Elte

Germany here, I have a fixed rate for 30 years.

Long ago in high school, I entered a LEGO robot competition with some friends. Tests were line following, collision detection, etc. One of the tests involved the bot being sent on a collision course with a wall. It had to detect running into it and turn around. This was one of the easiest ones to complete, but shortly before the test started we realized that our pressure sensor was malfunctioning and didn't send any more signals. There was no more time to swap it out, I don't even think we had a spare to be honest.

Not wanting to give up points on an easy test, we gauged the distance the bot had to cover in the test, and quickly uploaded some new software. At the start of the test, our bot moved forward for 4 seconds, stopped, then turned around. Full points on that one!

Some times things just need to work and we can worry about them working _correctly_ later...

That some times works, but the references I'm interested in aren't always the one directly on the route. For instance, the name of the street just before the one you need to turn into can be helpful to remember. Also, if it's a list of directions I no longer have the context of the actual map, so it's a subpar solution regardless.

Ah yes. I often use Maps when I have a rough idea where to go, but I just need to commit the street names of a few turns to memory. Finding those names indeed tends to be a frustrating experience.

It's good to know I'm not the only one. Whenever I've had an occasion recently where I thought an LLM might be useful (either I didn't know the framework or I didn't quite understand the subject matter) and asked ChatGPT or Bard, they always just hallucinated crap that didn't work and couldn't be made to work. Just yesterday Bard hallucinated a method that was called `something_that_exists_somethingIAskedAbout()`, switching to camel case halfway through, that obviously didn't exist. For the same problem, ChatGPT came up with an existing method, but modified its parameter list to make it do things it didn't do.

I struggle to think of a single instance where it's been helpful for me, and I keep trying, because I don't enjoy doing useless grunt work any more than the next guy, and I want to at least try to learn to ask it the "right" questions.

I've gone through the process some 4 to 5 times in the past two years or so and never had any issues with it. The delays are annoying, but I get part of my money back no problem.

I currently have YouTube Music, and have looked into getting Premium a couple of times, because I watch enough YT content to want the ads disabled everywhere. But for some reason they won't let me. If I go to the YT Premium page, they tell me I can't do anything there, and I have to go to my account page, where of course there is nothing to do either. I suppose I could cancel my YT Music subscription and then try to sub YT Premium, but with notoriously bad customer support and a number of family members using it also, I kind of don't want to go deal with that also not working and me having to go through the hassle of getting everybody in again.

If they want to sell premium so badly, maybe they should actually let me buy it.

The documentation reads like a tutorial, which is fine the first time you read it, and really annoying the next 99 times when you're just trying to find something. My biggest gripe though is that the majority of classes / methods aren't locally documented with comments, or only minimally. If I don't understand how a certain parameter behaves (or even what a function does), I have to go online and search for examples, or look through the docs hoping that it's explained. And don't get me started on Facades, which are a code discovery dead end...

All that being said, my overall experience of working with PHP / Laravel is quite pleasant, probably more so than other technologies I've worked with in recent years. Everything has its issues I suppose.

I've started to use ChatGPT for semi high-level questions only this week, and I'm with you. It has hallucinated quite a few nonexistent functions, and it's generally unhelpful slightly more often than it is helpful. Just now I asked it why an `<input />` and a `<select />` with the same CSS had different heights (I've managed to avoid CSS for a while, shoot me XD), and gave it the CSS applied. It suggested the default browser styling was the culprit, and I should set the same height to both elements. I replied they already had the same height set. Then it suggested setting the same padding - they already had the same padding. Then it put `box-sizing` in an example and I promptly realized that `<input />` and `<select />` must have different default values for `box-sizing`. I asked if that was correct, and it said yup!

Based on what I've seen elsewhere, I really feel like it should've been able to answer this question directly. Overall this matches my experience so far this week. Not saying it's never useful, just regularly I expected it to be...better. Haven't had access to GPT-4 yet though, so I can't speak to it being better.

Also not OP, but I literally just learned about Hedy [1] today. No experience except from clicking through it for 20 minutes, but it looks quite interesting, taking somebody from a language with a very simple syntax (and limited functionality) to full blown Python, one level at a time, by making the language gradually more complicated (and more powerful).

[1] https://www.hedycode.com/

I've got a couple of templates where I've aliased the value of a TypeScript enum into a local variable before using it in the template, so I'm pretty certain at that point I was unable to use the value of the enum directly (that's also how I remember it). However, I just tried it and...it seems to just work now. So thanks for making me revisit that :D.

I don't think there's any evidence that they're inflammatory (great video about it here [1]), but obviously oils are almost 100% fat and therefore have a ton of calories. At the same time, some people feel incredibly satiated from eating fats, to the point where they might eat fewer total calories if they include some...

Generally, avoiding added high calorie fillers (that includes sugar and oils alike) is almost certainly a good idea if you're trying to lose weight though.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xTaAHSFHUU

Biked through the tunnel, then ran over the Köhlbrandbrücke the one time a year they let you do that. The fun one can have pointlessly crossing a river (:.

Absolutely, bike lanes in Germany are an afterthought _at best_. I see bike lanes here springing into existence randomly with no way to get on (you're on the street with the cars, and suddenly you see a bike lane on the other side) and, similarly, ending with no reasonable way to continue (just hop off the sidewalk here please!). In my neigborhood, "red" means bike lane 50% of the time and sidewalk the other 50%. There is literally a sidewalk close by where the lane colors switch half way through. They're also often poorly paved with big bumps to get on and off at intersections.

Being born and raised in the Netherlands, this was a bit of a nasty surprise when I moved here. I really think you can cut down car use significantly by improving the infrastructure. The distances and landscape lend themselves well to biking, but the roads do not.

I moved from the Netherlands (where I was born) to Germany, and I mostly use my VPN to bypass the location block on video from Dutch public broadcasting. I even still pay taxes in the Netherlands (still work there), so I feel perfectly absolved from the little moral issue anyone might have with this.

When I was initially exposed to Monty Hall, what confused me the most is that I didn't know that the host would always open a door with a goat, rather than just picking one of the remaining doors at random. In the latter case (i.e. the case where the host can pick a car), even provided that you are in the universe where he picked a goat, switching and staying both yield a 50% chance of success.

Along these lines, I find a "nocommit" git hook [1] to be an absolute life saver. If for whatever reason I need to temporarily break a piece of code, I just add a `// NOCOMMIT` comment above it, and git won't let me commit if I forget to change it back.

[1] https://gist.github.com/hraban/10c7f72ba6ec55247f2d

No notifications from HN is great. Nothing will happen if you forget to answer to an stranger on the internet.

I think by and large it's a good thing, but in certain cases "nothing will happen" isn't the outcome I'm looking for ;).

Thanks. It'll happen sooner or later, my girlfriend strongly wishes to be a parent and will probably murder me in my sleep if I back out now ;).

I know I'll likely figure it out, as I have everything in my life so far. That doesn't prevent that dread from creeping up, though.

Commented below on somebody else asking the same :).

(Sorry for the late reply - while I appreciate no notifications from HN it also means I tend to just forget about it).

The hobby is sports. I'm relatively gifted as a "hybrid" athlete, if I work hard at it I can get podium finishes at OCR / Hyrox type events. I'd still do it without that though, it produces an emotional state that, while not taking away the rational thought that there's ultimately not much purpose to anything that I do, makes me not really care about that at all. Makes things make sense even when they don't.

However, the fact that it (a) combines really poorly with a lack of sleep and (b) has an expiration date (athletic ability is of course age bound) do contribute to the sense of dread.

I may be like one of your boring unfulfilled friends, except I have a single hobby that makes me feel a sense of purpose, whereas very few other things in my life ever really have. On a rational level, it seems to me that having kids will add a sense of purpose to my life, given how many people share this perspective. At the same time, thinking about the time and effort I will be forced to take away from the thing that keeps me sane fills me with dread. It's not like there's a way back.

I'm a bit confused by this point in the article, because it also states:

There seems to be a hard limit on how many calories our bodies can burn per day, set by how fast we can digest food and turn it into energy. He calculates that the ceiling for an 85-kilogram man would be about 4650 calories per day.

Given that "regular" people clearly do not burn 4650 calories per day, and it is possible to burn 4650 calories per day, there must be a point at which exercise _does_ increase energy expenditure. I'm guessing it just doesn't happen for regular doses of exercise (including, evidently, walking 14km per day).

Perhaps the body down regulates calorie-consuming processes to a point where it's just the bare minimum, and calorie expenditure increases from there. Or perhaps we should take the opposite view and say that our bodies up regulate unwanted processes (like inflammation) to use the energy of an engine designed to keep running at a certain level?

Either way I find this incredibly interesting. And either way I'm probably also going to keep stuffing my face on a day I run 30km :).

I don't think it's about reaching conclusions; I think people just don't like hearing bad news, much less bad news about things that they regularly participate in. We say "don't shoot the messenger" for a reason - it's just much simpler to shoot the messenger than to consider the message.

What I'm personally always worried about is to what extent I might be doing it myself. It stands to reason that these people themselves don't believe they're engaging in unacceptable behavior, after all.

Tip: Scotch tape. I was immensely frustrated with the fingerprint sensor on my FP3, which would only register in perfect conditions, so I had to type my password half the time. Somewhere online I read the tip to put a piece of scotch tape over it, which sounded utterly ridiculous, but at the same time so straightforward and harmless that I tried. I have no idea why it works, but I'm only typing my password whenever the "extra security" counter kicks in now.

What types of trips? Distance traveled isn't really a relevant metric if you consider that cars may be used between cities (where distances are longer) and bikes inside of cities.

I'm from the Netherlands, 30 years old and have never owned a car. I do most everything by bike and public transport, occasionally if the situation calls for it I rent or borrow a car (I know people with cars that, unsurprisingly, aren't being used all the time). It certainly depends on your exact living situation, but my impression is that infrastructure plays a big role. I lived in Amsterdam for 12 years, and almost everything in that city encourages you to use a bike, and almost everyone does. Recently I've moved to Germany, and even though it's generally considered a bike friendly country with lots of people owning bicycles, the infrastructure doesn't compare. Dedicated bike lanes are way less common, and whatever is there is often bad quality (avoiding bumps all the time is really energy consuming). Again, unsurprisingly, people use cars here over distances where it wouldn't even cross my mind.

Of course distance matters, and cars will be preferable for long distances with bad public transport connections. I've never found driving a car inside a city to make a lot of sense though, it's often not even faster taking congestion etc into account. Put the bike infrastructure in place, and people will use it. Lots of Dutch train stations now have what's referred to as a "public transport bike", a few euros lets you borrow a sturdy bike for a 24-hour period. Take a train into town, do the rest with the bike, it's all really simple and fast. I see this being added to large parking spaces outside of cities in the future (maybe they already have - I don't own a car so I wouldn't know ;]).

Yeah same here! Nothing like watching a 200ms timer go down to 100ms just because you swapped out some data structure or cached some variable. It's a very satisfying game to me.

I sure hope so!

Well, this does explain the disproportionate amount of actors that are arrested in CSI after reviewing the video evidence.

Looks great! Is it too late to suggest a rename to co-fit? (Sorry, I couldn't help myself)