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cyode

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I could see this being a great activity in a high school civics class. Very creative. One rule that tripped me up is:

If two parties tie in a district, nobody wins it.

This isn't realistic as ties don't happen in practice in elections, and some party will end up representing it. But the spirit of the gerrymandering concept is conveyed well enough.

Ask.com has closed 3 months ago

“Jeeves’ spirit endures.”

This goes hard.

While he never married or had children, Jeeves is survived by his brother software butlers Jenkins and Alfred who have asked the public for privacy during this difficult time.

Isseven 4 months ago

Heads up OP: I’m trying to get a pro license but your checkout flow is borked. Probably should fix ASAP before missing out on HN front page traffic.

MacBook Neo 5 months ago

I don't think that was the intent. If anything, 90%+ of these features here feel nice-to-have, and I bet OP agrees (or is neutrally sharing the comp).

I hope, with the velocity unlocked by these tools, that more pure ports will become the norm. Before, migrations could be so costly that “improving” things “while I’m here” helped sell doing the migration at all, especially in business settings. Only to lead to more toil chasing those phantom bugs.

The lone ranger donor route feels severely suboptimal, unless perhaps if the donor is a .001%er pledging a large share of their net worth.

Imagine if this anonymous person worked with a foundation pledging to match $3.5M if said amount was raise via crowdfund. Even if say $1M goes to the campaign and NGO bloat, that’s still way more pipe money.

Pulled from IMDB, Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox voices the consternation perfectly:

Batman: [seeing the wall of monitors for the first time at the Applied Sciences division in Wayne Enterprises] Beautiful, isn't it?

Lucius Fox: Beautiful... unethical... dangerous. You've turned every cellphone in Gotham into a microphone.

Batman: And a high-frequency generator-receiver.

Lucius Fox: You took my sonar concept and applied it to every phone in the city. With half the city feeding you sonar, you can image all of Gotham. This is wrong.

Batman: I've gotta find this man, Lucius.

Lucius Fox: At what cost?

Batman: The database is null-key encrypted. It can only be accessed by one person.

Lucius Fox: This is too much power for one person.

Batman: That's why I gave it to you. Only you can use it.

Lucius Fox: Spying on 30 million people isn't part of my job description.

Excellent series, I've been reading for a few years now!

Q for OP: looking back at your 8 posts, I don't see you ever reflecting on loneliness (or lack thereof) as part of your founder journey. Yet both founder friends and anecdotes always emphasize this as a big weight.

Is it a significant factor for you, compared to your past life at FAANG? Do you you ever think about spending your time differently to optimize for more social fulfillment (vs. fulfillment from building or becoming profitable)?

I didn’t know it was called crosswordese! I wonder what the most common term used is. As a very occasional player, for some reason ARIA, IBIS, and VENI/VIDI/VICI stick out, but I’m sure it’s actually one with an E.

This quote stuck out to me as well, for a slightly different reason.

The “tenacity” referenced here has been, in my opinion, the key ingredient in the secret sauce of a successful career in tech, at least in these past 20 years. Every industry job has its intricacies, but for every engineer who earned their pay with novel work on a new protocol, framework, or paradigm, there were 10 or more providing value by putting the myriad pieces together, muddling through the ever-waxing complexity, and crucially never saying die.

We all saw others weeded out along the way for lacking the tenacity. Think the boot camp dropouts or undergrads who changed majors when first grappling with recursion (or emacs). The sole trait of stubbornness to “keep going” outweighs analytical ability, leetcode prowess, soft skills like corporate political tact, and everything else.

I can’t tell what this means for the job market. Tenacity may not be enough on its own. But it’s the most valuable quality in an employee in my mind, and Claude has it.

Satisfying to see all the payload request and response sizes in bytes not kb.

Q: the display just starts at 0 and increments comment id by 1 every 10 seconds. Has the device caught up to latest? If you power cycle it, do you have to run through all historical comments?

I have several young cousins (gen z) who use TikTok as their Google. Recipes, travel ideas, news, fashion, shopping, how-to videos. While of course a lot of their usage is passive scrolling that trains their algorithm, they're very adept at using search to find the same things I find in my browser.

It's bonkers to me, but I guess my patterns of information lookup have just calcified with age.

Bugs Apple loves 6 months ago

I’ve encountered several of these, but (at least on iOS 26.2), I can’t reproduce the typo one.

Autocorrect Won't Take No For An Answer. You fixed it. It unfixed it. You fixed it again. It unfixed it again.

My experience is after the system makes the first autocorrection, the word is underlined, allowing me to revert to the original spelling. Then subsequent instances of the word aren't autocorrected.

It’s true though that if I leave the context and enter the same unrecognized term elsewhere, it’s the same grind. The only fix for this is to spotlight search for “Text Replacement” settings page to essentially add it to the iPhone’s dictionary. Clunky, but personally only have had to do this twice.

Floor796 7 months ago

Mega gif indeed. Two relevant excerpts found in the about page (it's a gif but not a gif):

Why 796?

The name of the project has a small code: 7, 9 and 6 are the ordinal numbers of the letters in the English alphabet for the word GIF. This project is essentially one big gif, a mega gif, so all the action takes place on the 796th (GIF) floor of the space station :)

How does animation rendering work?

In order to maintain pixel clarity and still have good compression, it was necessary to create own video format. The entire animation is divided into sections, and each section is packed into this special format. The browser then loads the desired section and renders it in a separate thread into the common canvas.

The dandelion metaphor is also employed as cover art on a book I like called "Contagious: Why Things Catch On." by Jonah Berger.

I find it interesting that this article focuses on what communities will help an idea germinate and eventually go viral, vs. Contagious which focuses on qualities of the information itself that make it spreadable. The former is probably more impactful, but both play a role.

The book ends with a mnemonic summarizing what "steps" an idea should follow to be considered contagious:

[S] - Social currency (does sharing the idea make the "spreader" look good/smart/impressive)

[T] - Triggers (topics that come to mind frequently due to an environmental trigger. Case in point: the song Friday by Rebecca Black gets most of its streams on Fridays)

[E] - Emotion (obviously ideas that evoke an emotional response get more attention)

[P] - Public (whether or not info reaches others depends how public-facing the distribution channel is)

[P] - Practical Value (is the idea useful?)

[S] - Stories (if the format of the information follows a narrative, it sticks more with people and is also easier to retell)

To speak nothing of the global audience for these films. I'm guessing most people's first experience seeing these movies was off a VHS or DVD, so the nostalgia factor is only relevant to small percentage of viewers, and only a small percentage of that percentage notices.