tsm

I just started using Goatcounter for a noncommercial site (music history research blog) and I'm happy with it. All I wanted was a glorified hit counter.

It doesn't have the goal conversion metrics and other advanced features of GA, so obviously not a drop-in replacement for all use cases.

https://www.goatcounter.com/

Counterpoint: I left a company where I was a Senior Software Engineer and among the most experienced devs of the ~25 they had and joined a company where I was clearly the least experienced dev of the ~10 they had. The CEO of the new company told me that Senior wasn't a realistic title for me in comparison to everyone else and I'd be hired as a Software Engineer—but that I should feel free to use "senior" on my résumé if I thought it'd be helpful.

I thought that was incredibly reasonable. For what it's worth, I do not use "senior" on my résumé and if I'm ever asked why I got downgraded after multiple senior positions I'll happily tell this story.

Hot-swappable batteries may be less relevant, but easily-user-replaceable batteries are sorely missed. I still do some work on a T60 (from 2006, I think) whose battery was obviously toast. It took $15 on eBay and ten seconds to pop the old one out and get a brand new one in. Meanwhile my wife's MBP's battery is also about dead and figuring out how to replace it is just enough effort that we haven't made it happen yet.

While I'm here: other features I miss include the Thinklight, literally everything about the keyboard (layout, not being chiclet, key depth), dedicated trackpad buttons, the lid latch, …

I used OS X from 2013-2020 when my at-the-time companies gave me a top-end MBP and the very strong encouragement to use OS X. It was fine. But my most recent gig had a lot of Linux users anyway, so I returned to Linux, got a crappy System76 ultrabook, have Debian and StumpWM running on it, and couldn't be happier. I plan to use this laptop and not do much more than a `sudo apt-get dist-upgrade` until the 2030s. Maybe I'll replace the battery too.

> Google has decided to finally pull the rug out from under those of us who signed up for GSuite when it was free…and will start charging later this year.

Do you have a citation for this? I heard last year they were going to start charging for new accounts, but that since I set it up on my domain in 2008 I was grandfathered into the free plan indefinitely.

I am also a native English speaker (American; living in the UK) and the GP's use of "He's" seemed absolutely fine to me.

Not trying to discount your opinion, just adding another data point.

Visiting my parents is great!

It's just that in the 20 minutes I sometimes have to kill on their computer I went from playing commercial games from my childhood to good solitaire to…bad solitaire. So much for nostalgia.

On every Windows computer I ever had, from 3 to XP, none of whose hardware was great even by the standards of the day, Solitaire opened instantly and was maximally responsive and crisply animated. They changed things in Vista, I think, which slowed it down by was basically fine. But the new one ("Microsoft Solitaire Collection") takes forever to open, requires multiple clicks to get a game going, lags, has ads, and is such a dumpster fire that one of the few joys I had in using my parents' computer when visiting them is now gone.

It's not about clock time, it's about reducing the latency (and friction) between thinking about code and having it written.

I might think for a couple minutes and then come up with ten lines of code, and once they're in my head I want them in my editor now before I lose track of them.

Some of my friends sign emails/letters to me with YMHOS. But we all do research on the 18th century, which…ah…is an important factor.

&c was widely (exclusively?) used in the 18th century. I happen to have been looking at this newspaper ad most recently: https://i.imgur.com/ALe5XeT.jpg

The inference is that the second book (Airs &c &c) will also be of Airs, Minuets, Gavotts, and Reels (or something similar).

Also, 18th-century letters routinely end with some snowclone of "your most humble and obedient servant", with many writers eliding some or all of it with &c since it was understood.

Usually there are a few life events to anchor it to (school graduation, marriage, child birth, moving, changing jobs, etc.)

I just moved to the New Town from Chicago and the difference in walkability and general "convenient access to convenient things in the city" is startling. I highly recommend it!

> Amazon has no reason to crack down on fake reviews because they don't effect their bottom line either way.

For various things (certain electronics/peripherals, certain tools) I deliberately avoid Amazon because I want something I can trust and don't have energy to decide which of the fifteen similar-looking things on Amazon is well-made and which is a fake or just crap.

Clojure has an optional type system: https://github.com/clojure/core.typed

(note that Lisp is flexible enough that a type system can be written as a library)

There's also this for run-time checking (i.e., you won't get any help at compile-time, but functions called with bad values will fail in very clear ways): https://github.com/plumatic/schema

Evergreen is the company name, Ever Given (which does appear on the ship in much smaller letters) is the ship's name.

Interesting that he teaches putting fingers on the top row, not the home row.

I'd also never heard that the ring finger, "anatomically considered, is different from the others" and that pianists had elective surgery ("double tenotomy") "to free the finger from the impediment to action". Anyone know more about that?

They've been booted from AWS, which is a significant infrastructure problem.

I had the same issue and have been quite happy using an old Android phone connected to a dummy Google account with no extra apps.

It's astounding to me that nobody is making modern 4:3 screens. I made my Thinkpad T60 last far longer than it should've just because I didn't want to give up the aspect ratio.

Edit: I was wrong. 0123 is octal, not decimal

[Incorrect original post: 0123 evaluates to the integer value 123]

> I write for about three hours in the morning—from about 9:30 till 12:30—and I do another hour’s work between 6 and 7 in the evening. […] I never correct anything and I never go back to what I have written, except to the foot of the last page to see where I have got to. If you once look back, you are lost.

Another example of creators using a schedule to force creativity (not waiting "for the mood to strike") and creating without worrying about quality.

If you've been procrastinating writing that novel or playing that guitar or whatever, the best way to deal with it is to put half an hour on your calendar to just do it.

You can google for more information, but British boys' schools (especially in the 20th century) are notorious for bullying and sexual abuse.

Especially in the smartphone era, I actively enjoy having a couple hours to kill in an airport. I make sure that I have a range of activities to do depending on energy level (writing about my research / hacking on something / reading nonfiction / reading a "brainless" book / surfing through HN or reddit), have pre-meditated that it's okay to pay airport prices on a fancy coffee drink or a beer or whatever, have pre-meditated that I should have no expectations about productivity, and then just hunker down in a chair with my computer/phone/book and a drink and chill out. It feels very removed from the pressures of everyday life, which I like—I wouldn't be able to chill half as well if I were at home and felt like I was supposed to be doing something more important.

On an airplane you lose the internet, but the same general strategy works for me. Re. sleeping, it works for me to sleep when I'm able to and say "well if you can't sleep right now, read your book. Oh, you're too tired to read your book? Maybe it's time to sleep"

I think I'm a little fired up about the Play Music -> YT Music migration, recent Google Photo storage restrictions, etc. What I see in TFA is another case of Google limiting choice in a user-hostile way. I happen to use Firefox and will be unaffected by the above, but Firefox is the only non-Webkit-based browser of any consequence. I'm incensed on behalf of people who use Epiphany or Brave or Konqueror or anything like that.

> Even if WebKit is not blocked, we can be confident January 4 will be a sad day for browser diversity

This is true, I hate that this is true, and I hate that there's very little to be done about it.

I use Firefox for ideological reasons, and last week got off my ass and ensured all my documents (from Dropbox), music (from Google Music / now the inferior YT Music) and photos (from Google Photos) were stored in a way I could control. My plan going forward is to use an old laptop running Syncthing as my primary source of truth for files. Email is next (but more complicated since I don't want to self-host it).

It helps me personally to take Stallmanesque approaches to managing my digital life. And if Google continues to get more and more restrictive I have the technical acumen to find or make alternatives—or figure out how to do without. But I'm worried about the growing number of non-technical users who are increasingly dependent on technology and—startlingly—increasingly less technical. People who only use Google Docs on their phone and a laptop have no reason to understand that documents correspond to files on disk that can be edited by programs running locally.

It more and more seems like the future is tech oligopoly with more and more subscription fees. What else could happen once a generation has been trained to only use Approved Tools running on Approved Servers?

Do you daily-drive Debian?

Does anyone know of a good open source, self-hosted alternative?

On the google side, "wake me up at 7" results in a 7AM alarm 95% of the time and a 7 PM alarm the other 5%. Just frequent enough to screw you over…

I learned Common Lisp in high school and took a course called "Discrete Math and Functional Programming"[0] my freshman year of college (the prof wrote the textbook). To me it felt like a math course (covering predicate logic, sets, graphs, and eventually the lambda calculus. It was also the first time I had to write proofs outside of geometry class), but all of the teaching was paired with examples in ML. For example, half the homework one day would be writing proofs about powersets, and the other half would be writing ML functions to create and manipulate powersets.

It was a really neat idea, and it felt like ML got out of the way and just let me program without having painful syntax or semantics. That said, my biggest ML programs would be five functions spanning ~30 lines loaded into an smlnj interpreter. I never got to deal with functors and modules and who knows what else, and am sorry that I don't know how to "program in the large" in ML. I'm now a professional Clojure dev and would love to see how ML does things.

I own a copy of ML for the Working Programmer (which I see @eatonphil is panning below) and the ML compiler book by Appel, neither of which I've read. Maybe I'll make the time one of these months…it'd be nice to have a Motivating Project though.

0: https://cs.wheaton.edu/~tvandrun/dmfp/