FiddlyPack

Tbh I want my 3GS form factor back. That design was the "right" one imho, and we lost it due to market pressure for bigger screens and better cameras, when what we needed to do was keep the utility but largely stay off our screens.

Dan Ariely was one of the biggest disappointments and betrayals of my intellectual life. I found the "research" he did to be mind-blowing, groundbreaking stuff at the time, and I told many people his work, sharing his papers and podcasts as a true enthusiast.

I am astonished that he holds an academic-adjacent position anywhere, no matter what his regrets might be today. Private redemption shouldn't be out of reach, but it shouldn't be possible for him to hold a position at any institution concerned with uncovering Truth. He should have resigned out of respect, if his institution was too gutless to do so. It's a tragedy.

How? I tried but got forced back onto 5.

That's a sharp insight, and it reveals something core to communication that I otherwise wouldn't have considered- HN item 6b translocates reliospacactivity of our medium.

Shall I engage the tachyon beams, sir?

That's the fun part. We don't. Could have happened 10 years ago without us noticing. I don't expect my skin cells to be able to recognize "me" anymore than I expect we will be able to recognize a superintelligent AGI. If it arrived 10 years ago, then the last 10 years could simply be its PR campaign. We wouldn't even be able to tell if it was successfully achieving its "goals" or not, assuming an AGI even has "goals"

I was writing slop grenade essays in Slack before LLMs were a thing. To everyone who had to put up with my overly verbose style: I am sorry.

I'm trying to take your comment seriously, but it's very difficult. My partner is a physician in the US. People are ending up in ERs because it takes a year for them to see the specialist who could have prevented the same problem.

"If you can afford it" is true everywhere. You can also see a specialist in just about any country in a couple days if you've got the money to fly there; often cheaper and faster to travel outside the US to get care, depending on what you need.

"Public" healthcare in the US is a joke. Insurance costs more and covers less every year.

Gotta find some way to keep the population occupied with something “meaningful” as you automate away their jobs while providing longer lifespans!

Multiple cursors has been supported for quite some time now in VSCode, as well as related useful default editor shortcuts like jump cursor by word, beginning/end of line, etc, that are especially useful when moving around multiple cursors/selections simultaneously.

Once you have audience _capture_, worse UX becomes a valuable dark pattern because it requires _investment_.

Have you ever seen a modern slot machine? There seems to be a pattern to winning, if only you study it a bit longer...just put in one more coin and the epiphany will come.

I’ve been a bike commuter too and if it’s any consolation whatsoever, I just want to let you know that if you see me with my cell phone on my steering while driving, it’s because I have my navigation app open and I want it in my peripheral vision so I can be attentive to the road.

If it prevents two or three cars from making the light you were both in together, you’ve needlessly made those specific cars wait for an entire additional cycle...in heavy traffic, it’s bad for everyone when as many vehicles as possible don’t make it through the pipe, as it slows down the entire congested apparatus further.

Regarding McDonalds, correct, the innovation was not in the franchise. The innovation was in creating the corporate and logistic structures necessary that every single McDonalds, everywhere, even though owned by franchisees, would deliver pretty much the same experience.

Innovate means to make changes in a thing that is established. The innovation here is that the thing is the same everywhere, you don’t need to know the local errata to rely on it.

I say this as someone who was downright flabbergasted that the iPhone was described as “innovative.” After all, I had been using a handheld PC with full Windows installed for years when the original iPhone came out, and it could make VoIP calls just fine! It took me awhile to accept that the incremental “new” people are talking about when they talk about innovation is distinctly NOT novelty. It’s a shuffling of the already existing puzzle-pieces in a way that, in the cases it is successful, we call innovative, and when it fails, it was simply “ahead of its time.”

...the innovation is a consistent more reliable and timely experience, consistent across geographies, where it did not exist before.

McDonalds didn’t have the first burger franchise, the innovation is very much in the reliability of an experience that is a better fit for the needs of the consumer than the alternatives.

I too avoided booking taxis due to bad dispatchers, even though I’m sure some good dispatchers existed in some areas. That doesn’t really do you any good when the use case for a taxi is generally that you need a car in a place that is not your home, and so you are unfamiliar with the area.

Uber not only gave you a reliable dispatcher, they show you with GPS that the taxi on the way, which greatly improves consumer confidence that yes, the ride really is on its way. If that existed pre-Uber for some areas, it hardly matters if you never visit the area and so don’t know about it’s existence.

I didn’t think I suggested this necessarily went “more than 40,” only that “on” time might be hard to differentiate from “off” time, and that some activities that look like “off” (having dinner with teammates) might have real value while others that look like “on” (researching some tech framework that is irrelevant to the problem you are trying to solve) might be worthless.

Oh, yes, I hear you on being present for 10 min of a 1 hr meeting. Your presence is absolutely valuable for the entirety of the hour meeting, even though it’s not clear from the outset where precisely during that time those 10 min will be valuable.

I guess that’s what I mean; it’s not necessarily obvious when is work time and when is not. Even as you’re posting on HN during your meeting as you understand it is not valuable for you to be 100% “present” and it would be more valuable to explore ideas and culture on HN as you listen, so it is also true that many will be working on ideas as they eat dinner with their families, solving problems while they sleep, and planning their dependency graph during their commute. I just don’t think “hours worked” is an honest metric any more than 4 years at college shows that you were anything more than present.

Those 4 years could have been rigorous and honest and intense and valuable with a B average to show for it, or you could have been partying and have an A for your effort. Time spent might be required, but it also doesn’t matter.

I think this is a pretty good definition, except that in creative work (like developing a novel application), sleeping often produces some of the best epiphanies/solutions. The truth is this: we have patrons, and our value is not calculable by the hour.

The confusion is because many of us work many days remote, and/or have flexible hours. For many of us, our entire existence is oriented around improving a bottom line...so when we have down time, we are recreationally reading about how to do that better, whether we are on the clock or not. So, if you are a remote worker, and you produce 3 proof of concepts for your company for fun, and none of them pan out, how many hours did you work? Nobody knows, including you.

No shade here, but how can you possibly be on HN right now? Or do you consider this kind of commenting activity to be part of your job? I consider myself to work maybe 15 hr per week, but according to my contract I work 40, and sometimes my timesheet says 60. Nonetheless, I am “on-call” quite a bit, at my own discretion.

I just can’t imagine how I could stay in deep concentration and be “legit 65-70 hours per week,” unless I was also counting chatting on HN, Slack, meals with coworkers, research...ie the things that make my actual “work” time (of maybe 15 hours per week) truly productive.

I guess it would be totally reasonable to include some of those activities as “legit work time,” but then how do you decide what is and isn’t legit? I require a lot of adjacent “down” time to provide very high-value “on” time for my company, but how could you possibly know if 20 hours spent researching something you are excited about will have any value whatsoever for your company? Should it be “billable?” This is the unsung benefit of being a salaried worker: you don’t have to concern yourself about whether your research and exploratory development is “on task” or not, you just need to bring the benefits back to your company.

I think the argument is that all of our personal servers should be treated as such (that is, not appliances that require zero maintenance), and that this is a step in that direction.

All the router hacking of 2018 was possible because we treated our home Internet services as dumb-connections instead of treating them as the vulnerable “Internet Services” that they are.

Not sure where “and nurses” is coming from in your comment. Nursing research is predominately on long-term patient outcome, whereas MD education is predominately on the disease / underlying cause. The nurses I know are more focused on and better educated on how holistic care serves the long-term outcomes of the patients, while docs are better educated to attend to the acute problems.

I would expect a change to quality of calories provided in a hospital to originate from a DNP before a MD.

This is actually kinda what the person you’re replying to is talking about. You have a piece of software that replaces some knowledge workers’ task. At first it seems like you are saving money, but the specifics of the task require an adaptable workforce over the course of years, and the RPA requires an adaptable collection of workers to learn from. Now, instead of just having a job that processes those inputs and outputs, you have the same thing but made more baroque by being connected to RPA, plus software developers to maintain the RPA software itself.

Short term, it seems to eliminate workers. Shortly after those workers are eliminated, truth on the ground has changed, and now there’s an ADDITIONAL cost to updating the software, which is harder and more expensive to do without the workers that have been eliminated.

“Lying without malice” is called “tact.”

...huh. Interviewing in VA/MD, only once had a candidate wear a suit. Nice shirt and blazer with jeans/slacks seems to be the norm. I wonder if it’s micro-regional to DC? Or something about the specific software industry you are in?

This is a surprising perspective to hear. All the really smart people I know happen to struggle with a variety of difficulties in this area, and I think it’s related to a paralysis of choice, not just in terms of choosing between outcomes available to them personally, but also in choosing between different outcomes for their friends and the world, none of which is utopia.

On the other hand, the few sub-100 IQ people that I know well enough to have a sense of seem to be more content with their lot in life, having long ago learned that they do not have much agency to change it, and thus are more accepting of whatever situation they find themselves in.

Semver _allows_ non-breaking changes on major release. It also supports tagging which could be a date tag.

The entire spec is like a 10 minute read. Anyone using semver should have at least read the semver spec. Anyway, the bullet on tagging:

“Build metadata MAY be denoted by appending a plus sign and a series of dot separated identifiers immediately following the patch or pre-release version. Identifiers MUST comprise only ASCII alphanumerics and hyphen [0-9A-Za-z-]. Identifiers MUST NOT be empty. Build metadata SHOULD be ignored when determining version precedence. Thus two versions that differ only in the build metadata, have the same precedence. Examples: 1.0.0-alpha+001, 1.0.0+20130313144700, 1.0.0-beta+exp.sha.5114f85.”

Take heart! All culture, and especially music, is about retracing steps. “Pioneering” in music is about capturing the Zeitgeist in just the right manner and with extraordinary expertise to be undeniable, which then creates a new normal. That’s not exactly pioneering, it’s standard setting. The perfection of a musical meme is retroactively confirmed by virtue of its proliferation. It’s genius, while undeniable, as a strong relationship with luck.

:part and :theme CSS puesdo-selectors will help address these issues

Exactly so. The use case of Local Storage is usually “application cache.” When you’re building out features, it may not even be obvious that you’re injecting application state _that originated in localStorage_ into the DOM. That’s why this is such an easy problem to fall into.