That was not at all the universal response to the iphone. http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=iphone is a (nsfw) contemporary article that I agreed with at the time, and I knew a decent number of people who got an early iphone and then switched back to a blackberry.

I've worked on software where we had multiple maintained release branches and we always just worked off master and then cut long-lived release branches from master at some point. Once a branch was cut we'd never merge master into it again and instead backport just specific fixes, which is quite different from git-flow.

Large GitHub PRs are miserably slow even with a maxed out Mac Studio on gigabit fiber with single-digit ms ping to their server. It’s not an example of something that works well on high-end hardware but scales down poorly.

The eight round interviews are incredibly stupid from the hiring side as well. My job’s thankfully not gone quite that far, but I’ve had a bunch of hiring panels where I don’t have anything to add that the four other people who interviewed the candidate didn’t already cover and my involvement in the process was just a complete waste of time.

I would have guessed a much higher number, and the number possibly being as low as 4% seems like good news to me.

The entire point of having multiple branches of government is that they have different powers.

There are both different powers and similar powers between the different branches.

And to some extent it got less entertaining as it got higher quality.

I do suspect this would not run well on a 75 Mhz Pentium 1. It would be very surprising if Quake 1 was actually the pinnacle of what as possible on the hardware of the time, though. id made exactly one game targeting that generation of hardware, and then their next game had meaningfully higher system requirements despite coming out only a year later. The hardware capabilities were changing so fast that there simply wasn't time to iterate on a specific target.

Not sure but I think it might have been getting close to what was possible - I remember reading about Michael Abrash working with John Carmack on all sorts of things to get acceptable framerates.

Oddly enough starting an article with a defense of Nick Shirley leads to the comments on an article being about that.

I mean, I wouldn't have led off that way either, but I know what Patrick is talking about and I read the article. I genuinely believe the current administration is the worst in the history of the country, and I also believe that to oppose it effectively we need every government body we run to be completely on the ball, so it's really dispiriting to see people reflexively defend misconduct and incompetence. That shouldn't be a habit we share with the party we oppose.

(I can't speak for Patrick's politics, only for mine.)

No government body is run completely on the ball, which is why it's such an effective bad-faith demand.

I don't even know where this belief comes from. I'm certainly not aware of any historical scenario where authoritarian regimes end when their opponents finally embody perfect behavior above reproach.

It would be a bad-faith demand if I was asking people to assume every blue-state government was bad. But I'm not: I'm simply asking to recognize one that clearly is.

You don't need to ask people to assume every blue-state government was bad, Nick "name a Democrat city that's prospering right now" Shirley will do that after you, you just have to tee him up by saying the first part: "we need every government body we run to be completely on the ball".

I doubt you yourself are engaging in bad faith (of course I recognize your username) but it's still a bad-faith demand to expect "completely on the ball" behavior above reproach and your intentions don't matter when you echo the demand.

For the author, it wasn't enough to simply recognize a failure to prosecute fraud fast enough, such a failure must be characterized as the cause of the irresponsible demagoguery that followed. Then turns around and wonders why his article isn't treated as the apolitical dissection of fraud that he claims it to be.

I don't understand this at all. The DFL-controlled government of Minnesota royally fucked up and allowed fraud against a social services program on an industrial scale. That fraud isn't a small crime; it's a grave crime, victimizing the most vulnerable people in our society. It's a very big deal. This is a technical post discussing a variety of different ways in which program administrators could hope to prevent something like it from happening in the future.

How are people finding ways to downplay or dunk on this? I just don't understand. What do I care how "apolitical" it is? I don't care. I do not care. The fraud is what we should care about. That's what the post is about.

You don't have to care how apolitical it is but the partisan political nature of the post, which it starts and ends with, is why the HN thread is reacting to and discussing partisan politics. What makes it partisan is the shift from admonishing the government to justifying the partisan "irresponsible demagogues" that are currently brutalizing Minnesota by pointing to the blue-state government's slow prosecution of Somali immigrants.

When Charlie Hebdo was bombed and shot, I suppose what people should have been writing is a technical post about the poor quality of their work with tips on how to convey the same artistic point in a way that doesn't invite fanatics to bomb and shoot them, concluding that by not reining in their bad work they have ceded the field to people who will not be gentle in their proposals. Then you can comment things like "What do I care how apolitical it is? The art is what we should care about. That's what the post is about".

Edit: maybe a better analogy would be 9/11 with the US and Al Qaeda, where the US would be less innocent in your political sensibility than Charlie Hebdo and the dynamic I hypothesized was more real.

The partisan politics of this story are off-topic for the site! We're supposed to be discussing the substance of the story!

The partisan politics are in the story and part of its substance (and really how could it not be? what he's suggesting has substantial political consequences even setting aside the naked partisan jabs). The presence of technical details doesn't negate that, many polemics have technical details.

That is not a plausible objection to this article and as someone actively involved in Democratic politics and a compulsive HN participant I find this whole thread really embarrassing.

Historically one of the big problems with Xcode has been that they only dogfood. There’s people on the team that have not touched any other IDE in decades. They’ve gotten used to all of the quirks, and just don’t really know that things could be better. Every new improvement has to be designed from scratch rather than just ripping off what other IDEs do better.

Apple internally has structured their projects to not run into all of the debugger performance cliffs, but don’t provide any guidance on how to do the same thing and don’t proactively fix the problems they’ve avoided.

Every time I’ve talked to someone who has worked on Xcode they’ve expressed the opinion that Xcode is best-in-class and they simply don’t understand why people disagree.

> Every time I’ve talked to someone who has worked on Xcode they’ve expressed the opinion that Xcode is best-in-class and they simply don’t understand why people disagree.

Wow.

I won't say Xcode is anywhere near the worst IDE I've ever used (Eclipse) but I wouldn't say it's anywhere near best in class either.

> There’s people on the team that have not touched any other ... in decades.

From using Apple products, I get the impression that the same is true for many other things.