lincolnq

I've spent a bit of time last year trying to convey my product instincts to the Zulip team and mostly stopped because I felt like they didn't care enough / weren't moving very fast. The basic problem is that the mobile app is, like it or not, the way most people will use the product, and it needs to be designed by an opinionated person who actually will say no to things.

In my view, the home page should be just like a proper messaging app: show every recent thread ("topic" in Zulip nomenclature) that I'm involved in, across all my channels, with unread ones indicated using a 'dot'. Or, if you really want to be like Slack, just copy Slack more directly. In either case, the other views (Inbox, Combined Feed, DMs, etc) should be under menus, not primary actions.

The other thing is that it's often hard to figure out how to reply to a topic. In the Combined Feed, which is my preferred view for consuming updates, the UX for replying sucks -- first you have to figure out to tap the headers; and even then, you can accidentally tap into a channel instead of a topic. It's extremely non obvious when you've done this and constantly causes people to reply in the wrong topic.

I vibecoded some improved Inbox UX using Claude Code and I think it would be a big step up, but it's hard to know what the steps would be to get it shipped, since I don't have time to spin up properly on the codebase and I doubt my changes are acceptable as-is. If Zulip team wants them I'd happily share though.

If you're interested in this stuff at all, check out some code.

Example: https://github.com/ImperialCollegeLondon/FLT/blob/main/FLT/M...

Also check out the blueprint, which describes the overall structure of the code:

https://imperialcollegelondon.github.io/FLT/blueprint/

I'm very much an outside observer, but it is super interesting to see what Lean code looks like and how people contribute to it. Great thing is that there's no need for unittests (or, in some sense, the final proof statement is the unittest) :P

Poe's Law is hitting me in the face right now. This is satire, right? I can't quite tell (seriously! please tell me)

If it is satire, it's quite subtle and well done. It references the old reasons why "Agile" was invented (current software development processes being bureaucratic and meeting-intensive, the new one will be lightweight and engineer-led).

If it is not satire, the juxtaposition is striking.

It's actually because replies boost their email domain's reputation. (Mark as spam is a good response, given that it's exactly what they don't want)

Is that 20x cost... actually bad though? (I mean, I know Datadog is bad. I used to use it and I hated its cost structure.)

But maybe it's worth it. or at least, the good ones would be worth it. I can imagine great metadata (and platforms to query and explore it) saves more engineering time than it costs in server time. So to me this ratio isn't that material, even though it looks a little weird.

"solution to no particular problem"

I deeply disagree. While Worldcoin's execution seems questionable at best, the idea seems like a solution to a problem that we (society) definitely have, namely the real-people problem. Worldcoin or something like it, if properly implemented, makes it possible to distinguish between real people and bots. This is a real problem that we have today, is getting rapidly worse, and till now this problem has only been solved in shitty ways by governments.

Iframes bypass CORS, so the trick is to use an Iframe and figure out (using some side channel since you can’t peek into the frame) whether the iframe loaded the content successfully or whether it loaded an error page.

…no? Exercising 2h/week (close to the minimum) costs 100 hours per year, at $100/hr that’s close to 10k already and that doesn’t include the attention cost, or anything to do with diet

Can someone explain more about what happened here?

I think Wren is doing a pretty nice job (www.wren.co).

I agree that this is possible, and definitely worth paying attention to.

But some hype cycles are "real", e.g., looking at the internet in early 2000, you might have thought it was about to crash or about to be huge. Either way, you'd be right. It was about to crash in the short term, but in the long term, it still made sense to "get into the internet" in 2000 because it was still a secular trend that ended up making a huge impact on the world.

I agree the modern rules are better.

Mogg Fanatic was massively nerfed in the modern rules though, which is sad, because it was such an iconic part of the monored deck. (It used to be able to sac itself and deal 1 in combat trade)

It took me a while to notice, but there is more text if you click on the images then mouse over the highlight boxes.

Employees not succeeding at disconnecting from work is often unintentional, and caused by subtle, pernicious effects of middle managers simply existing and following basic incentives (such as "my boss just sent me an email after dinner, guess I should act/forward it along").

Forcing companies to write down their policy on this seems like a pretty good idea, because it forces HR to actually decide how they want their employees to be treated, and enables middle managers to be held accountable for their actions along this axis.

Off topic, but I am very interested in the topic of what other inventions are universal (I've thought about this myself a bit). Do you have a list or writeup?

In the last few months, for some reason, my (completely unmaintained) LinkedIn has started to top search results for my name -- over my regularly updated personal website and blog (at lincolnquirk.com) when you search for my name on Google. The same has happened with a friend of mine whose blog is far more popular than mine. It's incredibly frustrating.

If one of my reports were joking about quitting, I would at least consider whether they were in a ha-ha-only-serious mode, and probably bring it up at our next 1:1. I don't think there's as much risk of hurting someone personally if you joke about quitting, but i do think it's an easy way to attract potentially unwanted attention/conversations with your manager!

I’d expect that the ergo costs of using a laptop at all (short key travel, screen down from eye level) would swamp the additional cost of having the keyboard off center. After all, you can just crane your neck down and sideways instead of just down :).

Seriously, anyone using a laptop full time for work (who cares about ergo) should invest in an external keyboard and monitor.

Nooo don't compromise your vision for hacker news commenters!

Great product design is a mix of flexibility and opinionatedness. You have to find your "users" and then build the thing they want. If HN commenters give you crap about it they're not your users, at least not yet, and that's ok. Your product doesn't have to appeal to everyone at the outset.

I'm a medium experienced home chef, and I have a Thermapen, and really like it. It's a better thermometer than the $10 one, or even a $30 one. The accuracy doesn't matter very much, but the reading speed does matter, and Thermapen reads extremely quickly.

Haha, yup. And if you sign an Android app in CI, Codecov might have had access to your signing keys. Good luck changing those.

What do you think he should be doing instead?

I know you are being sarcastic, but I don't know if everyone understands Sam Altman's motivation for running OpenAI the way it's being run. Sam is trying to create AI which causes the greatest benefit for humanity. That's openAI's mission. Open sourcing everything now would not achieve the mission.

In case the "why" is not obvious: AI progress is limited by a) great research talent; b) money -- specifically being able to invest in compute. If OpenAI were to open source everything, they would not be able to raise the money they need to invest in compute, which would cause a death spiral in their ability to attract and retain their researchers. They need to have a story for why they will make money in the short term to continue being a top tier AI research org. And since AI is "winner take all", it is likely worse for the world if a less altruistic company takes all the talent and source code.

If your point is just that OpenAI is a misnomer now, I agree :). It's not open. But I do think they have settled on a surprisingly good point in solution space (the capped-profit company, the charter, etc); I don't see ways to validly criticize the company from an altruism perspective.

Gotta say, I’ve had the Honeywell for a couple years and I’m quite happy with it. I haven’t had any of the problems that the article cites — it works well, easy to clean, easy to refill. I’d be quite confused about whether article has the same product, except that the photos match my model.

My instinct is that the overhead is small. You need to add a few C stack frames and do some string conversion on each call, maybe an allocation to store the result. It’s not going to be as quick as doing in pure Rust, but the python-to-native code layer can be pretty lightweight I think!

Databases. If you want to be able to quickly do a lot of useful operations on large amounts of data, B-trees and their variants (B+ trees) are the way to go. Using a B-tree, you can find an entry, sort and do range queries by key, and inserts and deletes are fast.

Hang on though, in the linked thread they said that the fraud was incurred at the point of real users signing up for uber -- when they type uber into the app store search (e.g. an organic install), the ad network fraudulently takes credit for it at that point. So "enough analytics/logging" would not do the trick here - I think they would have noticed if a certain type of ad wasn't leading to trips, as you are pointing at.

Funny story about this. A few years ago, someone wrote an @channel, something like “SF office be careful which printer you select, several items from your office have ended up printed in Boston”

To which I replied “this sounds impossible” and started trying to figure out how this person could be so confused about printing that documents might magically make their way across the country from office to office!

At which point I discovered, to my great embarrassment, that Cloud Print existed, and that it was necessary to set up printers this way because of Chromebooks. Oops.

Not sure yet whether I am happy that it’s gone, or sad that other old-school techs like me won’t be able to have similar experiences going forward :)

We use Mypy to type check python, and I really like that system. Catches a lot of errors. Not as many as a full static typing system, but still a lot, and you can always drop back into dynamic typing when you want.

I feel silly responding to a downvoted comment, but here goes anyway: Correlation does not imply causation, but it wiggles its eyebrows suggestively and points “look over there!” (Thanks Xkcd)

In this case, we are in a position of not knowing very much about what causes/prevents COVID. Based on this study, we can learn Vitamin D seems to be involved, and there is an obvious causal mechanism that one can hypothesize might exist, even if not proven. Even if there’s only a 10% chance that vitamin D supplementation could be helpful, knowing it as a possibility could be useful to many, and justify action even if uncertain about the causality.