sedev

The news is wrong. Especially about the CHAZ. Source: live here.

Concurrence: the ability of the code to be self-documenting ends at the borders of the code itself. Factors outside of the code that impose requirements on the code must be documented more conventionally. The "sleep 10 seconds to (hopefully) ensure that a file has finished downloading" anecdote from upthread is a great example.

What immediately comes to mind for me is the comparison to third-party Twitter clients mentioned here: https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/texas-tweetbot-de...

> Amir Shevat, Twitter’s former head of product for the developer platform, who

> lives in Round Rock, was responsible for ensuring that the tools Twitter

> provided independent software developers using the platform met their needs.

> He said about 17 percent of engagement on Twitter, historically, was through

> third-party apps, which played a vital role in defining Twitter’s identity.

That's 17% of _engagement._ I strongly expect that with both Twitter and Reddit there's a sort of double Pareto distribution going on: the majority of _users_ go through the first-party site/tools/clients, but the majority of _valuable_ users go through the third-party site/tools/clients. The users who are invested enough in the platform to have strong opinions about how things should be done and who use the platform enough that they seek out tools that actively meet their needs rather than just taking the default tools, are also users who are worth, at the very least, _placating_ because those are also the users most able to cause problems if the platform stabs them in the face the way Reddit and Twitter have done.

Unfortunately this heuristic, while often good, can sometimes lead you wildly astray — for examples see the article on Beyoncé and the article about the plant _Zea mays._ Good articles, but you want a hazmat suit for the talk pages.

The link rot problem is real but Wikipedia editors have _diligently_ institutionalized automated use of the Internet Archive and other snapshotting sites (but the IA is the best one & deserves donation support). So compared to the average among other sites, Wikipedia has much less of a link rot problem.

There's also the niche use case of vertically arranged English letters — you see this once in a while on signage, but my favorite example is from _Street Fighter 3,_ where the character DeeJay has pants with "MAXIMUM" written down the leg, which means that you can flip the sprite (i.e. to have the character face left or right) and the word stays intact.

Even if you're right — I don't think you are, but even if you are — you're derailing your own point to indulge in petty sniping targeted at another profession. The aside makes the piece weaker because it detracts from the focus and makes you sound like a jerk. If I were your editor, I'd have struck out the entire aside about social scientists and compressed it to "as is often the case, the naïve method has problems, so what banks do instead is…"

There's a Blood Knife article https://bloodknife.com/inadequacy-of-inspirational-scifi/ critiquing Stephenson that makes an interesting companion read to this. I have enjoyed Stephenson's novels tremendously, but when OP says they're not "preachy," that is rather a whopper — particularly thinking of _Cryptonomicon,_ but _Termination Shock_ also digresses into it.

Short version: no. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Image_use_policy#Fai...

This would be a great time to reread the classic "Better Than Free" essay. https://kk.org/thetechnium/better-than-fre/ By my count, the average OnlyFans account absolutely nails 5 out of the 8 "generative" qualities that Kelly identifies.

Digging down a couple layers of links from this, the underlying paper, "Partial State in Dataflow-Based Materialized Views" https://jon.thesquareplanet.com/papers/phd-thesis.pdf is pretty intriguing. It sounds like a potential free lunch in specific performance areas, which means it also sounds too good to be true, but if it turns out to be a metaphorical 90%-off lunch that's still very promising.

Please clarify as to whether you are speaking sarcastically or earnestly in this post.

Title should probably have a [2013] marker.

"Laches" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laches_(equity) is probably a relevant concept here. In a scenario like the one you're describing, the delay is likely to be taken into account, but it's unlikely to be the whole of the argument.

One of the better things Apple does with their position as a middleman is give customers more control over their relationship with app creators of all kinds. If the customer is unhappy about their experience, iOS gives them what amounts to a one-click "get off my phone and get out of my wallet" button. Compare this to the notorious New York Times cancellation rigamarole where cancelling a subscription required a phone call to a person whose job was to talk you out of cancelling. This level of autonomy is clearly valuable to customers: behold the widespread dissatisfaction about subscriptions vs. one-time purchases. People don't like the experience of being strongarmed into a business relationship any more than they like it with interpersonal relationships, and rightly so. However, because Apple exerted the degree of control that it did over what shape a customer relationship mediated by their app store could look like, it hasn't been clear exactly _how_ valuable that control is to consumers.

Once app creators have options for customer relationships other than Apple's app store, I expect that we'll find out exactly how valuable that autonomy is to customers, and I'm personally fascinated about what the answer might be.

The archive has it: https://archive.is/BBAsb

That's also available with emacs, though, it has its own extension ecosystem that's about as easy to access as VSCode's.

From a recent HN discussion, I learned that emacs has had a sampling profiler built in — not on MELPA or something, first-party! — since about 2013. How many widely-used applications these days contain a facility for asking "why is the command I just issued executing slowly?" and for _doing something about it?_ As far as I'm concerned, that's now table stakes for a programming environment: you should be able to not just run a profiler on whatever program you're using the editor to interact with, but to do robust profiling on your editor itself.

Now that you mention it, I _did_ fail to explain why I brought up Telegram. My bad, thank you for calling me on that. I mentioned Telegram particularly because in my social circles, Telegram is number one by a long shot in terms of "people just want to be where their friends are and not feel left out." I should have actually said that, rather than jumping to the next part of the idea.

(I am not here to defend Telegram's portrayal of itself as a secure messaging service — Telegram is grotesquely bad on that axis)

The claim I'm making is "they are not, in fact, 'just another Parler.'" You are pointing out many correct things about their potential liability and problems with holding that data! However, those things are, at most, a subset of the problems with Parler and at worst disjoint problems from Parler's problems. I stand by the argument of "a static, private data archive is not the same as a live, public web service." I did not make the argument of "there are no problems with the static, private data archive."

Strongly agree with this. However, I also believe that there is no existing service that does both well.

Using Telegram is a rational decision if you want a service that's good at fun conversations. Signal's value proposition is _secure conversations_ and it does that much better than other services. "Fun" is not part of Signal's value proposition. More people want/need fun conversations than need secure ones. Regardless of what people "should" want, Telegram serves people's mundane everyday needs materially better than Signal does. "It's fun and the people I care about talking to already use it" is a compelling value proposition, not a frivolous one, given people's everyday needs.

The more someone cares about security and is willing to trade away other good things for security, the better a platform Signal is — but remember, this also flows the other way.

No, they're not. Holding a static, private archive is not the same thing as hosting a live, public site.

Friend, the amount of work that the modal model does is _far_ more than that. Unless you mean the amount of work OF is doing?

Ah, I see it's time to deploy https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt again. I'm always sad that that document has aged so well.

Unicode normalization/equivalence is half of what you want and UCAPI is probably the other half.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_equivalence https://www.casaba.com/products/UCAPI/

I'm glad whenever this article shows up — it's so much more _pragmatic_ than a lot of things in its genre. What it talks about is actionable, and makes communities better. Forcefully ejecting Nazis, fascists, Gamergaters, and their fellow-travellers from our communities, is both the morally correct thing to do and deeply practical.

• akd is the AuthKit daemon, which among other things authenticates you to the App Store and to iCloud.

• captiveagent detects when you're on a captive-portal network, it does this by checking for known-content domains apple controls

• helpd is the daemon that connects to Apple's online help docs

• locationd powers location services

And so on. These are all easy to google. Come _on._ >:[

This has also been my experience of RST: it adds a huge headache of complexity. I've also found its documentation and tooling to be very poor. Tastes may vary, but my experience was that almost every feature ended up with an obtuse name that needed a tremendous amount of searching for, the docs had inexplicable & glaring lacunae, and that the error messages that the tools omitted were infuriatingly unhelpful. Writing RST was an exercise in pain for my team. For the problem domain it was built for, Markdown works, works well, and works with few enough moving parts that you can actually figure out where your errors are, should you drop any in. This is very much not true of RST: the tools hate you with a seething, brooding hatred that will make you waste an hour trying to track down the one line in file X that's making the compiler emit a cryptic error about file Y. RST has some good ideas, but as far as I can tell, no-one involved with it takes usability seriously at all, which in turn means that they produce software artifacts that express a shrieking, gleefully sadistic hatred for the user.

That "[employers] want few things more in life than for their engineers to remain really, really smart at developing distributed databases and really, really stupid at salary negotiation" is one of the most valuable career-enhancing lessons a developer could possibly learn. I want to etch it into CS101 classes. Learning it late is better than learning it never, though. Well put, Patrick.