ryangittins

Well said! After a few years of LLM sycophancy convincing laypeople they've managed to make progress on or fully crack famous math problems it's satisfying to see a world-class mathematician really put it through its paces. It's all the more impressive that Tao seems satisfied with the conversation.

As I recall there wasn't an abundance of notice of Pivotal Tracker's sunset, but I did kind of expect someone to come up with a more 1:1 open-source replacement with a one-step migration tool.

We looked at Linear and other options but ultimately ended up going with Shortcut. We wrote our own small migration script and moved over the old Pivotal IDs to keep as much historical context as we could. Shortcut's been a good tool overall, though I preferred Pivotal's Goldilocks level of compactness as far as the UI was concerned, as well as the general design.

Pivotal's API was tidy and integrated nicely into our development process. We have some git aliases such as `git start <branch>` where the branch name will end with a story ID by convention. The alias would do the work of creating the branch, setting the remote to the dev's fork of our repo, marking the story as started, and assigning the dev as the owner. It saved a lot of manual steps, so thank you for your involvement in the project which allowed such a nice workflow!

Pivotal Labs

RIP Pivotal Tracker, and thank you for your involvement! It was a nice piece of software.

Interesting, I hadn't considered that! You're probably right.

Hah, wow. A post with an ID under 10k. Meanwhile this one is over 47M.

I didn't realize I've been reading HN nearly its whole existence. For all my complaining about what's happened to the internet since those days, HN has managed to stay high quality without compromising.

This is the coolest place! I'm so sad to see they're in financial distress.

As a kid I would browse their website endlessly, just fascinated by all the weird stuff. It scratched the same itch that watching Mythbusters would scratch. In adulthood I rediscovered them and went to their Milwaukee location for the first time. We spent hours there, looking through all the cool stuff they have. It really gives you ideas!

...getting insecure or jealous of all the other social connections that your extrovert friends have. There’s an asymmetry there that can feed lots of insecurities.

I wouldn't sweat this too much. Mathematically, most people have fewer friends than their friends have.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendship_paradox

You and I are what Kurt Vonnegut called Bashers:

Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done they’re done.

I always found this frustrating in high school, as some assignments required submission of a first draft, second draft, and final version of a paper. I always wrote the final version first and then worked backwards to created a second and then a first draft by removing sentences and generally making it worse.

Funny, I just checked up on the status of this project yesterday! I've been on the lookout for a personal CRM for a long time and have had my eye on Monica for months.

It looks really promising but I could not for the life of me get it to run in the Docker container last time I tried. I have a dozen or so other Docker containers running without issue, so I don't think it's my setup. Are people reporting better success with Chandler when it comes to containerization? I'd love to use it but have spent too many hours trying to get it to work.

Yes! I'm sure I'm not using it anywhere close to its full potential, but just being able to two-finger tap a link to open it in a new tab is huge.

What are your favorite shortcuts?

This is a fantastic analogy for something which has bothered me for years! One example which comes to mind is pushback received on a pull request for a cron job. This script did some heavy lifting so it took a few minutes to run.

The reviewer suggested all sorts of minor optimizations so a script which runs once per week in the middle of the night with no one waiting on it could run tens of seconds faster. A complete waste of time and effort to my mind, and one understandable as the OP describes: a technical challenge which, when solved, equates to zero consumer upside.

It's similar, but not quite a binary search. Imagine you have a book and you're trying to determine if a certain page number exists or if it's been torn out. You know the order, as pages are numbered in sequence, but you don't know whether the target page is still in the book or not. (For very large, cryptographically secure books you can assume the pages have been torn out uniformly.)

With the method described, you would measure the thickness of the book (the size of the lookup file) and open to a proportional page. e.g. If you're looking for page 120 and the book is 360 pages long, that's 1/3 of the thickness. So, find the point that's a third of the thickness of the book and open the book there. You'll be pretty close.

With a binary search, you wouldn't measure the thickness of the book. You'd always just blindly start in the middle, assess which half the target page is, and repeat the operation on that half and you'll get there pretty quickly.

Both exploit the knowledge of how the data is organized and both are most well-suited to uniform data (like pages in a book or random hashes), but are just different strategies requiring different means of accessing the data.

Admittedly not a perfect analogy, but you get the idea.

Sure, there is one airplane but that's hardly revolutionary. A couple of guys can fly a few dozen feet. So what?

As I recall, one of the clinchers was his use of the phrase, "you can’t eat your cake and have it too" as opposed to the now-predominant variant "you can’t have your cake and eat it too."

I often wonder if stylometry can be used to positively identify a person based not on general word frequency, but by a single phrase or two which are rare in general but commonly used by the individual. In theory this could be relatively easy to find given a large corpus. You'd pick out the top few n-grams for short phrases by an individual and identify the ones which are most overly-represented compared to the rest of the population.

I suspect it's part of an effort to push back against the overwhelming number of thoughtless "listicles" which seem to dominate the internet. I'm planning a trip abroad right now and half the effort is in finding a list of places to visit which was put together by someone who actually went there and has some thoughts rather than someone who slapped together some nonsense. Or someone who has taken the time to really whittle a list down to 7 items rather than making another useless "1200 Things to Do in Italy Mega Post!!!"

I think you're right in that "opinionated" seems like a shorthand for "thoughtful curation" which is the opposite of what search engines tend to turn up.

Interesting take. This reminds me of when people say that hate CGI in movies. What they really mean is they hate bad or noticeable CGI—a huge portion of CGI is stuff we don't even notice, like landscapes or city streets.

A lot of people say they left a job too late. Not many say they left one too early.

I think you know that you are still in the midst of burnout. If you can go a few months without a job and be okay, my suggestion would be to quit immediately and start looking for a new job in your own time. You need time to decompress followed by a complete change of environment. Recovery is not going to happen in this environment.

Feel free to contact me if you want to chat about your experiences. I went through something similar last year.

Not sure how this feature made its way in.

It's possible the language was just following usage rather than leading it. Regardless of whether or not it's right, I commonly see something like

    } catch (\Exception $e) {
        // no-op
    }

I've seen the same hack done with `switch (true)` in pre-PHP8 code (and other languages) as well.

I've never heard of F3 so I can't compare and contrast, but Slim is definitely my go-to for projects like the one you describe. Just enough boilerplate to handle the basics, but not a ton of framework-specific quirks and conventions to learn.

I'm fuzzy on the details as it's been 5+ year since I looked at it, but it wasn't as simple as that. I think it may have been that it worked over HTTP but not HTTPS, and/or they did say that accepted it but it broke under some circumstances.

I ran into a number of finicky issues building siftrss[1] a few years back. One I toiled over quite a bit was the discovery that Feedly, a very popular feed reader, does not support gzip. I haven't checked in recent years, but they may still not.

It's frustrating when you're forced to change the behavior of your "agnostic" application for the sake of a large, commonly-used third party tool in the ecosystem.

[1] https://siftrss.com/

Those aren't funded by taxpayers like libraries are.

This is true of a lot of things. Imagine if libraries didn't exist and someone got the bright idea for one today. It would never fly.

What's the alternative? Professional jurors?

Maybe if American society valued science the same we we value justice, we could compel people to occasionally participate in surveys and studies the way we compel them to participate in jury duty.

We see the latter as a fact of life and occasional annoyance for a cause greater than ourselves. Maybe we should treat a contribution to science the same way. Many countries require some military service of young people—we could ask people to contribute in all sorts of ways.

I've made this a few times and it's pretty nice!

Chillichump is great! His enthusiasm, depth and breadth of content, and general manner really got me into growing peppers and making hot sauce during the pandemic. I've got a dozen different varieties growing on my balcony right now!

Thanks, I'm glad you're liking it!

Great idea! I've submitted my side project, https://siftrss.com/.

It lets you add filters to any RSS feed for free in a few seconds. It's great for filtering news, podcasts, and anything else you get via RSS down to just the items you want to see.