HN user

jwhiles

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johnwhiles.com 9mo ago

Why and how I rewrote these Obsidian plugins

jwhiles
3pts1
johnwhiles.com 1y ago

AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why

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johnwhiles.com 2y ago

My mum couldn't use WhatsApp because her font size is too large

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johnwhiles.com 2y ago

How to Make Cloudflare Properly Cache a Remix Site

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johnwhiles.com 2y ago

The Loneliness of the Mid-Level Vimmer

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johnwhiles.com 2y ago

A software epiphany

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johnwhiles.com 2y ago

On Doing Maintenance / Cataloguing Your Work

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johnwhiles.com 2y ago

Some notes on making my new micro SaaS product with Remix

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johnwhiles.com 2y ago

I made a Quotebacks plugin for Marked.js

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johnwhiles.com 3y ago

Golden Age of Consumer Software

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johnwhiles.com 3y ago

Show HN: A browser version of the 'ReAct' pattern for working with LLMs

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johnwhiles.com 3y ago

Check out uBlock origins element picker

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johnwhiles.com 3y ago

Fixing a Memory Leak in a Ruby SideKiq Job

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johnwhiles.com 3y ago

Rating the Ramen I ate in Japan

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johnwhiles.com 3y ago

I've rebuilt this website too many times. I just did it again

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johnwhiles.com 3y ago

Setting up my new computer, Neovim configs, and Spotify in the terminal

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www.johnwhiles.com 4y ago

Is MadLAD Sentient? – An Interview

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www.johnwhiles.com 4y ago

Shaving is an example of how consumer products extract more money

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www.johnwhiles.com 4y ago

Power and Influence and Networking

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www.johnwhiles.com 4y ago

Things I sort of believe about making music

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www.johnwhiles.com 4y ago

Don't try to moderate your behaviour

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www.johnwhiles.com 4y ago

Big on Hacker News

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www.johnwhiles.com 4y ago

Maybe you should do less 'work'

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www.johnwhiles.com 4y ago

Linking into LinkedIn

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www.johnwhiles.com 4y ago

YikesScript

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Apple M5 chip 9 months ago

These obviously are’t planned obsolescence though.

Flexgate is a manufacturing error, that they handled in a consumer hostile way

Batterygate, was an arguably misguided way to support outdated models - prioritising one goal (battery life) over another (speed)

The iPod thing I’ll admit I know nothing about.

It sounds like, for you, planned obsolescence is defined as any instance where a product isn’t manufactured perfectly or degardes over time, regardless of whether it was planned. For me, planned obsolescence should contain at least a hint of planning.

Your interpretation of my comment, though I guess intended as a joke, can only really mean two things:

1. You are unaware of DHH’s more recent favoured topics 2. You don’t think there is a problem with DHH’s opinions

Either is fine, I don’t really care.

The issue for me is that Cloudflare’s PR team obviously are aware what DHH writes about. And they’re sponsoring his project anyway. Cloudflare knows that this is repellant to a lot of people, that some of us will begin removing them from our stacks in response. But they don’t care, because they think it’s more valuable to cosy up to a bunch of mid life crises who’ve spent too much time on twitter.

Thanks for the response, and apologies for misrepresenting your results somewhat! I'm probably not going to change the title since I am at heart and polemicist and a sloppy thinker, but I'll update the article to call out this misrepresentation.

That said, I think that what I wrote more or less encompasses three of the factors you call out as being likely to contribute: "High developer familiarity with reposito- ries", "Large and complex repositories", and "Implicit repository context".

I thought more about experimenting on myself, and while I hope to do it - I think it will be very hard to create a controlled enviornment whilst also responding to the demands the job puts on me. I also don't have the luxury of a list of well scoped tasks that could feasibly be completed in a few hours.

In case anyone isn't familiar with remix, bloomingkales seemingly has no familiarity with the framework. Obviously it's not been created as a conspiracy to sell training courses. The idea is ludicrous.

It's quite a nice framework. It's easy to learn, straightforward, the people in their discord are very helpful. It has the backing of a large company (shopify) who are using it extensively.

It is, I'll say again, obviously not a conspiracy to sell training courses.

The title made me think this was about a 'negative 40B pivot', when it actually means an 'approximately 40B pivot'.

Does hacker news not support Tildes or what?

I do think this is a cool product, but I would be very hesitant to buy a clock that relies on the internet, and on an API that might die at some point.

The only time I had to work with C# it was a non .Net Core project, and I had to run the editor in a virtual windows machine running on a Macbook. It was a vaguely traumatic experience.

Hey!

I usually find it very hard to remain deeply engaged with a podcast. I'll be focused for a few minutes, then my focus will shift and only later will I realise that I've been passively listening - absorbing it as a form of ambience but not properly engaging with what's being said. I think this is probably true for most listeners, especially because podcasts are often used as a soundtrack for doing some other task.

When we are not fully engaged with audio I think just go along with whatever's being said. We ignore logical leaps, and then pick up the thread later. But we do, I think, remain aware of the presenter's affect towards whatever topic is being discussed.

So a lot of the time I think when we listen to a podcast all we are really taking away is “what the topic was” and a sense of whether that's a thing we should feel positive or negative about. We don't critically engage with what's being said and whether the conclusions being reached are valid.

That's a lot of waffling, but the point that I'm really trying to get to is that podcasts seem to be more a medium for transmitting vibes than for transmitting complex thought.

This would be fine if podcasts were all entertainment, but when a lot of them are about world affairs, or psychology, or whatever, then I think it leads to people listening to podcasts believing they are educating themselves but actually just absorbing memes (in the mgs2 sense) from the presenters.

So mostly I think that podcasts are just a way for people to start believing things without understanding why they believe them. The more “Produced” a podcast is, the worse this effect probably is. And people listen to them ALL THE TIME. There's probably never been a better medium for spreading disinformation. lol

ANYWAY

I really liked your podcast, and it does some things that I think alleviate the issues I have.

* It's complex enough that if I become disengaged I can't pick up the thread, so I end up just pausing / rewinding. * It's a conversation, and you as hosts don't agree a lot the time. You do some of the work of critical thinking for the listener. * The editing is very funny.

I originally gave your podcast the time of day because I was considering going to a future of coding meetup in London, and wanted to know what the vibe would be. The meetup sold out while I was listening :)

“ The process is self-reinforcing; the more degraded it becomes, the harder it is to develop a useful and accurate theory.” This is a really good point I think.

It feels like the Sprint / Agile practices that a lot of us use lead us to value expediency more than anything. So we'll try and find the quickest way to make a change that gets an existing program to do what we want. If we lack a working theory of the codebase that usually means we're doing something that runs counter to the overall design. And then over time everything gets worse and harder.

Hello! I wrote this article.

I want to say something about the pop-ups, which to have been much more discussed than what I wrote. (UX disaster as engagement bait?)

My desire in showing was to make the site feel more “alive” and to make the reader aware that other people had been there. I was trying to build a vibe of website as public space. Clearly this was not an approach that handles hacker news traffic and attitudes very well.

Secondly, I wanted to make readers aware of how much data is visible about them just from visiting a website.

I wanted it to feel like when you land on a drop shipping site that occasionaly tells you “Alice in Norwich just bought a widget. They're selling fast!”. You slowly realise that the data is real, and that the site actually can see where you live, who provides your internet. Etc. It was meant to be creepy.

Anyway, I've removed the feature now. It was clearly causing usability issues for some people, which was not what I intended. I'll think about other, better ways to get the effect that I had hoped for.

Finally, I'll say that it was at least interesting for me to see things like

“Someone else just connected to Johncom. They're in Kansas City, US, 64121 and are connecting with Spectrum”

“Someone else just connected to Johncom. They're in Cape Town, ZA, 8001 and are connecting with airmobile.co.za”

I got to learn about some new places, postcode formats, and ISPs.

In London I personally always try and cycle beucase I know that any bus I get is likely going to be slower because they are continually stuck in car traffic. Especially during rush hours.

Annoyingly, the time when I would like to get public transport most is when it rains. And this is also when the public transport becomes slowest and least reliable.

HN Badges 3 years ago

This taught me that it's possible to change the colour of the header, and that I had enough Karma to do so! Now enjoying my very pink version of hacker news.

There's two main groups on hacker news. The people who think Go and Java are the only reasonable languages, and the people who think Rust and TypeScript are the only reasonable languages.

Probably you talk to a designer, or if that's not possible then deliberately copy the look of existing websites which you believe look nice.

Clearly you already have CSS, which is all that's required for a site to look any way that you want it to. You just need to write different CSS.

What's the reason to think that it reduces the amount of creative code that's written. Doesn't it just let you get through the copypastable stuff faster - all things being equal I'd assume it means you spend more time on the creative parts.

Not by AI 3 years ago

Gonna start slapping this on all my AI generated content