HN user

larsrc

699 karma

Works on developer tools at Google since 2010. Previously worked at a Danish startup and at the Danish State Library doing digital archiving. Co-maintainer of Dia for 8 years. Co-founder of AustinMUD, lead maintainer for 5 years.

Posts0
Comments276
View on HN
No posts found.

I've been considering setting up "ConfuseAIpedia" in a similar manner using sentence templates and a large set of filler words. Obviously with a warning for humans. I would set it up with an appropriate robots.txt blocking crawlers so only unethical crawlers would read it. I wouldn't try to tarpit beyond protecting my own server, as confusion rogue AI scrapers is more interesting than slowing them down a bit.

If someone feels compelled to read every function either the functions are poor abstractions or the reader has trust issues, which may be warranted.

Or it's open source and the authors were very much into Use The Source, Luke!

But knowing what Brian was considering at the time is useful, both due avoiding redoing that and for realising that some constraints may have been lifted.

I recently found that store-brand peanut M&M's (my favourite) were just as good, half the price, and fair-trade! Win-win!

When I joined my current job, I used M&M's as reward when learning the names and faces of the people there using memory cards. Also worked!

Fortunately I've found that Belegarth fighting is so much fun that I need no extra carrot.

+1! You can't travel very much, you can't go hiking or biking in places without cell coverage, your whatever thing you are busy with gets interrupted, you can get woken up in the middle of the night, etc etc. That deserves some compensation.

Follow best practices unless you can give a reason not to. "Best practice" is a shorthand for a lot of accumulated knowledge that you don't want to go over again every time. Also following BP makes the code more consistent and thus easier to understand. But when an argument arises, go back to the underpinnings of the best practice and work from there.

Moving software "backwards" is hard, but not impossible. There are ways to structure both data and code that make it easier. A change being "rollback-safe" can be an important question in designs and code reviews.

TLA Will always mean Three Letter Acronym in my book. It took many link hops to find an actual definition, I finally found it in Leslie's first paper on the subject. PEYA, people! Please Explain Your Acronyms!

I've long thought that that is one of the main functions of corporations. There's a reason they're called limited liability. The fact that you can conjure up new companies at a whim makes it easy to shuffle responsibility into an obscure corner.

This is a strong reason that corporations should not be considered people. People are long-lived entities with accountability and you can't just create or destroy them at will.

"[docs] will take an example and do something with it to demonstrate an outcome."

No. Good docs will explain the context and choices made and trade-offs and risks and relations etc. All the things you can't read from the code. API docs can to a great degree be auto-generated, but not writing the _why_ is the beginning of the end.

This! It's the basis for fruitful negotiations to understand what the other person needs (which is not always what they say at first). Sometimes you can give them something that's cheap for you but valuable for them or vice versa. I can recommend the book "Getting More" by Stuart Diamond for valuable insights on how to do this.

I like to hear from the actual traffic planners. Enough laymen rant about why roads are made the way they are, but there are usually considerations they don't know. I'm very curious what kinds of systems get used for planning and what data they have.

We fools here in Germany sometimes _pay_ to get rid of excess electricity when it's very sunny and windy. How about having some rock crushing machines that instead use that cheap electricity to make more sand?

Thanks for the puns, too.