mhomde

Christ I almost forgot about Three Investigators, but I really liked them at the time. "The green backs" as I thought of them (Nancy Drew was red) Probably one of those things you should never re-read though. Using Alfred Hitchcock as "cover author" must have really paid off

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2010/sep/23/thre...

"The Three Investigators were created by Robert Arthur, who wrote the first few books and then oversaw and edited the rest of the series. It was he who had the brainwave of having Alfred Hitchcock as the patron of the team. Hitch introduced each case, and often called them in to set them off on their latest adventure. It was this intrusion of real life into a fictional world that cemented my relationship with the Three Investigators. Could these stories possibly be true ... ?"

And...

"The real magic, though, was in the boys' headquarters, hidden among the piles of junk in Uncle Titus's scrapyard. Built from an abandoned trailer, the secret base was accessed via a series of ingenious secret passages, with the codenames Green Gate One, Tunnel Two, and Red Gate Rover – the latter so named because it was hidden behind a painting of a dog."

Are you sure? I get what you're saying, but I'm not sure they won't argue that applies links without summaries as well. And what about thumbnails?

I mean the "fair use" laws weren't exactly clear cut either but seemed generally sane

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Hacker News would technically be affected by the same Link tax. It would probably not be enforced but still.

It's such a stupid idea and I really lose hope about the future of a free internet when I see stuff like this. Hopefully saner minds will prevail

But, but, that's just how Blogs work man :)

They clearly attribute it to them (though I find it a tad lame they don't have a specific attribution area), and you could argue that being featured on a popular blog helps people discover them, and with google ranks as well. Curation does add some value and it's not like The Verge for instance doesn't create its own content.

I find sites that just repackage reddit stuff to be much much worse.

Yeah, he has a point :) It's always struck me as weird that we "allow" political leaders that can put personal gain and career in front of what's good for everyone else. Also as you touch upon the world is rapidly becoming too complex to be governed by us. AI could save us from bureaucratic inefficiency, corruption, shortsightedness and cognitive bias.

I'd actually welcome our AI overlords if they could execute according to a a reasonable value system (maybe execute is the wrong word). On the other hand, how do you set its goals, and what could possibly go wrong :)

I kinda want to see a black mirror episode of AI overlords shepherding humans for their own good :)

Yeah, but a huge problem with finding accommodation for it's recruits. In contrast to Berlin it's impossible to get a first hand rent contract. A second hand is going to be super expensive and buying somewhere somewhat central is ridiculously expensive.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-nordics-housing/both-immi...

Sorry, I think I meant transatlantic airport, or a "large" airport. Not sure, it used to lack something I heard but not sure exactly what and if it's still true. They're struggling with building a new one so something :)

Maybe Leipzig is the new Berlin :)

Yeah I guess that's what stemming the tide :) Also a lot of German companies seem to require that you speak German. I know awesome programmers/designers living in Berlin but if they work for Berlin companies they seem to earn a pittance of what they'd would in for instance Stockholm. But if more tech companies, like Soundcloud, imports themselves into Berlin and Germany, employees and all, that will change.

Can it be because venture capital hasn't come to Berlin/Germany in a big way yet? Typically German companies seems more aimed at the German market rather than an international one, which maybe doesn't fuel a bubble as quickly.

I think Berlins "Poor but happy" times are fast coming to an end. Rents have been rising quickly the last few years and tech companies and startups becoming more prevalent. Heck, Neukölln went from being a cheap alternative to being as trendy and expensive as Kreuzberg.

Berlin kinda, from what I understand, enjoyed it's special culture much because it wasn't an industrial city and lacked an large international airport, but cheap rent, international vibe and fun hipster values seems like the perfect void for tech to move into now that rents and prices in the usual "big cities" have gone through the roof. I can also imagine cities like Amsterdam and Berlin getting some Brexit escapees.

Mark my words, Berlin will be Europe's Silicon Valley within a few years.

I think this is great news and something I've been pushing for for a long time. Sure adoption of Windows Store apps are pretty low now and it's incredibly hard to earn any money on them, but at least it's not impossible now like it was before with MS taking such a big cut.

Maybe this is enough that some hobbyist start putting some more effort into developing for the platform, which actually is quite nice.

There are tons of articles and books on design. In the same way you build your toolbox with programming with algorithms, concepts design patterns, best practices, you need to build one for design. Ergonomics, color theory, typography, ergonomics, Fitt's law etc etc. Then work on applying them until you develop and intuition for what's the best solution to a problem.

With design, maybe more so than with code, it's a lot about developing good taste. Code can be empirically worse or better but design is a lot of having a point of view and working within self imposed constraints.

One book I'd really recommend is "The inmates are running the asylum" by Alan Cooper. It's more about shifting how to think about design rather specifics, but it's one of those books that puts a voice in your head that will help guide a lot of decisions.

Each to their own but my experience has been the opposite. I just purchased an Oculus Rift with touch controllers, being carefully optimistic but a bit skeptical, thinking it was going to be as you said "Gimmicky", somewhere on par with 3D cinema experience-wise.

But man, it totally blew my mind how good and immersive it is. Maybe the strongest feeling of "wow, we really live in the future" I've had. The low latency combined with excellent controls really creates a feeling of being there. Google Earth by itself is worth the price of Oculus many times over. Then there are titles like Lone Echo, Robo Recall, Beat Saber, Skyrim VR, Quake 1 and Quake 2, Minecraft etc etc. Sure there aren't a ton of AAA titles yet but those that are hold an amazing quality IMO and has spoiled me from "normal" gaming

I'm not super familiar with how it works in the US. But here you loan against the value of your property. If the value plunges you no longer have coverage for your loan and the bank may ask you to cover the difference. This happened in the 90's in Sweden where many even were forced to sell their homes when they couldn't pay.

Many home owners I've talked with is not aware of that this is even a possibility and refuse to acknowledge the risk. I guess it's one of those thing one rather not think about :) Another major difference is that in Sweden, in contrast to the US you can't simply give up the keys to you home and be rid of the debt (as I think it is in the US) but it stays with you.

People often fail to take into account that risk has a value. I did some quantitative analysis (most of that is BS but that's another story) for a gig and it was big eye opener.

People talk like:

"Well property praises will always go up. It's a good investment yada yada" but there is a risk that they won't (which often is a sore point). There's even a risk they'll crash. Many people (at least in Sweden) is so over leveraged that it wouldn't take that much for the bank to require a mortgage holder to put in more money to cover the decreased value of the property.

How large risk for a "catastrophic decrease" varies but taking that risk is a cost in itself. It's the same as with insurance, the less healthy/more risk you are the more it costs.

With renting you might not have the upside of investment, but you also don't have to bear the "cost" of that risk

Speaking of red... In Sweden we have a color called "Falu red" that's the icon red that long has been put on many cottages and houses. The pigment is based on the copper in the copper mines of Falun. The metal helps against fungal infestion and absorbs UV rays helping the paint last longer. There are some areas where it's the only color allowed to help preserve their heritage.

https://www.theawl.com/2017/12/falu-red-the-color-of-bucolic...

As a bonus or most famous sausage is called "Falukorv", it's also red.

Aww, no Chang? :) Someone has been hanging out in Hubud too much :)

I think one of the main problems is that we still describe too much of "How" we want to do something, rather than "What we want to do", ie too many implementation details are specified.

Programming languages over time have moved towards higher layers of abstraction, from punch cards, to assembler, to c, to c++, to java/c# etc etc.

We haven't done the next leap yet and come up with a mainstream descriptive language that allows us to abstract away things like threading, tasks and optimizations.

If programming was even more about declaring intent a lot of work could be simplified I think. We could also put more intelligence into the interpreters/compilers and even adapt execution for different scenarios

I always wanted a language that was built upon the concept on just passing things forward in a pipe, and was like an hybrid between functional and c style languages, like:

  someobject => doThis() => doThat() => dontForgotToFinishUp()

  obj1, obj2 => doThis() => doThat() => dontForgotToFinishUp()

  (obj1, obj2) => doThis() => doThat() => dontForgotToFinishUp()

  [obj1, obj2] => doThis() => doThat() => dontForgotToFinishUp()

I didn't mean to trivialize it, it's an extremely impressive accomplishment for sure. The documentary was very interesting as well, recommended

I'm still intrigued by the possibility of a more "elegant" solution to Fermat being out there. Wiles approach seems like brute forcing it by stitching together different proofs. It seems very implausible that Fermat actually had an actual solution, but it should be possible that one exists.

I guess the incentive to find it is much less now though when the theorem has been proved.

Unfortunately IMO that kind of thinking seldom works. It's very managerial to assign specific time and percentages to things but in practice I've never known development to be managed that way. Also you underestimate their weaselness :)

Refactoring needs to be an integral and constant part of the development, in the long run that will decrease time needed for refactoring, and time required to fix bugs. But that time is variable, and might come in large chunks depending on how much technical debt you've accumulated

yeah, that's what's often is being done. But it prevents the methodology to have some useful best practices built into it, and a methodology could be a force in improving code quality and keeping it intact over time, which is from all the projects I've seen severely needed

Some developers think that, and unfortunately a lot of methodology enforces that thinking.

Cleaning up code as you go should be a habit I agree. It's slightly trickier when code reaches a "boiling frog" point and you need to take a look at the bigger picture and perhaps re-architecture. It often easy to keep chugging away at the tree's and not seeing the forest.

The downside with the scope of those kind of structural refactoring is that they touch a lot of code, so they're perceived as "risky".

Also developers get attached to the architecture they have learnt and know, and don't want to re-learn, even if the simplified code would be easier to learn for someone new

I don't know, when it comes to code quality and things like that I'd rather prefer a methodology that insulates it against bureaucracy rather than involves it. Keep the Dilbertian forces at bay.

Product owners should prioritize feature set, requirements and sometimes bugs, but the less they have to do with the intrinsics of reaching them the better.

Yeah totally, but if was intrinsic to a trendy methodology you might be able to shield it better in the same way you do stuff in the name of being ISO-whatever compliant :)

Nice article! I'd like to a software methodology more supportive of what I'd call "Continuous refactoring" or a more "kaizen"-like mindset. "Agile" isn't always as agile as I'd like, but becomes rigid in peoples interpretation of the rules.

It's a constant fight to keep down the number of lines of code and complexity, in large projects. Once a code-base passes beyond a certain point it becomes difficult to see redundancies and patterns. Bloated code breeds bloated code.

If you on the other hand keep trimming and keep refactoring deep and wide as the code and requirements change you can often keep things manageable and understandable. "bad code" get's easier to spot, it's a little bit like the broken windows theory.

Scrum IMO and a lot of the agile methodologies, at least in their implementation, in my experience, tends to treat projects like brick-building and lacks a way to support and enforce constant re-architecturing and removal of code smells.

If code quality and refactoring is not supported by the actual methodology it can become an bureaucratic problem where product owners doesn't see the value and doesn't prioritize it (even though it leads to quicker development time and less bugs in the long run)

Unit testing is supposed to make refactoring easier, but can become an impediment to refactoring as well, as the cost of rewriting tests can be seen as too high.

We're currently experimenting with having one hour meeting each week where you can discuss things like that, and then dedicating some time to refactor, we'll see how it works out :)

It's just a general thought I've been having. We're using text and files because it's the way things always have been. But it seems there should be benefits to perhaps move beyond that.

Things like with more canonical representations of code, rather than arguing over coding standards (although it can still text-based rather than completely graphical). Ability to more easily see related code and flows. Manage the meaning of code rather than its text (not changing text but changing symbols when you refactor).

There's been attempts to move in that this direction with things like code bubbles (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsPX0nElJ0k) but yet there hasn't been an approach that's both visually attractive and offers enough benefits, but it's probably coming somewhere down the line

That's actually a good idea, thanks! I'm not sure it would be feasible but it would be neat if methods was automatically versioned (in all but syntaxtic changes) and you could automagically compare results of the different versions.

It kinda falls apart with refactoring but still :) I'm finding it more and more evident that file's as the default unit of storage and viewing of code is an obsolete concept