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blowskion A Sketch of the Biggest Idea in Software Architecture (2022)

If I’ve understood then, a narrow waist architecture follows two principles:

- code to an interface not an implementation

- segregate interfaces, don’t overload them with responsibilities

blowskion A Sketch of the Biggest Idea in Software Architecture (2022)

A comment from a previous discussion of this post is still true for me:

> The text tries to introduce the idea of a “narrow waist” as an architecture pattern. But I don’t fully understand how the author distinguishes this concept from similar ones, and some of the examples even seem to contradict the principles.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31777080

blowskion Everyone has JavaScript, right?

This whole topic is as interesting as "tabs vs spaces" or "emacs vs vim". There's a vocal minority of people that want to tell everybody else how the web should work, and everybody has ignored them for the last 20 years, and will continue to ignore them.

blowskion Physically attractive attorneys tend to have greater success in federal court

Michel Houellebecq observes that a beautiful girl in her 20s will be confused in her 30s at the paucity of men holding doors open for her.

blowskion Show HN: Talk to Me Human – my game about social persuasion

Getting To Yes by Roger Fisher and William Ury.

blowskion Tips on how to structure your home directory (2023)

I've tried using tags, but the effort isn't worth it for me. Between search, occasional housekeeping, and a decent folder structure I have everything I need without being coupled to Apple.

blowskion What a difference four years makes

I would prefer the market to be exerting that pressure. But big tech has done such a good job of erecting barriers to entry, while governmetns have done such a bad job of anti-monopoly regulation, that steps like this are now necessary.

blowskion Scale of the Universe

The "What If?" books by Randall Munroe (of XKCD fame) cover topics like this with that kind of thought process.

blowskion Scale of the Universe

Gosh, you're right.

Assuming:

- 5,250 can stand front to back

- 3,500 side-by-side

- 750 on top of each other

That's more than 13 billion humans you could fit in said cube.

blowskion What a difference four years makes

I just learned this is _that_ Betteridge

> Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

blowskion I Used Netscape Composer in 2024

The demands on UX and UI have fast outpaced the ability of designers and their software to deliver on it. As new requirements come along, we are forced to make different trade-offs to those we made in the past, and perhaps that leaves those of us who don't need the new requirements feeling like the software has "got worse", ignoring the benefits to others.

To take one example, 99% of monitors in 1997 were 1024x768 CRT with single pixel density, which freed designers to assume that's what their end user was on. No such standard exists today.

blowskion Scale of the Universe

TIL - All humans stood on top of each other would be significantly taller than the diameter of the Sun.

blowskion Analyzing a Baking Recipe

Do those factors also affect how much volume you need?

blowskion Startup Idea: Reverse Amazon

In the UK at least there are house clearance companies who do exactly this, typically after a death. They first look over the entire contents of the house, then buy it from you and either sell it on or dispose of it.

blowskion Only <SPAN>s

Up to IE7, non-standard elements couldn't be styled without a shiv.

blowskion Only <SPAN>s

What year was that? The custom tags thing used to have a lot more problems than it does now.

blowskion Only <SPAN>s

I don't really know much about this area of UI. Can you explain why this breaks accessibility? I did load it in reader mode (macOS Safari), and there were no paragraph breaks - is that similar to the experience of a screen reader?

blowskion Stop Acting Like You're Famous

In the true HN spirit, I have a little script goes through the Hacker News API and shows them as an RSS feed. But if you'd rather use something off-the-shelf there's https://hnrss.org/submitted?id=synergy20

blowskion Show HN: Open Source TailwindCSS UI Components

Also https://flowbite.com/ (and I'm also not affiliated).

blowskion Stop Acting Like You're Famous

I'd suggest going through https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders and looking at their submission history.

blowskion Ask HN: What software sparks joy when using?

I really enjoy writing code, especially when learning something new, or feeling mastery over what I already know. JetBrains IDEs help with that a lot and I genuinely love it.

Claude or ChatGPT let me bash out my frustrations.

But, honestly, when I feel like that it's often best to get away from the computer entirely. Go for a walk, read a book, spend time with friends, do some old fashioned craft - whatever floats your boat.

blowskion Stop Acting Like You're Famous

Simplicity bias, kind of like "bikeshedding". A large number of people can read this quickly, agree with it, and upvote it. Whereas articles about optimising machine code for the Apple Silicon CPU, or "Risks to the Glen Canyon Dam" are a lot more niche.

Personally, I follow specific people who regularly submit interesting content, and pay less attention to the homepage.

blowskion To make a fortune, target bored young men who want to make a fortune

It's best to think of it as spending $20 on entertainment.

blowskion 20 years ago Gmail revolutionized email. It's time for a new revolution

This seems like a generic advert for a generic email product, that's only posted here because it says "Google is bad". I don't disagree with the sentiment, but let's face it, if this company got the same level of traction as Google, we'd be talking about how they're now the bad guys and how do we migrate away from them.

blowskion Monkey Management

This was my impression of the article as well. Nobody can agree on what they're all trying to improve in the product and why, everyone's just trying to avoid being fired while working on their own stuff.

blowskion Boaty McBoatface

We have a gritter called Grit Rhys Jones in our area.

Griff Rhys Jones (popular in the 80s - “Alas Smith and Jones”, “Not the Nine o Clock News”) lives nearby, and occasionally drives it.

blowskion If Inheritance is so bad, why does everyone use it?

Pragmatists used inheritance because it gave a quick benefit now, and the longer-term costs were ignored. Some pragmatists became successful because they moved quickly, so the "Programmers from the Church of Purity" used inheritance because successful companies used inheritance. When inheritance was no longer the quickest way to move quickly, the pragmatists moved on. The Church of Purity now bangs on about Functional Programming in the same way for the same reasons.

blowskion Is It Dry Yet?

Thanks for the correction on that. In the UK cold and damp go together, and I’d always assumed you can’t dry clothes because of the cold.

blowskion Meta used monolithic architecture to ship Threads in only five months

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34074344

His resignation four weeks later.

blowskion Meta used monolithic architecture to ship Threads in only five months

You’re right, I didn’t even think about these! I still wouldn’t include them in end-user facing features, but try are certainly necessary to be a valuable product at Twitter-scale.