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heckanoobs

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I have more nuanced takes on lodash too but I'm putting them in another reply to separate them from the big picture stuff I already mentioned.

Lodash also differs from the standard lib's implementation, notably it's too permissive. Take this example:

const uhoh = null

_.forEach(uhoh, () => {})

uhoh.forEach(() => {})

lodash's forEach has no problem running on a falsey value (it gives you back the value) whereas standard lib leads you to a TypeError.

Two thoughts here. The standard lib forces the programmer to think more about types, which is a good thing. Second is that lodash's more loosey goosey approach acts as vendor lock-in. In two years, when there's 60 lines and 3 files of separation btwn uhoh's assignment and the _.forEach invocation, you won't know whether it's expected to be null or not. So you won't know if you should replace the code with

uhoh.forEach(...)

or

(uhoh || []).forEach(...)

Lodash has two values, a bunch of utility functions and it works cross browser. The most common utility functions are now standard issue in es6+. And a transpilation build process is a superior way of dealing with cross browser incompatibilities. Babel + browserlist + caniuse all work seamlessly to ensure you only have the polyfills and browser support you need, vs the one-size-fits-all approach of lodash.

There's probably a handful of functions in lodash that are still useful but why take on the security risk and maintenance of another package dependency if you can just copy a couple ten-liners into your own utils folder? It's not like the world is going to come up with a more performant debounce anytime soon.

I guess lodash also relies on jquery which is in the same boat. es6+ has stolen a lot of its thunder and target-aware transpilation is a better approach to cross browser support

I was on all the social media but took the plunge and deleted them all.

Some things I visited to blow time like imgur have infinite scroll in their apps but are paginated on their mobile site, so I just visit the mobile site and stop after one page. I had disabled infinite scroll in RES at first but eventually left Reddit altogether.

I no longer browse app stores, Netflix, hulu, etc. I already know what I want to watch and search for it directly.

Stopped using any feature with infinite scroll implemented. It's the common thread between social media feeds, app store lists, streaming services, etc. For sites like HN I stop after the first page.

I was bored at first but then I started filling my time with more productive hobbies, which was the point. Infinite content providers are designed to steal all your time.

It's crazy how little I use the internet now. I never realized what it had become until I put some restrictions in place that ended up blocking out like 90% of the web.

I like to keep evergreen lists for everything too, I'm curious what software you're using? I've shoehorned lists into evernote and trello before but ultimately their uis are about doing something else

Just like SF has microclimates for weather it also has them for compartmentalizing the city's various problems. Fidi and east cut (or whatever realtors are calling it now) don't have feces, needle, and tent problems. It does have scooter litter problems. The city population swells 2x every work day and the majority of those workers interact with scooters parked haphazardly.

If it's one thing entitled early adopters and east bay commuters have in common, it's that they DGAF about the sense of community in SF. So they park these things in the most selfish ways possible. I swear some of them have to be doing it on purpose. I've seen them blocking turn styles at embarcadero station before.

I had a friend visiting from out of state and usually the first criticism of SF I hear is something about homelessness as we pass through the 'loin. But this time we were by embarcadero and it was "did a scooter gang of children all get raptured at once?"

The article really undersells criticism #2 (they block sidewalks). In their short time in SF I saw scooters laying down in the middle of sidewalks, blocking bus stop curbs, left in tight construction corridors, left in front of building entrances and leaned in front of muni turnstiles.

People also take a wide berth around the scooters so they congest sidewalks even if leaned to one side.

If they come back I hope they do it by replacing the stupid bike docking stations with scooter docking stations. Scooters are a better fit for that model. Pay homeless ppl to return them to the docks and solve two SF problems at once

I think you can get by with adding timestamp support to a single feature flag. So the code has IS_PREMIUM everywhere but when you add a new use of it you also manually record the time. Since you know the expiration time of their license you can always determine what features are unlocked based on that.

Then you just develop the app as any other demo-with-upsell app. Users even continue to get bug fixes and other updates after they let the license lapse.

In cases where features are removed, combined, refactored, you'll have to be judicious about what timestamp you apply to the refactor. I would resolve in the customer's favor personally.

Edit: Thinking on this more you might also want a rule like feature flags are only implemented at the view layer. That way your biz logic never gets tripped up on flag checks as features cross paths under the sheets. So its does require a fair amount of code discipline to pull this off

Not an external resource but I've identified that there are thought tools I continually apply in my own thinking to gain new perspective. I started writing them down and organizing them which has immediately benefited me and maybe one day I'll have distilled them clearly enough to share with others. Kind of like a toolbox for the mind.

Anyway, my advice is write down your own thoughts and discoveries. You'd be surprised how much content there is when you start collecting it all in one place and it will help you be more critical of your inner workings

They all start with the idea of monetizing an underused resource (cars, houses, curbsides) with a novel business model whose goal is to dance around existing laws.

I don't know of a word that captures what feels like an arbitrage-ish assault on our law books. Without knowing that word I can only suggest something too generalized like organized crime economy

I used Haxe and NME years ago to build an Ouya (RIP) game. I was coming from actionscript and it was a delightful language. Glad to see it's still evolving. That game project was a blur of haxe, java, and c++ due to Ouya's infancy and haxe could handle it all. I was impressed

You say you've shown no hate yet you reply to my support of this acquisition with a comment that quickly dismisses my enthusiasm as misplaced hype.

Now you provide advice when I didn't ask you for any. I don't know you. You don't know me and you certainly don't know what will "serve me better" as readily as I don't know that Microsoft will fix all my problems.

If you've found stability in your world view then good for you, it takes all kinds. Skeptics and optimists and more. Spend less time putting others down and more time melting in the pot.

We can assume Microsoft's motivation is money, they have a long history of selling professional solutions to development teams, I'm a developer with a team on GitHub in need of solutions, and I have money. It's Microsoft's to lose.

I think you're mistaking your blind hate for my blind hype

I'm excited by this. I feel trapped between Google who will give everything away in exchange for spying on me, and Apple who will respect my privacy but shake me upside down with the most ridiculous vendor lock-in tactics. I'm glad someone as powerful as Microsoft can play the underdog role and provide a viable third alternative.

Windows laptops that run Linux well enough for development. VS Code. I now develop on my PC at home using the same workflows that I use on my fancy pants work MacBook.

I have a lot of faith in this acquisition. My software team is growing fast and we have so many little problems that feel like they should be solved at the GitHub layer but the solutions aren't there. Microsoft will fix that.

Watched about an hour so far and this is fabulous. The talks very clearly outline the bounds of the problem space (known and unknown) and then start going region to region. The goal is to perceive the texture of the knowledge domain. This is my favorite way to learn about a subject.

Looks like it's gonna be a nerdy Saturday night binge watching these. Too bad there isn't a Netflix for this kind of stuff

Can you try to formulate those values?

This is an issue I see with effective altruism and other (new atheism, veganism) hyper-rational movements. It's not enough to establish a viable alternative; they also have to exterminate every other line of thinking, in the pursuit of the almighty rationalization.

There's a lot of charities out there and I think it's enough if EA creates a marketing channel for some of them to have a unique advantage. "No one paid attention to us until we showed we save the most lives per dollar". If everyone agreed donating was entirely about maximizing lives/dollar then maybe this truly is the most important stat. But people donate for scads of less-than-rational but still well-meaning reasons.

It works against EA's (new atheism's, veganism's) best interests to draw a line in the sand and alienate everyone else. To me this feels as rational a conclusion as you can get, which makes it funny to me that the people particularly taken up by hyper-rationalism behave the way they do.

I've made reddit more enjoyable in the past by using plugins that auto collapse comments past depth 1 or 2. On avg, conversation devolves past that point.

I've since quit Reddit but comments here have convinced me to take a second look. I think this time around I will put even more filters in place, like no subreddits with over 10k subs, and some way to hide everyone's karma count including my own.

I guess what I'm trying to say is maybe you and I don't need a pay wall to filter, we just need an opinionated browser plugin (or easy way to share settings in RES)

I think the climate has a big role in this. In NYC you see the same homeless ppl for about a year, then the hard winter weather hits and they (hopefully) head somewhere warmer. NYC citizens don't have these difficult conversations that SF citizens have looming over them, because the climate conveniently and quietly wipes the slate every year. SF on the other hand can be a forever destination with outdoor livable weather year round.

This doesn't explain why IRC can't compete with Slack or the other corporate messaging services.

Slack was a side project by a failing game company. Its growth was largely organic.

I think the original premise is right that user experience is more important than ethics or philosophy or whatever the heck it is we're talking about when federations come up

SF already has those things.

The bathrooms are expensive because they need technology that prevents ppl from hanging out in them, so they automatically lock down and power wash the inside after every use.

The sidewalk cleaning is also expensive, it costs the city millions per year to power wash the civic center sidewalks every morning. And that's just a fraction of the area.

These expensive things don't make the city better they just improve the quality of life for the homeless population, which can now boom until the quality is right back where it started. Would you then add even more bathrooms and street cleaners in response or realize that cleaning the mess isn't going to solve this problem?

I still whiteboard my programming question when giving interviews, can someone summarize the case against whiteboards?

I'm just looking for the candidate's thought process and some pseudocode. I could do the same thing in an empty text file but the substance of the interview wouldn't change.

My feeling right now is that being anti whiteboard is focusing on trivialities like complaining that the office style guide uses Allman vs K&R bracketing or something. But I'm open to having my mind changed if there's something more to it.

It sounds like you live for the future but don't have any vision of what that future is or know why you are trading your time now for time later.

You could try living in the present more. Alan Watts' The Book is a good way to explore that perspective shift, if you enjoy reading philosophy.

If not, try questioning your assumptions and getting out of your comfort zone a bit. The prison exists because we forget that we made the walls and the bars.

I've heard the movie plot twins phenomenon is because multiple studios will want a script and start assembling a team around it but one will outbid the other for the rights to the script. The losing studio will then pay a ghostwriter to create a similar script so they can continue with their plans.

Another theory is a lower budget production produces a similar movie to kind of 'draft' the marketing success of the main movie. These are called mockbusters

I imagined myself on a forum like the old days, freely typing my thoughts into the void. First thing that came to mind was who owns this content? Second thing was can I get a bigger audience posting it somewhere else?

The internet's broken and it broke me with it

I'm surprised at how well Google's awful little autodialer has been received. None of us like when we call a number and are handled by an automated script on the other end. But we are immediately okay with deploying an automated script which does our bidding?

You need a Google Glass-level lack of social accuity to think siccing autodialers on barbers is okay

You should separate trendy goal-oriented mindfulness from the thousands year old concept so you aren't throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

A mindfulness consultant forced onto a workforce sounds about as effective as forcing all your employees to run five miles every week. But that doesn't mean that running is bad for you.