hartleybrody

This is probably the skill you remembered: https://github.com/AminBlg/SimpleEnglish

I have been using it for a few weeks, and it significantly improves the quality of the docstrings and code comments, as well as the readability of spec docs.

I have also added a few key bullet points to my AGENTS.md and have found the results to be very effective and generating plans and code that looks like something I would have written:

-----------

    ## planning, design and spec docs

    - the highest design goal is simplicity -- in our systems and our mental model -- even if if means edge cases are unaddressed and could potentially fail
    - please practice "ya ain't gunna need it" (YAGNI) do not add unnecessary guardrails
    - do not plan to add caching, many layers of unnecessary abstraction or other premature optimizations
    - look for places where adding or clarifying an invariant would simplify the code or the overall system

    please specifically try to avoid:

    - redundant calculations or duplicated work
    - duplicated conditionals or state-machine logic
    - storing state that can be derived from other state, which could drift and become out of sync over time
    - leaky abstractions across layers of the application
    - multi-line comments explaining a variable name or a single statement. well chosen names and design should makes these unnecessary, as the code is self-documenting

11 years ago, I had the idea that I should be able to take any article on an arbitrary website and listen to it as a narration in my chosen podcast player. At the time, text-to-speech (TTS) services were very robotic and it was difficult to listen to anything longer than 10 seconds. But now that TTS is much better, long form narrations are actually quite pleasant to listen to, so I gave it another go.

There's a browser extension that reads the content of the article on the page (only when you activate it, using least privilege browser APIs for content scripts) and then narrates the article for you. You get a custom podcast RSS URL that works in (almost) any podcast player, and then you can take articles with you to catch up while driving, walking the dog, etc. All the typical podcast audio controls you're used to like speed settings, skipping, and no new apps to download or learn.

It has genuinely been a big benefit and allowed me to keep up with articles I'd never normally have time to read, plus it allows me to reduce my screen time. My wife also uses and loves it. There have been some interesting bugs in the narration like originally pronouncing "24/7" as "twenty-four sevenths" but I am working through different strategies to get more accurate narration from arbitrary long-form text.

With apologies for the ".AI" domain, it was a bit of an impulse buy: https://earcast.ai/

Boston. Was looking into becoming a medic when living there many years ago, and learned that Boston EMS has their own dedicated training and certification, with more limited protocols for EMTs since there are so many world-class hospitals within a few minutes drive from any point in the city. EMS has less to do but load-and-go.

Is IntelliJ generating source code that gets committed to your codebase?

Seems completely different. See also, this discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44976568

>that you're sorry and to truly empathize with the people they're firing

Serious question: what should have been said on this call to do that? There was a lot of "I'm sorry you feel that way" seeming to come from the HR representative, but it seemed to miss the mark.

I used to work in a hospital and one thing that was already tough was when doctors would copy massive (multiple page) notes that were mostly boilerplate, probably stored as some template in the EHR. After seeing the same note a few times, you started to learn which page to scroll to in order to view the relevant section for the patient. I would hope this system only generates clinically-relevant text for that patient, usually only 2-3 paragraphs for a standard consultation.

Wow, lots of haters in this thread. Having doctors spend less time with clerical/administrative work needed to record conversations will free up more time to focus on patients. I assume the generated note text can be easily modified by the doc if necessary, but saves them the bulk of having to type things up and remember everything that was discussed.

This is an excellent point. While their main value prop seems to be "servers closer to your users" you could also just use them as a drop-in replacement for something like heroku and just use one region to simplify the mental model, pricing and orchestration.

OP here, thanks for making that distinction more clear. I had listed them all as new tech that I am starting to use, but you're correct that I wouldn't intend to use them all _together_.

The HTMX and alpine libs were intended to be sprinkled onto existing web apps (my usual python/flask stack), whereas Phoenix would be for building all new projects.

> How do you go from talking to someone during some hobby activity to a friendship outside of that activity?

This is where having multiple hobbies not only adds depth to conversations & makes you more interesting, it allows you to cross-pollinate your friend groups from each hobby. If you join a cross fit gym and a running group (as others have mentioned in the thread), then you invite someone from the gym to the group or vice versa.

The invitation can either be a "I think you'd really enjoy this activity", in which case you're introducing them to something new and cool, or it can be "I think you'd really like the people I do X with" in which case you're helping them meet friends.

People who take you up on the offer to either try something new or meet new people with you as their guide are sure to become friends. You get to see each other in new elements and your relationship can now trascend simply doing one activity together.

I think this approach feels a lot more natural than jumping straight to "hey, I've seen you at the rock gym a bunch, let's get coffee?" which can feel like a big jump and somewhat forced.

> (they’re scams).

citation or story?

Pilot was told their flight was being diverted due to a suspected bomb on board. What "game of chicken" would make a pilot doubt that instruction and chose to keep flying, given what the information they were being presented at the time?

It's not like they called to the plane and said "we'd like to kidnap a passenger, please land" and the pilot went along with it.

What a perfectly obtuse, technical solution. Is grandma going to solve a captcha in order to sign up on a wordpress blog to view photos of her grandchildren?

Dropbox is "just" a private s3 bucket with s3cmd on a cronjob -- or a million other technical solutions -- but they're a successful business because they nailed the user experience for average joes.

The point of OP's product is that you don't have to cobble together a bunch of hacks to replicate the desired user experience, it's supported out of the box.

The article links to a YouTube video of a lecture by the author[0]. One of the top comments contains a list of timestamps in the video where he discusses specific surgeries:

    7:55 Angina example
    10:05 Parkinson’s disease example
    13:10 Multiple sclerosis example
    14:52 emphysema example
    18:47 knee pain
    20:40 spine surgery
    21:52 Injection therapy for pain
    24:59 Explain perceived effectiveness 
    26:29 correlation vs causation
    29:33 Improvement not due surgery
    30:33 Natural history
    34:01 regression to the mean
    35:43 concomitant treatment
    39:16 perceived improvement: patient vs clinician
    41:50 therapeutic envelope
    42:38 Intervention: the placebo pill
    44:02 Building the ideal placebo
    47:02 “Why do we still operated?”
    52:00 Determining effectiveness
    52:55 Reducing error in estimating the truth
    54:55 Why we need blinded randomized trials
    55:12 Ethics and Placebo
    59:50 One possible solution
    1:00:20 Current status of placebo RCT in orthopedics
    1:00:44 Summary, questions, and comments

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzueFu1cq5U

Jeff Bezos has a great interview where he talks about his decision to leave his cushy Wall Street job and start a website selling books. He talks about how he used a "regret minimization framework" where he projects himself into the future and imagines which decision he would regret the least.

I have used this technique multiple times myself to help with otherwise fraught or overwhelming decisions, and I think it's a great way to shift your frame of reference.

Interview where he describes it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwG_qR6XmDQ

> because that would be better for society.

Citation Needed.

I can think of many legitimate reason that a site owner might want to be anonymous. Maybe they're exposing corruption or sharing information that powerful people don't want to have exposed.

I assume one could use it to store and read back an offline dump of wikipedia[0] in order to help recreate society.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download

Quizlet is great if you're looking for pre-built decks, as you mentioned. As far as I'm aware, there's no spaced repetition feature, which is the main value in Anki.

Also, one of the values to me in using Anki is creating the cards myself. It allows me to mull things over and decide what part of a fact is important, and how I'd like to recall it.

Relatedly, the value isn't necessarily in reading someone else's study guide before a test, it's in creating your own study guide. That process helps you understand and retain the material far better.

"It's not sunshine and rainbows" is not a legitimate argument against taking a step in a better direction.

Every system has its flaws. Some have many more than others.

When I was in the woods and found one on me, I took the batteries out of an extra flashlight I was carrying and kept the tick trapped in the handle.

When I got home, I transferred him to a double ziplock labelled with the date and where on the body I found him and tossed him into the freezer for a few months until I figured I was in the clear.

Agreed. Cool URIs don't change. [1]

[1] https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI

I completely disagree. All new technology goes through a pruning phase for the first few years where people realize whether it's worthwhile or not. It's like natural selection, only the fittest survive.

A technology that's been around for decades and is still considered a viable candidate will be much more reliable, documented, mature, bugfree... than some new library that is untested hasn't been worn smooth over time.

Most things that I want to keep organized get split into high-level folders.

    ~/Documents
        /personal
            /project-1
        /client
            /client-1
                /project-1
        /school
            /semester
                /class

Each of the high-level folders contains a folder called `_archive` where I move old clients or projects into, this way the organization-level folders only contain things I'm actively working on.

Then I have `~/Downloads` and `~/Desktop` which are both a bit messy and get purged (Downloads) or reorganized (Desktop) from time to time.

Wow, the "If I don't feel like doing anything else after that, I will go back to bed." seems like the key part of it. Giving yourself a way out makes it even easier to commit to the small task. Good tip.

The counterpoint (and what this article mentioned in several places) is that the "more aggressive fingerprinting" techniques can have high false positive rates, and then the legitimate users of your site are going to end up thinking it's broken or the data never loads because they're inadvertently triggering your fingerprinting.

It feels pretty ridiculous to tell a user "you can't use our site because your system language settings don't match our IP list for that area."

Sidestepping the fact that assuming you can tell someone's language from the geo mapping of their IP address is already pretty problematic.[0]

[0]: https://medium.com/@kristopolous/stop-guessing-languages-bas...

Well then some record of it existing must be stored.

But if you're heavily invested in bonds then you can't "liquidate your assets at any time" like the commenter above you said. It sounds like you're talking about different investing goals, not really refuting their claim.

Can you elaborate a bit more detail around a MVP-style architecture where the database isn't on the public internet?

I assume you're talking about something like a public facing load balancer that connects into a private network where the web servers and database server live, and you'd need a bastion host (or just the load balancer) to connect into the private network and access any of the machines.

I'm seeing green checkmarks across the board, but they just added a notice to the top of the page:

> Increased Error Rates

> We are investigating increased error rates for Amazon S3 requests in the US-EAST-1 Region.

MailChimp has something like this. A few years ago I accidentally committed and pushed an API key, and I got an email from them a few minutes later saying that they had found the key and already invalidated it, so it couldn't cause any damage. Very proactive and smart, especially for an email service which is likely a huge target for abuse around this sort of thing.