipse for years (for the right combination of languges and available plugins, of course) and had been searching for a decent “general-purpose” replacements (e.g. supports a lot of languages in a decent way, is configurable enough so you can work, has more features than, say, an editor with only syntax highlighting). So ok, I never used Sublime Text (tried it out, didn’t like it for some reason) and VS Code was the first thing since like 10 years where it was just a joy having a nice, functioning and free IDE/text editor that didn’t look like it was written i the 90s (like, can’t configure the font, horrible Office 94-like MDI), doesn’t take 2mins to load (like eclipse with certain plugins) etc.pp
It’s about frictionless onboarding, and yes, maybe I sound really nitpicky here - but it’s from the standpoint as a totally hobbyist programmer, as my overlap with any work projects or any serious open source work (where I usually have the tooling set up like at work, as it’s long-ongoing and worth the investmnt). That’s also the focus on free. Absolutely willing to pay for a good IDE (e.g. IntelliJ IDEA) but not if I’m firing it up once per month.
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Is there a chance that the ill reputation of Electron apps is that Electron itself offers ample opportunity for prime footgunmanship?
I’d argue that yes, it’s quite possible to build a nice simple (moderately) lightweight thing in Electron; it’s just pretty hard in comparison to building, say, a nice simple (definitely) lightweight CLI. Or even a desktop app using a regular graphical toolkit?
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Visual Studio Code, Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, Spotify all are unfortunately not simple. And while they could be reduced to simpler apps, I kinda feel like we’re all using them exactly because they have all these advanced features. These features are not useless, and a simpler app would disappoint.
It also seems like GUI and CLI toolkits are lagging behind the Web by maybe a decade, no joke. I’d love to see a native framework that implements the React+Redux flow. Doesn’t even have to be portable or JavaScript.
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I’m a huge fan of CLI software that eats text and outputs text. It’s easier to integrate into my flow, and the plethora of tools that are already available to manipulate the inputs and outputs.
An example: I’ve written a CLI client to JIRA that I have plugged into the Acme editor. I just tweaked my output templates a bit to include commands that I’d want to run related to a given ticket as part of my regular output, and added a very simple plumber rule that fetches a ticket’s information if I right-click anything that looks like a JIRA ticket (TASK-1234, for example). It’s served me well as a means to not have to deal with the JIRA UI, which I find bloated and unintuitive, and it allows me to remain in the context of my work to deal with the annoyance of updating a ticket (or fetching info regarding a ticket (or listing tickets, or pretty much anything really)). It’s far from perfect, but it covers most, if not all, of my day-to-day interaction with JIRA, and it’s all just an integration of different programs that know how to deal with text.
[edit: It’s far from perfect, but I find it better than the alternative]
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Is either part of that open-source by chance? I’ve been trying acme as my editor and use JIRA at work. I have a hunch you’re largely describing four lines of plumb rules and a short shell script, but I’m still having trouble wrapping my head around the right way to do these things.
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Full disclosure, the JIRA thing has bugs that have not stopped me from using it in any meaningful way. https://github.com/otremblay/jkl
The acme plumbing rule is as follows:
type is text data matches '([A-Za-z]+)-([0-9]+)' plumb start rc -c 'jkl '$1'-'$2' >[2=1] | nobs | plumb -i -d edit -a ''action=showdata filename=/jkl/'$1'-'$2''''It checks for a file called “.jklrc” in $HOME. Its shape is as follows:
JIRA_ROOT=https://your.jira.server/ JIRA_USER=yourusername JIRA_PASSWORD=yourpassword JIRA_PROJECT=PROJECTKEY #JKLNOCOLOR=true RED_ISSUE_STATUSES=Open BLUE_ISSUE_STATUSES=Ready for QA,In QA,Ready for Deploy YELLOW_ISSUE_STATUSES=default GREEN_ISSUE_STATUSES=Done,Closed # The following is the template for a given issue. You don't need this, but mine contains commands that jkl can run using middleclick. JKL_ISSUE_TMPL="{{$key := .Key}}{{$key}} {{if .Fields.IssueType}}[{{.Fields.IssueType.Name}}]{{end}} {{.Fields.Summary}}\n\nURL: {{.URL}}\n\n{{if .Fields.Status}}Status: {{.Fields.Status.Name}}\n{{end}}Transitions: {{range .Transitions}}\n {{.Name}} | jkl {{$key}} '{{.Name}}'{{end}}\n\n{{if .Fields.Assignee}}Assignee: {{.Fields.Assignee.Name}}\n{{end}}jkl assign {{$key}} otremblay\n\nTime Remaining/Original Estimate: {{.Fields.PrettyRemaining}} / {{.Fields.PrettyOriginalEstimate}}\n\n{{.PrintExtraFields}}\n\nDescription: {{.Fields.Description}} \n\nIssue Links: \n{{range .Fields.IssueLinks}} {{.}}\n{{end}}\n\nComments: jkl comment {{$key}}\n\n{{if .Fields.Comment }}{{$k := $key}}{{range .Fields.Comment.Comments}}{{.Author.DisplayName}} [~{{.Author.Name}}] (jkl edit {{$k}}~{{.Id}}):\n-----------------\n{{.Body}}\n-----------------\n\n{{end}}{{end}}" -
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It also seems like GUI and CLI toolkits are lagging behind the Web by maybe a decade, no joke. I’d love to see a native framework that implements the React+Redux flow. Doesn’t even have to be portable or JavaScript.
I couldn’t disagree more. Sure, maybe in “developer ergonomics” Web is ahead, but GUI trounces Web in terms of performance and consistency.
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I belive one of the things that gave Electron apps a bad reputation (aside from the obvious technological issuses) were things like “new” web browsers, built with electron, offering nothing practically new, that most people would actually want, such as lower memory consumption, for example.
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Building UIs is hard in general - it seems like electron trades off ease of making UIs performant for ease of building them.
That being said, it seems like it’s not prohibitively difficult to build a fast UI in electron: https://keminglabs.com/blog/building-a-fast-electron-app-with-rust/
It seems like most people building electron apps just don’t think about performance until much later in the process of development.
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I think one of the few main selling points of Electron was accessibility. Anybody with solid knowledge of HTML, CSS and JS could find his way around and build the app that was running on multiple platforms. But it wasn’t performant and it was quite resource hog as it turned out. Now why is this not the case with Visual Studio Code? Because it is being written by really good developers, who are working for Microsoft, who worked on creating Typescript, in which is Visual Studio Code written, on top of Electron. Now you can get the sense of things why Visual Studio Code is different case than rest of the Electron apps, people behind it are the reason. And whole story defeats the point of Electron. If Electron as a platform could produce half as good results as VSC in terms of performance and resource efficiency than maybe it would be more viable option, as it is right now, I can see the pendulum swinging back to some other native way of implementing applications.
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This is very welcome, I’ve used them for a good few years so will need to set time aside to check out their source as it becomes available.
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[Comment removed by author]
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I think it’s usually because “that’s what work is buying me”.
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I really like Lenovo X1 Carbon.
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Personally I like the Dell XPS 13 and 15. The 4K screens are really amazing to see in person. You can configure with an i7 processor, optional fingerprint reader, fast SSDs up to 1TB, up to 32GB RAM, touch/non-touch display options, up to 97Wh battery in the ~4.5lb model or 56Wh in the 4lb if you want to go lighter (benchmarks). For ports, it has an SD card slot, 2 USB-A 3.0 with PowerShare, 1 HDMI, and a Thunderbolt 3 (including power in/out).
I feel they compete in several of the categories and are worth checking out in person somewhere (Frys, etc) if you’re in the market. Just earlier today someone posted a link to this guy’s experience spending a year away from MacOS and he winds up with an XPS 15, which he mostly likes.
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I went from a 2011 macbook pro 15” to a thinkpad 460p running kubuntu, its not as flush as the macbook but it beats performance & price for me. Form factor, I should’ve got a 15” again but thats my choice. Fit & finish on the macbook is better but then I can easily remove my battery and get to all the internals of the laptop, so I prefer the thinkpad.
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The new Huawei Matebook X?
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How about the ASUS ZenBook Pro? I don’t have experience with it, but superficially it’s got very similar form factor and design to a MacBook. Aluminum uni-body and all. And being not-Apple, you obviously get better performance for the price.
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I’ve run Linux on a Macbook because my employer wouldn’t give me anything else. Reason was: effort of IT team vs my effort of running Linux.
But pretty sure my effort was extensive compared to what their effort would have been :)
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16:10 screen, wide-gamut display, correct ppi (X1C is too low, and the high-res Dells too high).
The last ThinkPad (of which I have many) to have a 16:10 screen was T410, which is now 8 years old.
Personally, there’s no other modern laptop I’d rather use, regardless of operating system. To me nothing is more important than a good and proper screen.
If anybody comes up with a laptop that has a 4:3 screen, I’ll reconsider.
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It does, but tragically it’s ruined by a glossy finish on the screen. I bought one for the aspect ratio and brightness but almost threw it out the window several times in frustration before giving it away.
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I don’t think many people buy new Apple hardware with the intention of immediately wiping it and installing Linux.
My MBP, for example, is running OSX because I need it (or Windows) to use Capture One photo software. When I upgrade to a new machine I’m going to put Linux on the old one and use it for everything else. I did the same thing with my iMac years ago.
I personally still think the build quality of Apple laptops are better than the alternatives. The trackpad in my old MBP, for example, still feels better than the trackpads I’ve used on newer machines from other brands. The performance and specs are less important to me as long as it’s “fast enough” and the build is solid.
All that said, I’m not buying any more Apple products because their software quality has completely gone down the toilet the last few years.
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In this case I didn’t really have a choice. I had tried asking for a PC before I started this job; but they tried to get me in really fast and provisioned a Mac without even asking me. My boss made up some bullshit about how you have to have them for developers laptops as the PCs the company bought didn’t have the specs (16GB of ram and such). I’m really glad I got Linux booting on it and not have to use it in VMWare (which does limit your max ram to 12GB and doesn’t give you access to the logical HT cores).
But yea if it was my personal laptop, I wouldn’t even bother buying a mac to being with. My recent HP had everything supported on it with the latest Ubuntu or on Gentoo with a stock kernel tree right out of the box.
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I have 2 MacBook Pros from the 2012 to 2014 era. Love them both. Awesome hardware. I wish I could say the same for the software. Each version of OSX has gotten progressively worse for me as a developer since the high point that was Snow Leopard.
Several folks I know using Sierra and High Sierra are dealing with regular kernel panics.
I’ve started to contemplate what my next laptop and OS are going to be for work. Sometimes I harbor fantasies of buying another used MacBook Pro and installing something like Dragonfly or FreeBSD on it.
In the end, I’m probably going to settle for something like a Thinkpad that I’m “ok” with and some Linux distro.
Leaving aside “consumer” apps I need, there’s enough software like Zoom et al that support windows, Mac, and windows that I need for work that are going to end up being limiting factors.
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I am currently writing this on a mid-2014 MBP with High Sierra and the most recent updates have been grim. I have a lot of hanging applications, even Apple applications like GarageBand, and have to restart a couple times a day to keep things usable.
It was a great computer for a long time, but the software recently has been terrible.
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I feel like that is a theme in my life.
I accidentally upgraded by iPhone 7 to iOS 11 and now its mostly unusable. The level of lag opening a new application is nuts. Lyft as an example takes 60 to 90 seconds from when I open to it being usable.
Earlier today I opened the Messages app and wanted to take a picture and text it. It took almost 2 minutes for the message app to open, for me to be able to select the person I wanted to message, for that to open and then for the camera to come up. By the time it was ready, the thing I wanted to take a photo of was gone.
It feels like when I stopped using Apple products in the 90s again except now they have a lot more market share and they arent dealing with a signature laptop bursting into flames.
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I had a 2011 macbook pro with the 15” screen that I thought could never be topped. Couldn’t justify the increased price for the 2016/2017 model so I went for a thinkpad t460p and loaded kbuntu on it, I’m very happy with the machine in general but there are a few irritances such as photos being synced between my laptop & iPhone no longer happens, its just not as integrated which I do miss.
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Had a 2012 non-Retina (but the higher resolution variant) MBP until earlier this year. Had replaced the HDD with an SSD years ago, and upgraded even that to 1TB. Replaced the WiFi/Bluetooth card once it died. Took out the combo drive. Heavy, thick, but still worked great.
I ended up finally swapping out for the T470s. Slim, higher resolution, NVMe, Linux-compatible hardware.
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Fantastic editor, always my first install on a fresh *nix.
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4ad
1 year ago
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Linux kernel hardeners Grsecurity sue open source's Bruce Perens for defamation
This is the end of Grsecurity. At least, I hope it is.
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I couldn’t disagree more. I believe entities like grsec pushing kernel security forward in any way is valuable, whether or not Linus or your or anyone agrees or disagrees with what or how they’re doing it. Having these other players looking out for and challenging the status quo of system security seems valuable. Having them become closed source is weird and unfortunate, but I certainly don’t want them to go away.
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These days there is the KSPP and I’m much more comfortable with the way they are operating. Obviously many of their patches are based on work by PaX/Grsecurity (at least for the time being), but unlike Brad Spengler et al. they are much more transparent about their work, don’t throw a public temper tantrum every two months, acknowledge that things other than security might matter too and actually cooperatively work with upstream instead of acting like everybody secretly hates them.
PaX/Grsecurity have brought great innovations and I think there is room for more radical security improvements that aren’t bound by the strict compatibility policy of mainline Linux, but Grsecurity is being way too hostile to make me trust the security of my machines to them. I’m also not convinced their technical process is sound and up to modern standards, but who knows what they are really doing?
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admg
1 year ago
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30 years of Final Fantasy: a cult of devotion, and the music still soars
The main composer (Nobuo Uematsu) also had a band ‘The Black Mages’ for a few years in the late noughties. A lot of my friends were big fans. Took a rock attitude to the final fantasy music rather than the orchestra angle.
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I’m of the opinion that most new TLD’s are a scam. A quick look at the name register I use, shows they’re currently offering tld’s such as “.apartments”, “.bargains”, “.bingo”
Along with the slightly amusing “.website”
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I’m also fairly certain that when non-tech people see a website like rent.apartments, they’re going to wonder a bit since it’s so different than the .com ilk they’re used to.
At least, I’m fairly certain my wife is going to ask me. ;)
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What a crazy number of servers they (might!) have! If those numbers are correct or at least good ballpark figures it would be interesting to see utilization stats.
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bill
1 year ago
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Why the ThinkPad TrackPoint is still a thing, according to Lenovo’s chief designer
Number of photos it can hold (avg 4MB)
What a bogus metric. I wish people would refrain from using it.
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Wrong article? That comment fits contextually with the comments under this article - https://lobste.rs/s/horqtr/how_big_were_first_hard_drives
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Be pretty interesting to see what this ends up as. I recently bought a t460p, which is a great laptop for running ubuntu. My only issue with it is that the screen feels a little flimsy, it can flex a little too much compared to my old 2011 macbook pro! I’d also prefer to get a bigger screen next time, convinced myself that 14” was enough but it feels a little small when using on its own and not connected to other monitors.
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This week, I’m enjoying being unemployed, I finally left a soul crushing corporate financial services job to move into another financial services job in a few weeks time. On the plus side its a much smaller company and I’ll be developer number 9 or 10. They also seem like genuinely nice people which is another plus. Planning on spending a bit of time playing with django rest framework as a possible future extension for a side project I worked on previously and spending a bit of time brushing up my C# skills.
I’ve had a basic blog/site for years so also planning on actually fleshing it out with details of what I’ve worked on in the past. Non technically I’m going to be doing a lot of reading, its a great feeling being out of an office and sitting in the park with a book!
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Nice to see people escaping from OS X. I switched back to Linux a couple of months ago after six years of the slow erosion of my sanity with each new OS X update.
In the end, my final wake-up call came from the keyboards and touch bar on the new MacBooks. It is clearer now than ever that Apple doesn’t want my business anymore.
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I started with a Lenovo Thinkpad 13 Chromebook, and replaced ChromeOS with Ubuntu. The MrChromebox firmware stuff was very helpful. Subsequently replaced OS X on my desktop Mac Mini and got a HP Chromebox at work. It’s been pretty refreshing to be back in the land of X11 and tiling window managers after all these years of putting up with the OS X alternative.
What’s less functional about the ZenBook, or do you mean that FreeBSD doesn’t have support for as much of the hardware?
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I just started a new job and they gave me one of the touchbar Macbooks for work. 4 USB-C ports, nothing else. The monitors they ordered for me (DisplayPort, Mini DisplayPort, HDMI) are not even connectable without an adapter. Neither is the Apple magic mouse (to charge), nor is the Apple keyboard (both regular old USB).
I don’t like the touchbar because it lacks any sort of tactile feedback. I end up smashing the
~button instead ofescnow. -
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I don’t use Apple’s iCloud sync for photos between my phone and computer, but I use Dropbox to share photos between my own devices. It’s a little bit more effort, but I think it ends up working better for me, because all my photos aren’t immediately downloaded onto my phone and using all of its space.
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I think the author of these slides is right in their response but I don’t think the tone is all that great.
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While I agree with your sentiment, I think I’d be pretty irked by complaints such as the below!
“While it’s always bad form to let your code hold open database transactions while performing unrelated blocking I/O, the reality is that most engineers are not database experts and may not always understand this problem, especially when using an ORM that obscures low- level details like open transactions.”
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I can see where they have one “moral claim” against Uber, that comparing MySQL logical replication and Postgres physical replication is not an apples-to-apples comparison.
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I agree, too. Engineering teams make decisions based on their best guesses. Sometimes they may have overlooked something or may be plainly wrong. That’s fine.
Getting a snarky reply instead of a polite discussion will deter future engineering teams from writing thorough blogposts detailing their operations in fear of getting dumbed down.
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admg
1 year ago
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GitHub now lets its workers keep the IP when they use company resources for personal projects
Recently I went for a job interview (which I turned down after some dodgy comments from the interviewer) where I asked about the companies attitude towards side projects which are sold. I was something to the effect of ‘under UK law, the company owns everything by default’.
It’s good to see a change in this attitude from bigger companies, my current company is OK with side projects as long as they don’t compete. A reasonable position really.
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my current company is OK with side projects as long as they don’t compete.
As @mjn mentions above, as the company gets larger, it becomes easier for the company to assert that pretty much anything relating to software or hardware “competes” with the company. As an Apple employee, if, say, you wanted to do technical training as a side business, sorry, iTunes University offers training, so you’d be “competing”.
Though if I was in a band and wanted to distribute my music on iTunes, apparently that’s fine.
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I have no idea how I have never seen this guy’s blog before, and he does seem a bit crazy (apparently, not all of his satire may actually be satirical in nature), but it certainly has some interesting points on software development.
What stroke my mind is the difference between this and GitLab’s model of extra pay to those remote workers that like spending extra, which goes as far as paying a different salary based on different cities in the same metro area (sounds like they might even pay you more if you live in a good neighbourhood of a city, too, I have no idea how that’s even legal).
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I would hope that blog entry is satire!
Interestingly about gitlab, it looks like they change salary considerably (nearly £5K!) between the two major cities in Scotland. In practice I know both cities have lots of companies offering the same salary. So their pay calc’s would probably put them at a disadvantage.
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Awww memories :) I had a love affair with the NDS too at some point: https://dslinux.org/
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Lab 3 on http://deadbeefsociety.org/bootcamp.html.
That looks neat, bookmarking for later, thanks.
Bookmarking that one as well, looks well worth going through!