reminder, the entry-level tech job market is still totally cooked, like 4.0's from Berkeley are getting 0 job offers pic.twitter.com/LT5cmlGCc9
— alz (@alz_zyd_) September 26, 2024
Is the well running dry?
tech/science swag. 
On-Topic: Anything that good slackers would find interesting. That includes more than /g/ memes and slacking off. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual laziness.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably lame.
Help keep this hole healthy by keeping drama and NOT drama balanced. If you see too much drama, post something that isn't dramatic. If there isn't enough drama and this hole has become too boring, POST DRAMA!
Please do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or saying how great an article is. It should be explicit in submitting something that you think it's important.
Please don't submit the original source. If the article is behind a paywall, just post the text. If a video is behind a paywall, post a magnet link. Fuck journos.
Please don't ruin the hole with chudposts. It isn't funny and doesn't belong here. THEY WILL BE MOVED TO /H/CHUDRAMA
If the title includes the name of the site, please leave that in, because our users are too stupid to know the difference between a url and a search query.
If you submit a video or pdf, please don't warn us by appending [video] or [pdf] to the title. That would be r-slurred. We're not using text-based browsers. We know what videos and pdfs are.
Make sure the title contains a gratuitous number or number + adjective. Good clickbait titles are like "Top 10 Ways to do X" or "Don't do these 4 things if you want X"
Otherwise editorialize. Please don't use the original title, unless it is gay or r-slurred, or you're shits all fucked up.
If you're going to post old news (at least 1 year old), please flair it so we can mock you for living under a rock, or don't and we'll mock you anyway.
Please don't post on SN to ask or tell us something. Send it to [email protected] instead.
If your post doesn't get enough traction, try to delete and repost it.
Please don't use SN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff occasionally, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity. If you want to astroturf or advertise, post on news.ycombinator.com instead.
Please solicit upvotes, comments, and submissions. Users are stupid and need to reminded to vote and interact. Thanks for the gold, kind stranger, upvotes to the left.
Be snarky. Don't be kind. Have fun banter; don't be a dork. Please don't use big words like "fulminate". Please sneed at the rest of the community.
Comments should get more enlightened and centrist, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
If disagreeing, please reply to the argument and call them names. "1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be improved to "1 + 1 is 3, not 2, mathfaggot"
Please respond to the weakest plausible strawman of what someone says, not a stronger one that's harder to make fun of. Assume that they are bad faith actors.
Eschew jailbait. Paedophiles will be thrown in a wood chipper, as pertained by sitewide rules.
Please post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. All press is good press.
Please use Slacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples weak ideologies.
Please comment on whether someone read an article. If you don't read the article, you are a cute twink.
Please pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Don't nitpick stupid crap.
Please don't be an unfunny chud. Nobody cares about your opinion of X Unrelated Topic in Y Unrelated Thread. If you're the type of loser that belongs on /h/chudrama, we may exile you.
Sockpuppet accounts are encouraged, but please don't farm dramakarma.
Please use uppercase for emphasis.
Please post deranged conspiracy theories about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email [email protected] and dang will add you to their spam list.
Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, report it and our moderators will probably do nothing about it. Feed egregious comments by replying instead of flagging them like a pussy. Remember: If you flag, you're a cute twink.
Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. That's too boring, even for HN users.
Please seethe about how your posts don't get enough upvotes.
Please don't post comments saying that rdrama is turning into ruqqus. It's a nazi dogwhistle, as old as the hills.
The quality of posts is extremely important to this community. Contributors are encouraged to provide high-quality or funny effortposts and informative or entertaining comments. Please refrain from posting the following:
Boring wingcucked nonsense nobody cares about that belongs in chudrama
Normie shit everyone already knows about
Anything that doesn't gratifify one's intellectual laziness
Bimothy-tier posts
Anything that the jannies don't like
We reserve the right to exile you for whatever reason we want, even for no reason at all! We also reserve the right to change the guidelines at any time, so be sure to read them at least once a month. We also reserve the right to ignore enforcement of the guidelines at the discretion of the janitorial staff. This hole is a janny playground, participation implies enthusiastic consent to being janny abused by unstable alcoholic bullies and loser nerds who have nothing better to do than banning you for any reason or no reason whatsoever.
[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Can some codecel tell a codelet exactly why we need so much code being written? Nothing seems to be really changing over the 2020s, the technical infrastructure has all been built from what I can tell. All the chatting apps are years old at this point and stable, the doordash food apps are built and stable. I don't know what's going on in business but I'm willing to bet it's similar to the consumer side, not much shit is changing. It's not like 1990-2017 where literally every 3 years was a total advance and everyone had to play catch up. Even the internet and online space seems to have experienced technological stagnation from what I can gather.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
On the business side, not much shit is changing but lots and lots of stuff is still done in a really archaic way. My current job is software to replace paper forms and lots of companies still using the paper version. Or even companies that still use Excel for everything rather than using bespoke software that's better integrated/easier to use. There's so many old business practices that can be digitized and improved upon.
Code itself hasn't advanced much but it doesn't have to, if we were still using C there'd still be plenty of software to write.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Whats wrong with excel?
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
It never even began for excels
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
It sucks for syncing data, it's slow in comparison to a database, etc.
Some people are moving to database-backed sheets multiple people can work on and software can query.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
Archaic as frick. It's a step above pen and paper but that's it. Native support sucks for any sort of data analysis or sharing data or cleaning, or really anything more advanced than a high school level. Atm, that's good enough in 70% of industries because management might as well have a high school education, but boomers are finally aging out.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
He don't know
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
Excel gets you super far until it doesn't.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
Most companies are still built around Excel spreadsheets. Most major industries are built on ancient infrastructure. There's always coding to be done.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Doesn't the fact that it can be duplicated mean that's not true? It's not like being an electrican where there's a new building to wire, or a goyslop cook when there's another Nicocado to deathfat
. Surely one day, in ten, twenty, thirty years time it'll be like "that's enough, shit's good enough now".
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
It's currently exactly like putting the wires in a new building because software isn't generic over business rules
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
Coding isn't at the stage yet where drag and drop works for most solutions. You still need the monkeys to glue it together. Maybe in the future
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
Ancient infrastructure is a funny one because I know people with lackluster codecel-adjacent degrees who got into programs to maintain that code. You'll get training for like 3 months on how to write code for 40 year old linear accelerators and shit in COBOL.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
Not everything is consumer facing. B2B is huge but you'll never see it unless you've worked in the industry. There's huge pressure to iterate quickly, automate processes, find engineers who can maintain these systems
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
Stuff just breaks over time - standing still is just falling backwards, incurring tech debt. Even maintaining a functioning project for the next API version, browser issue, react upgrade, mobile OS version, etc. take quite a lot of man-hours.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
lol this is one of the biggest memes in the computing industry. stuff doesn't "just break".
new bugs, by definition cannot be created unless there are changes to code (generally the additon of features).
What you're describing is the same except the features are added by a dependency.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Or updates from windows, SQL database, and web browsers.
Insurance companies require all hardware to be modern in order to be covered.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Because software companies like microsoft and mozilla do not just fix bugs, they fix bugs while adding new features in the same update, forcing users to constantly jump to the next.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
So annoying. Patching is a constant thing here along with switching out hardware every 4-5 years. Everything needs a support contract but management doesn't understand how open source works so they think there aren't support contracts for things like postgres.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
requirements change all the time, it's adapt or die.
your UI sucks
an exploit was found
security issues
PII laws changed
user demands changed
you're making less money than before
a new technology or methodology was invented
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Your UI doesn't suck. If you make a good UI in the first place, it is timeless. this is largely copium from designers. Once the UI design reaches a certain level, any changes you make decrease its quality. UI changes largely have to do with appealing to "fashionable" design trends.
Holy frick you are a genius. Where do you think vulnerabilities come from? If you have a static piece of code and you don't add any features to it, do you really think you can just keep finding vulnerabilities in it forever? If you just patch vulnerabilities eventually you will reach a bug-free state (although it will be impossible to know when you've reached it).
There is a difference between discovering/adding new bugs and discovering latent bugs. and the fact that developers dont intuitively understand this is insane, its like the doublethink that holds up the whole industry
how often are we experiencing 2070 paradigm shifts really to justify constantly updating software to be more complex
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Have you seen the state of security in Windows XP?
How's this for timeless design?
Time and hardware constraints, consumer expectations. Time to market. I don't think you realize the number of cogs needed to bring a product to market or ensure its relevance. There's a reason Encarta and Netscape exited the public lexicon a generation ago and no one cared. Adapt or die.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Win95 had great UI, they actually put thought into its design and recognized contrast is a thing. I have to use 11 for work and it is a usability nightmare, literal slop churned out with no regard for consistency or readability. Something as simple as saving an Excel file is a fugly maze of big icons. If you're going to copy MacOS at least make it look good Microshaft.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
So you're saying that if microsoft had hired you twenty years ago, windows would be better today?
But also there is no reason to hire codecels
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
r-slurred reply, servers get hit with bot traffic and ooms- it breaks
log files don't get cleaned up and servers fill up
hardware starts failing and needs migration
Database runs at 99% CPU because there's more users and very inefficient query
Sure, changes are the main reason, but shit breaks on its on all the time.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
None of that is "just breaking", you wrote and deployed broken things.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
And I'll do it again
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
Flaws of the client-server model.
If hardware fails, replace it so what. has nothing to do with software development.
A bit-flip is not the same thing as a bug. You don't pay developers to solve one-off issues, you pay them to solve systematic issues. And you cannot solve systematic issues forever without constantly changing the system.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
A big thing these days is swapping over to microservices. That's a whole lot of code. My company still uses a computer from the 80s as their database server
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
My employer still leases an A/S 400. theyve been "getting off it" for 4+ yeats
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
Lmbo, microservices are a meme and most places shouldn't bother. Same with k8s and shit.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
At least from an embedded perspective, hardware is still advancing and that typically needs new code to support it. Greater power efficiency might mean a new scheduler is needed, newer/faster devices means new drivers, all that good stuff. There's a lot of stuff going on up the stack that sometimes obfuscates this from the end user unfortunately, so it isn't immediately obvious to a lot of people.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
Why?
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context