alex-moon

Not only do I think you're right, I think put this way it seems obvious - I am almost heaving a sigh of relief having a better historical comparison than "the dot com bubble".

Brave on Android, same error.

Every point of friction, every struggle documented in minute detail, on a long and bumpy path to some kind of result. The stakes are zero, the whole project an act of pure expression. It is like a kind of oasis in a desert of articles about new ML models. I don't mind that HN is all about new models all the time now, but content like this being on the front page is soothing.

Here in the UK there is an ongoing debate happening more or less behind the scenes around the language that should be used for families of patients nearing end of life. The standard question is: Should we "do everything possible" to keep someone alive? The proposed better question is: Should we "allow natural death"? Any doctor understands intimately that these two questions are equivalent. Understandably, the average person doesn't. Why wouldn't you "do everything possible"? In most of these conversations the argument against just doesn't come up.

"Common sense is nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down in the mind before age eighteen." Attributed to Einstein 1948.

I realise this is the Internet, and it's not for me to convince you of anything. But you've formed an opinion on what is normal and "neutral" strong enough to bring it to a thread about something else online. Is that opinion informed, or received?

For example, you say: trans women can compete in sport with cis women, and that is unfair. Is it? I don't see an a priori answer either way. I certainly don't think banning the "promotion" of trans people in public is a viable solution.

Genuinely curious: what makes you think the moral panic around trans people is structurally different to the moral panic around gay people decades ago? All the arguments you've made here are more or less identical to arguments made to keep homosexuality illegal previously.

This is what neutral language sounds like. It sounds to me like you'd prefer to pretend these people don't exist. I'd like to remind you that male homosexuality was illegal in UK as recently as 1967. Section 28 was in force up until 2003. Same sex marriage was illegal until 2014. The ideology you are seeing in this job ad is liberal democracy. The ideology you are defending is something else entirely, and very much not a form of neutrality.

Enjoy? No, but a lot of reading and writing is very functional, for communication purposes for business etc. (documentation is a good example). In these cases the important thing is that it's accurate.

I absolutely love post-Roman, pre-Norman British writing because it's so rare it gives the era a sense of mystery. This is of course the time when King Arthur is supposed to have lived. In the absence of contemporary records, the impulse to fill it with wizards and dragons is understandable.

As someone who has had to do some grub editing on the computer in an AirBnB because peripherals were all messed up on the guest account (no internet, no sound, you could only see a tiny part of the screen, I honestly don't know how they had managed to do it) I am super pleased to see this resource. Stuff like this is a bit, you know, hopefully you never need this, but when you do, it is so useful to have it.

All things in tech are seasonal.

I think this is maybe the most important point in this entire thing. It's not just tech. Things change. The funny thing is things change now faster than ever before, yet we still have that tendency not to notice while we're in it which we always have had. To be honest it's part of why I tend to try to put some bits about tech history in my blog posts - it puts a perspective on life more generally which helps me psychologically.

I think this is a really important distinction to make. The OP seems to be making a fallacious equivocation on the word "parameter" - specifically, any individual "parameter" in a large ML model has no unit of measurement because it doesn't mean anything on its own. I watched a great documentary about the "Soft Hair on Black Holes" paper where they talk about having to move from the blackboard to the computer because the equation explodes into thousand of parameters - the key thing to understand being that each of those parameters represents some "real" thing, a momentum, a charge, a curvature, etc.

I'm not convinced for one reason above all: short-circuit evaluation is available to use in most any programming language I've ever used, including Python and C. That said, I have seen this idiom in a lot of bash scripts. I've never understood why it's idiomatic and I'm not seeing an explanation here.

As someone who's big into UK Bass who finds new music mainly through a mix of Spotify, Beatport and Reddit, I found this recommender quite good actually! It seems to respond better to descriptions of the kind of music than to "Find tracks like these: <list>" which is what Spotify is good at.

So I came to Babylon 5 late in life, when my partner's mother revealed she had the entire box set on DVD. My partner had recently introduced me to The Expanse, which, like many, I consider the greatest sci fi TV show of all time - she described B5 to me thus: "Babylon 5 walked so the Expanse could run." Suffice to say, my expectations were sky high.

No other TV show has so greatly exceeded my expectations.

It is like make but designed specifically for the way non-C(++) users - people like me for example adding scripts like "make run" and "make build" to my node/python/PHP/etc repos - use it. It is great! I still don't use it literally just because make is already installed on any *nix system I encounter day to day.

Are we supposed to find the figurative "gym for problem solving" the same way office workers workout after work?

That's it, yeah. It sucks but it's part of the job. It makes you a better engineer.

You're absolutely right that this isn't sustainable however. In one of my earlier jobs - specifically, the one that trained me up to become the senior engineer I am now - we had "FedEx Fridays" (same day delivery, get it?). In a word, you have a single work day to work on something non-work related, with one condition: you had to have a deliverable by the end of the day. I cannot overstate how useful having something like this in place in the place of business is for junior devs. The trick is convincing tech businesses that this kind of "training" is a legitimate overhead - the kinds of businesses that are run by engineers get this intuitively. The kind that have a non-technical C-suite less so.

Reposting this one with a better title in hopes it catches more eyes this time. Apologies if this is against the rules!

I am kind of surprised no-one has mentioned the obvious: Hacker News. Unless I've misunderstood your question, the bulk of web dev discussion happens in technical posts on personal and business blogs, which are then aggregated right here. It's a big part of why I'm on here.

If you're talking more about chat, the more messy "pair programming" side of web dev, I have always found this happens in actual dev teams who are working on the same product or for the same business. You do absolutely get chat like this at conventions - I have been to DjangoCon and PyCon back in the day and there were enormously useful discussions at those - but devs need to have something in common to talk about. As someone else has said here already, web dev is a far far broader topic than you might think - I have often found speaking to other devs I did not understand what it was they were doing. Alberta Tech did one on this: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DBSpm2CNuGF/?igsh=NGttZzk5NzB...

Absolutely. It's one of my all time favourites stories and this is pretty much the reason why. I wish my users gave me such specific steps to reproduce!

I should guess it is about liability more than anything else. They want to advertise and sell to children, but they don't want to be taken to court about it. Makes a tonne of sense from a profit perspective, especially as people under ~25 years of age are more susceptible to impulsivity and addiction due to the developing prefrontal cortex. From a sales perspective, the younger the better (as any parent can confirm).

The History of Medieval Europe by Maurice Keen

Reality is Not What it Seems by Carlo Rovelli

The Brain: The Story of You by David Eagleman

I had a crack at reading the first Game of Thrones novel (I think it's just called A Game of Thrones) but my brain seems to be in non-fiction mode at the moment. I think I'm drawn to a kind of sweet spot halfway between "related to my everyday experience" and "removed from my everyday experience" - not sure I could read about programming or business at the moment, though I also haven't tried.

OK yeah I think I see what you're saying, if the SMTP mailer is a hosted service and we're talking about the logs for the service itself then failed connections are not an error - this I agree with. I also wouldn't be logging anything transactional at all in this case - the transactional logs are for the user, they are functionality of the service itself in that case, and those logs should absolutely log a failure to connect as an error.

"If a SMTP mailer trying to send email to somewhere logs 'cannot contact port 25 on <remote host>', that is not an error in the local system and should not be logged at level 'error'."

But it is still an error condition, i.e. something does need to be fixed - either something about the connection string (i.e. in the local system) is wrong, or something in the other system or somewhere between the two is wrong (i.e. and therefore needs to be fixed). Either way, developers on this end (I mean someone reading the logs - true that it might not be the developers of the SMTP mailer) need to get involved, even if it is just to reach out to the third party and ask them to fix it on their end.

A condition that fundamentally prevents a piece of software from working not being considered an error is mad to me.

https://joyus.ajmoon.com

This is actually pretty much as done as it's going to be (could use some nicer UI feedback, i.e. how you actually use the app) - it is actually just a demo for an effort I undertook to mod Datastar to support nested web components. I am writing it up as we speak!

Instructions: you have to answer three questions; each one will auto-submit once your response goes over 100 characters; the answer to the third question is your "post". It's a proof of concept of a friction intervention for social media to encourage slow thinking before posting (and hopefully reframing negative experiences in the mind, it's kind of dual purpose).

Point of curiosity: the community prediction is, presumably, an arithmetic mean, but I argue that is not a good model for a dataset that almost certainly gets more dense closer to the present, creating a gradient out into the future. It would be great to see the geometric mean as well.

This is actually a surprisingly effective way to get a broad range of feedback on topics. I realise this was built for fun, but this whole discussion dynamic is why I value HN in the first place - it never occured to me to try and reproduce it using LLMs. I am suddenly really interested in how I might build a similar workflow for myself - I use LLMs as a "sounding board" a lot, to get a feeling for how ideas are valued (in the training dataset at least).

It's funny, I have never thought of it this way, but, reflecting, I realise the way I do think about it is very similar. Whenever I have to justify a subscription on JetBrains or hosting or what have you, I always just ask myself: will this bring me joy? Specifically will it bring me as much joy as e.g. a Netflix subscription? Very easy to justify then.

To be fair, I used to smoke cigs, and drink heavily, which are both very expensive habits. I've since quit those (they weren't bringing me joy) but the benchmark is the same.

So it's fascinating reading this looking at the screengrabs of the "original" versions... not so much because they are "how I remember them" but indeed, because they have a certain nostalgic quality I can't quite name - they "look old". Presumably this is because, back in the day, when I was watching these films on VHS tapes, they had come to tape from 35mm film. I fear I will never again be able to look at "old looking" footage with the same nostalgia again, now that I understand why it looks that way - and, indeed, that it isn't supposed to look that way!

Baader-Meinhof complex in action: I have _just_ ordered a book of Rovelli's (Reality is Not What It Seems - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_Is_Not_What_It_Seems), it should be in my hands by the end of the week. I am fascinated by the ongoing work in quantum gravity, it's tantalising by its nature.

This is a great interview and I must say I like the man a lot more than I did before. He has articulated something here that I have long felt: that it is as important in politics as it is in philosophy or theoretical physics to be able to state one's assumptions, to suspend one's assumptions for the sake of argument and to drop/change one's assumptions in the face of evidence.

I feel like this is a vital skill that we, as a society, need now maybe more than ever, in literally any field in which there is any meaningful concept of "correct" (which I think is most fields). I also think it's a skill you basically learn at university - and that that is a problem. I don't know what an approach to cultivating it more widely would look like.