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doytch

456 karma · joined October 23, 2016

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doytch··on OpenAI: 'The New York Times Paid Someone to Hack Us'
If I’m reading the complaint correctly, the “hack” is what amounts to…prompt injection? Are we seriously considering that a hack these days? Genuine question.
doytch··on Cinnamon: Using century old tech to build a mean load shedder (2023)
The second-last chart (titled Success Latency in fig7) is a wonderful bit of data viz. What’s that kind of chart called?

This was a great article overall, though. Well written in addition to the visual aids.

doytch··on Apple Vision Pro and ADHD
I still find it quite odd that the west (or at least the US) has decided that we're entitled to a trial period with things we purchase. It's an incredibly wasteful practice and one that isn't at all common in a lot of other places on the planet. I know people who've moved to Europe who were in for a rude awakening when they tried returning things to the local shop just 'cause.
doytch··on Large shares of consumers use social media out of a fear of missing out
This reminds me of carbon offsets where you get paid to not cut down a forest.

I’m eagerly anticipating the first social media company to take money from every user in order to shut it all down and burn the code.

doytch··on Are Sunk Costs Fallacies? (2012)
Yeah, I think that’s almost kinda the thrust. That sunk cost is a fallacy only at an organizational scale and at the individual scale it’s merely strategy or thoughtlessness.

From the article:

> People commit sunk cost much more easily if someone else is paying, possibly in part because they are trying to still prove themselves right—an understandable and rational choice!

doytch··on Cooking and bird safety
Its a tempting thought, but remember that chocolate and grapes are toxic to dogs and we don’t worry about their effect on humans.
doytch··on Sponge cleans all teeth perfectly in just 15 seconds
They say a sponge has an estimated effective lifespan of two months, so I don’t think hard water should cause issues over that timespan.
doytch··on Flexbox Froggy
My personal heuristic:

- Start with Flexbox. Flexboxes of flexboxes will solve almost everything that’s common, and be easier to reason through and maintain imo.

- If you’re doing something that appears tabular, use Grid. Flexbox will appear as though it’ll get you there, but the moment you start having cell contents that are highly variable in size your columns will start to get out of sync.

- The above is esp the case if you’re trying to do repeating sets of rows. Eg Row type A, row type B, A, B, etc. That’s a Grid problem.

But of course, the only way to get good mental models is by trying both approaches and seeing what the drawbacks are. Maybe try the Grid games that folks have linked in other comments?

doytch··on We Glorify Overwork and Refuse to Rest
Yeah, I identify with that. It makes it harder that’s for sure.

The article linked to one of the author’s other articles which talked about how even if you love it, you start to be fueled by different energy.

> After working at high intensity for more than 90 minutes, we begin to draw on these emergency reserves to keep us going. In the process, we move from parasympathetic to a sympathetic arousal — a physiological state more commonly known as “fight or flight.”

> One consequence of relying on stress hormones for energy is that the prefrontal cortex begins to shut down. We become more reactive and less capable of thinking clearly and reflectively, or seeing the big picture.

I recognize that. Ive also noticed those stress hormones coming more often outside of work and affecting the rest of my life.

doytch··on Waku: The Minimalist React Framework with Server Components
One of the touted benefits of RSCs is actually colocation of code while avoiding waterfalls.

Naively, you can implement a component that fetches some data (eg, post) and renders. Some descendants may also need to fetch data and render it. But now you’re blocking the descendants from rendering until the first fetch completes, so you have a waterfall load that takes unnecessarily long.

An alternative has always been to fetch everything at the route/top level. But now it starts to feel a bit strange that your route component needs to know about everything its descendants need.

RSCs promise to allow you implement the former pattern which gives better maintainability without the performance hit of a waterfall since the entire render-fetch-data-render back and forth is done on the backend near your data.

doytch··on Common mistakes in salary negotiation
A lot of the time a seller is not really trying to maximize their sale price.

They start out trying to but then time drags on and they “just want it to be done.” At that point the seller is also prioritizing a deal over maximization.

Agents, since they’ve gone through a tonne of these processes, are more immune to the mental load the sale takes on them. I’d bet they’re less likely to try and blow through those final steps.

You can see this kind of thing play out across industries. In SW, a comparison may be the seasoned dev has no problem ripping apart their candidate solution and rewriting it since that process takes them less effort than the junior.

doytch··on Nvidia’s CEO Is the Uncle of AMD’s CEO
Language probably plays a non-insignificant role. I'd hazard a guess that more Indians and Chinese (the nationalities that are fairly well-represented in US leadership positions) are learning English than German, Polish or Slovak.
doytch··on Canada Woos American H-1B Visa Holders Fed Up with U.S. Immigration System
Canada’s dealt with a brain drain problem to the US for a couple of decades at least. The amount of folks I know who got educated in Canada and eventually moved to the US due to CoL and salaries is significant.

It’s a shame.

doytch··on U.S. pedestrian deaths reach a 40-year high
I live in a smaller American city and ride my bike for most trips. I ride conservatively and am constantly watching cars tires or looking into the cabin to get early warning about sudden unsignalled turns or any other odd maneuvers. The amount of people I see just casually browsing Instagram or texting is insane.

I grew up in another country where it was illegal to hold a cellphone while driving and it was actually enforced. I'm just completely dumbfounded at the behaviour here and the lack of enforcement.

doytch··on Rock and Roll Drums: All You Need to Know
Really? I feel the opposite. All the poor string muting really shines through :(

(source: crappy guitarist me)

doytch··on Anxious dogs, like anxious people, need help managing and reducing distress
> look at the dogs in the street

I wonder why there are so many dogs in the street ;-)

There's nowhere where dogs are "natural." They're a species that was bred to the whims and desires of humans, almost always to the detriment of their evolutionary fitness.

doytch··on React Aria Components
Interesting. I’ve loved using react-aria on past projects even with the amount of glue code you needed to write sometimes. Its not even that it was so much typing, but devs instinctively tried to abstract away reused code (“DRY!”) but would then inevitably run into issues and risk creating monstrosities… I’m thinking specifically of anything that used popovers…

I do like the idea that you can use these components as a starting point and drop down to first principles with react-aria hooks if it suits the use case.

doytch··on Purkinje Effect
I don’t quite know how to describe it, so this YouTube video will have to suffice!

https://youtu.be/mM6XJmhFZbI

doytch··on Purkinje Effect
They definitely /do not/ pronounce it correctly, but a valiant attempt is made! That’s good enough for me! I’ve noticed most folks pronounce it Dvor-zhak, with a slight but distinct gap added into the pronunciation of the ř.

But like I said, this is leagues better than the butchery I hear when watching hockey, say. :)

doytch··on Purkinje Effect
I’m surprised that a Czech name was Anglicized (not sure if that’s the correct word) for this. I’m not used to seeing that. I think I like it? Nothing insignificant grinds me more than watching sports and having Czech names sounded out phonetically via an English approach, and this anglicization is pretty good.

It’s interesting to me because other names like the difficult-to-pronounce Dvořák are kept intact and even attempted quite well by classical fans.

doytch··on Google Summer of Code 2023
When have you ever seen a complex, in-production software system and immediately thought “yeah I get this!”?

If you’re anything like me, you’ll have this feeling on every new project and new job you start for a while. I’m in my late thirties and am finally starting to realize that “hey, I have this feeling a lot and it’s always wrong.”

Push through it. Write the proposal. I think the proposal-writing process is the very best aspect of GSoC since it forces you into something that you really don’t tend to do in traditional learning like universities. It forces you to think a bit like a product person even and explain benefits and tradeoffs, backing up your beliefs.

doytch··on Google Summer of Code 2023
I disagree. I did GSoC on a project I hadn’t been contributing to beforehand and I still delivered useful changes.
doytch··on So what’s next (personal news from developer of popular CoreJS polyfill)
“Modern ESM” is a moving target. There’s always some new functionality that’s being added to the APIs that devs inevitably want to use. From his article, ‘structuredClone’ is a good example of something that everyone’s lusting over but isn’t quiiite there yet.

There are also still browser quirks etc for some of the newer stuff, and Safari tends to be a laggard, which cuts you off from iOS traffic.

doytch··on Pico.js – A face-detection library in 200 lines of JavaScript (2018)
I'm not saying it's correct, but my first thought would be that it would make it much easier for bad actors to come up with ways of getting around the algorithm.
doytch··on Show HN: A Little Tool to Visualize Guitar Chords
Yeah I noticed this. Pulled up Am7 and the note on the first fret of the B string is labelled as E and A for different voicings.
doytch··on W3.css – A minimal alternative to Bootstrap
Ha, same. Though I've been using Kagi Search for a few months now and blocked W3Schools from my search results so I never make this mistake anymore.
doytch··on How Not to Fight Inflation
> people who hold adjustable rate mortgages

This is the vast majority of homeowners in most countries.

Which also spills into rent costs, of course.

doytch··on Wasting time in tech interviews
> If a recruiter reaches out and I'm interested, I ask to talk to someone technical.

How do you phrase this? What are some successes and failures you've encountered with this approach?

doytch··on A history of Hup, the jump sound of shooting games
Czech has a version of "jump" that's similar as well, so I wonder if Slavic languages also do. Czech is odd in that some roots are Slavic and others German so who knows where it came from!
doytch··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2021)
Everest Agency | Sr QA, Sr PO, VP, UX Design, others | Remote (N/A) | Full-time | http://everest.agency

We're a fully-remote SW agency that checks notes builds what's next. I'm a dev, not an HR person so I don't have the full spiel on everything but the main sell to our clients is that we embed with their engineers rather than just building something and throwing it over the wall at them. My team is currently building a React, Next.js, and GraphQL app that lives in our customer's K8s cluster. I've rapidly picked up some knowledge in Kafka and Redis lately as well.

We're trying to fill a couple of roles but we're most urgently trying to pick up some Sr QA folks. We hire quickly and you won't be waiting around forever for an offer. Everest was the fastest from start-to-offer of all the companies I interviewed with a few months ago.

Job Postings: https://apply.workable.com/everestagency/

If you have questions for me before going through the application, I'm at mark@everest.agency

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