limograf

GDS is really brilliant, it's true.

You can charge up mushrooms with vitamin D (D2) by placing them in direct sunlight for 30 minutes. Any ordinary mushrooms. So salmon (D3) and charged mushrooms would do just as well.

Yeah. England&Wales legislation is fairly comprehensible. Of course it could be better. I just ran a random tax law through Hemingway and it scores between Grade 9 and 11, occasionally hitting Grade 13. So that's sort of fine, I think?

Apart from the bonkers preamble which decorates every act, of course!

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2022/40/introduction (Postgraduate, poor)

I do love it. I really do. I run a free code school for refugees, with an internal division where we also build products. All our teachers are volunteers, professionals from the local tech scene, so I work with hundreds of developers with all kinds of backgrounds and specialisms. It's both meaningful and technically interesting.

I'm the only technical person on staff, worldwide, so it's obviously an insane workload, but it keeps me fizzing with solutions. If I have an idea for something, I can build it and try it - so it keeps my crackpot inventor soul happy.

And it's wonderful to see my trainees flourishing in their lives and all their achievements. We have supported hundreds of people to become developers and restart their lives. It makes it easy to work hard, to do this.

Here's what we do with beginner developers who have never coded before: - build pages in Codepen so they can see everything build as they go, fork from templates, and share/riff off each other - export from Codepen to a folder so they can see that static sites are just text files in a folder and nothing mysterious -- at this point I also introduce an editor like VSCode - drag and drop that folder onto Github and deploy to Netlify

You can do this in an hour with brand new coders. https://syllabus.codeyourfuture.io/fundamentals/week-1/sessi...

Hard same. Adobe cheated me out of around six hundred pounds by making it freaking impossible to cancel.

I finally escaped in 2021, after being devoted to Adobe for 16 years. I will never buy anything from them again. It's over now. I do miss Photoshop and After Effects but nothing is worth that nightmarish hassle. Da Vinci, Affinity, Fusion, Smoke... there are other options.

You are completely welcome. It's an absolute joy, that place!

I love this comment!

Aye - I wrote the front end, a loooong time ago now.

In different ways, most things I've done have been meaningful. I learnt to code through cofounding a massive non-profit fanfic website with my friends and that build helped... me! I was living in poverty on welfare and had no way to go to school as I was the sole carer for my quadriplegic family member. Then I took what I'd learned and worked on a new project, connecting profoundly disabled people and roboticists to explore the world through drones. Nowadays I run a free code school for refugees and other people living in poverty, where professional developers volunteer to teach and mentor the learners so they can get good jobs in tech and start their own lives in this country.

Interspersed with those three big projects I've done contracting and agency work, mainly in Accessibility FE, and that has been a bit less motivating to work on, though it's useful, I think, to make all sites and apps work properly for as many people as possible. I've always stayed in the arts or academia for those contracts. I've never worked at a megacorp or for any kind of prestigious employer, so I've never really had to worry about the ethics of an employer. (Obviously I've never been paid loads either. :D )

I count myself so lucky to be able to spend my days like this. I leap out of bed to go to work in the morning. I recommend it!

I notice this difference with my US friends. They do seem to think hunger is a genuine problem that must be resolved immediately. A sort of health risk. I've occasionally tried to press in on what the unspecified danger is meant to be but it's hard to do so without being obnoxious.

Obviously hunger where there is food insecurity is terrible. But the first pangs of hunger in an otherwise well fed and, in my case, well padded person? It doesn't seem like it's a big deal to me.

Snacking does seem to have become established in the UK now though for children at least. (I also remember being told not to spoil my appetite as a child.) The children I know now often have some kind of tiny packet of something on the go in between meals.

Cookie bite hearing loss is more or less fixable, not CAPD. If you have both (which OP sounded like they did, or at least sounded like it was worth investigating) then you can fix it up a lot with targeted open dome hearing aids.

https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/auditory-processing-disorder/

Get a full audiogram and also ask them to look for cookie bite hearing loss. It's fixable.

Sure, they can raise prices but the customers who paid £350,000 for their charming holiday cottage won't pay £35 for a cup of coffee. The house prices are so out of touch with the rest of the economy, there's no way to catch up for normal people. So the cafe closes.

The self correction should actually be the house price crashing, but the UK government consistently props up, and pumps, the market.

The average house price in Salcombe (Devon) is £950,000! That's 30 average salaries.

Yes, of the six letters lost from the English alphabet, thorn and yogh are probably the most consequential for the spelling mess. In this, though, we can safely blame the French. ;)

https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/2016/12/07/episode-87-th...

Yep. It meant croquet lawn, basically. It's from Pall Mall (ultimately, ball hit / palla malleus) - the place Charles II played lawn games and around which fashionable people would promenade.

The Forth Bridge is a very long bridge that is permanently being painted. "Like painting the Forth Bridge" is a job that (feels like it) will never end.

https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/be+like+painting+the+Fo...

I work 24h/w (TWT) for my employer. I did this by... saying that's what I could do when they offered me the job. (There are some specific personal circumstances that prevent me from taking full time work.) And sure, it does limit you; a lot of places demur, but not everyone. For sure my small company are happy to have me. Of course they are: they get a massive bargain. I am prorata so they get a developer for janitor wages and still everything gets done. Who wouldn't be happy with that deal?

It's ITS derived but the nearer referent is Material via Penguin Book covers from around 1960 to 1975, like the classic Hare Sitting Up: https://www.flickr.com/photos/joekral/231480092/in/album-721...

For my one-woman-band projects I use:

Github for repos and static hosting Gandhi for domains S3 & Cloudfront for assets Fortrabbit or Digital Ocean also for hosting Runway for ML and hosted models Algolia for search Snipcart and Stripe for payments Trello for project management Whereby for client video calls Twilio for a phone number Google suite generally for admin and presentations etc Typeform for forms Waveapps for accounting

@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) { { html {filter: invert(1)} }

Ah, downvoted. ;)

Sorry HN! Of course I meant that it's actually just a complete coincidence that so many women leave tech after having children. We all just choose this completely on our own and childcare is not a factor in the least. There's literally nothing we could do about this completely natural and voluntary situation. It's not even worth asking the question.

Hammer it, lads. Happy to go to zero!

Years ago on a large project with many trainee and junior contributors, I had a sandbox.css as the last css file.

Juniors could try out new things and add in naive fixes for bugs. Then in code review we brought the change up into the cascade as a method of teaching cascade thinking.

It's rare to do that now as most front end devs are not interested in the cascade and use things like BEM instead. I can understand why - it's pragmatic - but I did personally find that a great way of building up devs who really grasped css on its own terms.

I work three days a week (UK). It's totally possible but you're right that it does constrain where you work. Smaller companies where you can talk directly to the boss is the thing. I have a family caring role so for me it's pretty non-negotiable. I just can't take most offers (which you're right, usually start full time even if in reality there's flexible working available to permanent employees).

It would hugely open up the field to women with caring duties if more companies would do this. Perhaps this is why they do not - I don't know.

I still can't get over the part where multiple keys just fell right off the keyboard. And you can't put them back on - the whole top case has to be replaced.

Sometimes you get a lemon - that's one thing, but this is a whole generation of machines. That seems new... Well, saying that: I had a 2006 iBook - the black one - and the battery ran so hot I still have the scar on my thigh (geek trophy!). Apple denied there was an issue with that machine, too, and the recall came way too late. So I guess it's a pattern and not a new thing, really.

Maybe the new thing is that I am actually genuinely tempted by the Surface. In 2006 there were no contenders.

Yeah - I've a MPB 15" 2017 and it is also the worst laptop I've ever owned. And it was to replace the MBP that was recalled (long after Apple had denied to me there was any problem and I'd sold it for parts on eBay). Nothing works on this machine! Bits literally fall off! I've got Applecare so the (horrible) keyboard has been replaced, the motherboard, the screen - on and on and on. Laptop of Theseus. I think it's compounded by how it's a MAJOR hassle to get things fixed. They can't even tell you how long it will take (except that it's weeks and there's no courtesy machine, pick up, or indeed anything remotely resembling customer service). I had to make four cross-county train trips to get it fixed last time. You basically have to buy 2 laptops and switch them out.

I've put off buying a new MBP because I just cannot face putting down three grand for something that probably will be even worse than this piece of junk.

I've had an Apple computer since I was 8 years old. I thought I was pretty much in for life but as soon as I can jump ship, I will. :(

I think it's to fit on the podium because actually everyone is saying "Stay at home".

Yeah, I think most normal people would just never apply and that's perfectly reasonable. I don't think working at Google is FOR normal people. I am a normal person and I'm pretty sure Google is not suffering from the lack of me! :D

You know, I work in tech but I have never attempted to have a Career in Tech. I definitely don't own a whiteboard and I'm sure I'd never get past the resume stage. (I've only actively applied for a couple of jobs in my life and all in the past year, purely because I thought I should REALLY get some experience with applying for jobs. I actually just had an interview and bombed it so much, omg, at one point I claimed not to know JavaScript! :D I don't think it's for me.)

But out of the rareified circles of HN, I've not found any of the career stuff talked up on here to be necessary anyway. There's more code that needs writing than coders to write it and so long as that's true there'll be work going. I work a few days a week for a company and the rest for myself. I have fun and write code and invent things and people generally give me enough money to pay my bills so I'm happy with that. It's a pretty sweet deal! Before I was a coder I was an unpaid family caregiver (hence no school or credentials or career) so compared to that I can't really imagine a programming job that could really genuinely be BAD. They are all simply gradations of sweet.

My brother (who did massively go to school) works at Google and loves it. I drop in and hang out with him there sometimes and it does seem great for a certain kind of person. And they have so many resources and work on loads of fun games and obviously it would be great to be rich as well. I think it's really clear why it's so attractive. If you think you have a shot then go for it!

But if you know you don't have a shot, why break your heart over it, is my view. It's not a bad thing to be clear eyed about your prospects in life.

Wow this is absolutely fantastic. I'd really love to read a walk through of how you built this.

Oooh. I might actually buy an iPhone from Apple this year instead of from the used stock of random phone companies. I think giffgaff is only down to third class condition SEs so this is good news! My hands are just too little for the new phones.

Google maps is fairly unusable on the SE because they've covered the actual map with so much junk you can't see where you are or where you're going, but everything else works fine for me. And there are other maps. That's honestly the only app I can think of that is properly broken. I'm probably the phone equivalent of the recalcitrant IE user but I'm sticking with the small size phone for as long as pos!