dimal

Holy shit, this is the best way to describe it. I mean, just that we have Scrum “ceremonies” should be an indication that it’s the opposite of what it says it is.

Exactly. This what Israel has been doing, as I understand it. We don’t need to use desalination for everything, but for places like California which have water shortages, it could certainly help.

I wish it would at least not show those obnoxious spinners over and over.

I’ve found that on the website, they seem to log me out pretty aggressively if I’m not using it often.

The medical industry, when presented with a chronic illness, instead of trying to cure it, sees it as a source of recurring revenue. And then that’s not even good enough. The consumers are captive, so they find a way to gouge them.

I wish people would stop calling what we have a healthcare system. We have a medical industry, which seeks to provide a minimum of medical services for maximum profit. The system is working exactly as designed.

I enjoyed it but I never understood why the seven races didn’t interbreed. That made a lot of far future stuff less enjoyable to me. Even Homo sapiens and Neanderthals interbred. Did the genetic modifications to each race make them completely incompatible?

I agree and disagree. Maintaining the health of a human body in a complex industrialized society is the most complex problem in the known universe. The amount of variables involved is astounding. But we’ve settled on a system that is more of a bureaucracy than a scientific endeavor and we wonder why it fails. We haven’t been doing our best. We could do better.

We should support science, but give up on medicine for health maintenance and chronic illness. Medicine as a practice is centered on curing acute illnesses and fixing acute injuries. I went to the emergency room recently for a really bad cut on my hand. The experience was fantastic. That’s the type of problem they know how to solve. It’s a completely different type of problem than a chronic illness, which depends on behaviors, environment, diet, exercise, etc.

And not just “you should exercise“. To recover my energy, I had to find just the right amount of the right type of exercise that would increase my energy without overexerting myself and making my symptoms worse. There’s no way that industrialized bureaucratic endeavor like modern medicine could help with that, unless of course I was rich. The medical industry can’t change. I’ve given up on it. We need a new science.

I’ve had chronic fatigue for long stretches my entire life, sometimes for years at a stretch. I think I would qualify for a CFS diagnosis, but no doctors treat it, so no one ever thought to diagnose me. They’d just say my tests are fine and shrug.

The fact of the matter is that the medical industry has no clue what to do about chronic health conditions like ME/CFS or Long COVID. They have no game plan at all. Everything I ever did to improve my symptoms and get my energy back was stuff I either did myself or just dumb luck that my body recovered.

> Instead of funding novel medicines like Ampligen, the NIH has directed most of its RECOVER resources to observational studies designed to learn more about the condition, not treat it.

So, this seems like a good decision. Observational studies aren’t giving up. They are the basis of the whole “evidence based medicine” pyramid of evidence.

I was on one team that used it and it always felt overly simplistic. But I have to admit that we generally delivered what we committed to each sprint. It was pretty clear when we were overcommitting.

I don't think most people understand how difficult things are for "high functioning" autistic people and how much work we have to put in just to get by in society.

It's not like I've had an easy life. At times, life has been pure torture. For example, I've barely been able to work at all for the past three years, because of being discriminated against in interviews, not because I was actually unable to work. The toll this took on my life and health has been incalculable.

From one angle, my autism is a superpower. From another, it's a curse. I'm able to solve intractable problems that other people can't. But since my way of solving these problems is impossible for neurotypicals to understand, and I can be kind of odd, I've been essentially unhireable. I've had to go into consulting because that's the only route open to me. And this is just one of many problems I've had fitting into society. It's exhausting to be "high functioning" in a society that doesn't accept what you are.

But yeah, I do agree that merging everything into one spectrum has made things unintentionally confusing.

Are you sure you want that? We could lose people like like Alan Turing, Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton in the bargain.

The estimates now are that autism affects about 1 in 35 people. That’s not a disorder. That’s human diversity. I realize that there are less lucky autistic people who are severely disabled. If this helps them, then good, but I don’t want to be cured. I want to be accepted. And the way our medical system works now, I don’t trust that any treatments will only be used to help those who most need it. Children who simply need acceptance and a little support will be drugged, because that will be the convenient option.

I wish they would be at least forced to change their name. It’s like if Exxon called themselves The Free Renewable Energy Company. It’s misleading to consumers. In tech, we all know it’s BS, but the average consumer might not. It seems like an argument could be made that “OpenAI” in violation of FTC truth in advertising rules.

Are you joking? Once a corporation gets large enough, the worst they can get is a fine, which is usually a fraction of their income. This is how the system works.

For example, depending on how you calculate it, Merck killed between 3,000 and 500,000 people with Vioxx, and they knew the risks prior to releasing it. They got a fine. And now, the company is now doing just fine. No one was individually prosecuted.

If you have a corporate charter and billions of dollars, you have a license to kill.

It matters what you measure. The studies only looked at Copilot usage.

I’m an experienced engineer. Copilot is worse than useless for me. I spend most of my time understanding the problem space, understanding the constraints and affordances of the environment I’m in and thinking about the code I’m going to write app. When I start typing code, I know what I’m going to write, and so a “helpful” Copilot autocomplete is just distraction for me. It makes my workflow much much worse.

On the other hand, AI is incredibly useful for all of those steps I do before actually coding. And sometimes getting the first draft of something is as simple as a well crafted prompt (informed by all the thinking I’ve done prior to starting. After that, pairing with an LLM to get quick answers for all the little unexpected things that come up is extremely helpful.

So, contrary to this report, I think that if experienced developers use AI well, they could benefit MORE than inexperienced developers.

There are plenty of better ways to draw a user’s attention to something. Any half decent designer should be able to do it without this kind of noise. And there are people like me that will close the tab before interacting with the page, so you’ll lose some people with this approach.

While the demo is interesting from a technical standpoint, please don't make buttons animate like this. It seems like everyone is adding nasty purple gradient borders to everything and now they want to animate it. Just because you can do this doesn't mean you should! I'm getting tired of writing custom CSS to remove distracting styles like this from websites.

What? Do you only start working on something the day before your deadline? Do you not plan ahead at all? If you’re always behind the eight ball, scrambling to land whatever you can slap together by the end of the sprint, it’s not going to work. But if that’s the situation you’re in, nothing will work. You’ve got to plan.

It worked fantastically for me at my last job as a lead, and it’s working great for me now as a consultant.

This pretty much describes my method of working as well. Often at the end of the day, when I’m not feeling like I have enough energy to solve anything new, I’ll spend some time just looking over some new problems I’ll have to solve in the next few days. I don’t try to solve them. I’m just “loading them into my head”. The next morning I usually find some potential solutions waiting for me. Thanks, brain! I’ll repeat that process a few times until I have them solved. Unfortunately, while this works great in real life, it doesn’t work for interviews.

If they can pull of that migration, it seems interesting enough for HN. It’s “just” a blog, but this is a huge technical challenge.

Cool idea. I’d suggest a few tweaks to improve text formatting. Justified text generally doesn’t read well on a device. Better to justify left. And paragraph breaks seem to be lost, which makes it harder to read and scan.

“Most of the time” in my case, it has been bad. Because it wasn’t one big bill. It was dozens of bills for $200-500. Each submission could fail in unpredictable ways. “Lost” claims forms, database “errors”, “incomplete information”, etc. And trying to deal with this burden while being sick, was too much for me. I scraped back a few dollars, but had to give up and move forward with my life.

I’ve found that it’s often able to fix its own code when I’m able to understand that problem and state it clearly. On its own, it tends to just go in circles and proudly declare that its solve the problem, even though it hasn’t. It needs a knowledgeable person to guide it.

I wish I was taught math like this when I was younger. So much time lost thinking I didn’t like math.

I thought the same thing, but that didn't work for me. It's busted.

I agree that 90% of software development happens in the mind, but also that being a keyboard maximalist makes sense, at least for me.

First of all, there’s the ease with which I can get those ideas out of my mind and into working code. If I’m fiddling with a mouse and dragging things around in some virtual 2D space, it adds cognitive load and puts my mind in the wrong mode for coding. When I’m editing in vim, it’s easy to get into flow.

There’s also the case that when I’m planning my solution, I’m also using a text editor with vim bindings, so I can get into the same flow state more easily as I’m doing software design.

And even though a coder might only produce an average of ten lines of code per day, that doesn’t mean I’m producing 10 lines each day. Some days I produce none, and other days I produce a hundred, so it makes sense to optimize for the days when I’m producing a hundred.

Beyond that, even the idea of producing a line of code seems to assume that you’re only writing new code. I’d say that 70-80% of my coding is refactoring. I’m either refactoring existing code or refactoring the code I’m writing as I go. The ten lines I write in a given day may have been written as thirty lines in the first draft, then edited down. So, again, optimizing for flow here makes sense.

It doesn't achieve the same thing, though. Functionally, for the computer, it's the same. But code has two audiences: the computer and the coder who has to read and write it. And from my perspective, the human is more important than the computer. And JSX is more than a convenience at first glance. You read a lot more code than you write. If all of my code was written like this, it would add significant cognitive load, make the code more difficult to reason about and slow me down.

Here's my perspective. I never understand how some people could look at the code you pasted and think that's just as good. But different people's brains process information differently. Your example has a lot of punctuation that's very difficult for me to parse quickly. I don't see the DOM structure that's being created unless I manually pick the syntax apart in my mind, but understanding the DOM structure at a glance is far more important to me than whether I need a compiler. For the record, I'm neurodivergent. I hope that helps.

Love the idea. FYI, on your demo page, the todo app is 404. And you might want to spell out static site generator instead of saying "SSG" on your docs. I didn't know what SSG was, even though I've used static site generators. I had to ask the AI.

I like your thinking. Things have gotten far more complex than they need to be. We've been piling abstractions on top of abstractions for too long and there needs to be a culling. If we get rid something that we really did need, that's better than the alternative. It's best now to ditch it all and see what we really need.

I’m obsessed with The Curse of Knowledge. I see it everywhere, especially in tech. It’s the reason why so much code is impossible to understand, why documentation is terrible, why users don’t understand how to use your app. Person A assumes that Person B understands the same things that Person A does, but they don’t, and confusion ensues, and even worse, people are usually blind to the misunderstanding.