waisbrot

In my experience, ORMs save a little bit of writing SQL and then cost an unbounded quantity of time in debugging mysterious problems because knowing why a query is slow now requires understanding the DB, your own code, and also the ORM.

This is an excellent distillation.

Yes, in practice you may find that one or two of these don't apply to your own special start-up. But probably they all actually do.

Developer community. "Open source" historically implied that an interested developer might hack on the code and submit their changes. But if the entire code-base is rewritten by the maintainer every year, then there's no developer community.

An easy example: you need 5 minutes of planned downtime (which is entirely within SLAs) to execute a major upgrade, but the system is also used by Sales for demos to major new clients. "We're going to take 5 minutes of downtime on Wednesday evening for an upgrade. Contact me ASAP if this is a problem for you." If you don't hear from the team, then it's OK to go.

Are Seattle, the Rust Belt, and upstate NY examples of higher taxes driving wealthy job-creators out? I think they were the opposite: the market moved and then the wealthy people left to follow it.

NYC has always been extremely expensive, and people have largely decided that it's worth the price. I don't see how a little wobble in either direction changes that. Everyone could have already moved to Miami, or Salt Lake City, or even cheaper places if they were actually price-sensitive.

Most Americans cannot get a mortgage for $1M.

Now picture NYC, symbolic of wealth and power. Owning property there is a great way to show off.

This tax may make it more attractive to own a second home there, because it proves you're not one of the fake-wealthy who can't afford the price.

And "large" just means that AWS will assign an account manager to talk with you. I was at a start-up who spent $300k/year on AWS and that was enough to get special attention and discounts. Enterprise pricing is confusing.

Nowadays, the top Google result is probably LLM-generated blog-spam of lower-quality than whatever chatbot your company is paying for.

Back when most Google results were authentic web-pages, something like "here's a web page that I think solves your problem" was a fairly useful reply from a coworker.

I think the down-votes on this comment are too bad. It's legitimately funny to write a muli-paragraph rant in high dudgeon calling other people "exhausting".

"Spider and Web" is quite short, pretty easy, mostly gives good hints. A great starter-game, I think. I also love Zarf's writing.

https://eblong.com/zarf/zweb/tangle/

That sounds like https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Tools-Rerere ?

Looking back, it would have been neat to have more metadata in my old Git commits. Were there any differences when I was writing with IntelliJ vs VSCode?

Claude adds "Co-authored by" attribution for itself when committing, so you can see the human author and also the bot.

I think this is a good balance, because if you don't care about the bot you still see the human author. And if you do care (for example, I'd like to be able to review commits and see which were substantially bot-written and which were mostly human) then it's also easy.

For example, I just asked ChatGPT "The boat wash is 50 meters down the street. Should I drive, sail, or walk there to get my yacht detailed?" and it recommended walking. I'm sure with a tiny bit more effort, OpenAI could patch it to the point where it's a lot harder to confuse with this specific flavor of problem, but it doesn't alter the overall shape.

I would still recommend trying Bazzite today.

If we take the post as truth (it's not clear to me whether we can), then Bazzite will get iffy kernel updates that will particularly break handhelds. But desktop will be more stable and you could even turn off automatic updates for 6months and see how things look after.

I think Bazzite has a very smooth experience for Windows gaming and even if you decide that you don't like it or that the distro really is falling apart, you'll have gotten the best Linux-gaming experience and can evaluate other distros more clearly.

https://gizmodo.com/dilbert-creator-claims-he-taught-chatgpt...

Scott Adams taught ChatGPT to put humans into an instant bliss-state. "Seems at least plausible"?

IME, taking on extra responsibility doesn't get you promoted. However, you can take it on and then find a new job with a better salary where the responsibility you added is part of the expectation.

The blog is not terrible advice, but "getting promoted" just seems like a waste of time and effort nowadays. To get promoted at Google from L5 (Sr SWE) to L6 (Staff SWE) you need to do the work of a GOOD L6 for 1y+ and have made some very solid internal networking connections and have multiple managers on your side and have an opening for such a role.

To get hired away from Google to an L6-equivalent role at Meta (or whereever) you need to get halfway through one L6 project and do a few hours of interviewing. There's no comparison in the level of effort. (And I'm not picking on Google here. I think it's the same or worse nearly everywhere.)

The technology is currently being heavily subsidized and made widely available. If we decided to ban it globally things would look very different. Would it be worthwhile for scammers to run a massive server farm and spend thousands on training and generation? Maybe? It would certainly reduce the quantity.

I love the Aphyr posts.

“Can I use any language?” > “Sure.” Move quickly, before he realizes his mistake.

"Following an interview that Tom’s Guide conducted with Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu, in which he said the company was planning to launch next-gen AI hardware in 2026, we received a number of tips alleging that Rabbit has failed to pay since late summer."

The article is mostly talking about using the `cron` scheduler and running things at 2am on Sunday because there's especially low traffic. These cron jobs are "I don't care when it runs, but it should have minimal chance of causing problems."

Your use-case is totally different: "I want this job to run at this time" so the only lesson that applies to you is that the `cron` utility might behave weird during DST switches. No idea if it underlies your cloud provider, so it may be completely irrelevant.

I think people generally mean "state", but in the US-centric HN community that word is ambiguous and will generally be interpreted the wrong way. Maybe "sovereign state" would work?

OP was alluding to Jesus

I agree that suddenly adding a formatter to existing code could be disruptive. But how does "buy in from the team" work over time? If you hire someone new and they don't like the format rules, do you stop using the formatter?

+1

For example, "nit: maybe call the function updateCreditCard instead of updateCard"

If you disagree and think your function name is better (or that the two are equally bad), then I'm happy to go along with what you've got. But maybe you didn't think of this name or maybe I've convinced you. Either it's a quick fix (and no re-review needed) or you just dismiss my comment.

As an American, a lot of UK geography and history questions are beyond my ken

But note that the UK-based contestants have no problem with sequences like "US vice presidents ordered by number of terms served" or "US capitals ordered alphabetically by the state they're in".

That's covered in the blog post:

First, that archers can actually be more effective against mounted troops than foot: the mounted troops ride close together, horses are hard to fully armor, and one horse getting hit in the leg can cause a lot of chaos.

Second, at Agincourt, the French knights _walked_ through the arrow-fire quite successfully, but the effort (physical, mental, cumulative effect of small wounds) tired them enough that the English soldiers could beat them hand-to-hand. And that this ability to inflict small damage before the main fighting is why archers were valuable.

"Maybe the memes making fun of this person are, in fact, an exaggeration."

Sure. I don't need much convincing that Ballmer was only "bad" rather than "uniquely terrible". It seems a pretty normal thing that the negative reaction was outsized.

But I also think it would be more interesting to look at cases where the reaction by the haters was _spot on_. Or even where it _undersold_ how bad things were.

Maybe. In my experience, a more common case is that the buyer has no way to evaluate value other than quoted price and so they're actually _much happier_ with a huge price than they would be with a smaller price for the same work.