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Realistically everything is mostly shitty architecture and nearly on fire all the time.

The best critique is surviving production and constant iteration and tackling limits and problems as they become apparent.

If you see a problem, research solutions and hit the cycle again. Sometimes things don't work.

There's not much science in it I'm afraid.


Sounds reasonable but three points:

1. It's not anonymous. The ledger is enough to identify someone.

2. It's not 100% better than my current spreadsheet (one tab a month for the coming 6 months).

3. There's no motivation not to close it after a month I.e. no contract


No no no no. This is not right.

1. If you debug with this, you're debugging different code to what blew up in production for example. Subtle timing issues wiped out instantly and memory ballooning masked etc.

2. If you leave it in for prod, it's going to have masses of call overhead.

You can debug well with assertions, logging and unit tests. There is no need for this. I rarely have to spin up a debugger these days.


I use de Node.js debugger a lot, I think is very useful when you don't know exactly what to log, and you don't what to start adding logging lines everywhere. You have one assumption but if you are wrong you can check different var, within the debugger step by step. Sometimes I even use the debugger inside a unit test.


The last time I used a debugger was when with VS/C# or IntelliJ/Java, many years ago. For the coding I do now, mostly Go/Python/JS, I find manual debugging techniques much more effective.


Indeed, it's like they've never heard of the term 'Heisenbug'


It's like they know that not all bugs are Heisenbugs.


Well that's a fair comment! It seems strange to me to describe debugging by instrumentation as 'awesome' - 'adequate' seems more appropriate to me. But then I'm not a Go developer so I don't know how the rest of the toolchain compares.


> No no no no. This is not right.

It's as worthwhile as the bugs they can find with it. I wish the author would tell us if he found the bug in the dns program.


It isn't happening until it has happened.

Also sure a compiler may drop but its useless without a pile of libs.


We had 11 years of uptime on a VAX cluster at a company I worked for in the late 1990s.

They took it down in 2001 to replace it with something that took up 2U of rack space, about 2kw less power and ran windows 2000.

I turned up in 2012 to replace it again with something cloudy and it had 11 years of uptime (well done NT!) again[1] so YMMV.

The cloud based version has gone down about 10 times (thanks Azure!).

[1] not a great position but this was on an isolated network with locked down everything so less of a problem than a normally networked system.


That's funny. I swear I've considered just buying up a boatload of used Alpha and Itanium machines to keep a VMS cluster going another decade. Put a guard in front of it to block any attacks due to its age or protocols. People might laugh but my stuff would stay running no matter what. Example below:

http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/brochures/commerzbank/comm...

Notice how the Intel hardware all failed when things heated up a bit. The AlphaServers running VMS just kept chugging along. The eventual fail-over didn't loose a single transaction. Aggravates me that I can't easily obtain such reliable IT hardware/software anymore outside eBay. I mean, HP NonStop sure as hell doesn't have a hobbyist program with used servers for $130. ;)


The mid-range HP stuff is pretty reliable. We had a DL380p Gen7 survive the switch underneath it catching fire. Had zero chassis failures on about 500 nodes in the last 12 years as well. Lose disks and power supplies all the time and the odd Ethernet interface but nothing else.

Agree with ebay. I still look around for Sun Ultra kit now and then but the wife has other ideas because it's noisy and expensive to run.


Wow! That is impressive. I appreciate the tip on those.

" I still look around for Sun Ultra kit now and then but the wife has other ideas because it's noisy and expensive to run."

The battle that never goes away. Haha. This is why you need a basement or soundproofed room for that stuff. That's on my todo list for next house.


Comedy timing for me.

My father was taken into hospital 4 hours ago after collapsing and turns out he's got a brain bleed. They stuck him in a CT straight away and are now doing a lumbar puncture to see if there is any blood in the spinal fluid. They don't know what has precisely happened but they suspect an aneurysm that went undetected. The mortality rate of this event is 50% in 30 days. He's had a long history of hypertension and a couple of surgeries to clean out arteries in his neck.

Not sure why I'm sitting here on HN but it was taking my mind off things. Fail :(

Anyway, moral of the story: Don't smoke and dint eat piles of shit; it'll get you one day.

Edit: Ordered the book as well now like an idiot. Scary tale when you're close to it but I find comfort in knowing things rather than ignorance.

Thanks for posting this.


God, so sorry to hear that. There's no "Fail :(" here, please don't think like that. You're just trying to cope with this stuff. It's the most humane thing to do, and you know what, you need to stay strong for your family and for that your mind needs such breaks from time to time.


Thanks for the uplift; appreciated.


May your dad have as good an aftermath as my friend has.


Indeed. Thanks for the kind words.

Glad your friend got through it. Terribly traumatic but a good outcome looking at your other post. Happy to know someone who got through it against the odds.


How is he?


Transferred to another hospital overnight (this time a competent one). CT again. Found a small bleed and are currently waiting for a surgical opinion. He's in a shitty mood unsurprisingly!


"Anyway, moral of the story: Don't smoke and dint eat piles of shit; it'll get you one day."

I'll add this warning as a former chiropractic student. I sat in back of a perfectly healthy 20 something classmate in Chiropractic school. He was getting weekly Ghonstead Rotaries(basically twisting the Atlas, and Axis, and probally a few cervical vertebrae?). Well on Sunday, he was biking with his beautiful wife, and father in-law. He suddenly stopped peddling, and had a major stroke, and died on the spot. Even through Chiorpractic claims to have a low rate of vessel tears; I honestly think the adjustments caused his death?

Sharon Stone was undergoing weekly Chiropractic adjustments. The Chiropractor was trying to cure the elusive Subluxation. She had a bilateral stroke late one night.(I have no idea what Chiropractic adjustments she was getting--there's literally over 50 different techniques.) A famous vascular surgeon just happened to be giving a talk in San Francisco. The hospital contacted him and he repaired both vessels. She is so lucky to be alive today.

Be wary of any Chiropractor who snaps your neck.

(I dropped out of Chiropractic school because I realized the subluxation is so rare, only a few have been documented, and they are always due to blunt force trama, like horrendous automobile accidents, and the like. I could only find two verified medical subluxations when I did my own research in the 90's.)

I used to snap my own neck when I was in school. It was a nervous habit. I'd turn my neck, hear the C02 pop, and feel better--for a few minutes; I thought? I stopped the nasty habit years ago. I haven't carried any tension in my neck for the last few decades.

I hope your father is feeling better.


Interesting - thanks for posting.

He's waiting for a surgeon to have a meeting about him now. Not sure what the state of things is TBH.


Ah yes. A guy I know designed a simple voltmeter based on a uC and a 3 digit LED display for some radio equipment. Shipped the design out to china.

Look on ebay or aliexpress now...

Boy is he pissed about that.

Interestingly though the product that contained this ended up being built in the UK for only about 20% more. Shafted on import costs of components though.


It's better than nothing and likely better than something without source.

Using the CLR which has no guaranteed memory zeroing and has immutable strings and GC and an exposed profiler and debugging APi is a larger concern IMHO.


> It's better than nothing

There are real issues with a false sense of security that you're glossing over here...


I didn't check but I assume they use SecureString.


I'd be surprised if they did and don't forget that it's serialized/deserialized from something which will be hanging around in the GC in the form of a memory backed stream or something too.


> the CLR which has no guaranteed memory zeroing

That's interesting. Can you elaborate?

> and has immutable strings and GC

Immutable strings is a pretty standard feature for a language, right?


Basically, when an object goes out of scope, it isn't de-allocated instantly.

Immutable strings aren't standard; they're an implementation choice.


They're all pretty good as an ex-contractor in the UK. Even getting paid is quite easy if you sub your timesheets quickly.

The killer is simply making sure that if you do the entire 6 month contract in 2 weeks that you still get paid for the rest or have a massive termination fee in the contract.

The agents don't care; they pass all costs on.


Any more specific advice on enforcing payment if you deliver the contract early?


Yes. Specify an early termination charge of at least 50% of the contract total.


They do all the annoying paperwork for you at the registration service like the initial transfer of directors capital and appointments and crap like that. It's worth it.

(I've killed 5 limited companies now so I have lots of experience ;-)

IR35 is the only PITA IMHO of doing all this and that's easily sorted by doing the odd phone/laptop repair at the same time and invoicing it.


No it won't..

IR35 is explicitly contract by contract based... In theory (and in practice) you could be working at 3 places at the same time and 2 of them would be outside IR35 and 1 would be inside it...

There are a lot of old wives tales and myths around IR35 http://www.contractoruk.com/ir35/top_ten_ir35_myths_debunked... shows a few of them. And sorry for posting links to the same two sites but that is where the real information is from people who have operated this way for years...


You're right and I glossed over most of it but the killers are concurrency, substitution and fixed deliverables. With concurrency, if you can prove that during the contracted period you had billable work outside the contract then that goes in your favour if you get nabbed and the contract is borderline. With substitution, the contract should state that you can provide a substitute on demand so you're contracting out services and yourself. The third is fixed deliverables; that's always a killer. Rolling contracts as non distinct labour are how to get shot.

For ref I had a small battle on this front and concurrency won it for me.

TBH get a good solicitor and get them to take a look at the contract paperwork. That's better advice :)


Concurrency was part of the HMRC's Business Entity Tests which were so hilariously inaccurate compared to IR35 actual rules its was funny.

I guess if you had a small battle and that won it that battle wasn't with HMRC but instead with the Cabinet Office or another government department / quango...


>> IR35 is the only PITA IMHO of doing all this and that's easily sorted by doing the odd phone/laptop repair at the same time and invoicing it.

??

Oh, a phone/laptop repair for someone else, and invoicing them for it?

In just under three years I've taken on 5 contracts of varying lengths and billed for a small amount of casual consultancy work on the side too. I'm clearly not acting as an employee, hopefully I'm in the clear :)


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