tsm

Congratulations on the launch! It's a nice way to blow off some steam on a pomodoro break or while mulling over a bug

I have no idea how they actually work, but if I were asked to design one:

• Choose some reasonable number of questions of the form "Is it ___"?. Let's say 256

• Come up with a list of objects, and for each one give it a 256-long bitvector encoding its answers to the questions

• Maintain a set (implemented as another bitvector) of the potential items. Figure out which question would divide the set in two most closely; ask that question.

I am the opposite of a hardware hacker or systems programmer, but it seems like this is algorithmically straightforward to implement with bit-twiddling.

It's a US-specific system for alerting people to missing children. It's named after Amber Hagerman⁰, a 9-year-old who was abducted and murdered in the '90s. On smartphones they can appear as (very loud) notifications with details about the missing child, potential abductors, vehicle, etc. You'll also see the same info on electronic message boards along the motorway.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amber_alert#Namesake

In addition to the difficulties described by Tokkemon, recorders have much less control over volume than transverse flutes do.

I moved countries last year and used the new phone number as an opportunity to get a banana phone. It doesn't have Signal, its Whatsapp doesn't support being connected to the webapp, its T9 implementation is absolutely horrific, and its 4G reception was very poor. After six months the 4G stopped working altogether and I reluctantly moved to a cheap Android phone by Motorola.

I wanted to be a believer, but it just…wasn't it for me.

I haven't seen it happen with novels (yet), but I was a little outraged to buy a weekly planner that featured mindfulness exercises and such to focus on each week…and find it laden with advertisements for the author's website, companion videos, etc.

I have no interest in using the internet for that; I bought a dead tree specifically to avoid my computer for a minute.

Do you have examples of the dev experience degrading? My experiences is that the tools and libraries only continue to mature (as does the Clojure language itself).

Do you just mean that things are improving less quickly than they are for, e.g., Typescript?

Recently discussed (different link): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32994480

My point is that everyone saying "Celsius is so easy, look at how logical it is!" are missing the point that you still have to memorize a bunch of temperatures. Nobody in their right mind is going to say "Well, it's 20% of the way between water freezing and boiling, so I'll wear long sleeves but no jacket today".

My point is that everyone saying "Celsius is so easy, look at how logical it is!" are missing the point that you still have to memorize a bunch of temperatures. Nobody in their right mind is going to say "Well, it's 20% of the way between water freezing and boiling, so I'll wear long sleeves but no jacket today".

I moved from a Fahrenheit country to a Celsius country, and let me tell you that knowing 0° was freezing and 100° was boiling did not help me decided whether I should put on a jacket when it's 17° outside.

(I now know how to interpret Celsius, but it involved memorising certain fixed points. The "30 is hot, 20 is nice, 10 is cold, 0 is ice" rhyme is a good one.)

I used letter-sized paper when I was a kid in Honduras, and if memory serves a number of people use US units.

My fan site for the TI-86 graphing calculator (first draft done as part of 5th grade Computer Class, revised to get extra credit in my algebra class a few years later) used it! I had no idea what Javascript even was, but I knew how to view source and knew that if I pasted in all the magic between <script> tags from my computer teacher's website I'd get the cursor effect. He (or the original dev…) had very well-annotated code that included a bunch of variables you could customize.

I would've said "it's an inherent problem, not just bad luck this time".

Counterpoint: pre-Covid I had an in-office job, and I would specifically request a WFH day if I had an especially meaty problem to write. The office was full of distractions, whereas at home I could focus in on writing code without background noise. Several of my coworkers followed the same pattern.

The two best:

1) Working (professionally) on a project that happens to be open source: https://github.com/metabase/metabase/

2) Coming to a Rails project mostly written by a very senior 7-person team. There was still a fair amount of jank (mostly from seed-round assumptions that weren't holding up when I joined after the Series A) but it still followed The Rails Way and nothing was too gross. It also helped that everyone important was still at the company and available for questions.

PS on (2): Seven of those original eight dev are now gone, including me; the median years of experience has gone from 8-10 to 0-3; the team size is at least 40 and I think more; and my understanding from friends still at the company is that the codebase is in general a flaming mess.

I worked in IT support as an undergrad ten years ago and am now going to grad school and using eduroam. It is such a night-and-day difference; I'm so incredibly pleased that there was enough international and inter-institutional cooperation to make it work.

I especially like it when I open up my laptop at a new coffee shop and discover it's already connected to eduroam—in the city I live in (Edinburgh) there are enough university buildings scattered around that a surprising percentage of the city center is covered. The National Library also uses eduroam.

Similar issue with Scots, which has many variant orthographies but is frequently written in mostly-English anyway.

Anecdotally, it's specialized. In the past five years I've put a tremendous amount of effort into improvising variations for 18th-century Scottish music (…don't ask) and have noticed that things slow down and from my point of view I have all the time in the world to think about what I've played and what should come next. But for the audience I'm zipping along at 480 eighth notes per minute.

Meanwhile, I'm absolutely useless at anything involving sports or a fast reaction time.

I'm reminded of the section of Peak (Anders Ericsson) where chess grandmasters were excellent at remembering board positions from real games and completely average at remembering impossible board positions.

An overwhelming number of programming-related things "pollute our natural language namespace". Off the top of my head:

Ruby, Python, Java, Rails, React, Go, Rust, Elm, Dart, C, C#, Node, Next, Nest, Kafka, LaTeX, bash, fish, cat, Android, Apple, Windows…

I'd be happy to search for this with "bubble tea framework" or "bubble tea tui" or similar and it doesn't bother me.

I had this exact same experience working as a dev for a property insurance startup

> The patient was now comfortable, felt well and we retired to our seats to recover. Eight hours later I was again summoned by the stewardess to see the patient, who had developed more chest pain and dyspnoea.

> I found her sitting on the toilet with the underwater seal drain on a high shelf. All the water and air had syphoned out of the bottle into the chest. The crisis resolved when I placed the underwater seal drain on the floor—draining the water back from the chest to the bottle. The air bubbled out of her chest when she coughed. After a few minutes she was almost back to normal, but exhaustion precluded the completion of a third full medical report.

Tweet with no image from @Xabber_XMPP:

Thanks @Wise for standing up to Putin and closing our business account because of the 'wrong' passport of the founder

Apparently, being blocked in Russia for refusing to comply with state surveillance laws and being detained at anti-Putin rallies is not enough punishment for us

Is this related to DHH's blogpost about Railsconf?

An Elegant Puzzle by Will Larson: https://press.stripe.com/an-elegant-puzzle

I've been in similar situations (for much less well-known books, granted) and took the approach of writing a personal and praise-filled email with my list of errata as an attachment. It makes reading the errata a little more opt-in.

I've worked on Rails, Node, and Clojure teams where Docker was optional and was always glad I avoided it. There has never been something important in my dev environment[1] that couldn't be responsibly managed by rbenv and bundler (or their equivalents for other languages).

[1] The one exception is SQL DBs and redis, but I have always been fine using brew, linuxbrew, or apt for them.

I was on the free plan (which I'd worked up to 10.5GB of storage through various incentive programs they ran) and specifically objected to

1. Limiting me to three clients at once. (Work computer, personal computer (Linux), personal computer (Windows), phone—oops!

2. Bombarding me with "your storage is almost full!" notifications either by email or when I visited dropbox.com to, e.g., get a share link for someone. Usually I had over a gigabyte of storage left. The webapp was at times unusable due to the volume of notifications.

3. Prohibiting me from keeping offline copies of entire directories on my phone.

Now I'm spending $20/month on a VPS running Nextcloud and am much happier.

Dropbox is the only SaaS I have ever used that fucked up its redesign badly enough to make me—a previously-thrilled customer—jump ship to a technically-inferior and more-expensive product. I don't regret it whatsoever.

I just moved from Chicago to Edinburgh, and have about ten years of experience doing full-stack webdev at various startups. I've looked into a few UK jobs and they all seem to pay about a third or at best half what I was making at my previous job with a SV startup.

At some point my hand will be forced if I need a visa sponsorship, but for now it's a pretty tough sell.