You have a long road of understanding HN, and everything and everyone in its incessant orbit, ahead of you. It will not be a comfortable experience and will make you doubt your choice of career, but once you understand, a lot of things will make sense and you’ll start noticing how much of your experience and existence is shaped by the people typing in this little box. If you’re in the audience that reads HN comments, a reliable predictor for a number of characteristics that I need not belabor, that’s an assertion I can quite comfortably make with no further knowledge.
“You have interpreted incorrectly. Here’s the correct interpretation. I’ve interpreted you incorrectly by assuming your remarks have something to do with tech moguls despite your drawing a map in crayon for me about engineering ethics. I do not intend to address that interpretation because I have announced my exit from this conversation, as normal people do, but your misinterpretation is fair game for me to dissect with a whole lot of defending a pointless forum comment.”
Thanks, kbenson. Insightful stuff. Real self-aware.
I’m a big fan of the people refreshing just to flag everything I say now, regardless of its merit or violation of any guidelines, a conclusion readily apparent by the timing of my comments and their removal now. You folks are doing excellent work keeping this community a safe space to have the type of mindset being assailed here by silencing the contrarian opinions. Some day, the Paul Graham Bunny will leave a prize under your pillow, but first you have to recite one of his essays as part of your evening prayer.
Every flag just proves my point, in a manner of speaking. I’ve touched a nerve. I know it, and you know it. I’m good with that.
1) Unfortunately, someone took a conversation about a purchase request as a chance to speak to [me] in a personal capacity. He’s a genuinely nice guy though and [I] like him. Just didn’t know what his role was in [my] workplace, and it wasn’t putting that story in [my] ear at that time, but I suffered through it.
2) Now that [I] live with the story, [I’ve] been waiting for a chance to share it so [I] don’t have to live with it any more.
3) What’s this? A thread about Azure? Someone finally mentioned crematoria! Yes! Gather around, fellow engineers, to dissect a Therac type of thing none of you will ever interact with, but will nonetheless defend on the grounds of “yeah, airplanes crash too” or free speech or mumble mumble. By the way, the person was half burned and fat. Sucks, right?
That’s a really insidious poison to accept, understand, and rationalize for your work, in ways that are not immediately obvious (clearly), and I lobby for ethics and licensing in our discipline for exactly the reasons on evident display this thread. This industry keeps turning out large-scale systems that are harmful to humanity. Do you think that came from postgraduate studies in evil, or a detached, clinical callousness and disregard for fellow people like the one you’re trying so hard to justify?
That person had a family. THEY WERE THERE. Maybe even kids. Dreams. Hopes. Aspirations. You’ve reduced them to a fat, half-burned corpse in the name of ginning up useful engineering disaster warnings or something. No, the discussion doesn’t NEED to be had. I reject your premise outright.
If it’s a problem that I care about those things, then, well, we are going to disagree. There is absolutely no small measure of irony in the numerous attempts across this entire thread to put my humanity into question for challenging yours. You’re only reinforcing for me that I’m absolutely right, and had underestimated the acceptability of the problem.
Yeah, the guy arguing for, and being rather amusingly/disappointingly flagged off the site for (you all sure showed me, with my uncomfortable feelings), being human needs a condescending explanation on how to communicate with humans from first principles. That’s just about the right approach.
Are you really that desperate for engineering requirements that you’re going after me for bucking the narrative? Perhaps I’d have found more purchase if we discussed the sexual habits and purchasing tendencies of those individuals blinded and killed by the Therac. One had blue eyes and liked Wagner. That’s at least three features for the model, right?
At a meta level, if our conversation doesn’t make clear the very problem I’m trying to communicate to you in regard to engineering’s relationship with humanity, I’d implore you to resist the urge to shoot the person who seems wrong and maybe look at whether you’re on the right path. My only mistake is saying it here, because this is basically its nexus...
Concern trolling doesn’t suit you, particularly when you didn’t get the memo to avoid the word “concern” entirely when employing it. Try a different tack, please.
Why, did The Gulag Archipelago grow a chapter about Microsoft Azure since the last time I read it? Or is it easier to take someone you disagree with down a peg by drawing attention to and making light of perceived sensitivity issues?
The only thing that offends me in this conversation is what this profession, and forum, do to people. You very poignantly included.
Keep trying to turn this around on me and my sensibilities or sense of offense, and I’ll keep right on ignoring it. I’m very comfortable on the absolutely right side of this, and just about as annoyed as OP was that you’re interacting with me at all and that I have to share a planet with people who think like you.
When an FAA policymaker gets on HN and tells us what the deceased passengers on the airplane smelled like, you’ll have an argument. There’s a difference between dancing among the foul and treating it clinically, and hitting me with the latter in a thread doing the former is incredibly disingenuous.
My own worldview that people are universally people and we all deserve dignity in death? Yeah, I know, what a tragic way of looking at things. I drink myself to death over it.
Even accepting your criticism, the same exact thing is communicable without (a) the unnecessary detail about the decedent’s weight and (b) specific recollections of the event in question. Tradespeople communicate like that among each other because of how grim the work is. I know because I was one before I got thrown in with this lot, who apparently think I’m weird for not being on board with an aborted cremation being communicated in detail because it’s ostensibly a JIRA user story in waiting, if I’ve understood your almost equally distasteful worldview correctly.
I’m looking forward to your startup addressing this issue, since you seem to be so keen on the purity of the engineering discussion beyond irrelevant brain filling on an article about operating systems in the bloody datacenter.
How horrifically inappropriate your entire story was, and how worse off we all are having read it. You had that one in the bag waiting for “crematorium” to be contextual, I’m sure, but I’m only left saddened about human experience arriving at the end of your story without a shred of hesitation at making light of someone’s indignity in such spectacular fashion. And, on top of it, you plopped “unfortunately” behind someone... talking to you, then co-opted their horrible story to share with all of us here.
I feel like I need a shower and I didn’t expect to read “that one time a worker annoyed me with a story about a fat person being removed from an oven half-cremated” on an article about Linux in Azure. Jesus Christ.
Yeah, those plebeian tool swingers often woefully misinterpret the shrewd protocols of someone who non-ironically shares that “unfortunately another human had a personal conversation with me after I started a business conversation”. It’s a real problem. Sorry that happened to you. Better to avoid people entirely and stick to Excel, in my experience, but the good news is you got a completely appropriate and tasteful and in no way horrible story about another human’s final experiences out of it, so it worked out.
Except nobody said, or even suggested, a fear of dying. Only you did. There's a significant difference between wanting more time to do things and sitting around terrified, and conflating the two is problematic.
Reading your siblings, you're projecting your own feelings onto a completely reasonable feeling that most people have: with another hundred years of experience, what's possible?
It is completely irrelevant, given the context. The only, only, only thing real-time means here is “can be run on a live signal passing through it” rather than “is a slow, offline effect for a DAW”. No hard real-time, no soft real-time, no QNX, no pulling out the college compsci textbook. There IS real-time in that sense in DSP, it just isn’t in a VST plugin.
I’ll repeat again that any compsci theorycrafting is not the concern here, and real-time has a very specific meaning in DSP. Computer science does not own the concept of real-time, and the only people tripping over the terminology are those with more compsci experience than DSP. I appreciate everyone trying to explain this to me, but (a) I understand both, and (b) this is like saying “no, Captain, a vector could mean anything like a mathematical collection, air traffic control should learn a thing or two from mathematics.”
Yes, it absolutely 100% will, depending on what you mean by handwaving “glitch”. VST is built into chains, and a flaky plugin will derail an entire performance, often making downstream plugins crash. I’m speaking from extensive experience writing plugins and performing with them in multiple hosts and trigger setups. It’s not a robust protocol, but it gets the job done.
Are you speaking from some experience with which I’m unfamiliar where it’s okay for DSP code to fail hourly? Trying to understand your viewpoint.
Implementing a VST plugin is literally the exact definition of requiring strict latency guarantees. Your comment winds through a lot of unrelated comparisons to ultimately not make any sense.
“Usually fast enough” are three words that guarantee failure in a live show/MIDI environment, which is a large use case of VST and its peers beyond production. By extension, “usually fast enough” further guarantees nobody will ever use your software. That’s noticeable right away.
The question isn’t about compsci real-time theorycrafting, it’s “here’s a buffer of samples, if you don’t give it back in a dozen milliseconds the entire show collapses.” That’s pretty clearly meant by “real time“ contextually.
It’s worth it. I can assure you.