Learning that some folks can produce so much value with crappy code.
I've seen entire teams burn so much money by overcomplicating projects. Bikesheding about how to implement DDD, Hexagonal Architecture, design patterns, complex queues that would maybe one day be required if the company scaled 1000x, unnecessary eventual consistency that required so much machinery and man hours to keep data integrity under control. Some of these projects were so late in their deadlines that had to be cancelled.
And then I've seen one man projects copy pasting spaghetti code around like there's no tomorrow that had a working system within 1/10th of the budget.
Now I admire those who can just produce value without worrying too much about what's under the hood. Very important mindset for most startups. And a very humbling realization.
In 1993 I was interviewed for an operating job in a power plant for a major airline, assigned to their data center. At my current job, I was working in a high rise office building with sixty-six floors.
The operating system computer was a JC8520, which was running a version of MS-DOS. All commands had to be typed in correctly or nothing would happen. While operating the plant, several commands had to be entered every shift, since the owners didn't purchase a very automated package.
In the interview for the data center job, I was asked if I had any experience with Windows. I didn't understand the question because I wasn't aware they were talking about a computer operating system! So, I replied at the office building I worked in there were outside contractors who cleaned the windows.
After my reply all seven of the interviewers were all grinning and I was aware I said something they weren't looking for. One of the men politely told me Windows was a computer operating system. My reply was, "Oh, I see."
When I returned home I told my wife what happened and we shouldn't get our hopes up. To my utter shock, a week later I was offered the job, which I took and after some training, learned something I didn't know before.
A lot of this resonates. I'm not in Antartica, I'm in Beijing, but still struggle with the internet. Being behind the great firewall means using creative approaches. VPNs only sometimes work, and each leaves a signature that the firewall's hueristics and ML can eventually catch onto. Even state-mandated ones are 'gently' limited at times of political sensitivity. It all ends up meaning that, even if I get a connection, it's not stable, and it's so painful to sink precious packets into pointless web-app-react-crap roundtrips.
I feel like some devs need to time-travel back to 2005 or something and develop for that era in order to learn how to build things nimbly. In deficit of time travel, if people could just learn to open web tools and use its throttling tool: turn it to 3g, and see if their webapp is resilient. Please!
American land of the free is being able to bring a gun to school but getting a fine because your grass is too tall. These HOA type stories are always so funny. It blows my mind people buy in places with rules like these.
> More streamlined menus that reduce visual clutter and prioritize top user actions so you can get to the important things quicker
Oh no, more of this.
What about less used options? How much slower? How much less discoverable?
Desktop applications are already for power users almost by definition, let’s not slow them down for the sake of reducing “clutter”. Absolutely annoying trend of the last 15 years or so.
In college, meeting someone that was better than me by every conceivable metric. You'd think that he beat me at one thing by neglecting another, but nope, the guy was excelling in every category. Perfect grades, involved in many communities, and generally pleasant to be around. There was no caveat, no excuse. Dude just straight up rocked.
I have met more people like that while travelling. I felt badass riding my motorcycle super far, but wherever I went, there was a greater badass riding along. Some of these travellers were on much longer journeys, on much smaller budgets, on a much worse bikes, riding offroad all the way, camping every night. Some were on bicycles, going around the world under their own power. I was just a rich tourist with a great bike who slept in hotels.
In a way, meeting those people was liberating. I will never be a world champion at anything, so I might as well play for the love of the sport.
> These days, some hobbyists opt for modern epoxy instead of the traditional and expensive Urushi lacquer. Epoxy probably yields a more robust bond and certainly allows for quicker repairs, but I question its safety for food-related use, especially at the temperatures found in a steaming cup of coffee.
People opt for epoxy because Urushi lacquer is traditionally made from poison oak sap and is a potent skin irritant to most people (it's where urushiol gets its name). It's really tough to do Kintsugi without smearing trace amounts of it all over the place, especially if you're doing it with kids, and cleaning it off is a pain since it's a hydrophobic sap. Even trace amounts can cause a reaction, especially if someone has sensitive skin or is severely allergic. People who do a lot of kintsugi develop a tolerance for it but it's an annoyance that most hobbyists just don't need.
Epoxies can be perfectly food safe and the FDA has a database [1] although it's not particularly user friendly. You can get MAX CLR or similar from Amazon. I wouldn't use it in an oven above 300F but it's fine for boiling temps. These FDA approved two part epoxies are used all over the place in hospitals and food manufacturing facilities where they're used to coat rough surfaces that would otherwise harbor bacteria.
I broke my Achilles tendon - had to have a FULL reconstruction - they took a tendon that used to help waggle my big toe (the muscle is in my leg) wrapped around my heel and back up my leg and rebuilt my achilles around that - now I have a muscle that used to wiggle my toe than moves my entire foot.
How hard was it to relearn? at first I'd try to move my toe and something else would move, it felt weird - but doctor's orders were essentially don't do anything for 3 months, bed rest and keep the leg raised - all the muscles turned to jelly ... then months of physio, in the pool and then in the gym - at that point, once I started moving stuff again my brain had adjusted - that muscle moves my foot, not my toe - I didn't have to do anything explicitly to make it change, it just did
At least as far as Hacker News is concerned, I'd call htmx way more marketed. It has hundreds of HN submissions in the past year alone [0] including one that broke 1000 points. Compare that to Hotwire which is sitting at less than 30 submissions in the past year [1], the most popular of which is this one.
Can you read them? Speech to text perhaps. That can also be done locally.
If a note's a minute, 1000 notes are around 16 hours of reading. Scale time needed depending on if it takes less or more than a minute to read. Add a note reference to the start of each recording, like a zettelkasten, so the scanned file, recording and text cross-reference.
If assessing other solutions, that's at least an upper bound on the cost of any other solution.
> I bet that WhatsApp is one of the rare services you use which actually deployed servers to Australia. To me, 200ms is a telltale sign of intercontinental traffic.
So, I used to work at WhatsApp. And we got this kind of praise when we only had servers in Reston, Virginia (not at aws us-east1, but in the same neighborhood). Nowadays, Facebook is most likely terminating connections in Australia, but messaging most likely goes through another continent. Calling within Australia should stay local though (either p2p or through a nearby relay).
There's lots of things WhatsApp does to improve experience on low quality networks that other services don't (even when we worked in the same buildings and told them they should consider things!)
In no particular order:
0) offline first, phone is the source of truth, although there's multi-device now. You don't need to be online to read messages you have, or to write messages to be sent whenever you're online. Email used to work like this for everyone; and it was no big deal to grab mail once in a while, read it and reply, and then send in a batch. Online messaging is great, if you can, but for things like being on a commuter train where connectivity ebbs and flows, it's nice to pick up messages when you can.
a) hardcode fallback ips for when DNS doesn't work (not if)
b) setup "0rtt" fast resume, so you can start getting messages on the second round trip. This is part of noise pipes or whatever they're called, and tls 1.3
c) do reasonable-ish things to work with MTU. In the old days, FreeBSD reflected the client MSS back to it, which helps when there's a tunnel like PPPoE and it only modifies outgoing syns and not incoming syn+ack. Linux never did that, and afaik, FreeBSD took it out. Behind Facebook infrastructure, they just hardcode the mss for i think 1480 MTU (you can/should check with tcpdump). I did some limited testing, and really the best results come from monitoring for /24's with bad behavior (it's pretty easy, if you look for it --- never got any large packets and packet gaps are a multiple of MSS - space for tcp timestamps) and then sending back client - 20 to those; you could also just always send back client - 20. I think Android finally started doing pMTUD blackhole detection stuff a couple years back, Apple has been doing it really well for longer. Path MTU Discovery is still an issue, and anything you can do to make it happier is good.
d) connect in the background to exchange messages when possible. Don't post notifications unless the message content is on the device. Don't be one of those apps that can only load messsages from the network when the app is in the foreground, because the user might not have connectivity then
e) prioritize messages over telemetry. Don't measure everything, only measure things when you know what you'll do with the numbers. Everybody hates telemetry, but it can be super useful as a developer. But if you've got giant telemetry packs to upload, that's bad by itself, and if you do them before you get messages in and out, you're failing the user.
f) pay attention to how big things are on the wire. Not everything needs to get shrunk as much as possible, but login needs to be very tight, and message sending should be too. IMHO, http and json and xml are too bulky for those, but are ok for multimedia because the payload is big so framing doesn't matter as much, and they're ok for low volume services because they're low volume.
Blog author here with a regretful correction. This result is not accurate, mea culpa. The headline should read: errors.Is() is 500% slower.
Basically: the critical functions in the benchmark are small enough they were being inlined by the compiler, which means it's possible for the compiler to further optimize the loop to avoid all comparisons in some cases, producing an inaccurate result for some of the benchmarks. You can fix this by adding noinline directives to the methods.
I'll be publishing an update to the article and a post-mortem on how this slipped past review. The rank ordering of techniques in the article is unchanged, but the magnitude of the difference is not nearly so large.
It's SUCH a win that they managed to roll this out to a small set of tax situations and states to start. Every government project I've been on has required creativity in defining an MVP that doesn't include shipping to everyone. This was cited consistently as one of the great successes of this project, they were able to ship something that successfully filed 150k taxes b/c they were able to scope things down to something doable in 9 months.
I just read Paved Paradise as well as The High Cost of Free Parking. This seems like the current gradual trend towards reversing the hidden subsidy for drivers, first by giving them less affordances at remarkably low prices or for free.
A few folks in the comments have mentioned a couple of times that it doesn't make sense to make a policy like this without supporting transit. I believe the argument would be that not creating induced demand will provide market effects to encourage the use of transit, which would then create greater demand for improved transit.
Similarly for housing, the well substantiated claim from modern urban planners is that we've been prioritizing housing for cars well beyond housing for people, and the best solution for that is to overturn minimum parking requirements and unbundle the cost of parking from the cost of housing.
Personally, I still find these opinions somewhat counterintuitive. The weirdest part about it is that it all posits that the solution to a centralized planning problem is market solutions, and it's coming from people you'd expect to have the opposite opinion. However, what we've had in terms of transportation clearly doesn't work for people and for the environment, and the last 20 years of "Shoupism" has shown some serious promise in terms of reversing the trend.
I know about the post title rule but I would be surprised if anyone clicks on this not assuming it's about the video game digital distribution service and storefront.
That said, here's a lovely video from YouTuber "Aging Wheels" about a (working!) scale model of a British steam truck: https://youtu.be/PFKa8K9qZBQ
> I’m not particularly patriotic, but this kind of thing feels particularly American.
Maybe that tinge of patriotism is why Americans don't even bother to see if something isn't an American invention - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_from_NPL_(MSF) - they'll just claim it anyways since they barely read outside their borders.
> What I find most strange about the modern day piracy is quality.
For a lot of pirates, it's a niche hobby to preserve the best quality version of some media / art. I see it as an underground librarian archivist movement.
In 100 years iTunes may be dead, but there will be some person with every album available in high quality lossless FLAC. Same with Netflix and it's bit starved encodes.
When I read stories about companies like Spotify creating e-waste like this, I think it’s worth pointing out that commercial companies don’t have to behave this way.
As a counter-point, back around 2008, I purchased two Squeezebox music players from Logitech (digital music players that Logitech had acquired from Slim Devices: high quality DACs that supported every audio format, gap-less playback, synchronised playing on multiple devices, and were very configurable).
They discontinued these products four years later (2012) but kept their mysqueezebox.com online service running up until the start of this year (2024). They kept the user forums running and archived the knowledge-base wiki. Most importantly, they open-sourced the stand-alone server software for running a local Squeezebox server and continued to pay the main developer to maintain the project for more than a decade after they discontinued the products. He’s still the lead developer and project maintainer of the server software, now called Lyrion Music Server: https://lyrion.org/
Correction: the stand-alone server software was always open source, specifically GPLv2. In addition to the audio quality and features, that was one of the selling points for me. It being written in Perl, meant that it was both cross-platform and easy to run on a GNU/Linux system.
> You're drowning in low-quality, pointless content designed to hijack your attention. It's making you distracted, confused, and unable to think straight.
> Be mindful of what you consume. Spend more time creating, less mindlessly scrolling.
> Your mind deserves better than the junk clogging your feed. Cut it out before it rots your brain.
That's literally it. I guess the piece is trying to be ironic by using the same style of junk information that it's telling us to watch out for?
Are they just banking on people not caring enough or knowing about the refund process? Clearly it can't be better off for them to refund hundreds of thousands maybe even 1m+ people.
We need laws that step in to make this impossible. Hardware should be designed so that it can be reused. Make it so that people can just reflash the memory at a minimum. There's no reason for something like this to become e-waste. And the excuse being Spotify wanting to protect their brand should not stand.
Napster was such an improvement over what it replaced, but, it’s funny by today’s standards Napster was so “basic”.
I remember waiting 3+ hours for a single song to download. Then discovering it wasn’t what I wanted but a troll who renamed the `Barney The Dinosaur I love you` song. Then I’d spend another 3+ hours downloading a different song. Ah 56k internet, what fun.
Today, TPB and a quick search can give you an artist’s entire discography in one go. Or if you’re into automation, lidarr , sonarr , and radarr can pull in your favorite things as soon as they’re released.
What I find most strange about the modern day piracy is quality. It blows my mind how different groups fight to offer the best version of a free thing. And they’re so good at it, that the pirated product is usually substantially better than the official version.
The term “open access” is misleading and carefully engineered to generate good will, when in fact it should be termed “pay to publish” (as argued quite nicely by Brian McGill [1]). As it stands today, OA is mostly a public money sink, a big scheme to drain public money from European countries. Not only are we paying a ridiculous, ungodly amount of money for people to host PDFs on a website, but the entire idea of publishers competing for the quality of their research output (in order to get submissions) has also basically been eradicated and turned meaningless. Reviewers are pushed to accept papers instead of rejecting them, because a rejected paper makes no money, and now we are left with a deluge of noise that passes for scientific literature. I sincerely pity the PhD student who needs to run a serious, systematic literature review in 2024. Hell sounds more attractive.
If you want open access, ditch the publishers and fund volunteer expert communities to edit and publish their own papers. You can’t have the cake and eat it too.
I have seen Will Larson's techniques applied/ forced in multiple organizations and have found that his view of the engineering world just does not work. I sense that there is a cult of personality around him that leads to engineering ivory towers.
Most orgs that I've seen follow his writing or ideas have ended up in conflict with the business and one another, isolated on a corporate island, and then gutted by layoffs.
I don't like to throw an author/engineer under the bus but I do not know why this guy has a following. I have never seen his methods result in happy engineers and delivered value.
My summary of this article (for managers):
1. Micromanage early and often
2. Measure, and whatever you're measuring, act like it's truth and that you know best.
3. Listen to the curmudgeons and the naysayers because they are the true sources of knowledge.
Edit- as I mention in a reply, try https://pragprog.com/titles/rjnsd/the-nature-of-software-dev... Ron Jeffries' "The Nature of Software Development". Incremental value, engineers leading delivery, constant feedback cycles, flexibility. I've followed the tenets of this book in many orgs, and they lead to measurable value, happy engineers, and successful orgs.
I am the author, I wanted to publish it myself, I didn't expect you had already published it. Thank you very much.
Encountered quite a few problems during the deployment, mainly related to HTTPS certificates.
The longest segment of a domain name is 63 characters. The maximum length of an HTTPS certificate commonName is 64 characters.
This caused Cloudflare, Vercel, and Netlify to be unable to use Let's Encrypt to sign HTTPS certificates (because they used the domain name as the commonName), but Zeabur can use Let's Encrypt to sign HTTPS certificates.
Finally, the Cloudflare certificate was switched to Google Trust Services LLC to successfully sign.
I don't know, that sounds like a complex kind of ingest which could be arbitrarily subtle and diverge over time for legal and bureaucratic reasons.
I would kind of appreciate having two formats, since what are the odds they would change together? While there may never be a 3rd format, a DRY importer would imply that the source generating the data is also DRY.
This guy's antics were featured on Retraction Watch back in 2022 [0]. All of this apparently happened in plain sight—as illustrated by this (farcical, single-candidate) faculty vote getting 50% blank ballots–protest votes. Everyone there knew.
"How can we design algorithms to detect..." is the wrong question in response to this scandal—it's completely in the wrong category. IMHO! These citation cliques are unsubtle and basically trivial to detect. It's the professional work culture of research universities that's the hard, unsolved problem.
I've seen entire teams burn so much money by overcomplicating projects. Bikesheding about how to implement DDD, Hexagonal Architecture, design patterns, complex queues that would maybe one day be required if the company scaled 1000x, unnecessary eventual consistency that required so much machinery and man hours to keep data integrity under control. Some of these projects were so late in their deadlines that had to be cancelled.
And then I've seen one man projects copy pasting spaghetti code around like there's no tomorrow that had a working system within 1/10th of the budget.
Now I admire those who can just produce value without worrying too much about what's under the hood. Very important mindset for most startups. And a very humbling realization.