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bobm_db

162 karma · joined April 12, 2019

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bobm_db··on If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel (2014)
Click the button in the bottom right and it moves at light speed.

Which, it turns out is really, really slow. Big revelation to me!

bobm_db··on Pika – A JavaScript package registry for the modern web
I'm going to go the other way on this. I like this idea, but I can see it's not for everyone.

I like to do some Javascript coding with my son on his Chromebook, and having a development environment is a hard problem for us to solve for some reason.

Having a webpage that just spins up VSCode and allows us to publish and test in a registry might be just what we need, no?

bobm_db··on Tesla Cybertruck
Whether you like it or hate it, you have to take your hat off to the Tesla marketing department. This thing is a meme on wheels.

_Everyone_ is going to see this, have an opinion on it, and want to know what everyone else's opinion on it is.

bobm_db··on Giant Molecules Exist in Two Places at Once in Quantum Experiment
Something I don't quite understand about quantum mechanics and the MWI... At the point the atom passes through the diffraction grating, it has a quantum superposition. According to MWI, reality has "branched", right?

Then the two realities interfere with each other to form the probabilistic pattern at the detector. So, according to MWI, reality has "merged" again?

If we accept the mulitiverse idea of MWI, doesn't that mean at some point particles aren't able to marge with their branched-reality versions?

bobm_db··on In 2027, at least 7 out of the top Tiobe languages will be Tree Languages
This is an interesting idea.

Isn't Python a tree language? Whitespace is significant...

How about YAML?

bobm_db··on No Silver Bullet (1986) [pdf]
I like this article, but I think actually the software industry has seen a succession of silver bullets. The problem is, once they appear, you take them for granted:

https://riskfirst.org/Silver-Bullets

bobm_db··on Coding Bets
I've started to think I'm better off building lots of small OSS libraries than one big one.

The big one seems like some massive accumulator bet, which is really unlikely to pay off, whereas one of the smaller parts may just have an impact on it's own...

bobm_db··on Things I learnt the hard way in thirty years of software development
I really like this one:

> Documentation is a love letter to your future self

This seems like a brilliant way of transcending what feels like a drudge-job, making it into something really meaningful.

bobm_db··on Consuming Hacker News
I think a really useful interface / AI project would be to write something that categorizes all the comments being made to an article.

That way I could dive into specific comments on topics that interest me, and also decide which comment branches to follow.

I have no idea how this might be implemented though.

bobm_db··on Consuming Hacker News
What do I need to google to understand this reference?
bobm_db··on Consuming Hacker News
I'm starting to find the "new" page more relevant to me than the front page...
bobm_db··on How fair do you think time estimate within 30% is? Plus/minus 20% if over 3 days
Yeah good luck with that.

Problem is, time is just _one_ variable. It's possible to hit every estimate spot-on, if you allow the other variables to change wildly (number of bugs, completeness of features etc). It's kind of like in quantum mechanics, where by knowing one property of a particle, you have to let go of all the others (maybe).

Anyway, I blogged about this a lot here, if it is any use: https://riskfirst.org/Estimates

It seems wrong-headed to be insisting on this, so maybe education is the answer?