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jquast

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I stand by my metaphor. It’s a command-line interface, a picture of text is only reducing its accessibility.

To complain about the visually impaired not doing enough to make the content more accessible for the visually gifted. I’m just too upset to respond to this kind of discussion. This is my last HN discussion, you’re right, blind people should take screenshots of their programs, enjoy your contrarian community

Donkey code 3 years ago

Hard disagree.

Please everyone name it what it is, and don’t try to be coy or clever. Call it the metrics database, the example.com web service, the marketing tool, the data acquisition service, etc.

I really hate that most private code bases are named “Steve” or similar, in a sea of micro services with Stacey and Stans and then there’s Steve 2.0 projects, and the only thing they bothered to document in the readme is the origin story and maybe a cute meme picture to go with it. And all of those people are gone and I’m a new employee and it’s not funny anymore.

Everybody please just be serious, name it what it is, and document private business code like a professional. You’re getting paid so please take your job seriously.

https://investor.vanguard.com/investor-resources-education/a...

I’m very certain that even in the crazy case you have outlined, SIPC insurance would cover up to a half million. Some brokers provide additional insurance beyond the regulatory requirements.

I think everyone recently learned about FDIC because of SVB etc., but I think it’s important that people are also aware of SIPC, and especially to consider that there is no crypto currency exchange that offers any such insurance of any kind, https://www.forbes.com/advisor/investing/cryptocurrency/cryp...

I don't chose to be spied on by any government! But if I could chose only one, it would be an opposing country like China or Russia.

American businesses are forced to share our private data witn three letter agencies. Conversely, I can't imagine any leverage, money or lawful, that would cause a Chinese citizen living in China, with families in China, to be so stupid as to collaborate with the US government in any way, unless they wish for their families to be sent to labor camps.

My data is safer with the Chinese. I don't like it, but that's where we stand with our privacy.

This will certainly be used by corporations to whitewash their bad histories.

IBM’s relationship with the Nazi Holocaust was difficult to find last week. the Wikipedia article, the book, and articles were all pushed further down to the bottom of google search because of the “News” that IBM pulled out of X advertising for anti-Semitic remarks.

Although the “news” is now older and not pushing down the results as far as it was last week. There will be perpetually generated “news”, books, and blogs that whitewashes away bad histories.

AI-generated PR campaigns that never, ever, stop.

Windows Key 3 years ago

It is easier to locate keys when given hints like an empty space on the board, it’s much easier to find “f4” next to a gap rather than counting four keys from the left

I would have disagreed about supporting 80286 PC-DOS and Apple ][ computers all the way to the year 2000

but supporting 2+Ghz 64-bit x86’s in 2023 isn’t really asking a lot.. and android phones in particular need to be prosecuted criminally for their ocean garbage

Some kinds of mushrooms take up lead And other toxic materials.

I only found this out because edible mushrooms grew in my yard, but they are warned in literature that they may contain heavy metals, as my well water contains 3ppb lead I wasn’t confident to eat them.

I also found this article for you, https://www.yesmagazine.org/environment/2019/03/05/mushrooms...

I grow my own turmeric and ginger with reverse osmosis filtered water indoors, perfectly lead free, and it tastes amazing when it’s fresh

One of the first things I saw Linux do was utilize two mouses with two separate mouse pointers (serial and ps2 at the time), I was a young teenager and it blew my mind and I was installing Linux at home by the end of the month.

You should especially consider the role of a historian or the person who wishes to set out to correct facts and figures that are in error in Wikipedia, this is precisely what they need to correct it, to be able to trace the lineage of the error and correct the associated facts and figures like an excel sheet would, it’s very important especially with LLM’s that can’t cite their sources and google having gone to shit to find them, errors are quickly propagated across the web like some kind of crypto mixer, it becomes difficult to verify

A non-historian mathematician does a good job explaining the issue of census data errors, https://m.youtube.com/watch?si=ySApTldsYVf3jv0W&t=1630&v=GVh...

We'd still be locked out of the account if I didn't have a friend's husband working at Google with access to their internal support.

Working exactly as designed, requiring you to be rich and powerful enough to have the influence necessary to get the help you need.

Google employs just the right amount of support to ensure that they do not have to interface with the poor.

I do like to call the large amount of TODO items i find in business codebases as “TO DIDNT”, always some comments about what we know should have be done, but some alternative or smaller solution was done instead.

Sometimes TODO comments describe a strict deadline, they read almost like apology letters!

It seems to be specific integration with a few specific Microsoft applications so far..

LLM might be the end of complex GUIs.

CLI and symbolic languages are so much easier for an LLM to work with so far, stdout and stdin, main and argv, these are things and LLM can compliment.

Microsoft may learn just how cantankerous their UI/UX and ever-changing GUI stacks have been to users and developers when they find out their best AI can’t even use it properly!

They did have nutrition labels, but they were voluntary, so you maybe did see "nutrition facts" of some kind, but they could have had any appearance or title and could make any claim deemed "truthful".

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK209859/

Every manufacturer should be encouraged to provide truthful nutritional information about his products to enable consumers to follow recommended dietary regimens. (WHC, 1970)

Food manufacturers were eager to respond to the consumer interest and did so in a variety of ways, often through the use of an assortment of new, undefined claims on product labels that attempted to state or imply something about the special value of the food, such as “extremely low in saturated fat,”

This article contains an image of a 1987 bran flakes label, which shows calories, proteins, fat, cholesterol, vitamin content, ingredients etc., mostly the same content but without the styling of Mr. Belser's nutritional facts label https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/02/25/282628088/nu...

I think it’s because git provides atomicy, requires it, requires you to make decisions on merge conflicts, etc while cloud sync makes invisible arbitrary decision of which file is newer, if there is a “conflict” like the same filename but different hashes and sizes, it will happily “clobber” your git database records by arbitrarily choosing which file is “better”

Ditch That Else 3 years ago

I was frustrated with a memory leak in someone else’s code of a dozen or more if-if-if-if-else-else-else statements like the second example, it was probably 400 or more columns wide. It was my first real job and I began to doubt my abilities, I couldn’t follow the logic.

I refactored it all as the author suggests, out of desperation to better understand it in a debugger if more code could fit on a page. To my astonishment the memory leak disappeared, so it has always since been a habit, sometimes I still rewrite code this way just to better understand it, I think it looks better.