creakingstairs

Were you teaching for a software engineering degree or a comp sci degree? Former is more focused on practical skills that are more “useful”, hence all those cross-discipline courses.

I’d argue that the core comp sci skill is more useful than learning how to use React or whatever. But I guess I’m another old man yelling at cloud.

I agree with you that replicas can be great.

Last year, I went to Otsuka museum of art[1] where they have life-size replicas of famous paintings (including the Sistine chapel), and it was great.

Before going, I was weirdly hung up about going to somewhere to see "replicas" instead of the real thing. But once I got there, I loved every second of it. All the artworks were replicated with careful detail in life size, so I felt like I wasn't missing much. In fact, I felt like I was enjoying it more! There were no crowds. I could get as close to the artworks as I wanted to. The lighting was great, since they didn't have to worry about damaging the paints. It was more engaging for the kids as they could free touch some of the replicated potteries etc.

It is a bit out of the way, but I'd highly recommend anyone going to Japan to check out that museum and maybe the onaruto bridge [2] on the way

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%8Ctsuka_Museum_of_Art

[2] https://www.japan.travel/national-parks/parks/setonaikai/see...

> As a hongkonger (zh_hk + en_gb), living in Singapore (zh_cn + en?), following JPOP. This is the daily fight I have with browser.

Ah yes as a Korean living in Japan with locale set to English, this truly is a daily fight.

> I would rather all application, including web app just give me the option to choose

I've left websites for other competitors because they wouldn't have a button to change language.

Ah really? My parents bought Korean rice in New Zealand even though it was more expensive. I do think there is some form of nationalism along with deep cultural connection to rice at least in Korea and Japan.

Interesting to find out Thai doesn’t have something similar.

At least for supermarkets around me they _only_ sell Japanese rice. You’d have to buy online or drive out which doesn’t work for vast majority of old population.

Also as an East Asian I can somewhat understand reluctance to change rice. It’s just such a staple in your daily life. If I had eaten one type of rice for my entire life (and the price of the rice has remained stable for the last 40 years) and suddenly I can’t afford that type of rice, it would be a shock.

I once checked in at a pretty decent hotel in India and realised that they used re-used customers passport scans and invoices to print wifi coupons! I strongly complained but I don’t really know if they’ve changed.

I _was_ working on an open-source, self-hostable app for sending out newsletter to your friends and families. I made a MVP but then I scrapped it after realising how cumbersome it is to manage email related functionalities. Since its strictly for connecting with your friends and family, I figured, why not let users use their own email to send out the updates.

So I made a proof of concept app on iOS that uses gmail API to send out newsletter emails. I wish I could just send prepopulated emails (with inline attachments and recipients) to iOS mail client instead of asking for gmail OAuth permissions, but it doesn't look possible.

Now I'm trying to create a polished app for alpha testing. Been exploring data persistence (Swift Data, Core Data, rxdb etc) and settled on Core Data. Architecture wise, I've settled on MVVM + Swift UI. At the moment I'm trying to figure out how to make mocks and XCode preview data geneeration ergonomic.

So far, I am pleasantly surprised at Swift and iOS development, but I still hate XCode.

I guess it depends. In one job I gave my feedback in a nice way that didn’t put blame on people but procedures and it helped the remaining coworkers.

In the another job I didn’t think providing any kind of feedback would help me or anyone there due to multiple reasons, so I didn’t even try.

My experience has been that people (including me) kinda suck at accepting critical feedback. You could try to mitigate this with some techniques but you never really know how the receivers will take it (or how the message is relayed!!) So the rational thing to do is to play it safe and not do an exit interview unless you are sure that it won’t backfire on you.

We are heading back to New Zealand soon and the situation does seem pretty grim from what I hear from friends. Ideally, we’d like to settle down in NZ but it’s looking like we may end up in Australia instead.

Sure there have always been people bad at math. But basic arithmetic is not really math. We used to drill it into kids but we no longer do so and I can usually see the difference between generations. For example, women in my mother’s generation were not prioritised for education but they often are pretty quick at arithmetic. But kids and young adults I come across pull out their phones for basic additions and divisions. And I find myself pulling out my phone more and more often.

I mean it’s not the end of the world and as you’ve said the raw number of people of numerate people are rising thanks to technology. But technology also seem to rob people of motivation to learn somewhat useful skills and even more so with LLMs.

Pagecord looks really cool. I was once inspired by Bear blog and thought about building something similar but ended up not going forward with it as I didn't think I could guarantee to keep the service up. Best of luck to your endeavor!

I've been going back and forth on this. For the initial version, I'm making it that a person can only be a member of one group just to keep it simple.

I haven't really thought about deliverability problems because at the moment, I'm not planning to provide it as a SaaS but only as an self-hostable app. I'm hoping it will be a kind of thing a tech-savvy person with their own domain will host for their own family and friends.

EDIT: but thank you for your advice! If it were a business, I agree that deliverability would be an important thing to think about.

Not yet sorry. I want to tidy up and test it out before making it public.

No, it will have to be a third-party provider. Currently using Amazon SES, but will be easy to replace with another email provider.

FYI I get access denied for your google docs link

An open-source, self-hostable app for sending out newsletter to your friends and families. I'm mostly making it for myself because I want to share what I've been up to and family photos, without uploading it to Facebook or whatnot.

At the moment, the flow goes like this:

1. During the week, write posts for things that have happened.

2. Posts can be assigned to groups. (family, friends etc).

3. At the end of the week (or month), the app automatically creates a newsletter for each group by pulling posts assigned to each group. Add some final touches yourself and send it off!

4. Every newsletter will come with a link to download all images.

I'm trying to design it to be as old people friendly as possible which meant making the experience as simple as it can get. This made me settle on email newsletters. Emails are ubiquitous, have been around and will be around for a while. It's easy to sign up and things are just pushed to you instead of having to go to another app.

Another thing I want is multilingual support as my family is Korean my in-laws are not.

I'm hoping to get an MVP working this week and get some testing done with my own parents and in-laws.

I was just looking at obsidian web-clipper's source code because I've been quite impressed at its markdown conversion results and came across Defuddle in there. I'll be using for my bespoke read-it-later/ knowledge-base app, so thank you in advance :D

I guess I'll give it another try. I quite liked the idea behind it but last time I tried, I gave up mid way. Because everything was a macro, there was no auto-complete and that coupled with sparse documentation with buggy website (at the time, looks like its completely different now) was too frustrating.

I also wonder how well this would work with upcoming type system.

I just looked into it and it looks like he actually went to a private cram school for a year to study for the national exam then got into Seoul National University.

It wasn’t the case for him but I’d like people to also note that in Korea, one of the strategy for getting into good universities is to actually drop out of high school and grind for the national exam by going to cram schools (hagwon)

People do this because there are certain admission categories where the university only looks at the test results. So they go “okay, by not going to school, my child can fully focus on exam instead of wasting time on useless subjects like art and PE. And school math curriculum is too easy anyway”

This really saddens me because schools should be more than gateways to universities, but I digress.

No there is also admission based on school grades, essays and achievements(수시). You still have to take the national test and get the minimum required grades though.

Or you just don’t like studying. There are plenty of Koreans who drop out of high school because they don’t feel like studying is for them. Yes, parents are more likely to try to force them to stay in school compared to other countries. But South Koreans are people too.

I’m split on this. I used to agree with you but when I talked to internal users and customers, they really liked having a back button in the app. I would tell them the browser back button is there and we haven’t broken history so it should work to which they just often shrug and say they “just” prefer it.

My hypothesis is that they’ve had to deal with so many random web apps breaking the back button so that behaviour is no longer intuitive for them. So I don’t push back against in-app back buttons any more.

I’d been a cynical and nervous wreck for early part of my life. And I still get episodes of paralysing gloom and doom. Something I often I tell myself is “despite” all the [negative things], I will be a positive force in the world and that is something to be proud of. It is easy to be positive during good times and it is difficult to be positive in hard times, but it’s worth it _because_ it’s hard. I’ve never been a religious person, but I’ve been thinking more and more about religious allegories and how it fits this mindset.

Anyhow, there is something about the word “despite”(그럼에도) that rings my soul. So I mutter it to myself all the time.

I really wish they would bring 12 inch MacBook with new M series chip and better keyboard! I’ve tried iPads to see I could get it to work for light browsing and writing when I’m out and about but they feel too limiting.

IMO domain knowledge is crucial here. I don’t know anything about pricier or financial products so hard to reason about the system.

But to give a general advice, I’d approach it by trying to break down the domain into concepts, then think about how those concepts can be turned into abstractions. Then you can think about relationships between those abstractions and engineering solutions for those relationships.

Also, systems all take inputs and produce outputs. Validating those would be another interesting aspect given its finances related.

I've been using Odin [1] for my hobby game development and I've been liking it a lot. Feels like a more ergonomic C.

Things I like:

- Vendor libraries like Raylib and MicroUI make it easy to get started

- I can pass around memory allocators and loggers implicitly using context, or explicitly if I need to.

- natively supports vector math and swizzling

- error handling with `or_else` and `or_return`

Things I don't like:

- Name spacing is a bit annoying. The convention is to prefix the procedures but I don't like how they look. It really isn't a big issue.

Have a quick read of the overview and if you are still interested, I highly recommand 'Understanding the Odin Programming Language' book by Karl Zylinski [2]

[1] https://odin-lang.org/docs/overview/

[2] https://odinbook.com/

Their work culture is changing but it’s not changing enough. People need to be able to go home at 5pm and need to be paid more.

Imagine leave home at 7am to ride a full train, getting to work at 8:15 (because you need to be ready to work by 8:30!) Then staying late till 7pm so you get home around 8:15pm to your small one-room studio. You eat, shower and clean. It’s time to sleep. You start doom scrolling in bed till 1am when you fall asleep.

Would you want to marry and have kids?

> You took a year off for mental health but still couldn't resist building 'for-profit projects' during your break. The only thing more persistent than your work ethic is your inability to actually relax.

> You complain about Elixir's lack of types but keep using it anyway. This is the programming equivalent of staying in a relationship where you keep trying to change the other person.

> You've lived in multiple countries but spend most of your time on HN explaining why their tech infrastructure is terrible. Maybe the common denominator is you?

Ouch, it's pretty good haha