HN user
https://github.com/ivanmaeder
I use the same setting but with the "three finger drag" option.
It's similar but doesn't need a click to start the drag and another to end it. You just grab things with three fingers and move them; lift when done.
It also lets you select multiple whole words with the mouse: single tap quickly followed by holding three fingers and dragging.
Great question, I will come back to see what ideas people have. Thanks for the Turing book suggestion too.
I have read lots of non-fiction books about programmers and engineers that have been very inspiring, they're just not technical: "Masters of Doom", "Blood, Sweat, and Pixels", "Coders at Work", "The Idea Factory", "The Soul of a New Machine", "Dealers of Lightning"...
The bot's recommendations are good, although maybe not inspiring.
"Programming Pearls" might be an exception—there are some great real-life stories and problems to think through in that.
Maybe also "The Art of Computer Programming" but I can't speak from experience (I'm not ready to tackle that one yet).
This might be relevant, it depends on the kind of project you’re building:
For speed I'd look at Ruby on Rails.
The way it's been explained to me, Rails packages (gems) are like prefab bathrooms and kitchens. Compared to e.g., Node.js packages which provide things like "sink" and "tap" and "door handle."
E.g., in Rails there's a popular auth package that includes password reset and recovery functionality:
https://github.com/heartcombo/devise
Always a pain to build, and not something these popular Node.js packages save you from doing over and over again:
EDIT: It sounds like I'm picking on those packages. I don't mean to, just want to highlight the difference in philosophy between the Node.js and Rails approaches.
Been working on a tool for creators that care about sustainability. It measures a website's carbon emissions and automatically removes them.
The tricky and interesting bit is figuring out actual emissions (vs applying a rule that 1 visit == x grams of CO2). Work in progress:
I built a very similar product 10 years ago and even back then we heard feedback like this. And I believe the situation may be more pronounced today.
There seem to be markets (or large enough organizations?) where coding job ads get a tonne of applicants, many of them inexperienced, and so automation is a good fit. But not when things are tipped the other way.
Our bet was for real-world tests too but it wasn't enough. A few things we missed that might help…
- Candidates don't want to be treated like cattle
- For many companies a good interview platform will be more beneficial than automation
- Companies say they care about the experience candidates receive, they'll say they're rigorous and try to be as objective as possible with the way they collate information and make decisions, they'll talk about how high their standards are, etc etc. Be weary
- There may be more gains to be made outside of the tech space
- The problem most companies complained about and is probably still the hardest: going out and finding people
I like the way you've solved the "real-world challenge" problem.
Good luck and all the best!
Thanks! Appreciate it :)
Hi HN,
My friend Ricardo and I feel very strongly about climate change, so we've built a service that makes websites carbon neutral. To get an idea of the impact of the internet on climate change, if the internet were a country, it would be the 7th most polluting country [1]. If unchecked, one prediction puts the internet at 14% of global greenhouse gas emissions by 2040 [2]. Our service looks like this:
- You add a script tag to your site
- The script calculates the electricity used
- The greenhouse gas emissions are removed through carbon removal technology
Also work in progress is a way to provide insights to help reduce your website's emissions.
Obviously the web is only one part of the internet emissions equation (the other parts being streaming, large file transfers, computationally-intensive applications, etc), but it's a massively visible part which is what we think can make this worthwhile.
We believe people who work online—developers, content creators, publishers, etc—have a huge influence, and a message like "This website is carbon neutral" could have a knock-on effect and really help push things in the right direction.
In terms of carbon removal providers, we're using services vetted by Stripe and Microsoft. We rely on them because the space is complex and they have very high standards.
Another benefit is that they back novel solutions that have a while go until the costs are affordable enough for global adoption. This is important because the more support these solutions have, the more likely their costs will come down and become easier to scale.
We'd love to hear your thoughts. If you have any questions, we're both around.
[1] https://www.sustainablewebmanifesto.com/
[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322205565_Assessing...
These Truths (Jill Lepore)
Thanks for sharing the article. He has a nice way of framing things:
My conclusion: Management is the most noble of professions if it’s practiced well. No other occupation offers as many ways to help others learn and grow, take responsibility and be recognized for achievement, and contribute to the success of a team.
I'd be very interested in actual data that compares virtuous and unvirtuous cultures, out of curiosity of course!
Here are some very small tools I made for things I do over and over again…
A button to create new files inside macOS Finder (`touch` without the terminal).
https://github.com/ivanmaeder/finder-touch/
(⌘ + Shift + N creates new folders by the way.)
This I just published now, I use it multiple times a day: an iOS shortcut for emailing myself things.
https://redchamp.net/blog/email-me
A command-line script for bulk-renaming files (it lets you edit file/dir names inside a text editor).
Here's a version of a piece in just intonation—
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0i68ifRkitA
—and "modern" equal temperament:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEbi-7tPaqo
As much as people describe just intonation as pure, etc, at least in this example it just sounds wrong to me.
As far as I understand, just intonation requires instruments to be tuned differently for different keys and stops "working" if a piece strays from the key (which music from Bach's time will often do).
Equal temperament is our workaround for the physics which doesn't quite match the 12-tone system.
On the subject of sustainability, I'd always heard the story of eating local, presumably to avoid the environmental impact of transporting food over long distances.
It seems that that's insignificant compared to the type of food we eat:
https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food#whe...
Shipping one kilogram of avocados from Mexico to the United Kingdom would generate 0.21kg CO2eq in transport emissions. This is only around 8% of avocados’ total footprint. Even when shipped at great distances, its emissions are much less than locally-produced animal products.
100 Years of Solitude?
And repetitive!
https://www.chenalexander.com/Bach
It's not for everyone and that's fine. I have some suggestions to try though.
BWV 999
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0g4FrGcRAIs
Goldberg Variations #13
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5-7QENoXoA
Erbarme dich, mein Gott
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zry9dpM1_n4
Cello Suite #6 Sarabande
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzb8aEW_Rdc
I'm going to go a little rogue with the Chaconne and suggest an arrangement ...
Apple should tone down the way they promote their products.
They can't keep pretending to be aligned with the environment and then put on a big show every year for products that provide tiny incremental benefits. I'm thinking mostly of the iPhone, but even things like M1: yes it's a step forward but that doesn't mean I *need* one right now.
For the record, I'm using a 2012 MacBook Air (8GB) for everything. The fans will spin up sometimes when browsing, or when Docker becomes uncontrollable, but it does everything I ask and it doesn't feel at all slow.
I want to believe that the work started by Ivan Sutherland, Douglas Englebart, Alan Kay, etc still has a long way to go.
On the other hand,
1. It feels like they addressed most of the low-hanging fruit
2. A lot of what was done by these people was build user interfaces. Does that qualify as thinking tools? Sure, the tools give us the ability to e.g., build crazy-looking buildings, but is that all there is?
The idea of inventing Arabic numerals in a world that uses Roman numerals is very powerful and transformative. But the bicycle-for-the-mind metaphor which we like to talk about in relation to graphical user interfaces is more augmentative (I can go further) than transformative (I can instantly teleport to another dimension).
3. Is it also possible we don't recognise modern advances because they're more gradual and diffuse? There are no PARCs and Bell Labs anymore because there are many PARCs and Bell Labs. Recent examples: how computing is helping with drug discovery, protein folding—these should count for something.
Having said all that, I have one big hope (dream?) for computing in the political space that involves complete transparency for democracies and a lot more citizen involvement. I imagine something like that evolving over a long period of time, as people adapt and begin to think differently. In my head, computing provides the vision of how things could be, but doesn’t necessarily lead the way with implementation.
This may be old, but I remember often looking for a function and having to paginate through the results to get to the definition.
So having the function/method/var/etc definition(s) at the top of the results.
Just saw this—the contract has been posted here:
A redacted version of the EU-AstraZeneca contract has been made public since the article was written:
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-europe...
It's not clear to me but it seems that the EU wants AstraZeneca to use some additional factories in the UK that they're not currently using (?).
I stayed at Jim Haynes’s place in Paris a few years ago—it was listed on Airbnb and seemed like an obvious choice.
He was welcoming and friendly but I didn’t spend enough time with him to properly connect.
Our world needs more people like this.
I think context switching is difficult to quantify, and difficult to talk about in a general sense.
* I'm sure some people are better at it than others
* Some work is easier to switch to and from
* Some work demands it—e.g., people in supporting roles that will put up with constant interruptions in order to help others
Throw into the mix that some people are better than others at deluding themselves about their abilities to context switch (or handle distractions in general), or who simply struggle focusing on a single task for hours at a time.
Personally, I don't find meetings and random conversations too bad. But if I have to completely unload a complicated task from memory and replace it with something else, coming back to the original task can often feel like starting from scratch.
Other things to think about:
* Figure 2 here—
http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S...
—from a study showing how "time spent on value-added tasks" drops if working on 3 or more parallel projects
* For other reasons (e.g., for faster feedback cycles, reducing overhead), batching isn't always a good idea. Here's a fun video showing that contrary to intuition, batching isn't always faster:
On the subject of system performance on macOS… does anyone know of a decent app/tool for limiting CPU on different processes or programs?
This might be less relevant on newer hardware, but I'm interested in limiting certain apps (e.g., Dropbox, OS tools) from heating up the computer and making the fans go crazy.
Using my phone I go through these thoughts almost daily—I've read all the news, caught up on email/messages, then: why can't I do more with this thing?
To add to some of the already good comments:
* Writing and thinking. The kind that starts in one place and takes you somewhere more interesting. E.g., "Think up 5 different ways a user might achieve X."
* Other adjacent/admin tasks that don't require a computer. E.g., cleaning out Trello
* Studying. I've used YouTube and a Flashcards app
OPTION + CMD + V to cut and paste files (found this today here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24080378)
Hold down OPTION to vertically select text (works in the terminal at least)
CMD + SHIFT + . in Finder to show/hide hidden files
CMD + CTRL + D on a selected word to open the dictionary
I'll sometimes use the `say` command to let me know when a long-running command on the terminal finishes (e.g., `say Done`)
Thanks for posting this. I had no idea files could be moved without the mouse!
Option-Command-V: Move: Move the files in the Clipboard from their original location to the current location.Actually I just found this:
Every device I've come across has it set up so that the plastic part should be inserted closest to the floor (horizontal plugs), or closest to the centre of gravity of the device (vertical plugs).
I don't know if this is specced—otherwise it's very interesting that all the manufacturers agreed to this kind of arrangement.
This is cool! Thanks for this, I had no idea it existed. It looks like the functionality is almost identical. Even the command names are similar…