happimess

Presumably, that header graphic is not to scale.

I had a PM who pushed us to A/B test _everything_. We hired a new graphic designer who suggested that we change our product links from ALL CAPS to Title Case (a very popular idea on the team, and his first real suggestion after a few weeks with us), and she insisted that we A/B test it first. It felt like an insult to him, and a dumb test since title case looked way better.

The three key outcomes I observed from the relentless A/B testing were UI antipatterns, team burnout, and a well-attended conference talk about "how we ran 105 A/B tests in a year, and what we learned".

My favorite example he gave: Buy 52 decks of cards. Put all the 7s of diamonds together in one deck. Let your audience member pick a card. It's the 7 of diamonds.

> There is need to iterate and adapt frequently, sometimes as part of your go-to-market strategy, in order to fully understand the problem space.

If you're pivoting so hard that your SQL schema breaks, how is a schemaless system going to help you? You'll still have to either throw out your old data (easy in both cases) or figure out a way to map old records onto new semantics (hard in both cases).

I agree with GP that this is a central problem to solve, not something to figure out _after_ you write software. Build your house on stone.

I am very grateful that I can add "don't you like fireflies?" to my list of reasons people should turn off their floodlights.

I love this idea for so many games, but I'll try to stay on topic.

From elsewhere in thread, heavily snipped:

  games like that aren’t fun. It’s been tried. [...] hopping online to go do your second job [...] implies work [...] no one wants to do that work

I wouldn't want to do data entry in an FPS game, no, but people love "bakery simulator" type resource management games. It would be cool to link my grocery-line-time-waster score into my overworld bank account, enabling me to shop around for gear in stores set up (but not manually run) by other players, to use in the FPS portion of the game where I steal morsels from the full-sized humans (or am I getting my threads confused?).

I don't know if you have anything to do this year, but their follow-up 'Into the Breach' is also amazing.

My cat and I have one firm English phrase: "3...2...1". I say that whenever I want him to make up his mind, and at the end I always close the door, pull the sweater from under him, or whatever. He definitely knows what it means, and knows I mean it.

> between "No, I don't understand you." and "I understand you perfectly well, but [nothing in my nature compels me to care]".

This is where he and I are for lots of other stuff, and I also love him for it.

Rad product! Can I feed it arbitrary images/html/something?

I think it's insane to, for example, work at an office early in your 20s, to put a couple grand in your 401(k). Those 1-2 years, if spent exploring, could mean finding a happier and more thoughtful way to progress through the latter 70% of your life.

I get a lot of mileage out of one deeply-considered why.

I think you meant "Sonoff Basic relays" in your last paragraph.

Great info thanks.

I have, at a truly well-run engineering team. She was fun to bounce ideas off of, and quick to rope in relevant experts, business or techincal. She also understood the value proposition of each feature, and could easily spot if you were wasting cycles on something unimportant.

Probably not coincidentally, this was the only place I've worked where KPIs were truly a useful way of framing our place within the organization.

I always check google's ngrams for questions like this, and their corpus shows "home in" being far more common going back as far as 1800.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=home+in%2C+hon...

Cool! Adding to the feature requests, can you enable vim-like navigation? WASD is a hazy memory compared to HJKL.

Spectacle runs just fine and is worth looking at. For me, it didn't really scratch the itch.

FWIW, moving a window to a different workspace is also constant-time (shift+mod+digit). Maybe I'd spend another half second positioning it among the tiles (shift+mod+vim navigation keys), but only if I'm just starting a project.

Alternate take: I achieve constant-time access (mod key + digit) to all those things with 10 workspaces in i3.

I can't imagine having to see them all at once. Realistically, I'm only actually thinking about 1 or 2 of them at a time. If I need to check documentation, I'm no longer thinking about my build output. Slack, email, and calendar are disconnected from development tools. And if I need to do a quick context shift, I can switch over instantly.

See also The Witness, which is gorgeous and probably could have run on a dreamcast.

I remember when Obama was roundly mocked for suggesting that people improve gas mileage by checking their tire pressure before road trips. Too easy and effective to be worthwhile, I guess.

> Really good pseudocode might be more useful than your actual code

Hear hear! OP, if you go this route, treat your implementation as a practice run, and write out exactly how it works in pseudocode.

My 2 cents:

I think that hiring a (good) professional for a rework/reimplementation would be productive, but it would certainly run the risk of exposing errors in your work. If that's desirable or not depends on your timeline to publish, I guess.

If your non-technical cofounder only knows a handful of marketing buzzwords, you should jump ship and find a better partner.

My personal idea of hell is cold-calling randos all day, trying to get them to pay me for half-finished software.

> (I remember posting a huge thing on slashdot when this article was originally posted)

Appropriate that _this_ comment is buried who-knows-where in slashdot's archives.

I added `margin-top: 3em` to `ul, ol, dl` and it is much more readable.

I think the author is talking about office politics, not electoral politics.

The Ashley Book of Knots is also a beautifully hand-written book.

https://www.amazon.com/Ashley-Book-Knots-Clifford-W/dp/03850...

In both, the aloneness of "him" is the focus. In the first, his companions are the subject of both sentences. In the second, The fog and "he" are the focus, with his companions only mentioned as an afterthought.

"Mostly-isolated development environment" is more important here than "external services", IMO.

I've been at organizations where local development required connecting to a MSSQL instance in a server closet at HQ; This is unacceptable, and devs will constantly be at war with each other.

Mocking your analytics provider (or whatever) seems much less problematic to me.

For the record, I think the second version is a clear improvement.

Clarence Saunders lived quite an exciting life.

There is an excellent episode of The Anthropocene Reviewed[0] that tells his story well.

[0] https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/anthropocene-reviewed/e...