allknowingfrog

Americans pay a pretty hefty health insurance penalty when they leave steady employment to start their own business. There have definitely been better times to be an entrepreneur in this country.

I'm not familiar with this pentagon trick. Care to elaborate?

I pulled beanstalkd into a legacy PHP/MySQL application several years back and was very pleased with it. It's probably not the right choice for a modern Rails application, but if you already don't have a framework, it's a straightforward solution to drop in.

I genuinely went looking for an "off" button, and was very confused when the snowflake icon changed the background color instead. I didn't even notice that the snow stops being generated until I read your comment and tried again. I'm both impressed and annoyed.

The article is specifically about the decline of Adwords, not the company as a whole.

ChatGPT makes the content visible and the author invisible. Why should anyone optimize for AI consumption?

Are you seeing anything interesting happening in this space with Zig? I've been dabbling a bit (after seeing so much about it on HN), but TigerBeetle is the only successful project I can name. I know a few embedded developers, and they all seem pretty content with C.

The article actually addresses these questions. It's way more than just a donation announcement. It lays out the various reasons that Zig is the language of choice for TigerBeetle.

The first paragraph labels me a "social media poster who identifies as a reader", based on my reading preferences.

Do what makes you happy, but don't pretend that reading "difficult" books makes you morally-superior to the rest of us. I read fiction for fun, and non-fiction for personal growth.

That...actually seems economically sound, but it's also a strong argument for the idea that pennies are effectively worthless.

Helix is great if you just want something fast that gets out of your way. If you want plugins and integrations and other magic, it's probably not for you. I used Vim for the past decade, because it fits the way my brain works. Helix captures that same spirit, but with some polish and friendliness that can only come from starting fresh, and abandoning years of entrenched design decisions.

Helix is a fantastic terminal-based editor. I would rather type in mittens than use a GUI editor. If that resonates with you, maybe give it a try. If you love your GUI, I don't think Helix will be the thing that changes your mind.

I switched from Qwerty to Dvorak in my 20s, and now from Vim to Helix in my 30s. Both transitions were rough for a couple of weeks, but honestly less difficult than expected. Neither choice turned me into a 10x developer, but neither one has ever caused a problem that I cared about either.

Do you spend a lot of time on systems that you don't control? Dvorak discourages other people from helping themselves to my keyboard, which is honestly worth more to me than being able to go the opposite direction.

XKCD 1053 is a way of life. I think about it all the time, and it has made me a better human being.

Culture is subjective. Art is entertainment. Maybe the English-speaking world wishes our governments would solve infrastructure problems instead of distracting us with pretty things to look at.

If the problem is that you get interrupted all day, how does waiting for tomorrow help?

This is actually my favorite kind of HN discussion. I think the added context is really interesting, despite maybe being a bit of a tangent. English is full of "orphaned" words and phrases that no longer make sense in general usage (no one ever refers to a "gamut" unless something is "running" it). I had no idea that "used to" was an example of this.

I think maybe the tone of your comment has a bit of "well actually" that bothers some people. It's the difference between sharing a fun fact versus policing correctness. The interesting point is that "used to" is weird, but not for the reason that the parent comment assumed. That's a genuinely fun fact that I enjoyed learning.

Ads are only easy to block because they load from centralized, third-party domains. Physical print publishers don't leave blanks in their newspapers and send them off to advertisers to fill in. They approve and print the ads, just like any other content. If digital publishers made similar agreements to embed static ads, they would not be affected by ad blockers.

Do we have a term for this phenomenon yet? Airbnb is a great example. Uber is another. Regulatory loopholes are the way that these companies actually make money, but they call it "technology" and everyone kind of shrugs.

I've been exploring PeerJS (https://peerjs.com/) recently. This seems like a similar concept. Would it give me anything that PeerJS doesn't?

I'm essentially in a TLM position currently. We're a small company, with a small codebase. I oversee three junior to mid-level developers, and I represent the team in our product/roadmap planning process. I also write a lot of code, review a lot of code, and make a lot of architectural decisions. At our current scale, and with our current resources, I think it works pretty well. Moving fast is one of our biggest priorities, and having a TLM definitely reduces overhead versus a more traditional separation of responsibilities.

I really never intended to have a management position, but this has been an incredible opportunity to experience a portion of it without fully committing. Other replies have described this as a transitional role, and I don't think they're wrong. In the long term, especially if the company grows, I can probably be more valuable by committing to one path or the other. However, for the right person and situation, I could see us minting a TLM again, regardless of size.

I became an old man well before I reached my 30's. :)

The author mentioned that he doesn't want to make suggestions that don't actually work. That seems like a pretty valid reason to run the code.

I worry about the digestive health of people who use phones in the bathroom. I go in there for a specific job, which I focus on until completion. I never get bored enough to start looking for other things to do.

I'm no expert, but it seems like the value add is the firmware they wrote to turn this into a more accessible platform. Hardware is always composed of other hardware, so "included" is not inherently the wrong word, though it maybe takes too much credit. In general, the intent feels wholesome to me. As a software guy, I had no idea that hardware could be so approachable, and I'm suddenly excited about the possibilities.

I stand corrected. That makes the current terminology make a whole lot more sense.

Did "duct" tape become the standard nomenclature at some point? I learned many years ago that "duck" really is the correct term, because the tape was originally made of cotton duck cloth.

Lots of people assume that "duck" is actually the misunderstanding, and that it must be a slurring of "duct", but there's no history of using duck tape on ducts. It's the wrong tool for the job, and the wrong name for the material. I'm surprised to see that sources like the NYT and Wikipedia are using "duct tape" as the preferred term.

Kind of meta, but you deserve recognition for this demonstration of self-awareness. You expressed skepticism politely, then asked specific questions instead of making assumptions. Sometimes HN gives me hope for the rest of the internet.

I haven't done anything with RubyUI, but I've been using Phlex for the past couple of months and I never want to go back. It's everything I wanted HAML or Slim to be. Everything is code. You create classes and functions instead of views and partials. Everything you know about managing and abstracting code suddenly applies to your UI rendering.

Paired with Tailwind, this is the fastest application development I've ever done.

To be fair, some of this "innovation" is just a lack of environmental regulations and human safety standards.