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acbabis

316 karma · joined October 6, 2015

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acbabis··on Why interruptions are frustrating to developers
> I’ve also learned to write code in a way that reduces cognitive load so that interruptions aren’t so disruptive to my productivity.

I have too, but sometimes I have to read other people's code, and I don't have any control over how difficult that is.

acbabis··on Why I prefer making useless stuff
I've found that learning to empathize with future-me, also made me better at writing code that others want to read. Kind of like dogfooding.
acbabis··on How to lower the price of plant-based meat
The overall portion of athletes are vegetarian or vegan is low, but the ones who are can still perform very well. This suggests that the difference is based, at least in part, on preference.
acbabis··on How to lower the price of plant-based meat
There could be a lot of reasons for that. I doubt the reason is that meat is the healthiest option for them; meat contains a lot of saturated fat, which athletes try to avoid too much of. It's more likely that meat is healthy enough for athletes who enjoy eating meat. This wouldn't mean they need meat, and they most certainly don't as there are a lot of successful vegan bodybuilders.
acbabis··on How to lower the price of plant-based meat
This. In conversations about vegetarianism, it's pretty common for people to give their distaste of fake meat as their primary reason for not reducing their meat consumption. I really wish that wasn't the default counter-argument, but there seem to be a lot of people who truly believe vegetarians need soymeat to survive.

I've noticed the vegan foods I enjoy most are the ones that aren't trying to be something else. They just use tasty vegan ingredients like potatoes or avocados. I think more people would consider reductarian diets if they were aware of this.

acbabis··on Shitlist Driven Development (2016)
I've experienced this first-hand. Joining an existing project and being put on test-writing duty very quickly turned me into our team's chief advocate of writing testable code.
acbabis··on Is Stupidity Expanding? Some Hypotheses
I don't think volume of articles is a very good measure. The distribution of people who publish things has changed over time.
acbabis··on Twitter to ban political advertising
I'm not a Twitter user myself, but the character limit is what made Twitter unique. It might be fun to laugh at people who only want to read 140 characters, but we shouldn't assume they aren't going elsewhere to post and read essays. A lot of people use Twitter and reddit/Facebook/HN/ect.
acbabis··on Supreme Court allows blind people to sue retailers if websites aren't accessible
I've also done a lot of accessibility work. For people looking to get into it, another crucial thing is using "Semantic HTML". If every button is a <button> tag and every link is an <a> and every form element has a corresponding <form> tag (even for AJAX), then you save about 80% of your accessibility work up front (no, this isn't an exaggeration).
acbabis··on Supreme Court allows blind people to sue retailers if websites aren't accessible
It's also a great way to persuade managers. Actually, a lot of the time you can just tell them you're doing SEO because nowadays they're fundamentally the same. Almost everything you do for accessibility has a positive impact on SEO.
acbabis··on I hate living in my tiny house
Bathrooms and kitchens
acbabis··on Dear Agile, I’m Tired of Pretending (2018)
"Agile transformations" are bad, but I still think agile itself is fine. Teams of self-organized, competent developers tend naturally toward agile-like practices. I've seen agile's story-centric model of development help new developers grow by giving them responsibility for specific, testable units of work.

As a lot of people have already said, the problems arise when managers expect agile to give them software on a timeline.

acbabis··on Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2013)
I feel like people who study subjective topics like the value of human life (philosophers) have already internalized "learned helplessness". It's empirical-oriented people like us who have a harder time grappling with the idea of not knowing everything
acbabis··on How to respond when you are asked for an estimate?
I once read someone give similar advice about estimation. What stuck with me most is that if someone pressures you to change an estimate, it's no longer an estimate. Most managers don't actually want estimates.
acbabis··on Jobs people are most likely to inherit from their mother and father
My internal kid voice said "Yeah!". Until I read the other reply, it hadn't occurred to me that your rhetorical question's intended answer might be "No"
acbabis··on The Uncanny Resurrection of Dungeons and Dragons
Another very important reason was left out: The 5th edition of the game was very well designed and received critical acclaim among veterans who were disappointed by the 4th edition. The article makes it sound like there's been a resurrection when in fact the game was just hibernating.
acbabis··on Amazon Is Testing Its Own Delivery Service to Rival FedEx and UPS
It is if there's large barriers to entry
acbabis··on Breast-cancer death rate drops almost 40 percent
I haven't researched it, but the two statistics could be reconciled if there are fewer smokers than non-smokers.
acbabis··on FDA slams EpiPen maker
Those givens are far from trivial, and getting them wrong is dangerous. You may as well say "Given we can perfectly predict the market, it's possible to make a lot of money"
acbabis··on Turn any link into a suspicious-looking one
This is neat. I'll make sure to use it whenever I post something here or on Reddit. Great work
acbabis··on Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements
Adblock Plus has an "Acceptable Ads" program that allows non-animated, non-sound ads to remain on the page. People who think supporting the sites they visit is the right thing to do, can enable acceptable ads while blocking annoying ones.
acbabis··on Amit’s Game Programming Information
Neat. Bookmarked
acbabis··on Amit’s Game Programming Information
The post on programming hex grids is another really good one
acbabis··on I am going to eradicate the inbound Windows Support scam
My wife does this. One time a support scammer called trying to get her to install malware. It went something like this:

"Ok. Please press the Windows key"

"Ok (long pause)"

"Did you press it?"

"Yes"

"What happened?"

"Nothing happened"

"Try again."

"Ok... Nothing. Does it matter that I don't have a windows?"

"Oh you have Mac?"

"No, I have Ubuntu"

"Ok, what version?"

"I don't know!? You're the computer person. Why don't you know?!"

The best part is that she was sitting on the couch the whole time.

acbabis··on Violating Terms of Use Isn’t a Crime, EFF Tells Court
In a sense, holding corporations criminally liable is better. The fact that a corporation can't go to prison almost balances-out the lack of mens rea requirement.
acbabis··on Stop Checking Email So Often (2015)
When I saw this in the HN feed, my first thought was "I should see if I got that email"
acbabis··on Supreme Court Should Block Printer Company’s Ploy to Undermine Consumer Rights
Yeah, that's my biggest concern. It's already hard to buy a PC without a copy of Windows. Imagine if you couldn't even buy a PC without relinquishing the right to switch your OS later. Or if you had to agree to leave the bloatware installed. One could come up with all sorts of horrible things if SCOTUS rules in favor of the printer company.
acbabis··on The Impacts of Video Games on Cognition (2015) [pdf]
> I can't play video games "for fun". I want to be good and that costs time. Video games have the downside of giving players easy rewards. I think it does something bad to your brain. Not necessarily altering it forever, but at least turning one into a little dopamine junkie.

I'm not sure this adds up. I think I get a dopamine fix when I play simple, relaxing games or games with the difficulty set too low, but not when playing to win. Getting better at StarCraft, for example, requires you practice the same openings over and over while focusing on things that aren't particularly fun. You discover just how lazy the human mind is and then feel bad about it :)

acbabis··on Ask HN: Are we overcomplicating software development?
Our meeting format was for each person to say a) What they worked on, b) What they were about to work on, and c) If they needed help with anything. Our rule was that you could ask for help as long as you were just scheduling a time to meet after the stand-up. It worked really, really well.

Then we got a new scrum master whose desired format was to talk about each item on the Kanban board each day, even the ones that weren't being worked on.

acbabis··on Cash for Words: A Brief History of Writing for Money
While I agree that free content isn't inherently better (and usually worse), I disagree that good content will emerge in free venues. Social media has crowd-sourced the costs of discovery. You don't have all day to separate the good free content from the bad, but some teenager does.
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