HN user
hackernews@andy800.33mail.com
https://www.thehousesometimeswins.com
2 applications: StartAllBack and Winaero Tweaker are both lifesavers, as far as I'm concerned. Both allow you to customize the look and feel of different elements so you can run the latest Windows 11 but still preserve elements of the traditional UI's - classic Start Menu, analog clock (sounds quaint but it has a second hand and the calendar is much more responsive), different versions of Windows Explorer, etc.
a heated debate ... exposed his ignorance
Didnt follow everything here, but wouldn't that make for a perfect cover story? If you're Satoshi, and people are getting close to verifying (or at least nominating you as "most likely candidate"), what better way to throw people off than to engage in a public conversation in which you (creatively) get all kinds of technical details wrong and make yourself look too ignorant or dumb to ever have been Satoshi?
Really cool, thanks.
Part of Panama is the Vector API, currently in "incubation". Kotlin Notebooks are a great dataframe alternative to pandas or polars in Python (and dplyr in R), and work fine for relatively small data sets, but are indeed slower when dealing with calculations on large data. Vectors should reduce that gap significantly.
Sorry, not giving McDonald's a pass. They have a large team of data scientists and technologists working on their app and customer data. Even with a massive base, running a query to find individuals whose spend has dropped 50% y-o-y is not too difficult, and should be an urgent priority at a company that reported "negative comparable guest counts" (i.e. fewer customers y-o-y) for fiscal 2024.
They must be doing a very poor job of optimizing their marketing. I had a long history or ordering the same items using the same "deal", dozens of times a year. They removed that deal and my spend at McDonald's dropped 90%. I didn't place a single order for 6 months - unprecedented. Have the noticed? Have they adjusted their marketing towards me? Did they bring back that deal or offer alternative promotions on the same items? No, no, and no. The purpose of apps and big data and especially AI is to be able to achieve the goal of 1-to-1 marketing based on individual preferences and patterns. Yet it appears a massive corporation like McDonald's is unable to achieve any of these goals, it's just continuing "mass marketing" - same deals to huge portions of their customer base, without differentiation - the same as the 1990's.
I admit to being especially sensitive since I worked in personalized loyalty marketing for nearly 20 years, so failures and missed opportunities really annoy me as both a customer and practician of the art.
"top talent" lol
Honest question, going back to Java, dont you miss scope functions (let, apply, also, etc)? Extension functions? Using sealed classes and "when"? I am happy to see Java (and the JVM) improve but it still seems to be missing some of Kotlin's best language features.
With the proliferation of JS, TS, Python, Go, etc, Kotlin is probably not even a thought for many young developers. Any efforts by JetBrains to bring Kotlin to where the people are at (as opposed to expecting people to come to IntelliJ) is welcomed. Call me a stan, whatever, but Kotlin is the best, most productive language I've ever used, by far. Yes, it takes some effort to understand how to effectively utilize some of its features, but once you do, productivity (and enjoyment) elevates tremendously.
Because you'd also have to submit the money it would cost to buy every combination, and also, you likely couldn't fit every ticket (tens of millions of combinations) with a realistic-looking ticket generation time (approx 1-5 seconds between each ticket created). i.e. if 50,000,000 tickets all had the same timestamp (or were off by nanoseconds) it would be a dead giveaway.
Tldr- about 20 years ago, when off-track betting systems were less sophisticated, an insider past-posted horse racing jackpot winners by waiting until the first 4 races of the Pick-6 were final before creating the ticket. They got busted and served time in federal prison because they had multiple winning tickets for the Breeders Cup Pick-6, basically the Super Bowl of horse racing, where scrutiny was extremely high.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Breeders%27_Cup_betting...
Organized crime ran very small, very basic "numbers" games that are the equivalent to the low-profile "Pick 3" or "Quick 4" games most states run. Hundreds, maybe a few thousand dollars of prizes. No organized crime ring paid out multi-million dollar jackpots -- this is entirely the invention of government lotteries and the private administration companies that run them, like G-Tech. When 8-digit jackpots weren't enough to draw desired participation, states joined together (MegaMillions, Powerball) to create 9- and even 10-digit jackpots.
Install StartAllBack and choose the Windows 7 theme. Even if you dont care about the other UI improvements like the older Start Menu, it's worth it just for the improvements to the clock and calendar - the analog clock especially.
you can either isolate the LA customers and charge them the "real" price of the risk, which will be unviable as a business
NOT lining up the premium with the actual risk is what's non-viable.
As a CEO of HTMX, I'm qualified to say that recursivedoubts is best described as a grug-brained developer.
Kotlin is an awesome back-end language with strong typing, tons of libraries and multiple HTTP frameworks (http4k, ktor, vert.x, many more) and templating options (jte is terrific, and fully typed). Guessing it's too late to switch now but worth checking out.
This is often why people get frustrated switching HTMX for the first time. The idea isn't to "translate" the code, but to completely rethink concepts like state and pages and things like components. Not everyone is able to conceptualize their application outside the boundaries of a specific framework.
Somewhat pedantic - Using HTMX represents a modern approach to building a web front-end. However, I'm confident that recursivedoubts (creator of HTMX) would agree HTMX is not itself written in modern Javascript. No Typescript, no modules, no functional programming, no async, etc.
I'm simply communicating the point of the article. Take it up with the author if you don't like it or don't agree. And he'll tell you that if sub-minute precision is necessary (i.e. someone would be reprimanded for being under 30 seconds late to a meeting) the simple solution is to include a second hand on those clocks, and there won't be any confusion. (Of course, what's the likelihood of a basic office wall clock being accurate to within 30 seconds anyway, but that's a whole other rabbit hole)
Not sure about this, I think the vendors were happy with their own proprietary code, agents and backends because the lock-in ensures that switching costs (in terms of writing all new code) are very high.
This can work in a lot of industries - I am skeptical fast food is one of them. Switching costs are low, alternates are plentiful, and collecting information (reviewing deals/prices across companies) is relatively easy.
If McDonald's enshittifies its deals while continuing to raise prices, it's way too easy for loyal customers to go elsewhere. I'm saying this as a huge fan and extremely loyal customer of McDonald's for decades... they are at serious risk of losing people like me. As I stated, I've gone from 15-20 visits to 1 since last June/July, whenever they made the big change.
Perhaps. Let's assume that the value meals is a massive hit and they are collecting far more revenue from customers who like it, than they are losing from people like me.
That's the whole point of data analytics and personalized marketing - even if the value meal works for most people they can still go back to sending me the offers and promotions I responded to previously, in an attempt to reverse my recent decline in spend/visitation. The app makes it possible to send individualized offers. There shouldn't be an entire "B" group where they just say, oh well.
No, this is the point of the article. The person without the seconds could not tell if you were late or not when his watch says 1:00. A display of 1:00 means the actual time is between 12:59:30 and 1:00:30, so there's a 50% chance the person arrived early. Only the person with the second hand could tell for sure.
Isn't this phrase commonly known (in USA) as Lombardi Time?
Your second example contradicts the first. "Sending a message" doesn't happen in an instant. There's always some latency, which can be significant in email systems (the most common, universally accepted way to send a message) and SMS.
The goal in messaging is almost always not about the send time (who cares?), but the receive time, when it is available to be read. If the goal is to have the message received at 1:00, then, as you note in the second example, sending it precisely at 1:00:00.000 guarantees it will be received late.
In any case, if you're that focused on intra-minute precision, you should probably be relying on clocks that incorporate seconds anyway.
Just a very small detail, but want to point out the distinction between these two comments. "Revicon" is demonstrating 10x thinking, it's not about being better at rewriting a linked list algorithm or some leetcode challenge.
Player 1 gets the same support request over and over, does nothing about it, ("hey, that's what the user entered, they should be more careful!"), complains about it online, and who knows how many hours are wasted in the back and forth with the customers.
Player 2 simply makes the necessary change on the backend, the users don't even realize they made a typo, totally seamless flow.
Hat tip to you. Hope you screenshot these two comments and bring this up in every interview to exemplify the contrast between "technically correct" and high-efficiency problem solving.
Disagree on not going to BK/Wendy's. The "deals" game becomes a habit, switching costs are basically zero, people start to comparison shop each app for the best deal (like shopping for air travel). It's a bit of work because there is no single consolidator but it only takes a few seconds to scan each apps offers.
At this point, being a fast food chain that doesnt have an app with deals is probably not viable - but I am very skeptical it generates any loyalty.
Much more - most McD's in USA charge over $4 for a large french fries.
As someone who spent many years segmenting customers and generating personalized marketing offers -- McDonald's is awful at this. I was a 2-3x/monthly customer (USA based) for years (even more frequent a decade ago, but I'm talking about since the app), ordering the exact same core items every time (except during breakfast).
When they began "value meals" last summer (which don't include their flagship items) they also removed the best deals from the app, the ones that did include Big Mac, QPC, 10-nuggets. I've placed one non-breakfast order in 6-8 months, whenever they started this.
I'm just one person, but if a customer declines from an expected 15-20 visits over a half-year period to 1, and you don't adjust your offer algorithm (and you're the biggest restaurant company in the world so no lack of resources), something is seriously wrong.
"Normally would" is more likely, prices from the mid-2010's. The order I used to pay about $12 and change for in 2015 (I know this because I ate there at least once a week), is now about $13, by using the app deals.
However since the rollout of "value meals" last summer, they took away some of the better deals and now McDonald's is simply expensive (for McDonald's) even with the app.