0xADEADBEE

Not the OP but have avoided Packt books for years: I find them to typically exhibit quite low quality of writing and I assert without proof that they lack the rigor in the editing process that more 'serious' publishers have. Also I think it's pretty easy to become a Packt author; some people I've worked with and a friend have been approached by them. Typically I only buy Manning or O'Reilly but I've read a few garbage titles from the latter of late so I suspect that might not hold for much longer. It'll be interesting to see if perceived quality becomes a market differentiator or if tech books at some point become unprofitable.

Thank you - I was starting to suspect it was just me!

I hadn't considered that possibility so this is helpful; thank you. I might run a few experiments around the office later!

I think this is a great point also. Something like Synesthesia is similar in not typically having adverse effects and it's helpful to have a taxonomy.

I agree I think. And not at all - I think I could have chosen my words more carefully there!

Not sure if this is helpful but I am at work right now building out my first Kubernetes cluster. I need a diagram of the different components to see how they all fit together and even though it's probably relatively simple, I can't picture it in my head and I am about to draw one on a whiteboard. If I can physically see something, I'm fine.

Coding is not at all visual for me because I lack the ability to picture anything. If I think of a function, I know what it does, I know what it returns and I know what arguments it should have but I can't picture a call graph in my head or anything like that; only metadata associated with things.

No on drawing pictures.

I hate to muddy the waters here but for years thought I had face-blindness before realising that I have Aphantasia.

You're exactly right: I know what a Sphere looks like but I am missing the bit that the rest of the world seems to have where they can conjure up an image of it. Even less abstract objects like a desk or Angela Merkel's face, I am quite unable to picture.

To answer your question, if I ask you to picture a barn in a field, you presumably have no difficulty in doing so. You've probably even made assumptions about things like the colour of the barn, the weather or surrounding terrain and have a sort of portrait with a barn at the centre, but I can't do that. I am having difficulty describing what I get but it's nothing close to anything like that. I know my barn is made of wood and I know it's in a field but that's about as far as I can get.

I'm happy that this is getting discussion because obviously it's quite strange to find out that a) you're not wired the same way as the majority of the world and b) that your self-diagnosis isn't a medically recognised condition. I'm excited to see what research comes out over the next few years.

There's a couple of bad faith arguments in this article that I didn't care for:

- Regarding user identification, rolling my IP address is trivial with a VPN. Less so on my static IP.

- The Facebook example without cookie deletion is a low-effort Straw Man

- I reject the leap that "we have figured out that they [VPNs] do not add much to your online privacy". In the very narrow terms defined, yes of course, but either the author has willfully missed out why people use them, or doesn't understand why.

I did enjoy this note though: "Somehow, VPNs have turned them not failing to do their job into something they can market as a special feature."; I think there's some truth to that.

I tunnel my traffic over a VPN to avoid my ISP building a profile on me. I change my IP every-so-often to mess with trackers at large. I accept that browser fingerprinting is probably thwarting my overall effort somewhat, but I'm reducing the vectors that I can. I firmly believe that VPN companies are capitalising on fear but I respect the hustle. I don't think any of those points are particularly niche (niche subject notwithstanding!) so I find it interesting to see this take on it. Perhaps this isn't an article representative of the position of the wider HN crowd?

I mean you say nothing, but they did start building their own secure chat app [0] with a view to making it mandatory for all government officials.

[0] - https://www.businessinsider.com/france-building-encrypted-me...

If I had any Python 2.7 stuff, I would simply move it to Pypy which has no such obsolescence date.

I've similar reservations but GiveWell [0] do some fine work in this area and I'd encourage you to at least check out their work. I'm not sure I agree with the religious part of your comment, on the basis that religious belief seems orthogonal to altruistic work.

[0] - https://www.givewell.org/

Your statement is hyperbolic but I take your point. I think we all expected a little better from Tesla though!

I suspect you're right - we probably got a bit caught up in best practices to our detriment. Thank you for this.

This sounds exhausting! But I'm betting there's some pretty solid benefits or you wouldn't do it. Could you expand on why someone might pick this a little?

I used Typescript from the get-go on a new project recently and it's slowed down both mine and my team's development velocity a lot. Time will tell if it's a smart decision but in terms of prototyping or spiking something, I'm picking Rails every time and I think based on my current experience I'd be apt to retrofit Typescript to an existing project rather than integrate it from the beginning. I don't suppose you could recommend any good resources for better learning Typescript? The docs are OK but if there's a book or anything you'd recommend, I'd certainly appreciate it.

Would you mind expanding on this? I went from Django to Rails and loved it so I'm always genuinely curious about the experiences of people who didn't have the same fun as me.

I saw this! It makes sense with the proliferation of front end view layers so I'm pleased that there's less work for me to do to integrate things like Vue and React. I was very late to the party with Rails but I do think it gets a lot of things right.

Fully agree with you - been in the JS world a lot lately and it's not as polished as the more 'traditional' web frameworks.

Channels was supposed to make core but never did - what happened there? That's what I was driving at really - if I were stewarding a modern web framework, I would be integrating websocket support. It never sat right with me that something as common as APIs is farmed out to a library in Django (this comes out of the box in Rails with no configuration) either.

I don't dislike Django, but I certainly find that there's a lot more messing around to get done things that I would consider pretty standard. I used the new Rails beta last week and I noticed that Webpack integration is now there - how long until we see something like that with Django?

What happened to bringing this into core? Last I was using Django that was the next big integration and it just sort of faded away.

I know this is the opposite of what you asked but I find Rails to be keeping pace with modernity much better than its conemporaries! Django seem to have given up on integrating websockets (ActionCable has been in Rails for literally years now), nor is there trivial integration for JS assets/asset pipeline functionality. I don't write much of either anymore, but I'd still reach for Rails the instant I need to get something done quickly.

They're fantastic and I hope the future is bright for them but I've had to pick Rails for a few projects over the last few months because the library support is so much more established. The more I get to use Phoenix, the more I am convinced it is the most well designed web framework there is, so I hope to use it a lot going forward.

Yes. And perhaps I'm cynical in my old age but if I were Google, I would prefer that people used my extension so I could more easily line-up their browsing habits.

I'm not sure this is accurate - I used to download music and can count on one hand how many times I procured a deliberately bad file. Spotify represents a reasonably priced and convenient service that has the music I want.

I did recently bin my Spotify subscription owing to privacy concerns but have returned - it's a pain to build up a library and then put it somewhere accessible (sometimes offline in an era of devices that aren't as big as the iPod I used to have) and I was optimistic to think that the value-add would be trivially replicatable. The weekly playlists are excellent too, so currently I'm prepared to pay a monthly convenience fee. If that changed too dramatically, I'd probably move back to piracy.

Netflix is a good example of faltering here where Spotify succeeded - I know 99% of the time that the media I want to watch isn't available on their platform whereas that's an almost non-event with the latter. Convenience is something people will almost always pay for.

I did the Google-free Android thing (until yesterday in fact!) with MicroG and while the functionality was fine, the updates never worked properly and I'd have to format each time and reload everything. I enjoyed CopperheadOS until that imploded, and updating was seamless so I know it's not impossible to get right (manual usage of TWRP for an update is one of the funnier jokes of a modern Android variant I think) but I grew weary and moved to Apple. I don't care for them particularly, but I'm happy to (hopefully) not have to wade through Android nonsense every few months and any data I can keep from Google, I'm all for!

I'll get right on using this the instant I want to bombard my users with 20 recommendations for a product they already own. Is there a bit of a lack of knowledge of how their recommendation system is perceived by the general public or is this something more interesting/explicable by corporate politics?

Thank you so much for a concise answer to the exact question I had.

I'm not sure it's fair to say 'without any further purpose'. People aren't leveraging the functionality of a third party to show a thread of tweets for fun; they're doing this because the experience of reading a thread on Twitter isn't as good as it could be, and the (what feels like a) sudden proliferation of thread compilers is a testament to that. There's a definite value add I think, and while she may not like it, I don't see that going away anytime soon.

I agree fully. I've no clue why phone numbers a prerequisite for most email account providers or anything else I have to sign up for. There is no quicker way to make me bail on a signup flow that to demand something that has nothing to do with what I'm using. I barely use my phone as it is, so I'm excited to see what the world will look like for me when I finally eschew it!

I'd be very interested on reading more about this if you have anything you could point me towards

Thank you for this - I'd often assumed Canvas Defender was no good but I couldn't quite put my finger on why. I would encourage anyone with even a passing interest to read this truly illuminating post because there is some fascinating stuff that even as a web developer I did not know:

https://multilogin.com/everything-you-need-to-know-about-can...