Friend: How much do you charge for a website?

Me: Depends, what do you need?

Friend: Just a basic website.

Me: I am going to need more details than that, is it static HTML site? Do you want to be able to add content yourself? Do you have hosting? Do you....

Friend: Dude, just give me a rough estimate.

Me: But...

Friend: It's for a friend, he has an idea for a business.

Me: ...fine...$100 million 👿

//Because making a website is just a push of a button to some people

"I'm not paying for a website that's going to be free to visit, that doesn't make sense"
-A million $ idea guy

I'm a self-taught 19-year-old programmer. Coding since 10, dropped out of high-school and got fist job at 15.

In the the early days I was extremely passionate, learning SICP, Algorithms, doing Haskell, C/C++, Rust, Assembly, writing toy compilers/interpreters, tweaking Gentoo/Arch. Even got a lambda tattoo on my arm after learning lambda-calculus and church numerals.

My first job - a company which raised $100,000 on kickstarter. The CEO was a dumb millionaire hippie, who was bored with his money, so he wanted to run a company even though he had no idea what he was doing. He used to talk about how he build our product, even tho he had 0 technical knowledge whatsoever. He was on news a few times which was pretty cringeworthy. The company had only 1 programmer (other than me) who was pretty decent.

We shipped the project, but soon we burned through kickstart money and the sales dried off. Instead of trying to aquire customers (or abandoning the project), boss kept looking for investors, which kept us afloat for an extra year.

Eventually the money dried up, and instead of closing gates, boss decreased our paychecks without our knowledge. He also converted us from full-time employees to "contractors" (also without our knowledge) so he wouldn't have to pay taxes for us. My paycheck decreased by 40% by I still stayed.

One day, I was trying to burn a USB drive, and I did "dd of=/dev/sda" instead of sdb, therefore wiping out our development server. They asked me to stay at company, but I turned in my resignation letter the next day (my highest ever post on reddit was in /r/TIFU).

Next, I found a job at a "finance" company. $50k/year as a 18-year-old. CEO was a good-looking smooth-talker who made few million bucks talking old people into giving him their retirement money.

He claimed he changed his ways, and was now trying to help average folks save money. So far I've been here 8 month and I do not see that happening. He forces me to do sketchy shit, that clearly doesn't have clients best interests in mind.

I am the only developer, and I quickly became a back-end and front-end ninja. 

I switched the company infrastructure from shitty drag+drop website builder, WordPress and shitty Excel macros into a beautiful custom-written python back-end.

Little did I know, this company doesn't need a real programmer. I don't have clear requirements, I get unrealistic deadlines, and boss is too busy to even communicate what he wants from me.

Eventually I sold my soul. I switched parts of it to WordPress, because I was not given enough time to write custom code properly.

For latest project, I switched from using custom React/Material/Sass to using drag+drop TypeForms for surveys.

I used to be an extremist FLOSS Richard Stallman fanboy, but eventually I traded my morals, dreams and ideals for a paycheck. Hey, $50k is not bad, so maybe I shouldn't be complaining? :(

I got addicted to pot for 2 years. Recently I've gotten arrested, and it is honestly one of the best things that ever happened to me. Before I got arrested, I did some freelancing for a mugshot website. In un-related news, my mugshot dissapeared.

I have been sober for 2 month now, and my brain is finally coming back. 

I know average developer hits a wall at around $80k, and then you have to either move into management or have your own business.

After getting sober, I realized that money isn't going to make me happy, and I don't want to manage people. I'm an old-school neck-beard hacker. My true passion is mathematics and physics. I don't want to glue bullshit libraries together. 

I want to write real code, trace kernel bugs, optimize compilers. Albeit, I was boring in the wrong generation.

I've started studying real analysis, brushing up differential equations, and now trying to tackle machine learning and Neural Networks, and understanding the juicy math behind gradient descent.

I don't know what my plan is for the future, but I'll figure it out as long as I have my brain. Maybe I will continue making shitty forms and collect paycheck, while studying mathematics. Maybe I will figure out something else.

But I can't just let my brain rot while chasing money and impressing dumb bosses. If I wait until I get rich to do things I love, my brain will be too far gone at that point. I can't just sell myself out. I'm coming back to my roots.

I still feel like after experiencing industry and pot, I'm a shittier developer than I was at age 15. But my passion is slowly coming back.

Any suggestions from wise ol' neckbeards on how to proceed?

I absolutely HATE "web developers" who call you in to fix their FooBar'd mess, yet can't stop themselves from dictating what you should and shouldn't do, especially when they have no idea what they're doing.

So I get called in to a job improving the performance of a Magento site (and let's just say I have no love for Magento for a number of reasons) because this "developer" enabled Redis and expected everything to be lightning fast. Maybe he thought "Redis" was the name of a magical sorcerer living in the server. A master conjurer capable of weaving mystical time-altering spells to inexplicably improve the performance. Who knows?

This guy claims he spent "months" trying to figure out why the website couldn't load faster than 7 seconds at best, and his employer is demanding a resolution so he stops losing conversions. I usually try to avoid Magento because of all the headaches that come with it, but I figured "sure, why not?" I mean, he built the website less than a year ago, so how bad can it really be? Well...let's see how fast you all can facepalm:

1.) The website was built brand new on Magento 1.9.2.4...what? I mean, if this were built a few years back, that would be a different story, but building a fresh Magento website in 2017 in 1.x? I asked him why he did that...his answer absolutely floored me: "because PHP 5.5 was the best choice at the time for speed and performance..." What?!

2.) The ONLY optimization done on the website was Redis cache being enabled. No merged CSS/JS, no use of a CDN, no image optimization, no gzip, no expires rules. Just Redis...

3.) Now to say the website was poorly coded was an understatement. This wasn't the worst coding I've seen, but it was far from acceptable. There was no organization whatsoever. Templates and skin assets are being called from across 12 different locations on the server, making tracking down and finding a snippet to fix downright annoying.

But not only that, the home page itself had 83 custom database queries to load the products on the page. He said this was so he could load products from several different categories and custom tables to show on the page. I asked him why he didn't just call a few join queries, and he had no idea what I was talking about.

4.) Almost every image on the website was a .PNG file, 2000x2000 px and lossless. The home page alone was 22MB just from images.

There were several other issues, but those 4 should be enough to paint a good picture. The client wanted this all done in a week for less than $500. We laughed. But we agreed on the price only because of a long relationship and because they have some referrals they got us in the door with. But we told them it would get done on our time, not theirs. So I copied the website to our server as a test bed and got to work.

After numerous hours of bug fixes, recoding queries, disabling Redis and opting for higher innodb cache (more on that later), image optimization, js/css/html combining, render-unblocking and minification, lazyloading images tweaking Magento to work with PHP7, installing OpCache and setting up basic htaccess optimizations, we smash the loading time down to 1.2 seconds total, and most of that time was for external JavaScript plugins deemed "necessary". Time to First Byte went from a staggering 2.2 seconds to about 45ms. Needless to say, we kicked its ass.

So I show their developer the changes and he's stunned. He says he'll tell the hosting provider create a new server set up to migrate the optimized site over and cut over to, because taking the live website down for maintenance for even an hour or two in the middle of the night is "unacceptable".

So trying to be cool about it, I tell him I'd be happy to configure the server to the exact specifications needed. He says "we can't do that". I look at him confused. "What do you mean we 'can't'?" He tells me that even though this is a dedicated server, the provider doesn't allow any access other than a jailed shell account and cPanel access. What?! This is a company averaging 3 million+ per year in revenue. Why don't they have an IT manager overseeing everything? Apparently for them, they're too cheap for that, so they went with a "managed dedicated server", "managed" apparently meaning "you only get to use it like a shared host".

So after countless phone calls arguing with the hosting provider, they agree to make our changes. Then the client's developer starts getting nasty out of nowhere. He says my optimizations are not acceptable because I'm not using Redis cache, and now the client is threatening to walk away without paying us.

So I guess the overall message from this rant is not so much about the situation, but the developer and countless others like him that are clueless, but try to speak from a position of authority.

If we as developers don't stop challenging each other in a measuring contest and learn to let go when we need help, we can get a lot more done and prevent losing clients. </rant>

My mentor/guider at my last internship.

He was great at guiding, only 1-2 years older than me, brought criticism in a constructive way (only had a very tiny thing once in half a year though) and although they were forced to use windows in a few production environments, when it came to handling very sensitive data and they asked me for an opinion before him and I answered that closed source software wasn't a good idea and they'd all go against me, this guy quit his nice-guy mode and went straight to dead-serious backing me up.
I remember a specific occurrence:
Programmers in room (under him technically): so linuxxx, why not just use windows servers for this data storage?
Me: because it's closed source, you know why I'd say that that's bad for handling sensitive data
Programmers: oh come on not that again...
Me: no but really look at it from my si.....
Programmers: no stop it. You're only an intern, don't act like you know a lot about thi....
Mentor: no you shut the fuck up. We. Are. Not. Using. Proprietary. Bullshit. For. Storing. Sensitive. Data.
Linuxxx seems to know a lot more about security and privacy than you guys so you fucking listen to what he has to say.
Windows is out of the fucking question here, am I clear?

Yeah that felt awesome.

Also that time when a mysql db in prod went bad and they didn't really know what to do. Didn't have much experience but knew how to run a repair.
He called me in and asked me to have a look.
Me: *fixed it in a few minutes* so how many visitors does this thing get, few hundred a day?
Him: few million.
Me: 😵 I'm only an intern! Why did you let me access this?!
Him: because you're the one with the most Linux knowledge here and I trust you to fix it or give a shout when you simply can't.

Lastly he asked me to help out with iptables rules. I wasn't of much help but it was fun to sit there debugging iptables shit with two seniors 😊

He always gave good feedback, knew my qualities and put them to good use and kept my motivation high.

Awesome guy!

My employer has a dev studio in Cali.
The office is gigantic.
It has amenities.
It has a stocked fridge full of iced coffee, energy drinks, and apparently wine.
All the devs have totally enviable hardware.
And they probably earn twice what I do, or at least 50% more.

Yet they write absolute shit, never test their code, and push broken updates every day, often marked as "ready for final testing." Their codebase is full of hacks and guesses and stale cruft and worst practices. I wrote a rant recently about one of their fuckups, which involved 18 million Facebook errors per. day. So that should give you some idea as to the quality of their code, and their level of can't-be-bothered.

Again, they make 50%-100% more than I do.

Their whiny lead dev is bloody lazy when it comes to building things correctly, and totally prefers to half-ass everything and complain instead. He probably makes 150% of what I do, doing like 25% as much work, and maybe 10% as well. Doesn't quite compare though, as he's a Unity dev, not a backend dev. So his work isn't as critical.

akagdkdafavskakeuxbfh.
Bloody pisses me off.

"But their cost of living is higher!"
THEY SHOULDN'T EVEN BE EMPLOYED.

Million dollar app/service idea.

Automatically reply to all LinkedIn inmail’s with “I don’t have any experience with that on my profile”.

Even without any NLP I estimate over a 90% success rate.

Welcome back to practiseSafeHex's new life as a manager.

Episode 2: Why automate when you can spend all day doing it by hand

This is a particularly special episode for me, as these problems are taking up so much of my time with non-sensical bullshit, that i'm delayed with everything else. Some badly require tooling or new products. Some are just unnecessary processes or annoyances that should not need to be handled by another human. So lets jump right in, in no particular order:

- Jira ... nuff said? not quite because somehow some blue moon, planets aligning, act of god style set of circumstances lined up to allow this team to somehow make Jira worse. On one hand we have a gigantic Jira project containing 7 separate sub teams, a million different labels / epics and 4.2 million possible assignees, all making sure the loading page takes as long as possible to open. But the new country we've added support for in the app gets a separate project. So we have product, backend, mobile, design, management etc on one, and mobile-country2 on another. This delightfully means a lot of duplication and copy pasting from one to the other, for literally no reason what so ever.

- Everything on Jira is found through a label. Every time something happens, a new one is created. So I need to check for "iOS", "Android", "iOS-country2", "Android-country2", "mobile-<feature>", "mobile-<feature>-issues", "mobile-<feature>-prod-issues", "mobile-<feature>-existing-issues" and "<project>-July31" ... why July31? Because some fucking moron decided to do a round of testing, and tag all the issues with the current date (despite the fact Jira does that anyway), which somehow still gets used from time to time because nobody pays attention to what they are doing. This means creating and modifying filters on a daily basis ... after spending time trying to figure out what its not in the first one.

- One of my favourite morning rituals I like to call "Jira dumpster diving". This involves me removing all the filters and reading all the tickets. Why would I do such a thing? oh remember the 9000 labels I mentioned earlier? right well its very likely that they actually won't use any of them ... or the wrong ones ... or assign to the wrong person, so I have to go find them and fix them. If I don't, i'll get yelled at, because clearly it's my fault.

- Moving on from Jira. As some of you might have seen in your companies, if you use things like TestFlight, HockeyApp, AppCenter, BuddyBuild etc. that when you release a new app version for testing, each version comes with an automated change-log, listing ticket numbers addressed ...... yeah we don't do that. No we use this shitty service, which is effectively an FTP server and a webpage, that only allows you to host the new versions. Sending out those emails is all manual ... distribution groups?? ... whats that?

- Moving back to Jira. Can't even automate the changelog with a script, because I can't even make sense of the tickets, in order to translate that to a script.

- Moving on from Jira. Me and one of the remote testers play this great game I like to call "tag team ticketing". It's so much fun. Right heres how to play, you'll need a QA and a PM.

*QA creates a ticket, and puts nothing of any use inside it, and assigns to the PM.
*PM fires it back asking for clarification.
*QA adds in what he feels is clarification (hes wrong) and assigns it back to the PM.
*PM sends detailed instructions, with examples as to what is needed and assigns it back.
*QA adds 1 of the 3 things required and assigns it back.
*PM assigns it back saying the one thing added is from the wrong day, and reminds him about the other 2 items.
*QA adds some random piece of unrelated info to the ticket instead, forgetting about the 3 things and assigns it back.

and you just continue doing this for the whole dev / release cycle hahaha. Oh you guys have no idea how much fun it is, seriously give it a go, you'll thank me later ... or kill yourselves, each to their own.

- Moving back to Jira. I decided to take an action of creating a new project for my team (the mobile team) and set it up the way we want and just ignore everything going on around us. Use proper automation, and a kanban board. Maybe only give product a slack bot interface that won't allow them to create a ticket without what we need etc. Spent 25 minutes looking for the "create new project" button before finding the link which says I need to open a ticket with support and wait ... 5 ... fucking ... long ... painful ... unnecessary ... business days.

... Heres hoping my head continues to not have a bullet hole in it by then.

Id love to talk more, but those filters ain't gonna fix themselves. So we'll have to leave it here for today. Tune in again for another episode soon.

And remember to always practiseSafeHex

THIS is why unit testing is important, I often see newbs scour at the idea of debugging or testing:
My high school cs project, i made a 2d game in c++. A generic top down tank game. Being my FIRST project and knowing nothing about debugging or testing and just straight up kept at it for 3 months. Used everything c++ and OOP had to offer, thinking "It works now, sure will work later"

Fast forward evaluation day i had over 5k lines of code here, and not a day of testing; ALL the bugs thought to themselves- "YOU KNOW WHAT LETS GUT THIS KID "
Now I did see some minor infractions several times but nothing too serious to make me refactor my code. But here goes

I started my game on a different system, with a low end processor about 1/4 the power of mine( fair assumption). The game crashed in loading screen. Okay lets do that again. Finally starts and tanks are going off screen, dead tanks are not being de-spawned and ended up crashing game again. Wow okay again! Backround image didn't load, can only see black background. Again! Crashed when i used a special ability. Went on for some time and i gave up.

Prof saw the pain, he'd probably seen dis shit a million times, saw all the hard work and i got a good grade anyways. But god that was embarrassing, entire class saw that and I cringe at the thought of it.
I never looked at testing the same way again.

The weirdest shit happened today. My 14 year old sister comes to me and asks me that she has a million dollar app idea that I should make her so that she can put it on the app stores and earn.
THE PLAGUE HAS SPREADDD😱

Today I became the lead developer of a system, which annually generates about 30 million in revenue.

I just finished uni. I have no idea what I'm doing.

I feel like this guy.

Less a rant, more just a sad story.

Our company recently acquired its sister company, and everyone has been focused on improving and migrating their projects over to our stack.

There's a ton of material there, but this one little story summarizes the whole very accurately, I think. (Edit: two stories. I couldn't resist.)

There's a 3-reel novelty slot machine game with cards instead of the usual symbols, and winnings based on poker-like rules (straights and/or flushes, 2-3 of a kind, etc.) The machine is over a hundred times slower than the other slot machines because on every spin it runs each payline against a winnings table that exhastively lists every winning possibility, and I really do mean exhaustively. It lists every type of win, for every card, every segment for straights, in every order, of every suit. Absolutely everything.

And this logic has been totally acceptable for just. so. long. When I saw someone complaining in dev chat about how much slower it is, i made the bloody obvious suggestion of parsing the cards and applying some minimal logic to see if it's a winning combination. Nobody cared.

Ten minutes later, someone from the original project was like "Hey, I have an idea, why don't we do it algorithmically to not have a 4k line rewards table?"

He seriously tried stealing a really bloody obvious idea -- that he hadn't had for years prior -- and passing it off as his own. In the same chat. Eight messages below mine. What a derpballoon.

I called him out on it, and he was like "Oh, is that what you meant by parsing?" 🙄

Someone else leaped in to defend the ~128x slower approach, saying: "That's the tech we had." You really didn't have a for loop and a handful of if statements? Oh wait, you did, because that's how you're checking your exhaustive list. gfj. Abysmal decisions like this is exactly why most of you got fired. (Seriously: these same people were making devops decisions. They were hemorrhaging money.)

But regardless, the quality of bloody everything from that sister company is like this. One of the other fiascos involved pulling data from Facebook -- which they didn't ever even use -- and instead of failing on error/unexpected data, it just instantly repeated. So when Facebook changed permissions on friends context... you can see where this is going. Instead of their baseline of like 1400 errors per day, which is amazingly high, it spiked to EIGHTEEN BLOODY MILLION PER DAY. And they didn't even care until they noticed (like four days later) that it was killing their other online features because quite literally no other request could make it out. More reasons they got fired. I'm not even kidding: no single api request ever left the users' devices apart from the facebook checks.

So.
That's absolutely amazing.

Forgive me father, for I have sinned.  Alot actually, but I'm here for technical sins.  Okay, a particular series of technical sins.  Sit your ass back down padre, you signed up for this shit.  Where was I?  Right, it has been 11429 days since my last confession.  May this serve as equal parts rant, confession, and record for the poor SOB who comes after me.

Ended up in a job where everything was done manually or controlled by rickety Access "apps".  Many manhours were wasted on sitting and waiting for the main system to spit out a query download so it could be parsed by hand or loaded into one of the aforementioned apps that had a nasty habit of locking up the aged hardware that we were allowed.  Updates to the system were done through and awful utility that tended to cut out silently, fail loudly and randomly, or post data horrifically wrong.

Fuck that noise.  Floated the idea of automating downloads and uploads to bossman.  This is where I learned that the main system had no SQL socket by default, but the vendor managing the system could provide one for an obscene amount of money.  There was no buy in from above, not worth the price.

Automated it anyway.  Main system had a free form entry field, ostensibly for handwriting SELECT queries.  Using Python, AutoHotkey, and glorified copy-pasting, it worked after a fashion.  Showed the time saved by not having to do downloads manually.  Got us the buy in we needed, bigwigs get negotiating with the vendor, told to start developing something based on some docs from the vendor.  Keep the hacky solution running as team loves not having to waste time on downloads.

Found SQLi vulnerability in the above free form query system, brought it up to bossman to bring up the chain.  Vulnerability still there months later.  Test using it for automated updates.  Works and is magnitudes more stable than update utility.  Bring it up again and show the time we can save exploiting it.  Decision made to use it while it exists, saves more time.  Team happier, able to actual develop solutions uninterrupted now.  Using Python, AutoHotkey, glorified copy-pasting, and SQLi in the course of day to day business critical work.  Ugliest hacky thing I've ever caused to exist.

Flash forward 6 years.  Automation system now in heavy use acrossed two companies.  Handles all automatic downloads for several departments, 1 million+ discrete updates daily with alot of room for expansion, stuff runs 24/7 on schedule, most former Access apps now gone and written sanely and managed by the automation system.  Its on real hardware with real databases and security behind it.

It is still using AutoHotkey, copy-paste, and SQLi to interface with the main system.  There never was and never will be a SQL socket.  Keep this hellbeast I've spawned chugging along.

I've pointed out how many ways this can all go pearshaped.  I've pointed out that one day the vendor will get their shit together they'll come in post system update and nothing will work anymore.  I've pointed out the danger in continuing to use the system with such a glaring SQLi vulnerability.

Noone cares.  Won't be my problem soon enough.

In no particular order:
Fuck management for not fighting for a good system interface
Fuck the vendor for A) not having a SQL socket and B) leaving the SQLi vulnerability there this long
Fuck me for bringing this thing into existence

Every single time a friend comes to you with a "million dollar app idea" because he knows you're in webdev

Devs online be like "I started learning to code when I was 2 years old and submitted my first application at 5, since then I've made a few simple apps and pull in 2 million a day, not much but it pays the bills"

So discouraging to come up with a novel idea for a simple product and spend a lot of time just to realize you're absolutely lost and severely lack the knowledge to even produce a working product of any sort. All the while some kid makes something "simple" 10x more complex than what you failed to do, and in like a day nonetheless.

How do people just pick up so much knowledge so quickly? How do they just figure out information they couldn't have possibly known like it's intuition?

Life is hard man.

Whenever a client say "I HAVE A MILLION DOLLARS APP IDEA "

post != rant;
post = "Feature Request";
@dfox

Stack Overflow is full of abuntch of downvoteing dickbuts. The devrant community is so much more accepting of new devs, why not add a question section.

Down votes would only be allowed for spammers.
One the question was solved, it would go into the devrant question archive, Searchable by everyone.

Ik you have heard this one before, but it's Just my two cents.

Just found old logs I had with an ex-client, pre-devrant:

"What if we add the newsletter checkbox to the login, so each time a user logs in, he has to uncheck it, or else he will be subscribed to our newsletter?"

Not sure if that even needs a comment, I am speechless that was an actual suggestion, ever.

I hate, HATE MYSELF!! I am an awful developer. I am an awful person.
I am trying so hard. To be a better person. To be a better developer. But, as a person I am again finding it difficult to empathize. At work, I really want to explore MERN stack but that I have to do it out of working hours. And damn! work is too much, I don't get time.
I need to work on a new project, for 2 months the discussions with MILLION TEAMS ARE GOING ON!!! NOTHING!! NOBODY HAS ANY IDEA!! THEY MIGHT FIRE ME!! I AM STRESSED!!
IT'S 1AM HERE AND I AM WRITING UNIT TESTS!! I want to cry. I want a partner maybe who can support me or maybe it's my mood swings.

Started watching silicon Valley. HELL, THE BEST TECH SERIES EVER.don't know why i always end up watching long multi-season series in my exam days xD

Anyways what would you guys choose for your million dollar idea: sell it at $10 million, or build a company out of it? I will definitely sell.

Dogecoin hit USD $0.40 recently, which means it's time for the Crypto Rant.

TL;DR: Dogecoin is shit and is logically guaranteed to eventually fall unless it is fundamentally changed.

===========================

If you know how Crypto works under the hood, you can skip to the next section. If you don't, here's the general xyz-coin formula:

Money is sent via transactions, which are validated by *anybody*.

Since transactions are validated by anybody, the system needs to make sure you're not fucking it up on purpose.

The current idea (that most coins use today) is called proof-of-work. In short, you're given an extremely difficult task, and the general idea is you wouldn't be willing to do that work if you were just going to fuck up the system.

For validating these transactions, you are rewarded twofold:

1) You are given a fixed-size prize of the currency from the system itself. This is how new currency is introduced, or "minted" if you prefer.
2) You are given variable-size and user-determined prize called "transaction fees", but it could be more accurately called a "bribe" since it's sole purpose is to entice miners to add YOUR transaction to their block.

This system of validation and reward is called mining.

===========================

This smaller section compares the design o f BTC to Dogecoin - which will lead to my final argument

In BTC, the time between blocks (chunks of data which record transactions and are added to the chain, hence blockchain) is ten minutes. Every ten minutes, BTC transactions are validated and new Bitcoins are born.

In Dogecoin, the time between blocks is only one minute. In Theory, this means that mining Dogecoin is about ten times easier, because the system expects you to be able to solve the proof of work in an average of one minute.

The huge difference between BTC and Doge is the block reward (Fixed amount; new coins minted). The block reward for BTC is somewhat complicated compared to Doge: It started as 50 BTC per block and every 4 years it is halved ("the great halving"). Right now it's 6.25 BTC per block. Soon, the block reward will be almost nothing until BTC hits it's max of 21 million bitcoins "minted".

Dogecoin reward is 10,000 coins per block. And it will be that way for the end of time - no maximum, no great halving. And remember, for every 1 BTC block mined, 10 Doge blocks are mined.

===========================

Bitcoin and Dogecoin are now the two most popular coins in pop culture. What makes me angry is the widespread misunderstanding of the differences between the two. It is likely that most investors buy Dogecoin thinking they're getting in "early" because it's so cheap. They think it's cheap because it isn't as popular as Bitcoin yet. They're wrong. It's cheap because of what's outlined in section two of this rant.

Dogecoin is actually not very far off Bitcoin. Do the math: there's a bit over 100 billion Dogecoin in circulation (130b). There's about 20 million BTC. Calculate their total CURRENT values:

130b * $0.40 = 52b
20m * $60k = 1.2t

...and Doge is rising much, much faster than BTC because of the aforementioned lack of understanding.

The most common thing I hear about Doge is that "nobody expects it to reach Bitcoin levels" (referring to being worth 60k a fucking coin). They don't realize that if Doge gets to be worth just $10 a coin, it will not just reach Bitcoin levels but overtake Bitcoin in value ($1.3T).

===========================

It's worth highlighting that Dogecoin is literally designed to fail. Since it lacks a cap on new coins being introduced, it's just simple math that no matter how much Doge rises, it will eventually be worthless. And it won't take centuries, remember that 100k new Doge are mined EVERY TEN MINUTES. 1,440 minutes in a day * 10K per minute is 14.4 million new coins per day. That's damn near every Bitcoin to ever exist mined every day in Dogecoin

"I have a $1 million idea. Will you work for me for beans? I'll reward you with paradise when they grow tall"

Best code performance incr. I made?

Many, many years ago our scaling strategy was to throw hardware at performance problems. Hardware consisted of dedicated web server and backing SQL server box, so each site instance had two servers (and data replication processes in place)

Two servers turned into 4, 4 to 8, 8 to around 16 (don't remember exactly what we ended up with). With Window's server and SQL Server licenses getting into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, the 'powers-that-be' were becoming very concerned with our IT budget. With our IT-VP and other web mgrs being hardware-centric, they simply shrugged and told the company that's just the way it is.

Taking it upon myself, started looking into utilizing web services, caching data (Microsoft's Velocity at the time), and a service that returned product data, the bottleneck for most of the performance issues. Description, price, simple stuff. Testing the scaling with our dev environment, single web server and single backing sql server, the service was able to handle 10x the traffic with much better performance.

Since the majority of the IT mgmt were hardware centric, they blew off the results saying my tests were contrived and my solution wouldn't work in 'the real world'. Not 100% wrong, I had no idea what would happen when real traffic would hit the site.

With our other hardware guys concerned the web hardware budget was tearing into everything else, they helped convince the 'powers-that-be' to give my idea a shot.

Fast forward a couple of months (lots of web code changes), early one morning we started slowly turning on the new framework (3 load balanced web service servers, 3 web servers, one sql server). 5 minutes...no issues, 10 minutes...no issues,an hour...everything is looking great. Then (A is a network admin)...
A: "Umm...guys...hardly any of the other web servers are being hit. The new servers are handling almost 100% of the traffic."
VP: "That can't be right. Something must be wrong with the load balancers. Rollback!"
A:"No, everything is fine. Load balancer is working and the performance spikes are coming from the old servers, not the new ones. Wow!, this is awesome!"
<Web manager 'Stacey'>
Stacey: "We probably still need to rollback. We'll need to do a full analysis to why the performance improved and apply it the current hardware setup."
A: "Page load times are now under 100 milliseconds from almost 3 seconds. Lets not rollback and see what happens."
Stacey:"I don't know, customers aren't used to such fast load times. They'll think something is wrong and go to a competitor. Rollback."
VP: "Agreed. We don't why this so fast. We'll need to replicate what is going on to the current architecture. Good try guys."
<later that day>
VP: "We've received hundreds of emails complementing us on the web site performance this morning and upset that the site suddenly slowed down again. CEO got wind of these emails and instructed us to move forward with the new framework."

After full implementation, we were able to scale back to only a few web servers and a single sql server, saving an initial $300,000 and a potential future savings of over $500,000. Budget analysis considering other factors, over the next 7 years, this would save the company over a million dollars.

At the semi-annual company wide meeting, our VP made a speech.

VP: "I'd like to thank everyone for this hard fought journey to get our web site up to industry standards for the benefit of our customers and stakeholders. Most of all, I'd like to thank Stacey for all her effort in designing and implementation of the scaling solution. Great job Stacy!"
<hands her a blank white envelope, hmmm...wonder what was in it?>

A few devs who sat in front of me turn around, network guys to the right, all look at me with puzzled looks with one mouth-ing "WTF?"

So... did I mention I sometimes hate banks?

But I'll start at the beginning.

In the beginning, the big bang created the universe and evolution created humans, penguins, polar bea... oh well, fuck it, a couple million years fast forward...

Your trusted, local flightless bird walks into a bank to open an account. This, on its own, was a mistake, but opening an online bank account as a minor (which I was before I turned 18, because that was how things worked) was not that easy at the time.

So, yours truly of course signs a contract, binding me to follow the BSI Grundschutz (A basic security standard in Germany, it's not a law, but part of some contracts. It contains basic security advice like "don't run unknown software, install antivirus/firewall, use strong passwords", so it's just a basic prototype for a security policy).

The copy provided with my contract states a minimum password length of 8 (somewhat reasonable if you don't limit yourself to alphanumeric, include the entire UTF 8 standard and so on).

The bank's online banking password length is limited to 5 characters. So... fuck the contract, huh?

Calling support, they claimed that it is a "technical neccessity" (I never state my job when calling a support line. The more skilled people on the other hand notice it sooner or later, the others - why bother telling them) and that it is "stored encrypted". Why they use a nonstandard way of storing and encrypting it and making it that easy to brute-force it... no idea.

However, after three login attempts, the account is blocked, so a brute force attack turns into a DOS attack.

And since the only way to unblock it is to physically appear in a branch, you just would need to hit a couple thousand accounts in a neighbourhood (not a lot if you use bots and know a thing or two about the syntax of IBAN numbers) and fill up all the branches with lots of potential hostages for your planned heist or terrorist attack. Quite useful.

So, after getting nowhere with the support - After suggesting to change my username to something cryptic and insisting that their homegrown, 2FA would prevent attacks. Unless someone would login (which worked without 2FA because the 2FA only is used when moving money), report the card missing, request a new one to a different address and log in with that. Which, you know, is quite likely to happen and be blamed on the customer.

So... I went to cancel my account there - seeing as I could not fulfill my contract as a customer. I've signed to use a minimum password length of 8. I can only use a password length of 5.

Contract void. Sometimes, I love dealing with idiots.

And these people are in charge of billions of money, stock and assets. I think I'll move to... idk, Antarctica?

Update:

The wasp is still alive.

I walked in today to find the damn buzzy mother-earth-fucker on the window. It doesn't have much energy now, and I didn't let it out because mofo got the chance a million times over to just leave me the fuck alone. So I just let it be. no idea where in the lab it is hidden now, and the robots will watch him all night, every night.

And you know what, I'm not gonna open the damn window for it ever again.

(Sat in my hoodie, wrapped, the whole day and was paranoid about it flying and sitting on me, but the war is on. He won't get out of this lab alive. )

The dreamer : doer ratio

"I have a million dollar idea"
"That's cool!"
"I just need someone to do the work and I'll be rich!"

DO THE WORK YOURSELF!!!

Anybody developing Bitrant yet?

Want to make someone's life a misery? Here's how.

Don't base your tech stack on any prior knowledge or what's relevant to the problem.

Instead design it around all the latest trends and badges you want to put on your resume because they're frequent key words on job postings.

Once your data goes in, you'll never get it out again. At best you'll be teased with little crumbs of data but never the whole.

I know, here's a genius idea, instead of putting data into a normal data base then using a cache, lets put it all into the cache and by the way it's a volatile cache.

Here's an idea. For something as simple as a single log lets make it use a queue that goes into a queue that goes into another queue that goes into another queue all of which are black boxes. No rhyme of reason, queues are all the rage.

Have you tried: Lets use a new fangled tangle, trust me it's safe, INSERT BIG NAME HERE uses it.

Finally it all gets flushed down into this subterranean cunt of a sewerage system and good luck getting it all out again. It's like hell except it's all shitty instead of all fiery.

All I want is to export one table, a simple log table with a few GB to CSV or heck whatever generic format it supports, that's it.

So I run the export table to file command and off it goes only less than a minute later for timeout commands to start piling up until it aborts. WTF. So then I set the most obvious timeout setting in the client, no change, then another timeout setting on the client, no change, then i try to put it in the client configuration file, no change, then I set the timeout on the export query, no change, then finally I bump the timeouts in the server config, no change, then I find someone has downloaded it from both tucows and apt, but they're using the tucows version so its real config is in /dev/database.xml (don't even ask). I increase that from seconds to a minute, it's still timing out after a minute.

In the end I have to make my own and this involves working out how to parse non-standard binary formatted data structures. It's the umpteenth time I have had to do this.

These aren't some no name solutions and it really terrifies me. All this is doing is taking some access logs, store them in one place then index by timestamp. These things are all meant to be blazing fast but grep is often faster. How the hell is such a trivial thing turned into a series of one nightmare after another? Things that should take a few minutes take days of screwing around. I don't have access logs any more because I can't access them anymore.

The terror of this isn't that it's so awful, it's that all the little kiddies doing all this jazz for the first time and using all these shit wipe buzzword driven approaches have no fucking clue it's not meant to be this difficult. I'm replacing entire tens of thousands to million line enterprise systems with a few hundred lines of code that's faster, more reliable and better in virtually every measurable way time and time again.

This is constant. It's not one offender, it's not one project, it's not one company, it's not one developer, it's the industry standard. It's all over open source software and all over dev shops. Everything is exponentially becoming more bloated and difficult than it needs to be. I'm seeing people pull up a hundred cloud instances for things that'll be happy at home with a few minutes to a week's optimisation efforts. Queries that are N*N and only take a few minutes to turn to LOG(N) but instead people renting out a fucking off huge ass SQL cluster instead that not only costs gobs of money but takes a ton of time maintaining and configuring which isn't going to be done right either.

I think most people are bullshitting when they say they have impostor syndrome but when the trend in technology is to make every fucking little trivial thing a thousand times more complex than it has to be I can see how they'd feel that way. There's so bloody much you need to do that you don't need to do these days that you either can't get anything done right or the smallest thing takes an age.

I have no idea why some people put up with some of these appliances. If you bought a dish washer that made washing dishes even harder than it was before you'd return it to the store.

Every time I see the terms enterprise, fast, big data, scalable, cloud or anything of the like I bang my head on the table. One of these days I'm going to lose my fucking tits.

The most common line nowadays,"Dude,I have a million dollar idea,You do the code and I will do the marketing. "

There are always guys coming with the same million dollar app idea every few weeks that want me to develop the app for share of the future revenues.

Btw the idea is always like this: "he man, i got an app idea which will make us rich quick. It's like Facebook and Instagram mix but with tinder functionality."

I just wrote a function that creates a configuration struct that is stored in a Singleton struct, but to create it I called the Singleton to get a connection to the database.

This created an infinite recursive function that maximized connections on the database, as the Singleton never got fully initialized. Not a good idea.

So to fix this I created the configuration after the creation of the Singleton, still calling the singleton from within the function. This worked.

Then I remembered that I could have just passed the connection as a parameter to the function. Like I've done a million times before...

It's time for the weekend, I need a break

I've assembled enough computing power from the trash. Now I can start to build my own personal 'cloud'. Fuck I hate that word.
But I have a bunch of i7s, and i5s on hand, in towers. Next is just to network them, and setup some software to receive commands.

So far I've looked at Ray, and Dispy for distributed computation. If theres others that any of you are aware of, let me know. If you're familiar with any of these and know which one is the easier approach to get started with, I'd appreciate your input.

The goal is to get all these machines up and running, a cloud thats as dirt cheap as possible, and then train it on sequence prediction of the hidden variables derived from semiprimes. Right now the set is unretrievable, but theres a lot of heavily correlated known variables and so I'm hoping the network can derive better and more accurate insights than I can in a pinch.
Because any given semiprime has numerous (hundreds of known) identities which immediately yield both of its factors if say a certain constant or quotient is known (it isn't), knowing any *one* of them and the correct input, is equivalent to knowing the factors of p.

So I can set each machine to train and attempt to predict the unknown sequence for each particular identity.

Once the machines are setup and I've figured out which distributed library to use, the next step is to setup Keras, andtrain the model using say, all the semiprimes under one to ten million.

I'm also working on a new way of measuring information: autoregressive entropy. The idea is that the prevalence of small numbers when searching for patterns in sequences is largely ephemeral (theres no long term pattern) and AE allows us to put a number on the density of these patterns in a partial sequence, but its only an idea at the moment and I'm not sure what use it has.

Heres hoping the sequence prediction approach works.

"Can I have an app? It's a million dollar idea: you take a picture of yourself and it tells you if you're pregnant or just fat. I don't have any money at the moment but I'm willing to give you 5%, maybe less if my friend wants to join. plus, no ads, and make it a free app so it will be liked alot."

Can you shut the fuck up? do you have any idea what the fuck you're talking about? that's the most fucking ridiculous idea I've ever heard. how the hell would it even work?

The everything is Data science craze trend.

Honestly it's not even sustainable with every kid and their grandmother wanting to be data scientists because it's a 'passion' and a 'dream job' and all of that click bait stuff.

It's just become ridiculous at this point and I doubt we'll even have the long awaited 'breakthroughs' people have been talking about for so long.

Also I have a strong feeling everyone thinks it's their 'passion' because it tops the lists of highest paid jobs out there and everyone thinks with 3 months of training they're a fully fledged data scientist because some Python or R package implements all the algorithms he could ever think of using.

Add to that the fact that most advertised data science jobs are actually data engineering where you maintain a date store and that's it.

Agree or disagree that's my piece and if you can convince me otherwise I'll be surprised because I've been subscribed to this idea for so long that it lost me some real good opportunities because I thought it was just what I was meant to be doing which turned to be false after I thought about it. There's a million other jobs that are more impactful and with pursuing.

It's always the people who being nothing but "million dollar ideas" who want you to build the entire product and then have the audacity to ask for 50% profit.

So, finally I can rant after a while.
After I stopped helping people coding online few months ago, because I was getting literally spammed 24/7 by everyones shitty multi-million dollar ideas, I introduced few of my classmates in to coding. Now, after ~6 months, I am spammed by my classmates by their awesome programming ideas which are too hard for them but they are sure its gonna be awesome. The difference is, that I cant say "FUCK OFF AND STOP SPAMMING MY INBOX WITH YOUR FUCKING IDEAS" to my friends and block them. Please fucking kill me. Once more someone will start messaging me their fucking idea
-like this
-in
-separate
-messages instead
-of writing one
-long and propper
-message
I am gonna swim with a toaster. 😡

I just found out my parents have less than $30 in the bank by the end of each month after all expenses...

We are not living. We are barely surviving....

Every day in my house it is dark and the lights are off. They turn all lights off in order to avoid getting a high electricity bill. I have to use my phone's flashlight as the main source of light in my own house, as if i live in abandoned cottage in the middle of a forest.....

Both my parents are jobless (have been their entire lives). They just borrow money from their family members and grandparents to pay these bills every month. They depended on luck their whole lives. A luck in context of "maybe if i dont work anything at all then a huge pile of money will fall down from the sky!".

So now I, as their son, have to grow up in extreme poverty and fight my way up, because of DUMB, STUPID people. They are good people, but what does being a good person bring if you are fucking stupid and valueless?

I knew i was poor but today i found out i was THIS poor. I had no idea we were THIS much poor. Because today my 4g internet got cut off due to not paying bills. The bill is $30. My dad cant pay it cause he doesnt have $30 in the bank. I was in shock. So i had to pay it

My $8.125 usd an hour backend software engineer + DevOps engineer (2 jobs in 1), is considered as LUXURIOUS SALARY, in the most corrupted country of Europe -- SERBIA 🇷🇸

When i tell the world i make $8 an hour with a computer science degree working as a software engineer, they laugh at me. People mock me "bro even a mcdonalds worker earns $17/hour what are you doing" im doing what i was born into -- born into poverty of a third world shithole country.

With my $8 an hour salary, i am in TOP 3% of the HIGHEST earners in serbia. Can you fucking imagine how miserable lives do people live if this is not even an average salary, but among the ELITE salary? Because the average salary in Serbia, is $3.75 usd an hour, sometimes even less than that.

When people say "its not about luck its about hard work", please, GO. FUCK. YOURSELF.

Go and be born in a shithole third world country. Now on top of that be born in poverty due to poor decisions of your parents. Go ahead and try it. Lets see how hard you fucking have to work to get to the same level compared to someone who was born into for example America, where you get paid 6 figures immediately after graduating computer science. Or on top of that, you're born in a wealthy family in america. Did you work hard to be born in the 1st class freak show or were you LUCKY to be gifted such life?

My whole life i have been fighting to get money and escape this misery due to poor decisions of my parents.

Very ironically, my parents have lived extremely luxurious lives in the 90s. They had 5 cars. 1 huge house with a backyard garage private office private jacuzzi private gym. This house was worth at least 500k in the 90s. Today this house would cost at least 1.5 or 2 million. They went to luxurious travels. Hotels of $5000 per night per person. Literally wasted 45k in 3 days just for hotel. They even GAVE AWAY FOR FREE money to our relatives and cousins, taking them on luxurious vacations for free etc. None of those people appreciated them, none of them came to help them in tough times, everyone forgot about them and abandoned us.

Like i said, my parents are good people, but what does it profit being a good person if you are FUCKING STUPID.

They were extremely LUCKY but their STUPIDNESS has made them broke. I couldn't be THIS much fucking stupid even if i tried hard.

Nobody is coming to save us. No one cares. Its all up to me now. All the pressure and stress and poverty is passed and inherited onto my life now. its up to me to either get rich or end my STUPID bloodline

I am living a very difficult life and no one seems to understand this...

What's wrong with the idea of having a huge computational network like in Watch Dogs to bruteforce encryption ?
I mean suppose having 500 or more million cores , how long does it actually take to bruteforce a 256 bit key ?

Going into uni, the first thing I did (like many others) was to join an on campus organization (club/group). I made the choice of joining my unis publication. Little did I know 2 years ago that I had just joined the top most student magazine in this country. (Literally).
Honestly, I was excited. I was the first web developer that qualified that year, and within a year I was able to claim my position as the senior developer. It had been an uphill climb all the way, I was able to redesign the entire website and implement an insane amount of features as well as add both iOS and Android apps to the list of things I had done in a year.

I had loved everything I did, only when I was given my new position as senior dev did I see the reality of being in this magazine.. it's in total chaos. Every year we elect new editorial members (as old ones graduate) however the new ones have no idea how to run the magazine, they have literally declared that were in crisis mode. Being in an art school were all about creativity, and honestly, there is nothing creative about our magazine anymore.

Suddenly after two years I feel that my work no longer matters to them anymore. I have thought about quiting a million times now but they would take away my grant if I did (we get a subsidy for working for the magazine). I have two more years and I feel like absolute shit being in this magazine, my work is never credited and I am never mentioned either! While I am the reason they have a face on the internet, they never once have credited me. I don't feel like I belong in the team anymore. I feel like they only have me there is because they can't find a replacement nearly as good. (I'm sorry but I consider myself the best.)

It's been a while since I've heard a consensus of a moronic idea from the corner offices. I was invited to a department planning meeting (just to listen, not necessarily engage or add value) and discussion went to the development of a mobile app.

Mgr1: "The CEO has the net present value of the mobile project as $20 million. Where did he get that number?"
VP: "No idea."
Mgr2: "How will it be any different than our web site that is already mobile compliant?"
VP: "It is to gain market share"
Mgr3: "Market share from who? A mobile app is not going to increase our customer base. At best, it will only move some of our existing customers to mobile. No way it would scale to those numbers."
VP: "The primary benefit is so customers can browse offline."
Mgr2: "Offline browsing isn't listed in the milestones."
Mgr1: "We're not going to push and keep gigs of data up-to-date on someone's phone just for random times they don't have internet access."
VP: "I guess that's right. We can push our pdf catalog. That's only a few hundred meg."
Mgr2: "Pushing the catalog? That's not on the listed milestones"
VP: "Its all assumed."
Mgr3: "Who owns this project? Web team is already maxed to capacity."
Mgr2: "Marketing team only has 3 developers, we can't take on anything as complex as a mobile app and support the existing processes."
Mgr1: "What about the network infrastructure and PCI compliance? We're talking about a system for the web site and another for mobile, right?"
Mgr2: "Who is going to manage all the versions in the app stores and future changes to the mobile platform?"
Mgr4: "Not us"
Mgr2: "Nope"
Mgr1: "OK, good. Its very likely this project will be dead on arrival at the next company strategic meeting."
VP: "Mobile the only project on the strategic meeting agenda. Sorry guys, it's happening. We're not going to leave $20 million sitting on the table.
<awkward silence>
VP: "Next item of business ..."

i was about to talk about golang - but it can wait.

snapchat's discover section is TERRIBLE. the amount of BULLSHIT, INCORRECT INFORMATION, AND PURE IDIOCY IS MAKING IT TERRIBLE.

now, usually, i rant about mashable when i say it's terrible. AT LEAST WHEN MASHABLE WROTE ABOUT THIS THEY WERE CORRECT. but no, alas, my faith in humanity is put to an all time end. a new evil has arose, by the name of "wired."

of course, and incredibly late to the party, a "tech" outlet wrote about bitcoin. the headline was "is bitcoin killing the planet?" IT HAS BEEN POSSIBLY THE STUPIDEST ARTICLE IVE READ OF ALL TIME. THEY CLEARLY HAVE NO IDEA ABOUT ANY SHIT THEYRE TALKING ABOUT.

let's take a look at the TWO facts they got wrong, and displayed to over a MILLION people.

now, instead of just GOOGLING TWO SIMPLE FACTS, THEY DECIDED TO JUST WRITE RANDOM SHIT.

ENOUGH WAITING - HERE THE THE TWO FACTS THEY GOT WRONG

picture 1: bitcoin up $900 in the last year? THE LAST MOTHER FUCKING, COCK SUCKING

.
.
.

YEAR?!?

WHY DO SUCH DUMBASSES HAVE ACCESS TO SOMETHING MILLIONS VIEW?

IT MAKES NO FUCKING SENSE

picture two: the actual fuck????

did i just read that?

b- bi- bitcoin will "run dry" BY 2032.

i think i finally figured it out.

these facts, they're literally just random number.

<thoughtBubble>
i can see it now:

wired employee 1: hey, guess what number im thinking of?

wired employee 2: 14?

wired employee 1: *screaming* BITCOIN WILL RUN DRY IN 14 YEARS

</thoughtBubble>

how do these people get hired. do they hire only hire 12 year old interns? im genuinely asking. does anyone know?

okay, end of rant. plz continue complaining about dumbasses who have power thru the media in tech

debugging a performance issue. basically the original dev had no idea what a database was for. system was generating millions of buffered reads, and paging horribly.

to see if an id existed they had done the following:
fetch all 1 million rows into an array.
iterate the array looking for a match.
if found, set found=true
continue to iterate the rest of the array.
return found.
repeat at every login.

replaced with
return person.get(id)

set world record for most i/o avoided with one liner.

Goto the play store and look for a flashlight, you'd find thousands of apps.

So what's the big idea? Well the big problem here is the whopping millions of downloads each one of them has

Let's assume there are a 1000 flashlight apps and I assure you there are!

1000* 1 million users... Either that or people exist with weird fantasies of collecting flashlight apps

CAN NODEJS KINDLY GO FUCK ITSELF?

well maybe not node itself, but those node js so-called "professional node developers"

WHO THE FUCK thought it was a good idea to pass about EVERY SINGLE ARGUMENT as a global variable so absolutely no code insights are available, eslint with THEIR eslintrc shows ABOUT ONE MILLION DIFFERENT LINTER WARNING and on top they commited the node_modules folder

-_-

I'm out.

RethinkDB is such a rediculous overengineered BIGGEST BULLSHIT I HAVE EVER UNFORTUNATELY USED.

Does anyone even use this total shit????

This shit eats RAM memory for just 1 CRUD operation as if you opened 10,000 google chrome tabs. Who the fuck thought that kind of technology is a good idea?

Yes it IS very fast, a real time database. But you'd have to have a multi-million dollar supercomputer to be able to handle so much data like a relational database can....

Yesterday was a horrible day...
First of all, as we are short of few devs, I was assigned production bugs... Few applications from mobile app were getting fucked up. All fields in db were empty, no customer name, email, mobile number, etc.
I started investigating, took dump from db, analyzed the created_at time stamps. Installed app, tried to reproduce bug, everything worked. Tried API calls from postman, again worked. There were no error emails too.
So I asked for server access logs, devops took 4 hrs just to give me the log. Went through 4 million lines and found 500 errors on mobile apis. Went to the file, no error handling in place.
So I have a bug to fix which occurs 1 in 100 case, no stack trace, no idea what is failing. Fuck my job.

My implementation of facebook's haystack storage solution. It's certainly not a faithful recreation, but I think this served my needs better.

The idea is you store all of your files in one large file, and just write down where each of your files starts and ends. This particular implementation I called an indexed haystack because it gives you back an index, sort of like an array.

I was attracted to the idea because it makes the file structure of the server so much more simple, and backups so much easier when you only have a few files rather than a few thousand. Facebook came up with it because it was more efficient to store a million photos all in the same file rather than in a million separate ones.

There is a 100GB limit to each haystack but that isn't technical, it's just a sensible thing to do.

Rant!
What ryms my gears seeing those posts on LinkedIn:
1. What startups need to do to become the next billion dollars corporate
2. App ideas that will sell in millions
3. What every wannabe needs to know to become the best entrepreneur

I honestly don't recall adding other than devs and HRs 😒

The difference between having a million dollar idea and having a million dollars is, unfortunately, a awful lot of work.

Hey just brainstorming a business/ startup idea I may try out sometime down the line. I wanted to put it in writing available to my peers for review. If that sounds boring, sorry.

So I've had an idea and I know it's a million dollar idea because it's absolutely boring as fuck.

Recently I have been learning about NoSQL and it has gotten me pretty excited about unstructured data.

Now the first thing you should know about me is I like to make business software. I don't like games or social networks or blah blah blah, I like business stuff. One dream I have always had is to make THE business solution. I've noticed so many specific business solutions for very specific areas of work. Specific software for car washes, which is separate from the software for car maintenance, which is separate from the point-of-sales software, which is separate from the [...]

One of the problems with this is the inconsistency. Modular is good, but only if the modules are compatible. They aren't. Training needs to be provided for each individual system since they are all vastly different. And worst of all, since all of these different applications reach their own niche market, they charge out the butt for things that are usually very simple "POST a form over http(s)" machines.

I mean let's not get too dreamy here. My solution is an over-complicated form-builder. But it would be a game-changer for small and medium-sized businesses. Allowing users to build their own front-end and back-end disguised as a drag-and-drop form builder would be THE alternative, because they could bring all of their solutions into a single solution (one bill!) and since THEY are the ones that build what they need, they can have custom business software for the price of a spreadsheet program.

The price difference we could offer would be IMMENSE. Not only would we be able to offer "cookie-cutter" pricing as opposed to "custom" pricing, but since this generic solution could be used for essentially all of their systems, we aren't just decreasing one bill. We're decreasing one bill, and eliminating the rest entirely. We could devastate competition.

"BUT ALGO", you scream in despair, "USERS AREN'T SMART ENOUGH TO DRAG AND DROP FORM PARTS TO MAKE A FORM"

I mean ya true. But you say that like it's a bad thing. For one, we can just offer a huge library of templates. And for another, which is part of the business plan, we can charge people support dollars to help them drag and drop their stupid fucking forms!! Think of the MONEEYYYY YOU COULD MAKEE BY EXPLAINING HOW TO COLLECT FIRST AND LAST NAMEEE. Fuck.

The controls library would be extensible of course. You would be able to download different, more specialized controls if you need them. But the goal would be to satsify those needs with the standard collection of controls (Including interesting ones line barcode scanner and signature input and all that). But if all else fails, maybe someone made an open source control for you to implement and ignore that stupid donation button. We all do.

This could PURGE the world of overpriced and junky specialized business software, and best of all, it's aimed at smaller businesses. With smaller businesses making more profit, they will stay afloat better and may start to compete with their larger foes. Greater for the entire economy.

Anyways, I'm sure it's full of holes. Everything always is. But I still think it's something I'll try before I die.

Fucking fuck! How could I be so naive?
I just started my masters in Enterprise Software Development. It's basically the continuation of the CS BSc I finished this year. I don't consider myself a lazy and bad dev and I finished in the top 5-10% of the class - I say this not because I want to brag, I know I'm not the best, I know I have my defects, BUT I don't think that it's a good sign that all of us, my top graduate friends all full of hate and anger against this whole MSc after just a week. And... It's mostly one fucking egoistic teacher's fault.
Okay, all of us are working full time which is obviously tiring if you combine it with the university classes. But I still think I could manage this first week better, if I wouldn't fucking came to the same line of the faculty.
I deeply fucking hate that I've been naively thinking that the masters will be different after experiencing one of the worst teachers last year. It's fucking first week, and I can't change the specialization anymore, only give up. I wanted to fill up the void with some usefulness, but I just fucking messed it up.

This "beloved" teacher is from the industry, he has a lot of experience and started to teach recently. Which is not a problem, no! It should be a great thing by default. But the way he holds his courses is inaccaptable. I don't think I have the right to share everything, but the following stuff just grinds my gears... Like a fucking lot:

1) He brags about a lot of stuff. Like he made really good deals in the past. Why should we know, that he made a contract with a client for 20 million euros. Okay. Whatever. That doesn't help us, and I think that bragging makes him look like an egoistic scum.

2) I hate this one the most: he fucking says that we have a choice in the administrative stuff. He gives us some hope and offers the possibility to argument and come up with our own solutions for grading and etc. But oh boy, is this a false hope, a fake idea of free will. He already knows what the final solution will be and on what kind of decisions will we all "agree". He did this last year, he does it again. Fucking naiveness of mine...

3) Lastly, he decided, that we have to go to theatre with him, all of us. No exception. And I like the theatre. But only when it isn't forced. Why and how could you pair this up with the grade you give to your students? Because that's what he does.

FML. How can I already hate this? How can I already be fed up with all the stuff? Anyways, I'm signing the contract with the university tomorrow, so let the fun games begin... I know, I look like a whining little boy now, but I just fucking had to went it after this deep fried shit-day. I probably have to get some sleep, and everything's gonna be fine. Eventually, skipping classes might become necessary in order to bear all this shit.

Okay so I’ve been brought in on a 12 month contract as an external replacement integration architect, alongside a large IT consulting firm. Turns out, they don’t need an integration architect. So I fill my time coming up with useful tools around the project that deal with all the missing parts in their MVP: like monitoring tools, data mocking tools, you get the idea. Essentially doodling.

Client has woken up to fact that they’ve overspent by X million, employing 30+‘developers’, 20+ ‘testers’, n+ ‘managers’ on a ‘low-code’ project … result: project shuts 4 months early.

Q: Essentially client wants remaining four months work done in two weeks. Is there a German word for laughing, crying, and banging the forehead on the desk at the same time?

Supplementary: how cross will client be when they realise project can indeed be done, and that consultancy have been emperor’s-new-clothing them for most of the last two years?

(Feel free to perform substitution on quoted terms at your leisure)

Sooo a coworker and I tonight were working on some software and somehow got side tracked on discussion regarding our thinking process, and how one of our other coworkers always things so strangely always defensive etc.. which then lead us to saying it would be nice if we could like see and feel how another persons brain is and how they draw conclusions and think..
this conversion immediately changed to the inner-monologue discussion.

And holy shit went go distracted for 4 hours tonight!

I have inner monologue, visual, auditory, symbolic and non symbolic abstract thinking in my mind, and it’s all happening at the same time, like a million miles a minute.

The other coworker has no inner monologue at all.

4 hours questioning each other trying to understand how the other one things then debating what we believe how the one perticular Coworker thinks. And then placing bets on what we think all the other coworkers are.

I’ve never had such a deep discussion on how my brain works nor how someone else thinks.

Like I was like joking but serious not in a bad way I’m not crazy my brain switches thinking depending on the situation I don’t have to. Try or think about it just occurs..

Like remembering things I’ll daisy chain and hop pictures, words and thoughts to bring back things but no effort it just occurs.
When a song is playing I can remember the last time I heard that song or part of the song I can feel how it was, I can see what I was doing what was happening in the world etc.
In the shower or driving I will have debates in my mind and play scenarios out in my mind on how a conversation or situation will go. I visually see and hear and feel the conversation that did or did not occur at that time. And I can jump to “playing” each person.

Or when a large decision is to be made or brainstorming an idea to me I like having the British parliament in a room, and debating the topic.

When people are talking I visually see what they are saying.

I thought EVERYONE was like this.. apparently not lol.

But this conversation did bring up a lot of realization of why I can quickly jump to conclusions or quickly move thru a conversation or concept but my coworker is lagging behind. Or having a hard time visualizing what I’m saying, thus me drawing it very fast and him/them saying how did you come up with that that quickly... ugh because in my mind I’ve already drew it up I’m just drawing what I see. Almost having to slow down and go back in time to explain something to them.

THEN we called a few of my “Star” interns haha and asked them, apparently they are all think the same way I do or atleast somewhat, which explains why some people I work i able to express ideas and continue thru a topic very quickly. While others I must slow down.

We need more of these discussions until now I had no idea there was “a different way people mentally process things” the entire conversation was very enlightening for the both of us, now I know what I must do differently and so does the other one.

But then we thought what caused this? Is this a learned trait from experience as a child? Or evaluation? Or just the deck of cards we are delt? Is this left hand people or right hand? I’m left hand and the two interns are left hand and they think the same, but the other coworker in the discussion was a right hander.. then we thought was this a result of imaginary friends as a young child? Was this a result of reading as a young child? Is one version better at math than the other.. music etc... is this a result of hyperactive brain? Drugs? Could drugs induce it? What does alcohol do to it...

Yeah we questioned all these things and more seriously went down the rabbit hole tonight... lmfao, tomorrow we will be surveying the rest of the team to see if we can draw any spurious informer conclusions and how accurate our bets were based on what we know personality wise of the other coworkers

SOOOOO thoughts???? Hahah

How many of y’all knew the other type existed? What type are you? And are you introverted or extroverted? Any rational relations we can connect to better explain this shit?

Any of us had annoyances with people with “a million dollar app idea” but what about these which gives unsolicited career advice?

I’m dealing with a boomer which keeps trying me to change my career and work into cyber security (because TV told him it’s a well paid field) despite me kindly telling him for multiple times which it’s not going to happen because I won’t throw away a career I love to work in a field which seems deadly boring to me (I love anything about coding from design to typing for hours on Vim meanwhile the only thought of reading for hours obscure documentation to find potential vulnerabilities on a system kills my spirit).

How the fuck can I get npm@5 to show me everything it just installed when I type `npm install`?

Was this because some twat wanted to push the idiotic idea that it's perfectly acceptable for js projects to rely on three million two line hipster.js libraries?

Fuck everything about the node ecosystem.

Alright, my very first post here was about this project and I am thinking it out loud again.

I see a problem and I am struggling to find a solution.

Now what I am thinking of is to articulate the problem well and state WHY I believe it needs to be solved. There are some reasons which must be presented in a capitalist way.

Furthermore, I am thinking of doing a market research to understand various demographics, validate the idea, and figure out the product-market fit.

Now, this qualitative research and quantitative data will help me decide whether it is worth putting in the efforts to solve the problem or not.

And since, we have an MVP already (funnily yes, we built it before all of the above), that will help me validate the tangible solution.

Once we get a confidence boost, then it will be time to get that single transaction which has net positive cash flow.

Start scaling to 'next billion users', so a billion transaction with net positive cash flow.

I won't be branching out into multiple verticals before be able to sustainably scale the core USP.

And while the second half sounds like, 'I have a million dollar idea', I am trying to be more and more realistic and rationale instead of falling in love with my idea.

I don't even have an idea (read solution) to fall in love with. Rather I have a problem that is bothering me.

So, yes, I am continuing this journey to solve the problem which started in second year of my hostel room and has evolved over 10 years.

Okay I got a genius/exceptionally stupid idea.
Some of you may know Xi. If not, it's an, in development, text editor backend, written in Rust.
It does all the heavy lifting and communicates changes with the Frontend over an rpc-api, typically on stdin/stdout.

Now, why don't we do this, but for other kinds of applications, that have been reinvented a million times, because a feature is missing or the ui has been shit.
Cross-Platform backends for file-managers, web browsers, password managers, media players,...

I'm in a big fat fucking stinking rut, as in progress on this project has absolutely stagnanted.

Gonna rubber face your duck now **UNZIPS** excepts I don't have zippers, as joggers are the one true way; fake Adidas til I fucking drop.

Brain damage aside, I understand both how I've layed out the data and what I'm supposed to do with it. We have a virtual machine, an array of instructions and arguments for a given process within it, and we need to walk this array and map values to registers.

We also need to spill values inside registers to stack, IF they are required at a further point within that block. This also isn't terribly complex. We simply look forward in the array and see if the value is an argument to any instruction that *needs* this value to be loaded (ie, within a register).

So this implies multiple iterations; we need to better understand how one particular value is used throughout an F before we can make a final decision on how many registers and stack space are actually needed for the whole block.

Here's where it gets tricky. If there's a call, we need to be certain that the symbol being invoked has already been fully processed. Besides the obvious fact that recursion fucks me up, there's another matter: say a private method gets invoked by another private method. We can take advantage of this, by which I mean, sacrilege incoming so put on this toga.

Looking at the output for C compilers, it would seem this is not done in practice, I would assume because it's a pain in the ass. But when you have the guarantee that F will only be called internally, as that's what "private" means, there's two ways it can go:

0. It's well below the 13-20 cycle threshold, so you inline the fucker. No suprises there.
1. It's a more involved affaire, and invoked in more than one place, so you don't inline it. Codesize matters.

Recursion and [1] are the big deal things holding me back. Not because it's too hard, like I said this is kindergarten level abstraction. I'm just slow and fanatical, which is how I prefer to spell "constant obsessive paranoid delusions". I can see the potential optimization I can pull here, so I'm stuck trying to figure it out.

Idea would be, handling the register allocation and stack spill for an internal-internal (or deep internal; what we like to call a "guts" method) in synchronization with the *calling* processes. This is, fundamentally, violating all conventions -- but so under the hood no one will notice.

Let me give you an example. If we were to pass some value to a function, expecting to mutate it and get a different value back, in a lot of cases it'd be stupid to make an implicit copy by using two registers, one for input and another for the output. Dude, it's one cycle. Multiply it by a million, say sixty times per second, for every time you __needlessly__ make a copy of a value that we've already stated is mutable.

Clearly unacceptable. This is, in the strictest sense, everywhere in every single codebase. Premature micro optimization is the root of all goodness, God is great and praiseworthy. So how do we go about it?

Answer is I know and I don't know. By which I mean to say, this very thing I've done by hand. Assembly is fun. Now the issue is teaching a calculator how to do it. Not so fun.

There is a dependency chain between processes, as I believe I've kind of alluded to. I'm trying to make decisions on the side of the caller depending on the details of the callee, which is why recursion is rawdogging my soul. This is the same situation, it's inverting the direction of one or more links in the dependency chain, which makes no fucking sense.

And yet it does.
Brain, explain yourself.

How do *you* handle this without crashing?
Brain?

<<ME STEWPED; BEEP-BOOP>>

Alright then, that was a useless attempt at fuckery. Let's have a nap then, maybe it'll come to me in the morning. That's what I've been saying to myself for almost a month now.

Perhaps it is a hardcoded fuk.

So. Wow I have a question. Ok for real... I am in need of advice. I have a concept for a platform based on a specific interest which almost all of us have, based on a peer-to-peer principle with multiple services and user types/needs/agendas/reasons. The platform is intellectually straight forward and users will all participate on the platform as they see fit which will benefit other users as well as motivate more to join. The platform will serve it's own purpose and meet the users needs in a way that you may have seen before but the intellectual property and how the platform is used, is so unique that I can't risk too much information.

The question is. How do I protect my idea / intellectual property so I can recruit help and market without someone coming along and stealing it out from underneath me?

This isn't uncle Vinnys Cologne idea...

Everyone thinks they have the million dollar winner. I'm not sure if this puts gold toilet paper in my bathroom just yet but... I have something that an existing platform with money will absolutely steal and try to push as their own idea... They will probably succeed too.

So how do I protect this from happening so only I get to fail or ruin this good idea?

Just saw a video based on the idea : what if the earth was a global country?
A provoking thought. If a 5000 people at google can control 3.5 billion people's data,
can we make a stable democratic government of a million(or more) politicians controlling the whole world's legislature?

Does this thought have a future? Since we are all connected by internet and simply moving towards a global village like environment, courtesy of softwares like fb or what's app, i think we would one day be ready to remove the boundaries .

Why TF does unity use mesh renderers for generating navmeshes? In what possible situation would that be a usefull?
Why would it chose to bug out on the complex visual geometry instead of using the finely crafted low-poly clipping layer? In what situation is that a good idea? Why would the AI need to collide with different things than the player? (IMHO NavMeshAgent should depend on CharacterController or Rigidbody)

I feel like so many features in Unity are potentially very nice but don't work well together or have WTF design elements like this one. Like custom shaders not being able to alter the result after the lights have been added together, and the undocumented finalgbuffer:ColorFunction function. Or a million other tiny things that make me wish I was smart enough to build my own engine.

/rant

What was the idea behind java spring (jpa) and creating/using like a million annotations? There are annotations for literally everything...