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Sevarison Rant: The DRY Principle Is Bad Advice

This seems like terrible advice and a terrible clickbait title.

His conclusion is even this:

> Coming full circle, I must admit, the DRY principle is a pretty important piece of advice after all

So DRY is fine. Just be sure you're deduplicating for the right reasons. Like every other "rule" we have out there for programming, there are caveats and you shouldn't be blindly applying rules.

I hate people like this.

Sevarison Google bans Podcast Addict app over non-approved Covid-19 content

> While obviously Podcast Addict does not deserve a ban, the sheer number of people in this thread advocating unrestricted speech around COVID-19 is thoroughly disturbing. This despite the carnage that the disease is wreaking in the US and UK right now, and the fact that conspiracy theories spread on Google and Facebook platforms have certainly added significant fuel to the fire of COVID-19.

There's no other solution to this problem. If they suspend Podcast Addict, realistically, they need to suspend every other podcast app on the store. Then they need to start filtering out all podcasts with episodes about coronavirus on their own podcast app, or their need to suspend that too.

And that's before considering that there's a lot of valuable discussion about the virus happening that isn't coming out of the CDC or whatever other official source you're adamant about following. I'm not talking Joe Rogan. I'm talking PBS, NPR, 538, JAMA, etc. At some point all you're doing is suppressing legitimate journalism (and yes, there's a fuckload of legitimate journalism on podcasts) or even academic sources (yes, they exist as podcasts too).

I don't see what benefit you're getting from suppressing freedom of speech in such a draconian way when there's so much unnecessary collateral damage. All you're doing is making it harder for legitimate coverage to reach people ... which seems like shooting yourself in the foot.

Even beyond journalism, there's a lot of "slice of life" episodes talking about how people are affected by the virus day-to-day. How people's lives have changed. How they're coping. Why would you be in favour of suppressing that?

Sevarison “Become Abnormal”: traits to cultivate for top performance

> Never in my life have I found these totally generic advice collations useful.

I only check the HN comments for posts like this. That's where the real meaty content is where actual programmers/engineers talk about what may or may not have worked for them.

Sevarison Oculus: Hand Tracking Updates

> PCVR is an evolutionary dead end a very small percentage of people who can afford them want a gaming PC tower in their home, PCVR is a fraction of a fraction of percentage.

PCVR is no more niche than the demographics for Far Cry 5. If you have the hardware to run a modern AAA game on PC, all you're really missing at that point is the headset. And I don't see Ubisoft refusing to make games for PC because there are too few people with powerful enough PCs. As GPU tech continues to develop and higher performance reaches lower price points, it'll also become more accessible to more people. Though you can already pay 200-250 Euros for a decent GPU now and it'll be more than sufficient for VR gaming.

Sevarison Oculus: Hand Tracking Updates

> vr video content. The ability to "stand" on a stage while the orchestra plays Mozart all around you is mind blowing.

So, uh, I've only watched porn so far. Got a link of that orchestra? Sounds cool.

Sevarison Nintendo 64 Architecture – A Practical Analysis

Man, it sounds like it was in development hell. I wish we could get somebody to talk about what it was like developing the 64DD and what problems they ran into. Probably won't ever happen, but I can dream.

Sevarison Google bans Podcast Addict app over non-approved Covid-19 content

The other side of this is that app developers are screwed when it comes to compensation. Providing the ability to sideload doesn't mean anything if developers can't be compensated and can't continue developing their app (as I don't expect them to if they aren't in any way rewarded for it financially).

Sevarison Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M

See, I said anti-trust. Not anti-monopoly. Anti-trust was, traditionally, about preventing market distortions by market actors that are becoming too big and powerful. It wasn't solely about monopolies. The whole "we're not a monopoly" shtick has been pushed by corporations in recent decades as if that absolved them completely from behaving in anti-competitive ways, and for some reason your average schlub has eaten it up, hook line and sinker, and politicians are more than happy to cut them slack because of lobbying.

Especially now, when you have companies like Giphy being tied into services across the globe and providing a surprising amount of data about users and usage patterns, the idea of monopolies is completely obsolete. It's time to bring back the idea of companies not being allowed to much reach, power and control over all aspects of our lives, as well as being able to use it to assert control over competitors and users alike.

Sevarison Security Flaws in Adobe Acrobat Reader Allow Gaining Root on macOS Silently

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/application-managem...

This seems totally unsuited to desktop non-enterprise use.

Sevarison Don't set the language of your website based on user location

One of the many reasons why I hate modern websites. They try to be too clever and try to guess what language I want, despite my OS and browser being set to en-US. And then make it particularly difficult to change the language manually in a persistent way. Why even bother with region settings if they're not going to be respected by websites or, hell, even games. I've noticed that if I have my system language set to English and my region set to German, some games will default to German. Which is annoying, but particularly infuriating when some games don't even provide an in-game language select, instead forcing me to Google for the right config file I need to change. And the only reason why I sometimes have my region set to German? There's no other way to change the MS/Xbox store region.

Actually, it's not just websites I hate. A lot of software makes me jump through ridiculous hoops to do basic things.

Sevarison Swamped bankruptcy courts threaten US recovery

No need to use something as cancerous as AMP: http://archive.is/Da3iS

Sevarison Security Flaws in Adobe Acrobat Reader Allow Gaining Root on macOS Silently

I always really liked the idea of Sandboxie (https://www.sandboxie.com/) where you can run any and every application in its own sandbox, but I was never convinced that its security was as strong as it promised to be. I wish MS would implement something like this.

Sevarison Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M

And the inexorable march towards tech companies owning everything continues. I wish anti-trust law wasn't such a joke across the globe.

Sevarison Ask HN: Do you ever go back and admire a piece of code you wrote?

I don't think level 4 exists. There is no code for problems of sufficient complexity that are self-explanatory. There are too many hidden assumptions and foreknowledge and tradeoffs and decisions baked into a block of code that, unless it's trivial, there's no way code itself can reflect it adequately.

Sevarison Ask HN: How do you manage self-study?

When you know a piece and play it, it can be fun. But the way there can be frustrating and tedious. You'll make mistakes. You'll learn slower than you'd like. You might repeat the same section a hundred times before you feel satisfied. Some days you'll even feel like you've forgotten how to play certain parts properly. But you do it anyways because you know it's rewarding and satisfying at the end of the day (and with a certain level of discipline), not because it's fun moment-to-moment.