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brickers

139 karma · joined January 26, 2022

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brickers··on Half-Baked Product
My personal take:

- you need aligned incentives across the board. Sales and accounts mustn’t promise what the company can’t deliver

- people need to defend their area of expertise whilst listening to what others are saying about theirs. For me this boils down to a division between technical and business focussed. Techies need to push for non-client facing technical improvements without making everyone ignore them every time they say “technical debt”, and they need to accept that sometimes you just build shit to get business through the books. Sales/accounts need to accept that sometimes the build budget is taken up with mysterious technical drives that will be worth it. When I say “must accept” I mean accept that it must happen some percentage of the time - each case still needs to be backed up by a business case.

- ultimately this needs to come from the top - founder(s) must balance these facts and drive it through the whole organisation, and in the article they didn’t

brickers··on Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
El Niño is a naturally occurring event
brickers··on A €0.01 bank transfer could compromise a banking AI agent
If you read the article, you can find out!
brickers··on Communication on European Tech Sovereignty, and an EU Open-Source Strategy
ARM?
brickers··on Show HN: Mission Control – Open-source task management for AI agents
I agree with what you’re saying. However given the reputation of openclaw (and I presume many other vibe coded spaghetti monsters) I appreciate the signal “I care about quality”.
brickers··on Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
If you ignore the early pandemic bump, it even looks like the decline started in late 2017, though it's more variable than after the bump
brickers··on The compiler is your best friend
This stuff is quite new to me as I’ve been learning F#, so take this with a pinch of salt. Some of the things you’d want are: - a function to produce a list of customers

- a function or two to retrieve the data, which would be passed into the customer list function. This allows the customer list function to be independent of the data retrieval. This is essentially functional dependency injection

- a function to take a list of customers and return a list of effects: things that should happen

- this is where I wave my hands as I’m not sure of the plumbing. But the final part is something that takes the list of effects and does something with them

With the above you have a core that is ignorant of where its inputs come from and how its effects are achieved - it’s very much a pure domain model, with the messy interfaces with the outside world kept at the edges

brickers··on Voting age to be lowered to 16 in UK by next general election
How does that work for e.g. infants? Doesn’t it give unscrupulous parents of those children an extra vote?
brickers··on An Illustrated Guide to Maritime Signal Flags
Or… England?
brickers··on There’s a 30-year old dead Rabbit in Seven Sisters tube station
They might already be familiar with Dave’s bassline from Eminem’s “My Name Is”. My personal favourite bit of music trivia
brickers··on Ask HN: What are you passionate about at the moment?
Becoming a dad or are you already one and just upping the excitement? If you’re new, my two pieces of advice are that there’s only right now to deal with when things start to feel rough, and lick your fingers to open the nappy sack before you start dealing with the nappy. Both gems and hard-won
brickers··on Ask HN: What are you passionate about at the moment?
Woodworking and designing furniture. Just this weekend I finally set up my home workshop after almost a decade of dreaming about it (and collecting things I thought I might need). Just spent two hours drawing basic layouts for some wardrobes, and looking at beautiful midcentury, Scandinavian, and Japanese items online. Any good resources (for technical or aesthetics) are very much welcome - I’m looking to invest in my knowledge now I can put it to use.
brickers··on Ensō: write now, edit later
I made something similar at https://drivl.app. I should have known someone else had already done it
brickers··on Recursive Recipes
This reminds me of something that always made me smile - when at uni I lived with an Israeli guy who made yogurt in a pan in the kitchen. When I asked how you make yogurt, the answer was “put some milk in a pan with some yogurt and leave it for a few days”. Not sure whether they’re in on the joke here, but the recipe for yogurt is to buy some
brickers··on How the Ear Works: Nature's solutions for listening (1997)
My dad was an audiologist and worked for many years with children with cochlear implants. I remember in the 90s him bringing a laptop home with software that tested otoacoustic emissions via a microphone/earbud combo. Later I met one of his colleagues from that time who, whilst working full time and with a large young family, obtained a phd in using this tech to test newborn hearing. That work has been the basis for the UK’s national newborn hearing screening service for decades now, helping to catch issues early where the most impact can be made. I’m really in awe of this profession - it’s pretty out of sight for many but makes a huge difference.
brickers··on How to assert for fun and profit (2022)
Re: data from another of your own systems. If there’s an interface between them that suggests you probably want those systems decoupled. Maybe in the future you replace one system with another you don’t control - ideally it would be nice not to have to make code changes because of that.

Re: asserting on user input. If you assert only then what happens on bad inputs when asserts are switched off in prod? Seems like an outcome you’d like to control at the time rather than allow to propagate (by writing bad data to a db and only being discovered months later, for example).

brickers··on Ask HN: What low code platforms are worth using?
.net dev here. I started my career using Mendix. It’s very much aimed at enterprise (see pricing) and in direct competition with Outsystems. I haven’t used it for about two years now so might be out of date. Some unordered thoughts:

- I wasn’t around for the decision between outsystems and mendix, but apparently the choice largely came down to the support provided by the Mendix team in getting a fledgling dev team up and running in a company which at the time only outsourced dev work

- following on from that, the Mendix guys were all great to work with. A genuine positive. I heard that the impression of outsystems was much colder

- it’s a really mature product that’s always growing. Backed by Siemens for a few years now.

- like all low code it has its limits but it’s built in Java and there is the option to add Java code where needed for performance or for some other reason. There are APIs for hooking into the platform at multiple levels so it’s extensible.

- in my current job I build in azure/logic apps/function apps. Personally I would either do function apps or full low code like Mendix (costs aside). I try to avoid the middle ground or power automate/power apps/ logic apps - you basically get the worst of all worlds, and are only really intended to link services together or orchestrate amongst services.

brickers··on Supermarket AI meal planner app suggests recipe that would create chlorine gas
Like this one [1], previously served to the Queen?

Sarcasm aside, I have now reviewed some articles on nutmeg intoxication (thank you) and will lower the amount I put on certain things - I love the stuff!

1 - https://www.marcuswareing.com/recipes/marcus-wareings-custar...

brickers··on A world where people pay for software
I personally find the subscription model in some ways better in terms of cognitive load - choosing between concrete things can be paralysing enough that the two most likely outcomes are failing to make a choice or choosing something and regretting it. The sense of now owning something that I spent hard earned cash on can feel a burden if money gets tight.

Subscriptions, on the other hand, match how consuming media feels to me - I spent time doing something I liked and the cost enabled that.

Looking on it from a pure economics point of view, clearly it makes more sense to buy a CD and have access to it forever from that spend. But psychologically it feels very different

brickers··on What Happened to Jai Alai? (2013)
Thank you
brickers··on What Happened to Jai Alai? (2013)
Interesting - where in the world is this the case? Mexico? I had a Spanish friend called Francisco, known as Paco, but a Portuguese Francisco I know was utterly baffled that his name could be shortened that way.
brickers··on Two algorithms for randomly generating aperiodic tilings
You’re right that the shape is used again and again, but the pattern of how it is laid does not repeat. So the new thing here is that there is a single shape that can cover the plane AND that it does this without the pattern repeating (and as an aside it cannot be made to do it with repeats)
brickers··on Two algorithms for randomly generating aperiodic tilings
it’s a non-square shape that does not and cannot repeat
brickers··on W3C re-launched as a public-interest non-profit organization
Jeff… Jaffe?
brickers··on Launch HN: IcePanel (YC W23) – Onboard engineers with explorable system designs
It seems like a sensible choice that mobile isn’t your focus - I’m just chilling on the sofa browsing HN after work… I don’t think I know the product well enough to comment on a mobile use case, but I’ll let you know if I think of something when I take a further look
brickers··on Launch HN: IcePanel (YC W23) – Onboard engineers with explorable system designs
Not sure if you’re intending this to be usable on mobile but I found some usability issues from a few minutes browsing on iPhone (I most definitely intend to have a proper look on desktop later - looks fantastically useful): 1- overlapping text/images in header; 2- list of steps was the first thing that was open - took me a minute to understand I could close that to get to the diagram; 3- I couldn’t work out how to zoom in on the diagram (it was very small) - the expected pinching didn’t work;
brickers··on Ask HN: Main things to consider when building an app for business/enterprise?
I took multi-tenancy here to mean that you have multiple customers on the same instance of your software, with separate user/data control, admins, configuration, etc for each customer, rather than what youve described with databases.
brickers··on Ask HN: Event Driven Design/Discovery?
Event modelling was the one - thank you! Event storming looks a like a good alternative to review.
brickers··on Recovering redacted information from pixelated videos
I believe Pentax have a system like this in some DSLR models