chefandy

If you can’t scroll down to see various swatch sets grouped by shade then you’re not seeing what you’re supposed to see. Works fine on FF for me but I don’t have Android.

Right. $18 is 6% of $300. For that to be a difference of little consequence, $300 must be an expenditure of little consequence. In the other direction $300 is 6% of $5000. There are people— a number of whom likely frequent this forum— for whom a $5000 expenditure isn’t particularly consequential, and getting an OK thing for $300 doesn’t make sense when you can get a pretty good thing for $5000. That certainly doesn’t mean someone being able to offer a useful version of a $5000 thing for $300 has no merit.

I see this sort of thing in amateur radio all the time. “Why on earth would anyone just starting out consider getting a Baofeng radio for $20 when you can get a better quality name brand equivalent for $200?” Well because $180 is a whole lot of money for a whole lot of people.

Appreciate it. I got through about 10 paragraphs of preamble and disclaimers before giving up. I’m sure this document is what the community and author need it to be, but only being interested in the technical takeaways, your comment at least helps me know what to skim for.

It’s a matter of perspective, though. For a white collar professional in the US? Sure. For most of the world’s population, the distinction between $300 and $18 is extremely consequential.

The nutritionist probably isn’t an idiot, and didn’t assume the developers lacked the knowledge or intellectual capacity to determine the nutritive and caloric density of food. People choose convenience foods for two reasons: a) they’re usually delicious in the least healthy ways, and b) because they’re convenient. The nutritionist likely understood that people choosing unhealthy convenience foods because they were delicious and didn’t care if they were healthy— such as the author— were going to do that anyway. They were probably trying to even out the cognitive load required to make healthy choices for the people that did want to make better choices but were just grabbing whatever was convenient while running to a meeting or as a quick break without losing their flow and didn’t really have time to think about it.

There might be a knowledge problem here, though: perhaps the author, a bit arrogantly, incorrectly assumed they understood the nutritionist’s ostensibly simple-minded intent and strategy on-sight, and dismissed it out-of-hand instead of considering its utility for differing goals, challenges, and motivations.

When analyzing non-computing problems through a computer science lens, the human element merely muddies the path to a concrete answer. It’s best to avoid that ambiguity and complexity.

I worked for a household-name-prestigious school (not as an academic) and they essentially used adjuncts for their cash-cow open enrollment classes knowing that people that were passionate and/or wanted to get the big name on their resume would essentially work for free compared to what even full-time non-tenured faculty got. They made a lot of noise about the university “community” and wellness but I guess that didn’t include adjuncts. It wasn’t UPenn, but the conditions are similar:

https://www.openculture.com/2013/09/death-of-an-adjunct-a-so...

A billion applicants for 2 full-time faculty jobs, but they’ve always got a billion adjunct openings that pay shit, offer no benefits, and have no job security.

Right. Like I always say — you can create a simple solution to any complex problem if you ignore enough pertinent factors.

I’ve worked in several professions, with dev being the longest— I’ve encountered more bullshit and incompetence from devs than any other industry I’ve worked in except for tech support. I’ve heard developers saying they’ll simply ‘pivot’ if the big productivity machine eats up their corner of the dev market. Oof… They’re looking at a rude awakening when they see how preciously developers are treated compared to most other employed adults, and how badly they underestimated the unseen complexities in other people’s jobs.

Sure. There’s overlap with a lot of things. This developer said that it was (paraphrased) ‘hard for him to take people like mechanics seriously because they lack his superior debugging skills.’ There was no attempt to draw similarities. He was simply saying that developer smarts were the best smarts and they trumped all other smarts.

I can’t tell you how many times developers have tried to explain cooking concepts to me knowing I’m a classically trained and experienced chef. Or explain design to me knowing I have a design degree and years of experience doing it. Some developers just have unending hubris.

I’ve only seen a handful of people use it for local development but I’ve seen plenty of people use it for servers in production. Look like the latest cpython has a JIT built in. It would be cool if it saw the same gains that ruby did.

Looks the the one at that link does unless there's some newer versioning thing I'm not aware of. The top results seem to be comparing pypy 3.10.14 and ruby/yjit 3.4.1.

Thought process: “In theory auditing a government agency is simple. I can write assembly for a computer with millions of moving parts. How hard could it be to debug an organization with twenty thousand employees that need support to configure their own email? I spent literally two weeks watching accounting channels on YouTube, so with my mighty developer ultrabrain, this should be a snap. If only developers had time to work on these problems the world wouldn’t need all of these suits.”

People might read that and think I’m being hyperbolic, but I had someone on HN argue that their debugging skills rendered them better at medical diagnosis than doctors, and better at fixing cars than mechanics, by their own totally objective genius developer standards.

I see some people say this but I’ve never seen a benchmark support that if you include performance-focused distributions like pypy.

https://programming-language-benchmarks.vercel.app/amp/pytho...

Is there somewhere with benchmarks that supports the idea that Ruby is faster than Python?

I don’t think this are optimal for the craftspeople market. If I managed a bunch of rental properties or something and was doing quick-and-dirty fixes all day, I’d buy these if they worked. The hole size vs screw size seems weird. Also if I had to board up my windows for storms regularly. Or quick home projects outdoors. Plenty of times where speed of application and easy unscrewing are both useful.

Or just port the number to Magic Jack for $20 and get a cordless phone $20 at Target that you have to charge once per week if you don’t just keep it on the dock, and pay like $5/mo or less for service. And you can make/receive calls from that number on a mobile phone using their app.

That would only stymie the smallest-time players. Things like sideways text in margins or rotated table column headers are common enough that these have been solved problems for decades. Breaking the text down into specific elements and handling it differently or ignoring it altogether based on context and content is trivial.

Case law is public domain. You can publish digitized copies of Westlaw books with the headnotes, keys, and a couple of other property bits redacted. Any of their proprietary elements though, definitely including the key cites, are clearly a no-go. The headnotes not only require creativity and expertise to make, many lawyers consider them indispensable (though many other lawyers apparently throw shade at lawyers that rely on them.) And since most of the rest of the book is public domain, it’s one of the biggest, if not the biggest selling point for their texts. They famously vigorously defend their copyrights— the defendant surely knew what they were signing up for when they started doing this.

* Is it so much more objective that I want to look to them exclusively for info? No.

Yeah I feel that. I also worked for many years as a nightclub bouncer where those actions and consequences are a lot more immediate, which in some ways is easier than with software work, but the nature and immediacy of the consequences could feel a lot more stark. We can't always know everything we need to know to make the best decision. I reckon the only thing we can ask of ourselves is to make the best decision we can based on the information we have, though the decision-making process certainly can be refined.

Like a lot of developers my age, the first programming book I read all the way through was the brilliant Learning Perl by Larry Wall. Likely the most quoted passage from that book isn't about programming, but about programmers: "The three chief virtues of a programmer are: Laziness, Impatience and Hubris." The book was funny, and that passage was intended to be humorous commentary on the bravado a little beneficial Dunning-Krueger can give us when approaching a problem in unfamiliar space. It's a joke about starting a projects and not letting daunting tasks kill your optimism: it's not a set of maxims that developers should model their life philosophy on.

One invaluable thing I got from my formal design education was not trusting my assumptions about the needs, perspectives, motivations, and capabilities of other people, or the complexities of the systems in which they operate. In many ways, this directly opposes Wall's Laziness, Impatience and Hubris. This is why interface designers make better interfaces than developers. It's all about pushing back against your own perspective and trying to untangle the messy human element to see what people really need-- in the case of software, what they need to most effectively and efficiently solve their problems-- and how best to provide that for them.

But it's a yin/yang thing. A whole lot of problems in this world have only been solved because someone didn't realize they were trying to solve an insolvable problem, until they did it. But there's a real danger in operating under the assumption that we've got this pan-topic expertise that allows us to slice through any subject with a few quick swipes of our super duper ultrabrains using a few mental calculations based on a couple assumptions and approximate a couple of things about human behavior based on the way we understand it, intuitively. That's lost on a lot of developers and engineers-- especially younger ones. (And after working with developers as a designer rather than as a developer for a while, I understood how infuriating that could be.) When it comes to things like advertising, where people are so heavily peppered with them, and quite possibly have worked on their technical underpinnings, they assume that they "understand advertising" instead of understanding their conscious experience with advertisements.

There are lots of terrible odious things that happen in marketing and advertising and you'll rarely find someone as critical of them as me. As a developer, I've come close to quitting jobs in protest of putting in some creepy telemetry in things I developed, and successfully skewered those initiatives. However, the pushback against advertisements generally is misguided. It's a huge topic that people paint with a broad brush based on their experience with ads. If you're interested in my thoughts, I was pushing back against someone that said we simply could do away with advertisements in this over-long comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43015751

Yeah they're definitely out there. Looks like there aren't any active forks either. Bummer. I had another really good example of one that was super popular but I can't remember what it was.

All company's incentive is fundamentally to sell more product and advertising and marketing are the ways to do that. Advertising is nothing more than a company communicating about their product. Like any form of visual communication, has two fundamental components: medium and message. (there are other important things that go further into marketing like context, intended audience, timing, etc. but I don't have the time to dig into those.) Independent reviews and word of mouth aren't advertisements because they don't originate from the company. If they pay someone to review their product then it is an advertisement.

Some mediums are: banners, paid testimonials, email mailing lists, video spots, catalogs, flyers, packaging, sponsorships, signs, car wraps, phone tree preamble or hold messages, etc. Even something that just displays a brand name or logo can be advertisements. You did not solicit any one of those exposures. They are ALL being put in front of your face by someone that wants to sell you something. Who sees those messages and how (TV spot vs YouTube spot vs Disney+ spot) is more of a marketing concern than advertising itself but it's all related enough for this discussion.

Messages are anything about the product or company, beginning with the name of the model "TACTIKILL XTERMINATOR 4000" or "NatureStop Gentle Reducer Premium" to statistics about the product to product descriptions to claims of efficacy or quality or usage recommendations, or sexy models smiling and enjoying their incredible life thanks to that laundry soap.

Both the medium and the message, independently, can be entirely benign or manipulative. There are laws in most countries that are pretty barebones about what they can't do-- e.g. spam for medium, and making false claims for messaging. A ultra-targeted Facebook Ad or sneaky TikTok influencer sponsorship can include completely unbiased data about the product. A catalog listing or sponsored whitepaper can include absolute bullshit and manipulative plays on emotion.

Ads don't just target end-consumers. Distributors, parts manufacturers, manufacturing machine manufacturers, packaging companies, suppliers of raw materials and intermediaries, transportation and logistics companies, warehouses, etc etc etc all have to explain why their product is worth buying over another. A lot of that is subjective.

For some entities, using an app container on DO or Heroku is a great solution because they don't have to manage some things themselves. Even if it doesn't save them money, it might be a QoL increase that makes sense in the context of the person using it. Their simply stating that their product is easier to use could be construed as biased-- if you need granular control over static files, those solutions are not easier to use by many people's estimation. For a lot of people whether or not they're easier to use depends on how comfortable someone is with deployments. Someone less familiar with coding than deployments probably would find heroku more irritating than useful.

If you think people exclusively want a bullet list of features rather than a TL/DR about why that company thinks it's a better choice, you're wrong. Especially with the bazillion things in our lives less consequential than web hosting. Straws. Contact lens solution. Gum. Candles. Wine. Shirts. If Red Kap is saying that their industrial work shirts are extremely durable, I want to know that rather than having a list of materials in the blend, the fabric weight, the composition of the thread, whether or not the armpits are gusseted, etc. Then I can take a look and decide myself if the company has the same idea of durable that I do. My life would be measurably worse if they could not give their subjective take on why those facts matter, and if I need to buy a shirt quickly before a camping trip, I don't want to go looking for a shirt forum and deciding whether or not those people are full of shit. Groupthink is a huge problems in online enthusiast communities as it is. It's just a different source of people trying to push their perspective except now the reward is their feeling like a know-it-all. Is it more objective? Yeah. Is it so much more objective that I want to look

Targeting can be good to a very limited extent, or bad to a great extent. I'm glad I get advertisements for a new local coffee roaster pop up in some social media feed. The chance of me driving down that little side street in that neighborhood is slight, and the same is probably true for my friends. The local newspaper is a shitty clone of USA Today and expensive so I don't subscribe to it, and they probably wouldn't even cover it anyway. The local food reviewer social media accounts, I know for a fact, are essentially hawking places for money without disclosing it. The local food forums/blogs/etc are full of cranks and blowhards and it's impossible to know if anything is really good or bad. I'm glad I see that instead of advertisements for stethoscopes and scrap metal recycling services which also target industries common in my area. I am not glad companies are trying to sneakily inject advertising into everywhere I go and that data brokers are doing their best to build the creepiest psychological profile possible. I'm happy to see a video of someone talking about something they like. I'm not happy about seeing a video where someone was paid to say they like it without disclosing that.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to sell something if you live in a capitalist society. That's the way capitalist societies function. (Even then, communist countries have and always did have advertisements to just let people know that things existed. Even if there was less manipulation involved in them, they still had to show people why something was worth buying instead of just giving them statistics and hoping people's nerdy friends would explain it to them.)

The problem is not advertising, or wanting to sell something, or even marketing. The problem is manipulation, unfair business practices, and lying. Trying to address those things by criticizing advertising itself would be like trying to reduce junk mail by banning mail. There are fundamental problems that need to be addressed but saying advertisements can just go away a) completely ignores what advertisements actually do in our society and why they exist, and b) completely ignores the guarantee that greedy people will still use greedy and manipulative business practices to get an unfair advantage because advertisements aren't the source of greed or the only way people can be greedy.

If you’re just glancing, then sure… and maybe if it’s only glancing-level important then that’s fine.

In my experience there are almost always some issues (either legit or misguided support requests,) PRs for docs and features, updates to libraries for vulnerabilities or deprecated code. Worth looking at stuff that isn’t open also. Even if it’s a 10 year old project and the last commit is from 6 months ago fixing a seemingly minor bug, if there more than a few stars or forks, and there aren’t ignored issues and PRs sitting there, I’d consider it trustworthy.

And if it does look abandoned but was active at some point, it’s always a good idea to take a stroll through the forks.

Marking “new tech paradigm isn’t about turning a profit/ the rules have changed” on my tech bubble bingo card.

A truly sinister conspiracy to recognize the humanity of people whose legal right to choose any bus seat or patronize many restaurants, among many other things, is younger than BASIC.

> When trying to make an informed choice on a purchase, I'll typically look for enthusiast communities or unsponsored reviews. Marketing actually tends to actively get in the way.

Right but where do they get their info? If there were no advertisements, would they call up companies to see what they offered? How would they know a new company existed? Would there be an online enthusiast group for toilet brushes and tape and granite blocks for curbs? How would you know if there was a new store to buy those things? Would that store having a sign that included what they sold constitute advertising? Could your local fish shop put a sign in the window advertising the weekly special? Could they post a picture of it online? Obviously circulars would be advertisements— would catalogs constitute advertisements? What would inspire any innovation at all if there was no way for anyone to discover some new competition existed? How would stores know that manufacturers and distributors existed? Is packaging advertising? Is there a limit to where you can place packages? Show them on the Internet? Do you really think those enthusiast communities wouldn’t be chock full of industry voices? Do you think they aren’t already? Do you really think your process is totally objective?

There are a lot of shitty practices in marketing and advertising. Especially with data-driven marketing, I might be the harshest critic I’ve encountered. But advertising at its core is just telling people that products exist. That’s it. Capitalist societies don’t function without being able to communicate that products exist, but even communist countries have (and always had) advertising to tell people that things existed.

I abhor many practices in marketing and advertising, but at some level, companies must be able to tell people that they have a product to sell. I have never encountered anybody that suggested a reasonable replacement that would work for everything from computers to condoms to lettuce to bars to bakeries to cars to cleaning services to email hosts to edge network caching to hobbyist clubs to camp grounds.

Cool work!

One of my least favorite tendencies of software developers is assuming they can pull apart non-technical/mathematic problems involving human complexity, even at a societal scale, with a series of logical thought experiments like they’re debugging software, and that their “bug fixes” and doc updates would tidy everything up with people as effectively as it does with processes. As complex as software can be, it hasn’t a sliver the complexity of human interaction on a small scale, let alone societally. The developer mindset often isn’t effective enough in reasoning about human behavior to make effective user interfaces for software they created.

When you start classifying entire categories of human interaction and societal structures in concrete stages based on a combination of a priori reasoning, gut instinct, anecdotes, and ‘common knowledge,’ there’s a good chance your words are portraying the boogie men in your head rather than any of the very significant and consequential problems in our society. There are entire fields that study complex topics you casually wield in your assessment— they’re probably a good place to start if you honestly think your gut instinct about forum posts on advertising can be meaningfully generalized to societal structures on a whole.