BytesAndGears

Say what you will about European regulations, but as an American who moved to Europe, I was absolutely floored when I bought a cheap bottle of sparkling mint-flavored water from the grocery store, and the ingredients were exactly:

* sparkling mineral water * mint extract

I don’t know if a single brand exists in the US that uses actual ingredients in flavored water, I’ve always just seen the vague “natural flavor”. But here it was in the random budget store brand

Yeah it’s nearly the main benefit of Ruby/Rails that you can spin up an mvp of your company in like a week, and have a decent feature set within a couple months.

The trap is when you start growing and it is hard to change. Because the features that took 1-2 months in RoR might take 3-4 months (or more!) to port to another language, and do you really want to stop your working business when it isn’t a problem?

Because Rails performs totally fine at small-mid startup scale. It’s only when you start getting a couple years old with lots of users that it starts to bite you. But at that point you already have gotten further than 90% of startups ever even make it. And at that point, honestly there are solutions for that too, like gradually pulling the poor-performing bits out into faster languages.

Writing this as someone who works for a startup that uses RoR, and I’ve seen it blow up over several years. I curse RoR daily because it pisses me off, but I don’t think this company would’ve gotten this far if it didn’t have the RoR speed at the beginning.

So are you better off starting your company on Go/Rust/Java? Maybe. But if getting to market fast will help you win, it’s hard to beat RoR.

I totally agree about how the lower investment in the non-Randstad parts of the country does not seem to have a negative affect. At least the further-away cities/towns that I’ve visited have been absolutely gorgeous. People are friendly, streets are clean, parks are well-kept, public transportation is world-class even in small towns.

That’s not the only thing that maintaining consistent style involves. For example, we have an auto linter at my job, but there have been a few (bad) engineers whose code I can recognize even after it’s all auto-formatted.

Plus, when you’ve spent enough time with the code in varied environments, you start to internalize what it should look like. Seeing something that doesn’t match the style guide will stand out as looking funny.

I don’t think they were suggesting that you need to memorize every minute detail of your prettier config to be a good engineer. Rather, a good engineer has focused on writing clean-looking code so intensely for so long, to know it automatically.

I think paying Apple and Mozilla to be the default search engine, as well as within Chrome, counts as intentionally crippling other search engines.

If Apple made them default because they’re the best, then that’s fine. But spending a ton of money to keep themselves as the default, when they already have the vast majority of market power, seems like an artificial barrier to competition.

Unless another search engine is so much better that Apple is willing to forfeit billions of dollars of pure profit, then nobody else has a chance to be the default.

Those are actually all converted to heat eventually, just with more steps.

Moving an electric vehicle causes motion, but that motion is absorbed by the air and ground via friction with both, aka heat.

Light is just energy in a photon — when it hits a surface that absorbs it, it becomes heat. And it can be quite a lot actually! If you put your hand in front of a really bright flashlight, you’ll notice a warm feeling. If you turn off the flashlight, it goes away immediately, proving that is the light itself causing the heat.

Approximately all of the energy we use as electricity is just changing something into heat with some useful work in between

I agree with your general idea that America’s obesity problem is not generally genetic. It’s fairly recent, and much too recent for genetics to be a major factor.

But I disagree that it’s a willpower problem. It’s a society problem.

I moved from America to Europe and there is little obesity here — because you get daily exercise automatically by walking around (due to good city designs), and toxic food is illegal.

Compared to the standards in America where you walk to your car in the driveway (and that’s the extent of walking that your city provides), and none of the food in the grocery store is actually what the box says (because it’s all chemical imitations).

In Europe, there are no hurdles to overcome because you get good food and exercise automatically just by living there. In America, you can overcome the hurdles with willpower, but you shouldn’t need to in the first place, if society just created a healthier environment.

Yeah, they have a graph of temperatures from 1940 onwards with a linear trend line— but just by looking at the data points, it seems that an exponential curve would fit the data better.

Maybe someone more skilled than me has analyzed that already? Because just eyeballing it, is really making me nervous about the exponential future projection of that graph of the next 20 years

Agreed. I lived somewhere that switched from a credit card reader on the machines, to an app.

The credit card reader was instant. You could just put in your laundry, swipe your card, and that was it. Instantly started.

They switched to an app by the same service company, and now there were a bunch more steps involved. Put in your laundry, find the app, open it, scroll through their “what’s new in laundry!” news that nobody cares about, click a bunch of buttons until you find the machine number that matches yours, go through the menus to pick washer settings, then pay there, and still need to push the start button on the machine itself.

So much worse, and also more error prone — I would regularly get errors when a machine disconnected from the internet.

Why people think it’s better, I have no idea. The only thing I can think is that credit card fees are cheaper on a $20 transaction compared to 20 $1 transactions

It’s funny because I still feel the opposite of you — I think the example where you say that you like their solution is a better approach, as long as it’s not horrible.

It leaves open the possibility that you as the reviewer are actually mistaken, and they possibly have a good reason for doing it that way.

I may be the senior reviewing the junior’s code, but they probably spent longer looking at the problem than me and there is a chance that I’m missing something. By suggesting “have you considered this, it may be able to handle x situation better”, you respect their work more.

It depends on context though, if somebody clearly just didn’t understand something obvious, then I’ll just tell them directly.

Either way, probably a difference in our opinions of feedback, you might prefer more directness than me

I also bike to work and meet friends every day, and it’s basically no effort. And you don’t sweat much more than walking, just ride more slowly if it’s hot out. Though I do live in a city in the Netherlands that has put some effort into making it easy.

Growing up in the US, moving here has really opened my eyes. I used to think the same as you, but it is truly easy to bike everywhere when the city you live in has invested in proper infrastructure. (Note that this infrastructure is cheap as hell too, and it really doesn’t take that much redesigning..)

Agreed, and my company has done exactly that.

Our public API is fit for the use-cases of our big customers that want deep integrations, and our frontend’s API is able to handle our specific workflows.

We have a bunch of shared backend code, but the endpoints that our API customers use are very specific. Sometimes we build custom endpoints for a single customer which would be useless for our frontend/services. Keeping them separate allows them to gain needed functionality without trying to bolt it on to existing internal APIs, and cluttering it all into one messy blob.

Of course our internal API is a mess in a bunch of other ways but at least we don’t have to deal with the public parts making it even messier

Wow, that first one is genuinely horrific, I can’t believe they had the guts to release something so strong. Glad they did though, it probably saved a ton of lives.