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excellent read. My brother in law has been extremely successful with real estate from his single apartment beginnings, nowadays when we meet and I ask him "how are you" he replies "I'm blessed".

dude I know you have a lot of money, I just wanted to know if you were sick or something. smh


But that`s the job. It`s not like they were doing something else and this is a side effect.

If i employ you to clean human feces, you can sure me for not providing adequate protection etc but you cant sure me because you had to deal with human feces. That is the job.


You've hit exactly what this lawsuit is about. They aren't saying "when I got a job as a content moderator I wasn't expecting to see traumatizing things", they're saying "my employer isn't providing adequate protections from the things I have to see as part of my job".


well it's interesting because it gives an insight for those of us who aren't there how things actually work.

Musk fan or not, you can't deny this has no interest


the whole point of driving a Tesla is not to rely on the Saudis


Unfortunately the Saudis have both oil and sunshine. We may be beholden to them indefinitely


So does Texas.


Do you know how much Saudi money is invested in Texas? Welcome to the wheel.


Saudi Arabia? I know they have money but it's like selling your chicken coop to a snake


No, it's Saudi Arabia attempting to diversify its holdings. If they've seen oil-rich countries fall again and again to low oil prices, it makes a lot of sense for them to hedge their bets and protect against the future where solar (they're investing a ton in this) and EVs may remain supreme. If these investments don't pan out, they still have a massive amount of very cheap oil reserves and will keep those longer than most other oil producers.


>If they've seen oil-rich countries fall again and again to low oil prices

... especially in context of how successful they've been at lowering oil prices to hurt their rivals.


yes yes, I get that but it also competes with their current cash cow. They obviously want a say in this technology that is inevitably going to destroy their oil revenues (and that is not a good thing).


Why do you say that?


I think the proper cause of action in that case was to return the car and do an old fashioned stake out with lots of beer.. I mean redbull and catch the burglars redhanded.


yes. I honestly don't know why this was not done. It sounds like the most obvious thing to do if you know that the burglars are going to come back anyways the next day.


Way to catch some sophisticated thieves, and if they don't show up anyway. Then stop going to that dealership.


This made me laugh. We were tasked to write an app for a customer and one of the main requirements from their product manager was the app had to open within 1 seconds. Not a problem we thought, then their technical guy came up with all these requirements that had to be resolved during the startup sequence.

So it was not simple and it was not fast. Nobody wants simple.. ever.


The implementation of this cheating is more insidious than you think. There could be a requirement to put in a "simulation" for testing. There's nothing unusual about implementing this feature. Then another request comes in at a later time to make this feature a build setting. Then at a later time someone who is not a software engineer toggles this build setting on production build during manufacturing to put it out in the field.


Hear hear. When building a bridge it's obvious when they're building a test bridge or a real life bridge for people to drive over.

"So you want to spend 100 million dollars on a bridge that you're only using for testing purposes. And you want to put this bridge right where it would be really useful to put a real bridge to handle rush hour traffic. And you have a deal with the city to collect toll payments for this 'test' bridge for the next 50 years. Yeah, I don't think we're going to be cutting any corners for the 'test' bridge."

VS

"You want me to take 2 hours to add in a test feature that can be conditionally compiled in for testing purposes? Also I talked to John in testing and they actually want this feature for testing. Seems legit."

Two months later. "Hey, I found this test feature that would allow us to cheat on the regulations. All we have to do is set this compile flag to true. The programmers even made this neat UI that allows us to change the build configurations without having to talk to them."


In addition, I think it's much easier to go back into the field and examine a bridge to ensure that something important was constructed to the specifications that you required. This is not the case with most of the software people write, certainly in this case it's pretty difficult for a developer to pull a car of the production line and verify that the code they wrote made it into the car without any changes.


The only joke here is somehow this author thinks the success of your project is dependent on the language you pick


It's definitely an important factor, at least indicts lots of other factors.

- is the language suitable for the domain?

- is library/community support mature?

- are there enough developers?

- who in the company will support it? It's obvious from HN topics that we are obsessed in language topics.

- it also reflect some part of design philosophy, and it could be good or bad for your project depend on the case.


"Dependent" is a strong word, but tool/job fit is still important.

I've personally never grown comfortable enough with C++ to get to a point where, were I to be the one calling the shots, it would ever be my first choice. But I also recognize that it's dominant in certain spaces for a reason.

At the same time, I have a lot of sympathy for people who prefer C over C++. There's a lot of cognitive overhead involved in understanding the semantics of an object-oriented language, especially a big complex one like C++ or Java. And complex languages do have a tendency to beget complex implementations, even when you're working on a project that could be small and simple.


> it's dominant in certain spaces for a reason.

That reason usually is: "no other compiler were available" or "no other choices at the times".


I've been in the business for 15 years, I have never seen a successful product fail because it was written in language x or y. It fails for a lot of other non programming language reasons though


I have never seen a successful product that failed for any reason, ever. ;)


wordperfect


Exactly! If I want to write my AAA game engine in JavaScript and Haskell it still has the same chance of success as an engine in C++


Funny how many people believe that language choice influences success. I guess they're all wrong?

Sure, there are an uncountable number of other factors, but picking the wrong platform/language can be fatal.


Yes, but that goes both ways: choosing a popular language can be just as fatal as choosing an unpopular language.

If you're a "body shop", then choosing an unpopular language could be fatal, whereas if you're building a specific software product that needs to do certain things on certain platforms, then choosing the language becomes less of a popularity contest and more about how it can help you finish the product quickly with the highest level of quality and performance.


Anytime I see someone bashing Java/PHP/JavaScript on /r/programmerhumor (reddit) I challenge them to a coding contest. I use the language they just bashed, they use their ideal language. No takers yet.

I think, more often than not, language choice is like golf club choice. Different pros have their preferences, but a pro can play a good game with any set of clubs. A novice will blame the clubs for a poor game.


To be fair I don't understand why anyone would bother. I am commenting on a forum, I don't expect to be given homework.


And you can perform carpentry using a big rock instead of a hammer. That doesn't negate any downsides of choosing the rock.


I would say it's more like people are pooh-poohing certain brands of hammers as being inferior to TrendTech Hammers (R) which are "obviously" superior.


The winner will be the one who gets to pick the task for the programming challenge.


Definitely pick the right tool for the right job.

Using C (maybe C++ ?) may be great for micro controllers, a BIOS, a stage 1 bloat loader, OS kernel and device drivers.

If you're writing application software, and probably even server software, you should be using something higher level and a bit more abstracted away from the hardware. Not necessarily by much. But definitely more than C / C++.


I think it does and it doesn't. It really depends on what your end goal is. Writing a web application? Not sure it really matters much if you use Python/Django, Ruby/Rails, Java/Spring. Just use what you (or the developers) are most comfortable with. Trying to make a game engine for AAA games? Yeah your not going to get away with Ruby or Python.


> Writing a web application? Not sure it really matters much if you use Python/Django, Ruby/Rails, Java/Spring. Just use what you (or the developers) are most comfortable with.

It might matter if you used COBOL, though. Or even C++.


Joke aside, it does contribute a lot. On one hand ability to get programmers (for acceptable price) depends on it, and on the other some languages are simply not suited for some environments.

Would you believe I once saw backend service written in PHP4? And not a small one either. It was just the only language the 2 original authors knew... Apparently they had a bit of memory problems because substr (or similar) leaked a few bytes, which over a course of few months amounted to quite a lot of memory.


"Almost perfect"[1] disagrees with you.

[1] http://www.wordplace.com/ap/index.shtml


which part? I skimmed through it and it mostly seemed to be group interplay, direction and competition. This is what kills products, not language of choice.


The part where they stick to assembly while the competition doesn't.


Where's the triple-A games written in brainfuck then?


Sounds like it would increase the risk of RSI instead of decreasing it


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