mFixman

To me, the greatest proof of the "lack of love" Google is putting into Maps is seen when I zoom in the city I live in and I get a bunch of hotels.

Adding a "if user lives in $city then he probably won't stay in a hotel in $city" would have a positive impact in all Google Maps users, but the measurable impact is likely too small to make a difference in a Staff Engineer's Perf so it's deprioritised under another new set of check-in notifications.

A lot of product companies are closing user forums from the early 2010s.

My guess is that there's some legal issue involved. Maybe the lawyers were convinced that somebody posting illegal or confidential info on an unmoderated forum is a big risk, and deleting the entire things is cheaper than paying some moderators.

Why doesn't English accept tones as the core of its script? :)

The Google Code Jam and other programming competitions motivated me and an entire generation to focus on programming as a fun pursuit and a healthy side of competition. While I'm very sad that it's gone, I'm very thankful to the Code Jam team for these 20 years of work put into competitions and in inspiring me into coding for fun.

If anybody here had any teenage students who are mildly interested in programming, I'd really recommend getting them into CodeForces or any of the few remaining competitions. They are more accessible than coding olympiads like IOI, and it's the perfect way to develop a programming muscle while being in contact with a community of peers.

It's a pity that nobody was able to reproduce the challenge phases of TopCoder SRMs.

Coding problems while taking of edge-cases for later was really fun.

Just like sport coding competitions are fun :-)

LeetCode problems are much simpler than the general coding contest, and they are only used as a basic competency tests.

It's like asking for the difference between an Olympic race and a blue-collar job requiring you to be fit enough to run a mile.

I'm sure somebody posted this exact same comment in an early 1990s BBS about the idea of having a computer in every home connected to the internet.

I would first wait until ChatGPT causes the collapse of society and only then start thinking about how to solve it.

You can use BetterTouchTool and configure it to tile an arbitrary amount of windows. As a bonus those windows don't have to be in full-screen mode, so you can cmd-tab quickly.

I agree that the windowing system of MacOS is an unusable mess.

It also has the best cycling infrastructure in Greater London.

One of the big problems London has is that each borough decides how much to invest in cycling infrastructure, and a commute is only as good as its worst section. My commute from northern Camden to the City is a pleasure, a commute from west London through Kensington will be more of a pain.

IMO TfL should force the creation of good grade-separate cycle lanes in all of the major streets in London, just like they force standardised bus stops. Currently one single borough is screwing over a quarter of the city.

That sounds like hell. People need sunlight to live.

The solution is not cubicles, or even closed offices. Just open offices with ~1/3 of the regular density of people per square metre would be good. It also gets you the promised "seamless collaboration" of open offices.

Same. I find it hard to read long and complicated articles from a screen, and I would pay a lot for a weekly subscription to dead-tree magazine Quanta.

Right now I print articles I'm interested in, which is far from the most efficient solution.

I have an account with First Republic. Should I panic and desperately try to withdraw all my money?

My experience is very different than yours.

I think you are getting scammed: airport SIMs are way more expensive than actual SIMs you get in town and eSIM you get on an app like Airalo. International providers are obsolete in the age of the eSIM, since you can get a local provider at the click of a button.

eSIMs are still a bit more expensive than physical SIMs you buy in a phone shop far from any airport... but that expense is worth having internet from the second you land.

My only disappointment with this is how hard it is to migrate, but eSIMs work perfectly for travelling.

Last week I saw an elderly driver going over the speed limit and the wrong way on a major street in London because there was a bit of traffic on the lane going his direction. Unlike your crazy e-bike kid, he could easily have killed somebody who was travelling normally.

Safety starts with car drivers.

While I agree that Hacker News always hated technology, this article in particular looks like like self-parody.

There are 0 mentions about language learning or course quality in a blog post about how to grow a language learning app. Instead, the discussion turns on the way you give gems to users, late-night notifications, and the maximum amount of emails you can send per day before people start unsubscribing.

I get that this is a blog post about growth, but it says nothing about the product and you could :s/Duolingo/Candy Crush/ and the text would be equally valid. This looks like a fake blog post from Hooli in Silicon Valley.

IIRC multiple entry points were common in Dijkstra's times.

Break, continue, and early returns always return to the end of the block, unlike goto in the '70s. Exceptions are more complicated, and the cause of a lot of inunderstandable programs.

There's PyTorch, which even Google seems to prefer over TensorFlow.

Facebook is incapable of building their own Roblox: even their ultra-sanitised always-smiling Horizon Worlds gets piled on by the media with dramatic accusations of VR bullying and VR harassment.

Imagine the kind of pearl clutching you would find in The Guardian if Zuck built something closer to VR Chat or Roblox.

There are, but most tech employers made working in the office worse and worse to the point where it's now both unpleasant and unproductive.

There's a nice middle point that Google used in 2012 with one office per ~10 person team team.

The offices are big enough to not be _too_ expensive, and small enough to enhance collaboration and concentration.

That would make sense if closed offices became common again.

It's impossible to collaborate in an open office. It's hard to talk to my team if that requires yelling louder than the other 200 people in the floor.

Don't forget not being able to have meetings due to a lack of free meeting rooms, not being able to communicate so you don't bother your coworkers in an open office, and not being able to concentrate because some coworker is talking!

My company does hybrid work, so it has fewer desks than employees. If you don't arrive early enough on event days you'll spend your day working on a sofa with your laptop on your legs. How productive!

It's the same in the UK, but that still doesn't do what I want: you can only filter by base price, so you'll get some hilariously overpriced apartments even if you search at a low price.

It's sad that long-distance trains are moving to an aeroplane-like food service.

Standing up and walking several carriages to the bar buy an overpriced might be less efficient than than having it delivered to your seat, but it feels so much better.

It's still a pretty awful tool, and anybody who wondered what the 109 means in `subtotal(109, A:A)` thinks the same.

Excel is so successful that competitors need to copy its bad parts.

Everybody seems up in arms about this situation, but I find the whole thing hilarious.

After half a decade of AI hype without many uses in the wild, we finally live at a point in history where "AI-generated Jerry Seinfeld makes transphobic joke, gets cancelled" is not an Onion headline.

Not everyone needs to be a writer or a mathematician, but children still should learn the basics of literature and math to improve generic reasoning skills that can be transferred to the rest of their life.

Programming is a skill just like any other, and learning it helps in everything.

Were people also up in arms for the Blockbuster jobs that Netflix destroyed?

Yeah the mid-'80s sucked in the US, but do you have any modern examples of decline? :-)