gsej

https://archive.ph/fZIB8

Also, the book these are actually all named after, The Varieties of Religious Experience, by William James.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Varieties_of_Religious_Exp...

I lost a little faith when I saw the article referred to Neanderthals as "our ancestors"...

Intrigued by the throwaway comment that we know handedness is genetically determined. Is that true? I was under the impression it was a developmental issue (identical twins with opposite orientation being one piece of evidence here).

I've developed an app for my own use (which doesn't look anywhere near as good visually!).

My biggest pain points were cleaning the account data, to make it suitable for import, and getting the appropriate prices so I can see the value of the accounts at any point.

My financial institution has two sets of downloadable CSV files - one for cash movements, one for stock transactions. They don't include stock symbols, just a "description" which occasionally changes. I'd suggest a plugin system where uploaded statements can be transformed first (depending on where they are from) into the common format your app imports. This would provide a useful point where people could contribute to the app.

Pricing is something I found hard too - I also use yahoo for current prices, along with a couple of other sources. Historical price ranges can be very hard to come by, at least for free and in easily accessible forms.

This is just premixed and shaped dough brought into stores and then cooked there surely. There's no guy at the back of your co-op carefully nurturing his bread-mother.

I'm in the UK and would prefer to buy non-Chorleywood bread, but my local corner shops only sell what looks like versions of the regular supermarket stuff, and the only genuinely artisan bakery is a distance away. Our local (medium sized) supermarket has the "bakery" section of unwrapped and traditional looking bread - but they are "baked in store", and I've no idea of the process that's used to produce the incoming dough. I suspect no real baker is involved.

I use a home video appliance called camect which is accessed through a web interface which explicitly only works in chromium browsers. Oddly, I often find that the bbc news page doesn't load images on the first attempt in Firefox, but always does in Chrome.

Yes they do, and people would ask for their change if they didn't. I don't know why.

I confess, I read the guardian website regularly, click through the annoying links which tell me I should really donate. I also buy the newspaper, so I think I've already paid. Never heard of gu.com though. Guardian UK I guess?

There are some odd things here. How can someone be a "scam prevention expert" and not be aware that caller id can be spoofed, and therefore should never be trusted for anything important? How can someone be a "scam prevention expert" and not know (even if you only "skim" the email) that you don't read out 2FA authentication codes to someone who calls you and asks you for them? These are surely the two most basic methods used to scam people...

Off by one error. Not uncommon.

I used to pull the code and run it for each PR, as I believed it just wasn't possible to read code adequately. Then I worked with one guy who clearly could read code very well - he found quite subtle issues just by reading it, and having seen it was possible, I put in the effort and learned to do it too. So in my case, my reason for always pulling and running the code was, as you suggest, that I simply wasn't very good at reading code. I still won't hesitate to pull and run code if I need to, but I'm pretty suspicious of code I can't read these days, and usually request it be made clearer.

I've also gone for fastmail. I looked at tutanota, but they don't have import of external mails. The pricing plans for protonmail were strange. Not enough storage or custom domains on the plus and personal plans and I recall you couldn't buy more (might be wrong about that - but it wasn't revealed until I created an account ), They have a very expensive "visionary" plan but it's limited to 6 users.

With fastmail you can have multiple domains, and your users can have different payment plans. Their import from gmail was very quick with no hitches.

In the UK some people still use them. My elderly parents still occasionally send them to us. We don't take them to a bank or ATM though - bank apps will accept a photo of one and make the transfer instantly.

git - compared with previous source control systems.

I've always been curious about the pit of venomous snakes. We only have one venomous snake in the UK - the common adder. It's bite is nasty, but very rarely fatal. I wonder if the story is made up, based on foreign tales of poisonous snakes, or perhaps they used imported snakes.

Hmmm. Once Fred is solely responsible for all of the good engineering practises, we should probably rename him Brent (http://allengeer.com/how-to-handle-brent-in-the-phoenix-proj...)

Absolutely. This has been discussed here quite a bit (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=120614530). In real life it's often visible when you have methods that take one or more flags to tell them how to behave. Fixing involves duplicating the method - one copy for calls where the flag is true, one for where it is false. Then simplifying, then repeating. The code that falls out at the end is often dramatically simpler than what was there before. It makes me wonder about some of these programming aphorisms - they only seem to work if you are already experienced enough to know to take them with a pinch of salt.

I don't think I've ever seen this combination of "very much cares about code quality" and "slow coder". Most of the clean code fanatics I've seen (and I include myself), are also very quick to deliver features - whereas developers who simply try to complete the feature in the shortest possible time, usually end up taking longer, because their quickly written code is buggy, then hard to read, and so hard to debug and fix.

It's not usually a choice between, leaving the code as it is (and just adding a bit of functionality), or refactoring to make it better. It's usually a choice between making it worse, or making it better. So the developers who aren't Fred, are making things worse. I try to make refactoring and keeping the code clean part of every team members' job description. It's often hard to get the business to schedule time for this sort of thing, so it should just get built into the time for each task. As for automating tasks which could be automated - seriously, if you have developers who are not doing this, then they are the problem, not Fred.

I've been using kubuntu for a while and while I like it a lot, it seems very "chatty" to me - way too many notifications which I have to disable one at a time. I only discovered the snap situation when Chromium started prompting before it would open files, and I couldn't find a way to disable it. In the end I installed Chrome, but I am looking around for an alternative distro.

Read "the long and short of it" by John Kay which deals with a lot of the basics around investing for yourself. It's a truly useful book, and I've given quite a few copies of it to people. It is quite UK-centric, but I think the central lessons could be applied in other jurisdictions.