HN user
Some of my greatest joys in life have come from putting string replacement plugins on other people's browsers. I mostly just applied it to news sites.
s/big/super massive/g s/cardiac arrest/cataclysmic diarrhea/g
I mean, it's really endlessly entertaining. I'm wiping away tears just thinking about it.
Without some way to generate revenue, people aren't going to publish recipes (for Google to scrape into their AI.) Maybe we could live without more recipes being fed into the machine, but there are many other types of content that will suffer the same fate.
It would be nice to find something better than an ad-revenue driven web, but I'm not sure this is it. We'll find out I guess...
I find many software developers are solution-oriented instead of problem-oriented. Because that's a common theme in my head it's what I see here, whether that's what was intended or not.
I believe that developers who orient their thinking/work around the problem they're solving instead of the solution they're implementing generally have a better outcome.
I wonder if that's what was happening with the artists in the study? The "successful" artists were really focusing on what they were trying to achieve, putting their time and attention into that?
(But then this ties into other comments here about the criteria for success. Maybe success in software problem solving doesn't correlate that well with success as an artist. I think success as an artist comes down to being considered an artist by the artist gatekeepers, who are some combination of other artists and people who fund artists.)
I had a great experience using Kaitai in a previous job. We were decoding proprietary binary messages from Teltonika OBD GPS trackers. The online editor, https://ide.kaitai.io/, is really nice for developing and testing your definition. You can store multiple binary files in local-storage and you get a nice detailed look at the data and how your definition is parsing it.
The All The Music project is something like that, but for melodies. They created all possible melodies of a 7 note diatonic scale and wrote them to disk as MIDI files, copyrighting them in the process. The melodies were dedicated to the Creative Commons Zero so that people could freely use them without worrying about being sued by someone else who had used that melody previously.
More details here: https://allthemusic.info/faqs/
SwearySkyscraper: A startup that develops novel and personalized swear words to help people better cope with pain, and integrates these swear words into a liquid damping system to stabilize skyscrapers during earthquakes.
Berlin's Museum of Natural History (Museum für Naturkunde Berlin) has a nice app for identifying plants and animals called Naturblick. It's available in English.
https://www.museumfuernaturkunde.berlin/en/research/naturbli...
"I have nothing to hide" really misses the point of what privacy is for. I don't close the door when I'm taking a crap because I have something to hide, I do it for privacy.
Also, blackmail isn't the only way to have personal or intimate information used against you. As the absolutely massive advertising industry can tell you, knowing more details about people makes them easier to influence and manipulate.
When working as the head of engineering at a start-up, I would get dragged into this process on the sales side. I would sit there cringing at all of the bonkers crap the Sales Engineer or Solutions Architect was spewing at the customer.
The senior technical person from the customer would ask me a couple hard questions and I would be pretty honest in my responses. Afterwards our Sales Success Customer Account Manager would be unhappy with me, but at least I wouldn't have to go to another one of those meetings for a while.
The deal would go ahead anyway because our management had convinced their management to make the purchase even though what we were offering didn't really meet their needs. They would only need to pay us if we actually delivered so they weren't taking a lot of risk, other than wasting their time, and we got to make a multi-million dollar "booking."
In the end I would either get along with their senior technical person pretty well because we could be honest with each other, or else they would despise me for being unable to deliver what my sales people had promised (Hi Sven!).
The standards of driving in Australia is terrible.
I think this is common in many places where a significant portion of the population lives in low density areas (eg: American, Australian and Canadian suburbs.) Outside of major city centers it is very difficult to live without a car, so states and provinces choose to set a very low bar for acquiring and keeping a driver's license.
This makes me think of going to chain restaurants. Everything has been focus-grouped and optimized and feels exactly like an overfit proxy for an enjoyable meal. I feel like I'm in a bald-faced machine that is optimized to generate profit from my visit. The fact that it's a restaurant feels almost incidental.
"HI! My name is Tracy! I'm going to be your server this evening!" as she flawlessly writes her name upside down in crayon on the paper tablecloth. Woah. I think this place needs to re-calibrate their flair.
a collection of half-finished documents that are always out of date
I think of company wikis as a place where information goes to die.
A useful feature, which I'm sure exists somewhere, would be "freshness" checks on pages. A timestamp for the last time someone looked at this and said "yes, this is still valid". For pages that are important, a team could set up recurring tasks for people to do periodic freshness checks.
Surely this is already a common practice, although not any team I've been on. Undoubtedly there is some ISO-9000 process for this...
I worked with a guy who introduced himself by saying "Hi, I'm firstName and I'm the world's best Java programmer." He would say that while shaking your hand and looking you in the eye like an otherwise normal person. I gather he had won some international Java programming competition.
Luckily I didn't work with him very much. He was a technical consultant for a customer of ours. He was brought in to hold us to account so he wasn't going to be fun to work with even without the ego...
That was my thought. Somewhere on the planet there's something that has a sexual explicit name and the take down is based on that.
The Starbucks this piece occupies is no longer a community hub – its capacity to function as one has been filtered out by profit-seeking decisions
To be fair, I think the reason that it formerly sought to be a community hub was also motivated by profit-seeking decisions. Maybe when there were a handful of locations the comfy seating was motivated by something other than profit. I imagine by the time they opened store number 20,000 that the design of the store, including the comfy seating, was very careful designed to seek profit.
Face it, Zuck is an accidental billionaire who had the advantages of Harvard but is now completely out of his depth and lacks a crystalized vision as to where to go from here. It won't be long before Zuck is shown the door after losing large piles of money and failing to make more of it. I give him 1 year or 2 tops.
I'm pretty sure people have been saying exactly that for 15 years now. Maybe someday it will come true...
You can consider porting your landline number to a VOIP service (I use voip.ms) and after that it's nearly free. I bought a basic Linksys modem (SPA2102) so that we can still plug in our cordless phones in an use them normally.
As a bonus you can set up simple filtering so that you don't get many spam calls. For me, all calls that have an anonymous or 800 number in the caller ID get redirected to a voice prompt that asks the caller to press 9 to talk to us; all other calls just ring our phone directly. You could also use whitelists, blacklists, etc.
It's both better and cheaper than a regular landline...
Thank you for putting a brief description of the product at the top of the post. There are often posts on HN for new versions of software that I haven't heard of. I click on them out of curiosity only to find a post that only talks about the new version. I have to go looking to find out what the product/project actually is. (And often the post is on a blog that doesn't have a link back to the main product/project site!)
I think having an extended application process is the point. It selects for people who are good at university, rather than people who were good at high school.
That's the best case scenario. Worst case is that they get nothing back and own nothing. (Based on the quick summary of the deal above; I don't know more than what's here.)
Speaking of the browser extension UX, for those who don't know, the keyboard shortcut for filling in your login details is ctrl-shift-L.
fd instead of find (fast, good defaults) https://github.com/sharkdp/fd
Maybe Asimov didn't think that the described scenario would be the state of the art for UX at the time, but that there would be other reasons for that UX. Maybe without some sophisticated ritual and human involvement the process wouldn't be accepted by the people? Many of our institutional, and democratic, processes involve extra steps and rituals, sometimes anachronistic, and maybe this is meant to be a reflection of that?
Perhaps the creators and operators of the machine also want it to have to complicated UX out of self interest. This could be a way of staying involved and/or retaining some control over the machine and its use.
I'm just speculating without any knowledge of the story in general...
I couldn't land without crashing but luckily the terrain was perfectly flat so I could just drive where I wanted to go. I did a few long distance, cross-country drives by pointing in the right direction and setting an alarm. At the prescribed time I would come back and make minor corrections before finally parking at my destination airport.
Detroit going bust is bad if all of your property is in Detroit, but if you have property in 100s or 1000s of cities then the individual booms and busts become less relevant.
If you haven't read the article yet you can test yourself. (I've copied and pasted the questions in random order. I don't know how they were presented to the original participants.)
"If you had to guess, what percentage of American adults..."
* Are left-handed
* Have at least a high school degree
* Are Hispanic
* Are Catholic
* Have an advanced degree
* Have a household income over $500,000
* Are vegan or vegetarian
* Are first-generation immigrants
* Have a passport
* Have a household income over $100,000
* Live in Texas
* Are fully vaccinated against COVID-19
* Live in New York City
* Own a smartphone
* Are Jewish
* Are Muslim
* Have flown on a plane
* Are a military veteran
* Own a gun
* Are Asian
* Have a driver's license
* Own a house
* Are Native American
* Have a household income over $1 million
* Are married
* Own a car
* Are members of a union
* Are atheists
* Have at least one child
* Have a household income over $50,000
* Are Democrats
* Are transgender
* Are gay or lesbian
* Are obese
* Are Black
* Are bisexual
* Have a pet
* Have read a book in the past year
* Are white
* Live in California
* Voted in the 2020 election
* Are Republicans
* Have a household income over $25,000
* Are Christian
* Have at least a college degreeMy team is using Kaitai in production at work to decode proprietary messages from a partner. The web IDE makes writing and debugging the format files pretty easy and I would strongly recommend using it.
Overall I'm very happy with Kaitai. I've found it to be effective and enjoyable to use.
Well, this is a cynical answer, but I think in this case: make money. Making things easier is one way to use technology to make money. Having a significant market share and making it difficult for others to enter the market is another way to use technology to make money.
There was (probably) a point in history where AirBnB existed to make things easier. Now I'm pretty sure it's just there to make money.
Interesting, thanks for the detailed response. It's fun to listen to Doctorow talk trash but a lot of details get lost in the process.
It will be interesting to see what Uber can do with the position they're in.
In the linked transcript Doctorow suggests that Uber's profits come from selling off divisions. "I’m finally curing my starvation by eating my own arms" is the rather colourful metaphor he uses. Does that line up with the 2021Q3 profit you mention, or maybe he's talking about something that happened earlier?