> Having given so much of themselves to their careers, they often felt unmoored and purposeless when they left their jobs.
That's in contrast with all of us who see the companies led by these guys as the cancer of society and we'd quit and never look back if we had FU money.
My feelings aside, if all their purpose is to grow their company, I kinda get why they wouldn't give a damn about bettering the mankind, improving their communities or raising a healthy family.
Can you please not post cynical and/or curmudgeonly comments to HN? I can understand the feelings behind it—we all can—but this is really not what we're going here, and it has a way more degrading effect on the threads than I'm sure you intended.
Hitting the reader mode of your favorite browser will help.
Usually it sounds like a weird advice and we'd want site owners to aim for readability...but TBH, blaming a site on a .pink domain on a page explaining the codepoints of an emoji flag to not be universally accessible seems beside the point.
> What counts as “negative” here? Criticism of technology, skepticism toward announcements, complaints about industry practices, frustration with APIs.
If skepticism towards business announcements counts as negativity, I wonder what else we'd be discussing regarding any of those announcements.
An OpenAI marketing piece for instance will already go overboard on the positive side, I don't see relevant commentary being about how it's even better than the piece touts it. Commenting just to say "wow, that's great" or paraphrasing the piece is also useless and thrown upon. At best it would be a factual explanation or expansion of some harder to parse or specialized bits ?
I read the pre published PDF but don't really see stand what we were supposed to take from this blog post in particular.
Aldo am I basically fullfiling the blog post prophecy ?
PS: I think articles that raise to the top page with absolutely no comments would be an example of people straight enjoying the content, and the site actually working great IMHO
> Also am I basically fullfiling the blog post prophecy?
Yes. I think the post does well to make the point that "negativity" comes in two forms, critical and toxic. Lumping the two seems like an oversight, to me.
That would be fine if it was a kickstarter or some "sold as is" prototype. But looking at the page and pitch, it's sold as a regular product backed by a regular company.
We're not talking about free returns or costly perks, but manufacturing defects that got passed their QA process or resulted from design issues. Leaving the customer holding the bag for these is kinda crap, even (especially?) for a small company IMHO.
Pebble also has a bad track record of making lasting products.
The original Pebbles had a zebra strip connector to the display which had problems; and their last product, the Pebble 2, had buttons made of a soft silicon rubber which quickly fell apart. The fact that the new Pebble company sold a brand new product (the Pebble 2 Duo) with the same defective design is worrying.
Exactly. I've bought custom keyboards off individuals under such limited expectations, but everything makes this watch otherwise look like a proper product release.
Just to spare people reading this a few clicks (from their FAQ):
> Yes, we warrant against manufacturing defects for 30 days after you receive your order. Ship us the defective watch, and after we receive it back, we will ship (no charge) you a replacement.
If the CTO is setting their position as the goal, we're talking about the managerial ladder.
ICs and specialists (I see product managers and directors as specialists as well) should have other options, but if all you're managing is people, getting more people under you is usually the only path forward.
> 1. Promotions are not a reward for past performance. Instead, they are a bet that you will contribute more towards those goals with a promotion than without one.
It's both.
You reasonably can't keep someone in the same position for 5 years when their market value has long gone past that point and they're expecting more. Even if you're not sure they won't be Peter principled out in the better paying position.
The better way if to have an internal pay scale that allows for more specialization without more responsibility, but that's IMHO rare and requires managers that can handle that.
> demonstrating performance at your boss's level
To note, it often results in advices close to "do X job for a while and we'll let you have it", which looks like a no risk move for the company but is not without downsides. I've seen people being half managers for a full year before becoming one, and boy does it kill morale.
It signals to employees they'll be literally working about their pay grade "for free" for an undefined amount of time, and it's an even worse proposition when they're effectively doing two jobs at the same time (they're still expected to excel in their current position while proving they can do the other position as well)
It's a more delicate balance than it might look at first.
And I agree that, taken to an extreme, this is abusive towards employees. But I think most (good) companies handle this pretty well.
I've seen a couple of patterns:
1. Your boss trusts that your instinct are aligned with theirs, and gives you more latitude. Maybe they allow you to design architecture your way rather than requiring detailed review. Maybe they delegate reviewing other people's code to you.
2. You understand enough about your boss's goals/constraints that you can represent them. E.g., they might trust you to represent them at a cross-functional meeting.
Either way, your name will come to their mind when promotions are available.
If it's actual code that runs important stuffs in production: either one cares enough to understand all the ins and outs and going into managements didn't cut them from coding, either they're only pushing what they see as "good enough" code while their team starts polishing resumes and they probably have a better output doing management.
PS: if you only have half an hour for writing something, will you have 3h rolling it back and dealing with the issues produced when stuff goes sideways ? I really don't get the logic.
A common policy I've seen from
engineering managers who code (and one I've stuck to myself when I've been in engineering management roles) is to avoid writing code that's on the critical path to shipping.
That's means your team should never be blocked on code that you are responsible for, because as an engineering manager you can rarely commit dedicated coding time to unblocking them.
This still leaves space for quite a few categories of coding:
- prototypes and proof of concepts
- internal "nice to have" tools that increase developer quality of life (I ended up hacking on plenty of these)
> While a number of articles cropped up explaining what the Showa Hundred Year Problem was leading up to 2025, they passed mostly unnoticed, mere curiosities compared to the major media attention showered on Y2K a quarter century ago. And, in fact, as 2025 comes to a close, I can't find any reports of actual issues stemming from the date change.
This is probably a combination of two things:
- computer people hate with a passion the Imperial calendar. Normal people are already annoyed when they have to do some calculation, in a decade+ spent here I never ever heard of anyone actively wanting to display or handle dates in the imperial/religious system. The only people I ever saw do it were required to.
- people who care the most about the imperial calendar use mostly paper and static data. It will be for printed forms, official announcements etc. The dynamic part will be mostly for this year or next year, and those will be up to date with the current/next area (also the sanest way to handle that is to have a unix date internally and only convert at display/parsing)
While most developers may dislike the imperial calendar, all of my bank/brokerage statements display dates using it, as do tax/pension forms. It's definitely still in heavy use for some very important data.
On a similar note, I recently requested a list of historical transactions from a brokerage and found that transaction dates continued to be annotated as Heisei all the way through Heisei 36 (2024), a full 5 years after Heisei officially ended in Heisei 31 / Reiwa 1 (2019). Late in 2024, transactions finally started being annotated Reiwa 6.
> my bank/brokerage statements display dates using it, as do tax/pension forms. It's definitely still in heavy use for some very important data.
I have a hunch the internal system doesn't store it in imperial calendar. While those can be very old system, they went through waves of modernization and in particular handling future payment was always a PITA as you couldn't predict what year it would be 5 or 10 years ahead, or even next year really.
Storing a Unix time and doing the conversion at display time is the sanest way to handle it.
Funny thing is,even with that kind of system the conversion tables can still be outdated, and will cause issue like the ones you had with lenient numbering.
> Its undoubtedly the whole region will be better off without its hold
This is BS. If he was an issue for the region he needed to be tried by his country by his own people and they should get their power back. A foreign power taking over the country to siphon it's oil doesn't help in any way.
It's the same situation with Trump, China swooping in and kidnapping Trump wouldn't help. We'd need the US population to fix it's own mess if we're hoping for any improvement.
We're just getting into another cycle of pain and grudges.
That's in contrast with all of us who see the companies led by these guys as the cancer of society and we'd quit and never look back if we had FU money.
My feelings aside, if all their purpose is to grow their company, I kinda get why they wouldn't give a damn about bettering the mankind, improving their communities or raising a healthy family.
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