dschuessler

Probably the most underrated software I use daily are some of my Firefox extensions.

https://github.com/einaregilsson/Redirector redirects my YouTube, Google, Twitter and Reddit links to privacy friendly frontends (i.e. Invidious, Startpage, Nitter and Libreddit).

https://github.com/proginosko/LeechBlockNG helps me staying away from time sinks on the internet during the day.

On the development side I use...

https://github.com/aaronvegh/nsregextester as my tried and true tool for regex debugging.

https://github.com/mhutchie/vscode-git-graph turns VSCode into a marvelous Git GUI.

Some HN community member recently plugged his side project in another thread and it seems quite fitting here: https://pausbox.com/

It's a configurable phone enclosure that physically separates you from your phone but lets important calls get through.

There are surely cheaper and probably more efficient ways to address OP's question but I might throw it in here anyways since it's sufficiently related.

I agree with both of your statements. They are definitely important points to make about your observation. But your post seems to argue against Martin's standpoint and for the assertion that „Tests are not specifications.“

From the fact that there are some tests out there that are barely specifying anything, it does neither follow that tests are not supposed to be specifications nor that tests are not specifications in general.

I think these are important distinctions to make.

Who would actually write tests like this in real life? Does anyone out there actually test their polynomials with a random sample of input values?

Yes, in a technical sense they are tests. But they are bad tests precisely because they barely fulfill the purpose to clarify the behavior of the function.

I’m not convinced.

I’m one of the people who upvoted this post onto the frontpage, because I found it an interesting explanation (in a how-possibly, not a how-actually sense) of the popularity of the news about Basecamp buyouts. I was interested to read what people with more knowledge about this topic might comment.

Could you elaborate on what makes this post „noise“?

Working link: https://www.grammarly.com/blog/engineering/running-lisp-in-p...

> FDBK rewards users with virtual currency for giving others feedback on their dating profiles, as well as for taking micro personal development courses.

That information should be high upfront on the page itself albeit more in an ELI5 way. From the first look I have no idea what makes your app special.

Also calling it "groundbreaking" without any elaboration on how it works makes it look kind of shady too.

Good luck!

These are my guidelines. As they are mere guidelines mileage may vary depending on the participants and the context of the meeting.

If you call in a meeting:

- Have a clear picture of what you try to achieve with it.

- Communicate the purpose of the meeting in advance.

- Moderate the meeting to make sure that its participants actively contribute towards its goal. That is, if the meeting digresses, politely address it and make a constructive proposal on when and how to address the topic that caused the digression.

If you are being called into a meeting:

- Ask for what you can contribute to the goal of the meeting if it is not clear.

- Take responsibility in working towards the goal of the meeting.

This is hard work and I'm having enough Zoom fatigue so that I do not follow these guidelines myself at times but I try. I'm curious what others bring up.

I use the Redirector extension to mitigate the problem of "getting into the habit" by automation: https://einaregilsson.com/redirector/

It redirects all my googling to Startpage so I don't have to change my habits at all.

I recently discovered Privacy Redirect which apparently took the idea a step further by providing presets that redirect visits to popular web services to their privacy friendly alternatives by default and thus mitigates the need to set up a redirector extension yourself: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/privacy-redir...

I switched from Windows to Mac in 2009 for professional reasons and the Mac software landscape at the time was far from what it is today. I got very keen on getting some tried and true Windows software to work on Mac which in some cases led me to discover half-baked open source software solutions that barely worked and were unmaintained. I guess this was the first time I thought to myself: "Gosh, wouldn't it be nice to know how to program."

I taught myself C at the age of 25 and approached a computer science degree shortly afterwards. That open source software is still unfixed but I'm glad it sent me down this path.

This is slightly unrelated but I looked up Quasar and their homepage (https://quasar.dev/) is the first website that literally makes me nauseous just by looking at it.

That's a kind of UX problem I didn't even consider to exist a few minutes ago.

Use the Teddit frontend (https://teddit.net/) and the Redirector extension (https://einaregilsson.com/redirector/) to redirect all Reddit links to Teddit and view the content there. You won't be bothered by pushes for login again.

> If the chats with my friends were disclosed, I'd probably be made a laughing stock at most but it's no big deal.

That’s a privilege many people don’t have. Think about sexual preferences, controversial opinions or health problems that can be disadvantageous in their career or when obtaining insurance. Or that aren’t problematic now but might be in the political climate in 20 years.

You could argue that people worrying about this still have the choice to use an E2E encrypted messenger. After all different needs are served by different products. But if this behavior becomes the norm, people who hide possibly disadvantageous information can be identified simply by their messenger use, partially defying the purpose of hiding their information in the first place.

I consider this a very strong argument for privacy as the default regardless of particular people's lack of a need for privacy.

EDIT: Removed remarks that could be misunderstood as snark.

> They are the biggest player in the dev-machine market, but more alternatives are popping up making it even harder to monetise.

As someone who loves the feature set of Docker for development but grows increasingly disillusioned with its performance on Mac, would you mind elaborating what these alternatives are?

> By contending nothing (YOU) imply anything.

I did not say that I contend nothing but that I did not contend that X could be „anything on the face of the universe“. But even if I did contend nothing I certainly wouldn’t imply anything. How does contending nothing imply something? What kind of reasoning is this?

> The nuance is just missed by you. I did address this. Multiple times. My initial post did mention that science and logic arose out of philosophy (and by implication is a part of it). The failure in this case is technically not on me, it's on your usage of the argument.

You are criticizing philosophy (as a whole) as „essentially just a mish mash of deep thoughts and ponderings of unrelated topics“, „archaic“ and „just an old way of thinking“. Now you insist that you meant science and logic to be by implication a part of philosophy. So are you saying that they are archaic as well? You can’t have it both ways. If you don’t include science and logic in your criticism you should clarify which parts of philosophy you reject. That would be the nuance I am missing.

> If you claim X is not anything that can possibly exist. Then type class X for me.

I attempted to type class X in my last comment: X is what – by popular convention – is worth asking the question what we mean when we talk about it. So I have to concede: That could indeed be anything. But in fact it isn’t. So I’m still failing to grasp the relevance of your argument. One day you could probably ask yourself what you mean when talking about a rock and call that philosophy because it would be considered worthwhile. So what?

> This is the essence of the argument. My claim is basically X is typed really poorly and arbitrarily with little formalism let alone sense.

Do you have the same demands on your own area of expertise? Would you mind formalizing it non-arbitrarily? I guess that would help me understand your expectations.

EDIT: Removed a remark that was due to a misunderstanding.

Even if X could be "anything on the face of the universe“ (which I did not contend) it does not follow that philosophy is concerned with „the set of all things that can be x“ (which you seem to imply). I rather clearly stated that philosophy is instead concerned with the answers to questions of the form „What do we mean when we talk about X?“

Your „religionology“ argument surely has a point. The critic of religionology would have to specifically criticize the worshipping of the cat rather than religionology as a whole. So you as a critic of philosophy would likewise have to target those aspects of philosophy you don’t practice yourself in the very moment you are arguing against it. That is indeed my point when claiming that you contradict yourself. I believe your criticism would benefit from nuance.

> studying what I mean when I talk about that rock is not actually a philosophy.

I agree. I think the misunderstanding lies in your belief that X can be anything on the face of the universe. Not everything is equally worth asking the question what we mean when we talk about it. By popular convention, religion, science, aesthetics and logic are worth it. Philosophy therefore turns to them rather than rocks.

EDIT: Rephrased first sentence.

> Sure if you classify all deep thought as philosophy then any argument against philosophy that is deep is in itself philosophy. It’s just meta games with words no point in bringing it up.

I did not classify all deep thought as philosophy but a very specific subset of thought: answers on questions of the form „What do we mean when we talk about X?“. Reflections on our own concepts if you will. The point of bringing it up is that as far as I can see you are taking a self-contradictory position.

I agree that you can answer the question „What do we mean when we talk about X?“ with a definition. That is one way of understanding the question. Yet we judge definitions to be inappropriate when it doesn’t capture what we _actually_ mean when we talk about X (just as your rhetorical question suggests that defining Wikipedia to be a „philosophy web site“ is inappropriate). So there is obviously a second meaning to the question „What do we mean when we talk about X?“, one that is not asking for a definition of X but for our concept of X on which we judge definitions to be appropriate or inappropriate. It is this latter sense in which I consider philosophy to be concerned with that question.

> Wouldn’t that imply that no philosophy is true?

I am a strong proponent of distinguishing „truth“ from „certainty“. That is to say, a theory (philosophical or not) might be true in the sense that it corresponds to the things it says something about. But since all human beings are fallible we can never be certain not to have made mistakes. So a philosophy can be true. But we can not be certain about it. EDIT: If OP writes that "there is no way to refute or evaluate philosophy" they might imply that no philosophy is true. Yet I would only agree that no philosophy is certain.

> I think of it as the search for truths that we can’t empirically prove, contrasted to science and math which are purely logical.

What (empirical) scientists usually mean when they call a theory or hypothesis „empirically proven“ is that there is evidence that meets some arbitrary criterion of strength. What mathematicians usually mean when they call a theorem proven is that it can be logically deduced from a set of axioms. So not only is the word "proof" used very differently in (empirical) science and mathematics, the way to obtain such proofs is usually very different as well. To lump these procedures together under the term "purely logical" seems to me to mix up important differences.

> But math and science have their bases in philosophy through universal laws and propositions, which are unprovable but necessary.

Neither the laws and propositions in math nor in the (empirical) sciences are necessary in the sense that practitioners are forced to assume them. Nothing prevents anyone from assuming something else whenever they wish to and important discoveries have been made that way (e.g. non-euclidean geometry, theory of relativity). Maybe you refer to some other kind of necessity though.

> Science and logic attempt to describe something central to the universe while religion and aesthetics are central to only the human experience. To place the two in the same box is a huge category error akin trying to scientifically derive creationism.

I do not see in what respect this might be a category error. The „box“ all these things are put into is the box of things we can ask questions of the form „What do we mean when we talk about X?“ about. This is possible for religion, science, aesthetics and logic likewise. And that’s what philosophers are doing.

In that sense your own post is engaging in the very philosophy you deem obsolete. Not only do you reflect on what we actually refer to when we talk about philosophy – thus engaging in metaphilosophy – your entire last paragraph is full of metaphysical and epistemological theses about the world and our knowledge of it. This is the problem of most critics who want to reject philosophy as a whole. They cannot argue for their thesis without already starting to philosophize themselves.

It's likely a missing plugin. As an avid VSCode user I would liken the difference of VSCode and IntelliJ IDEs with the difference between an unfurnished apartment and a fully furnished apartment.

With the latter you skip setting up your environment and just start doing your thing. The former is more barebones in this regard. It lets you build your own IDE from plugins and a ton of configuration options.

As someone who likes to have one app for everything code related (from Markdown to the programming languages I use, to config files and to LaTeX) I like to "bring my own furniture" for the unique combination of needs I have.

Thus it makes perfect sense to me that VSCode is regularly underestimated regarding its IDE capabilities. Stock VSCode is indeed just "Notepad++ on steroids". You have to invest some time to build it up into a fully fledged IDE.

There are several projects attempting to develop a native smart editor. For Mac users there is Nova (https://nova.app/) and for the Vim crowd there is Onivim (https://onivim.io/).

I have used neither of them but I find them intriguing, especially when I wait for my VSCode cursor to catch up with my typing.

Not necessarily. This expression probably refers to Qt's capability to use the subset of native widgets that are functionally equivalent across platforms. This blog post has some images of this feature in action: https://www.qt.io/blog/desktop-styling-with-qt-quick-control...

I combat this problem with a combination of LeechBlock NG (https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/leechblock-ng/) and hckrnews.com. The former prevents me from visiting Hacker News before 8 o'clock. The latter records every link that made it to the front page so that the possibility of FOMO is properly addressed.

Visual Studio Code has a Zen mode (Cmd+K Z) that should at least give you the distraction freedom of GhostWriter, regardless of the markup you use.

It's a trap. You only need to find the happy medium if you accept the constraints that generate the trade-off in the first place.

And in at least three of the four antagonisms you list, it comes down to the DX of the tooling. Static typing isn't so much of a pain if your type errors are helpful and descriptive. The missing brace in the XHTML doc is easily found when using proper and easy to use XML linters. And I don't see why writing native apps shouldn't be as simple as writing web apps. At least there are attempts that seem to get some mileage out of the idea (e.g. Revery, Flutter).

The trick is to make the toolset more approachable.

Why do you post a YouTube video of someone browsing the page instead of hosting the page to let us browse it ourselves?

Is it because it's not ready yet? Then it is maybe a good idea to have a page that communicates the idea while announcing the service to be "coming soon".

Either way: A YouTube video of someone browsing a web page is not an ideal medium of communicating your idea.

There's a self-hostable alternative called Inboxen (https://inboxen.org/) I haven't gotten around to setting it up yet, unfortunately.

I suspect by "develop" the parent comment did not refer to the construction of power plants but to the improvement of the technology. Like in "Research & Development".

Your pointing to that component of science that is commonly underappreciated in the public reception: mutual review. Be it in the form of replication, criticism or peer review.

Science is a social activity. So cooking things up in a kitchen all by yourself is consequently not.

The proper way to go forward would be to seek out the accepted forums and channels of his peers to get opinions on his work. That is as much a part of science as is experimenting.

Unrelated: Do I understand it correctly that his sample size is n=3? https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17c7LtrUlnzadif63pR8G...

These aren't mutually exclusive but rather well aligned goals.

I find it odd to ask whether any non-monetary goals are "truly" their goals. They are a listed company. Of course they want to make profit. But they do so in part by means of providing privacy and security.