HN user
Nice weather we're having.
* The UI is nice to have
* You get features like issues, project wiki, etc
* You can still collaborate/handle PRs easily with other people
I selfhost for the above and just to have a handy backup in case github is down.
Comparing a trivial <500 LoC program between languages doesn't tell you anything that's useful other than the terseness of the syntax. You might as well chain unix utilities together at that point.
Maintaining a 5k+ LoC java/c#/go/rust/crystal codebase is orders of magnitude simpler than standard ruby. Sorbet/RBS bridge that gap now, but are a pita to use compared to natively implementing a type system. I know with rust/go I get a simple binary at the end to copy over. Rust, unfortunately, has slow compilation times still compared to go, but I really can't stand error handling in go compared to rust.
That said, "ruthlessly productive" is an apt description. I just don't want to have to maintain a large rails codebase again without sorbet/rbs. I'm hoping phoenix/elixir or something in rust catches on.
All of 'em. All of them will be safe. AI generated content is devoid of meaning and randomly generating some pictures isn't indicative of anything to me. Human works of creativity are so much more than randomly generating things from prompts - and don't forget you're not seeing ALL of the pics that have been generated, but some of them.
As people start to generate crap at tremendous volume with AI, more value and emphasis will be placed on creative works made by humans. I very well could be wrong, but either way it's not happening anytime soon.
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Games like go and chess are different, of course computers are better for calculating and optimizing moves and branching paths - no creativity is needed. This portion is completely irrelevant to the discussion of computers trying to generate art.
Here’s my personal site: https://andrewzah.com/
It’s statically compiled with Hugo. I switched from Zola due to lack of asciidoctor support. My focus is on minimalism, loading fast, and utilizing semantic html design for accessibility.
The sad thing is I’ve spent dozens more hours working on the code for this site than actually writing articles. (Counting the various migrations from Zola, etc).
I have some drafts for articles and a lot of technical stuff to discuss but I just have zero motivation to write these days. I’d rather practice guitar.
Warp wants to john deere-ify our tools. Soon you won't be able to buy a hammer or table saw without some sort of platform marketing speak and a subscription service.
Exactly, that's why people tend not to choose Windows for development unless they're forced to.
edit: use -> choose
No. In daily life America and Americans are typically nuanced. Like literally any other country.
It’s the internet that disposes of context and nuance.
Navidrome [0] has been a solid replacement for me. It has all the features I want aside from Keycloak/generic oidc integration, and the author is very responsive.
Chiming to say that I also use a self-hosted instance of Monica.
I hop between a lot of projects and hobbies so I tend to be a bit scatterbrained. Having a central store of my contacts, past events, their likes/dislikes is extremely useful for me.
It is better. All humans have to sit or stand regardless. I exercise at my discretion instead of having to do difficult labor in order to get paid.
You're describing social/interpersonal problems which happen regardless of the type of industry or work. That has nothing to do with the objective fact that working in an office is better than having physical labor take a toll on your body in the long term. I never stated that doing nothing but sitting is healthy.
You and the other commenter have got to be joking.
My point was that office-work is far away preferable to daily physical labor. I’ll take sitting over throwing out my back, blowing out my knees and having constant pain. Not to mention the hazards of working with chemicals or industrial equipment or electricity, and so on.
Of course there are options that I use like exercising and standing desks. My point was that this is a significantly better situation health-wise than working in trades. And that I have the privilege of doing that.
Comparing construction or plumbing work to sitting is absolutely ludicrous.
I also use a standing desk anyways, but I am not sacrificing my health like my grandfather or father did who had/have back/knee and other health issues in their 50s from physical labor.
Being able to earn a nice living while sitting at a desk is an enormous privilege, and I also get money and healthcare to routinely visit doctors anyway.
Occasionally that thought pops up. Then I remember I’m making insane amounts of money, from the comfort of my desk in my house. At 25 I’m making more than my parents ever did, with a fraction of the physical effort.
If I really hated it, I could save up for some time and do something else, because again… I’m pulling insane amounts of money for software work.
Trades like plumbing, electrical work etc are -hard- work. I recognize that I have the privilege of not sacrificing my body and health for my income. My biggest concerns are making sure my posture is correct and that I take enough walks. Such a hard life.
I’ve noticed that some programmers tend to romanticize things like farming or plumbing, and generally speaking not understand the hard physical work those people have to go through. It can be quite patronizing.
Edit: sitting a desk is not “sacrificing your body”. Comparing that to the labor that people in trades do is completely detached from reality. Obviously there are things like standing desks and working out. But in life you have to sit or stand regardless.
You can always specify the type.
let foo: T = bar.parse()?;
// or let foo = bar.parse::<u32>()?;
baz(foo);
In my experience I've never found this to be surprising behavior, or unclear.
"The reality is that they are government institutions, and this makes being inside them bad in the DMV kind of way."
This doesn't really make any sense. I've never had an issue with being in a library because it's "a government institution".
You can ask the librarians to get books for you.
Libraries provide more services than just loaning books, and they're particularly useful for people who don't have the money to spend on a coffee, or who don't own computers... Obviously they aren't as useful for engineers who have money.
Deep, focused reading is a muscle that you need to work on. There isn’t a real answer other than practice, and focus on delayed gratification.
We skim websites/articles because there is so much information out there, and not all of it is useful. I skim articles and then go back to fully read them once I make sure they’re actually worth the time. Same with some books, but books generally are worth it since they went through the publishing process, etc.
I think Dan is on point here with asking questions for true understanding and not being afraid to do that. Our society, unfortunately, for the most part rewards those who are confident and act like they know everything instead of those who admit they don't know something. And being willing to look dumb/bad is crucial to learning a language, instrument, or new hobby well...
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But he lost me with the examples of the Apple computer box. Employees aren't little robots- they're actual humans that (mostly) are trying to be helpful. It would've taken Dan -significantly- less time and effort to just say WHY he was looking for a smaller box. Probably the same deal with the auto insurance agent- he could've just explained WHY he wanted such an unusual request, and the agent likely wouldn't have incredulously asked him 3 times.
In my experience people are straightforward and respectful with you when you're straightforward and respectful with them. Waltzing in and going "give me the thing in the smallest box" makes absolutely zero sense and it's like Dan was just purposefully playing a game of being obtuse towards random help staff... People aren't intelligent or stupid because they get confused when someone comes in with very unusual requests that they refuse to elaborate on.
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Also, I truly don't get the box thing. Technology-wise it makes no sense. Why doesn't Dan explain the reason in this post either?
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Last edit: I had an unusual situation once in Seoul at this one cafe that I visited a lot. There were two registers, and for some reason my credit card just wouldn’t work on the left register. So a few times I just asked “Hey, this is an unusual request, but could we use the machine on the right? My card works on that one, but not this one.” And guess what? The employees went “oh, ok” or “sure”.
It took slightly more effort on my part than saying “hey, use the machine on the right”. But then nobody was confused. It had nothing to do with the employees being intelligent or stupid or being perceived as such.
I'm not a fan of this article because it seems like Dan doesn't understand that people are much more willing to work with people who aren't purposefully being obtuse.
But Dan is on here because he generally writes well researched articles like [0] [1] and his minimal website aesthetics appeal to the HN crowd.
Check out Navidrome [0]. It's the closest one that I've found. It supports the Subsonic API so there are plenty of mobile apps and probably some desktop ones that work with it. I use play:Sub on iOS.
So your solution to other people cheating is .... contributing to the cheating problem yourself? Wow.
You know it's possible to choose to -not- play a game, right? There are so many games available that don't have ridiculous cheating problems.
The current marketing pitch (a personal gaming -coach-) has nothing to do with the current functionality of e.g. voicing timers or providing notifications. That's more akin to a personal assistant.
I would also say that what it's doing with Valorant is cheating. It's providing additional cues and advantages automatically, that other players have to keep tabs on manually. The other players have to risk glancing at the timer(s) and temporarily divert attention from the other parts of the screen, while the "AI" user can rely on auditory feedback that is not present in the game for everyone (and maybe was a conscious decision from the game developers).
The whole point of competition is to evaluate player vs player performance, not player+personal assistant vs player performance. If you allow uneven things like that, then it becomes an arms race and also becomes boring from both a viewer and participant standpoint. Part of the challenge of games like Valorant, League of Legends, DotA2, etc, is to learn how to manage the sheer amount of information while also engaging in fights/gameplay.
An actual coach "AI" concept could be to provide intelligent information -inbetween rounds-, not during gameplay itself.
This is simply not the case once you’ve been in that situation long enough. It’s pretty terrible. I would rather have lots of busywork than be sitting on my hands with nothing to do yet still have the obligation for the company.
Working on something due to lack of work during a zoom meeting is entirely different than doing something in my own time when I have zero obligation to get called out of it at any moment. This prevents Deep Work from occurring. It’s thoroughly unsatisfying, and work is simply not just “time for money”.
The shopping online etc that they’re referring to is being done out of boredom, not out of necessity. It’s a dopamine loop. Same with browsing social media or chatting online.
Please don’t dismiss people and handwave when they’re trying to discuss issues.
The word master has many usages. One specific context (master/slave) is inappropriate, but that doesn't mean every other context is unusable now.
Github changing master->main was the epitome of virtue signaling. This literally does not affect black people at all, nor does it do -anything- to help with racial inequality in the US. It's actually quite patronizing and tone-deaf to think that instead of all the things -Microsoft- could be doing to help racial inequality, they're putting in as little effort as possible.
Congrats on granting power over words to unreasonable people who ignore things like context in language and common sense.
It's not either one or the other. Anki is a supplement to input received from native speakers and media. The idea of spaced repetition is to help one efficiently remember the thousands and thousands of words needed for a sophisticated vocabulary.
I definitely don't recommend anyone to try and learn a language from e.g. Anki only.
I concur with all of these points. I've also written a bit about Anki and updating some of the default settings for better retention. [0] Making a good template for cards changes everything, particularly with adding context / usage sentences on the back of the card. Also, switching to using the native definitions once you can instead of the english translations helps immensely.
For me, I -hated- how long it took to input words into Anki, so for ~7 months I used Evita's Korean Deck which has about 5.5k words. I eventually burned out and got tired of the lack of context in the cards, but that helped me learn a lot of day-to-day vocabulary. I tried this a bit with a Japanese 2k deck but I think with logographic language it doesn't really work as well as slowly inputting words that you know the context/definition for.
Nowadays I write down words from books/movies/etc that I don't know in my journal, and every once in a while I collect those into a personal anki deck. I actually am working on a CLI program that helps automate the process of searching a word's definitions and creating a card. It outputs all of the selected definitions into a csv, which I can then bulk import into Anki. [0]
It's important to do it every day. Anki by default allots 20 new words per day, but this is quite a lot unless one plans to spend a while every day on anki. I find 5-10 words is more tenable, and simply 1/day is better than 0/day if one burns out.
[0] https://andrewzah.com/posts/2019/better-anki-usage-guide/
Anki user here, for about 5 years now studying Korean and to a lesser extent Japanese and miscellaneous topics.
This is cool, but I will never base my learning on a closed-source product. I simply don't trust anyone with data / workflows this important to me.
Anki doesn't have great UX, but it is -dependable-. It works, day in, day out, and I've had zero issues with it. I trust that in 5-10 years, my anki decks will be there and work exactly the same.
edit: I'm not trying to be negative. I think there is a lack of spaced repetition-based flashcard apps with great UX. However I personally value stability and guarantee of longevity over nice UX. If the developer of Anki quits tomorrow, it being open source ensures that it'll live on with new maintainers (even if that's just me).
It won’t affect the average user, but the only thing keeping some people on windows is games that use anticheats like BattleEye or EasyAntiCheat.
With proton a lot of games now run quite nicely asides from the ones that require anticheat systems.
Why would I use tooling that isn't open source?
Chess is a great game for learning strategical thinking, but I don't think it's really useful to try and reduce real life / business strategies into chess terms. Real life is fundamentally different and more complex than the rigid rules of chess.
Chess is also not really special here other than it being a very old, culturally important game. You could swap it out for go and nothing would really change except some strategy metaphors/comparisons. With all strategy games there are general, high-level strategies that players employ. But is it useful to anyone to make empty comparisons like "forward thinking"?
Actually rather than chess, I think it's better to learn strategy through more modern fighting games like Street Fighter III: Third Strike or Super Smash Bros. Melee. These kinds of games are much more reactive; one can see and intuitively understand their mistakes much more easily than through chess position analysis. These games still have very complex strategies going on, but they combine it with mechanical execution skills.
No matter what strategy game it is, I think everyone should experience that in their life; particularly business people. It really is incredible how much these games can teach us.
Transcoding is a fairly common feature, although typically to mp3. I use Navidrome [0] to self-host my own music, and it lets me set up custom transcoding profiles with ffmpeg.