Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I half agree with you, and am chuckling a little bit about the "very masculine hunting and zombie-defending skills" part, but... I'd like to offer some perspective.

I'm 36 and work on a pretty broad set of consulting projects: some schematic/PCB/mechanical design, firmware, some lower-level desktop/server code, and up and up to web/mobile apps. "Full full stack" if you will.

I live in a "major" Canadian city (although not in the top 15 by population), and I also own two wonderful properties about an hour out of town in a quite rural area. One is a cabin on a lake, and the other is a church from the 1910s. Sometimes I head out to one of these places to do the "Deep Work" thing, distraction-free, and sometimes it's to take time off, but end up getting an emergency call from a client. In either case, my Internet connectivity is limited to tethering, and depending on a few factors, that can either work fantastically well or poorly.

Going from the lowest-level to the highest-level projects, there's a very clearly declining probability of the project being able to build during a low-connectivity event. The embedded stuff pretty much always works just fine (it's a Makefile, or CMake). The C desktop/server stuff? Always works fine (any dependencies were pre-installed). Python/Ruby/Elixir web backend projects usually go OK, although I've occasionally ran into issues where the package manager wants to check for updates. Node front-end builds sometimes start to fall apart, and Android (via Android Studio) often refuse to build at all! (Some kind of weird Maven/Gradle thing that needs to go out and check something, even though the dependencies have all been pre-installed...)

It's extraordinarily frustrating when you can't change a line of code and hit "Build" to test a change locally. Everything's already present on the machine! It worked just fine 5 minutes ago!

To your prepper comment, and the previous comments about infrastructure, there's a significant population of the world that doesn't have 100% reliable infrastructure, even in Canada and the US. The tools we have used to work just fine in that environment, but are getting progressively worse.



> Some kind of weird Maven/Gradle thing that needs to go out and check something, even though the dependencies have all been pre-installed...

It is often possible to tell Maven at least to work in offline mode and not check for dependency updates.




Consider applying for YC's Fall 2026 batch! Applications are open till July 27.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: