pards

Just like the Ethereum fork in 2016 [0]. Before then, the battle cries of the crypto advocates were:

  - Blockchains are immutable! 
  - The code is the law!

...until someone exploited a code defect and took the founders' money, then they re-write history and ignored the hypocrisy.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO

pencils of color :)

other notables include the loo, the can, the john, and of course the dunny

> Lounge access is worth it alone

Airport food & coffee is expensive and often not very good. At least with lounge access, I get that subpar food & coffee for free plus somewhere to sit. With a family, that can save a significant chunk of money off the cost of a holiday.

> Note: Makefiles must be indented using TABs and not spaces or make will fail.

Oh no. I have never worked with Makefiles but I bet that causes pain and suffering.

I've lost so many hours to missing/extraneous spaces in YAML files that my team recently agreed to get rid of YAML from our Spring Boot codebase.

I have several responses depending on how ornery I'm feeling

    1. Respond with, "Hello. How can I help?", or
    2. Wait until 5:30pm then respond, "Hello" and close my laptop for the day

> It feels to me like “do the things you like” is a luxury of someone who isn’t anxious about paying all their bills.

I encourage my kids to keep their hobbies as pastimes, not as income sources. As soon as you try to make a living from your hobby or passion, it sucks the joy out of it.

Make money from your job; derive joy from your hobby. Separation of church and state.

> The threat actor had accessed the company’s GitHub account and accessed "some software artifacts as well as some personal information."

LexisNexis offers software to perform credit checks and sanctions screening so access to their source code is arguably more valuable than any personal data - it could be used to sidestep the regulatory steps in the financial system and facilitate fraud, money laundering etc.

> "We are looking into how this made it into print as we speak"

I hope there's a blameless post-mortem conducted and published.

At this point, I no longer trust anything I read online.

Is it time to mandate labelling the source(s) of content like food nutritional labels?

> Note: No generative AI was used to create this content. This page is only intended for human consumption and is NOT allowed to be used for machine training including but not limited to LLMs. (why?)

I love this. I wonder if it is effective, or if there's any legal recourse should the LLMs ignore it.

> sometimes you [novice] just need to be able to show them [expert] what you’re doing without any specific question in mind

> the vast majority of learning comes from a novice watching how the expert plies their skills, and not from direct questions and answers

This succinctly describes why pair programming can be valuable when used judiciously.

I've seen large institutions hold long, boring "knowledge transfer" sessions where the expert explains the codebase to a group of novices but these are largely ineffective without practical experience.

Pair programming for a few weeks during the transition period (novice drives, expert advises) can be a more effective method to bring a novice up to speed. It works in remote environments, too, but does require synchronous time.

> The other massive improvement has been moving most conversations to text or recorded calls.

Written communications skills are a superpower in a remote working environment. Unfortunately, very few people have it.

Lack of typing skills, ESL, Gen-Z slang, and internal acronyms makes for the perfect storm.

In Toronto, a crowdfunded shuttle service [0] was started to solve this exact problem - lots of people in an area underserved by public transit going to the similar locations at similar times of day.

The City shut it down.

[0]: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/liberty-village-shutt...

Very cool site, but...

It looks like each drag-n-drop changes the history. I had to click the back button about 10 times to get back to HN.

X-10 devices [0] that do this have been around for a long time. I've even seen elaborate setups that can be controlled via a landline.

[0]: https://thex10shop.com/products/x10-powerhouse-th2807-thermo...

> code output is rarely the reason why projects that I worked on are delayed

This is very true at large enterprises. The pre-coding tasks [0] and the post-coding tasks [1] account for the majority of elapsed time that it takes for a feature to go from inception to production.

The theory of constraints says that optimizations made to a step that's not the bottleneck will only make the actual bottleneck worse.

AI is no match for a well-established bureaucracy.

[0]: architecture reviews, requirements gathering, story-writing

[1]: infrastructure, multiple phases of testing, ops docs, sign-offs

uBlock Origin is blocking the call to "GET https://cloud.umami.is/script.js" so the end screen is blank. This makes it look and feel buggy.

Genetic selection is available in Canada for parents that carry detrimental genes. They can either screen the embryo prior to implantation during IVF, or do early stage testing of naturally-conceived embryos.

Exactly which diseases can be selected for is regulated.

Source: My wife and I participated.

I no longer assume that digital natives understand how technology actually works under the hood. They teach me about the latest social media trends, I teach them about computer hardware, networking, and terminology.

    My kids: Dad, the internet's down.
    Me: The internet's fine. You're just not connected to it.

And yes, my home office has an ethernet hardline because it's faster and more reliable.

The title refers to the January 6, 2012 episode, beginning about halfway through the article:

> “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory” is mesmerizing and flawlessly produced. It became the most-downloaded episode of This American Life. There was only one problem. In almost every salient detail, the story was a fabrication.

On March 16, 2012, This American Life, aired the “Retraction” covering Rob Schmitz’s deconstruction of Daisey’s piece (he uncovered at least thirteen lies).

“Immediately after that we started working with professional fact-checkers,” said Glass.

Sounds like the underpants gnomes [0]

    * Phase 1: Collect underpants
    * Phase 2: ?
    * Phase 3: Profits

0: https://youtu.be/WpnM37A4P_8?feature=shared&t=119

> "nothing at FB is someone else's problem"

I love this credo. Sadly, large enterprises seem to operate on the exact opposite model of "everything at XYZ corp is someone else's problem".

There's literally no way to fix our own problems. Everything beyond the application code is managed by an external team with their own priorities, and the best we can hope for is readonly access to their repos.

For a variety of reasons

  - Old on-prem mainframes
  - Old mainframes hosted by vendors
  - Network latency (cloud <--> on-prem, cloud <--> vendor)
  - Required sequence of calls (auth -> account list -> account balances)

I'm not defending it. Many of these systems should be updated but the banks are notoriously slow to act and risk-averse.

> Yet it takes me 30 seconds to log into my bank

This has little to do with bloat. There's a complex array of backend systems involved in logging you in to your bank: Authentication, authorization, customer system, separate account systems for each account type (debit, credit, loans, investments), etc. The bank's login process has to wait for all of them to respond and collate the data before returning control to the UI.

Rest assured, online banking teams spend a lot of time trying to optimize login performance but they're limited by the slowest of the downstream systems. There's a lot of data on that "account summary" page you see after logging in.

The login process performance could be improved by landing on a simple "welcome" page but the majority of people want to see all of their account balances immediately upon login.

Source: I have worked on several online bank websites and mobile apps.

He's rapidly trending into dictator territory

> they only do what’s strictly required to avoid a performance improvement plan. No one goes above and beyond anymore; no one takes initiative to improve things. Why? Because it doesn’t matter.

I see this at large Canadian financial institutions, too, but for the opposite reasons - employees recognize that it's really difficult to fire people based on performance. It's so hard, in fact, that it's easier to talk them up and get them hired internally by another team and make it someone else's problem.

> it seemed that we had agreed to the STARLINK enrollment when we purchased it.

Related to the GM ban https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42734260

This made my day. Thank you.

> many studies of nutritional epidemiology that try to link dietary exposures to disease outcomes are founded on really dodgy data

I wonder if the data are always skewed in a particular direction. For example, do people typically underreport junk food and overreport salads? Or do they omit entire meals? Or snacks?