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doytch

456 karma · joined October 23, 2016

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doytch··on Cal.com is going closed source
Right, but those capabilities are available to you as well. Granted the remediation effort will take longer but...you're going to do that for any existing issues _anyway_ right?

I understand why this is a tempting thing to do in a "STOP THE PRESSES" manner where you take a breather and fix any existing issues that snuck through. I don't yet understand why when you reach steady-state, you wouldn't rely on the same tooling in a proactive manner to prevent issues from being shipped.

And if you say "yeah, that's obv the plan," well then I don't understand what going closed-source _now_ actually accomplishes with the horses already out of the barn.

doytch··on Cal.com is going closed source
I get the mentality but it feels very much like security through obscurity. When did we decide that that was the correct model?
doytch··on Reading across books with Claude Code
The mental model I had of this was actually on the paragraph or page level, rather than words like the post demos. I think it'd be really interesting if you're reading a take on a concept in one book and you can immediately fan-out and either read different ways of presenting the same information/argument, or counters to it.
doytch··on Where it's at://
Listen I'm not a crazy huge fan of a lot of new tech, but this is pretty transformational. When reading the first article [1] I was struck by the fact that it granted so much new freedom to your "social identity" on the internet. The comparison to hosting providers was incredible, because imagine you building a website and posting your thoughts there or starting a business there...and then immediately being shut down and all your data lost because of some arbitrary change of policy at your "host".

Everyone always talks about how your Google account being tied to logins is scary because you can get arbitrarily locked out. This protocol makes something like functionally impossible since /you/ control your data.

[1] https://overreacted.io/open-social/

doytch··on US Intel
Huh? He talked about and linked to a series of his older articles, including this one from 2013. [1] It's been a while.

[1]: https://stratechery.com/2013/the-intel-opportunity/

doytch··on Why Exercise Is a Miracle Drug
This is a gross simplification on both accounts.

US Army veterans do have a higher rate of arthritis but their days are quite different from the "run 3-5 days a week" that most people think of when talking about recreational runners.

And the pacemaker comment stood out so I did a bit of digging and found a study [1] you might be referring to. Again, the effects were strong only in the heavy-duty-exercisers/pro/semi-pro cross-country skiier group. Additionally, this didn't offset the gains to cardiovascular or mortality risk - that group was still "healthier."

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39101218/

doytch··on Beetroot juice lowers blood pressure by changing oral microbiome: study
The dosage of this study was "2 × 70 ml ∙d−1, each containing ∼595 mg NO3−". That's probably gonna be tough to get daily by eating beets...
doytch··on Vanilla JavaScript support for Tailwind Plus
You’re right - if you only used it for ‘font-heading-2’, you wouldn’t need it.

But like the person you’re responding to said, the ergonomics improve for the majority of cases that are just ‘flex items-center gap-2’.

And yes, you could write it all yourself but Tailwind is a good set of defaults for those classes and minimizes bike-shedding and improves consistency. These are useful things in lots of teams.

I don’t really use Tailwind on smaller personal projects because I love CSS, but in an org of mixed skill levels, it’s pretty damn useful.

(Also, Tailwind uses CSS variables. It had solid support for them in the last major and first class support for it in the current one.)

doytch··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2025)
Join | Sr/Staff Golang/DB Developer | Remote (USA, Canada) | full-time | $175k – $205k/yr + equity

Hey, I'm an engineering manager at Join. We build collaboration tools for huge construction projects: think stadiums, hospitals, research facilities, etc. Our customers (GCs) love us and their customers (owners) love us so we're getting cool network effects out of that.

I'm looking for a senior/staff Golang/DB developer who has a bunch of tools in their belt, knows their tradeoffs, and /wants/ to share their knowledge with midlevels and help them avoid some of the scars you've accumulated over the years. :)

The full job description (along with my email) is at https://join.build/company/careers-sse/

If you're curious about anything, either reply or email me.

doytch··on HTML Form Validation is underused
This was one of the biggest "oh shit" moments I had when learning Remix: I could reuse the same validators across front and backend and they could even be right there in the same file.
doytch··on React on the server is not PHP
> Actually it would sort of be nice if these frameworks could be coded such that if I have JavaScript shut off, it just runs the code elsewhere and sends me the site.

Remix does!

Actually, most (all?) of the major frameworks will do SSR on pageload and only use client-side rendering for re-renders. But yeah, Remix will do exactly what you're asking for and force you to do full-page refreshes without JS. If that's what you really want.

doytch··on Show HN: My 70 year old grandma is learning to code and made a word game
Reading the code is a joy. I love seeing different approaches to what we all take as givens, such as design.css rather than style.css, or the usage of an `else if (1 == 1)` compared to `else` or even `else if (true)`.

(So I guess, thanks for not teaching her about bundlers and minifiers yet :))

doytch··on Show HN: My 70 year old grandma is learning to code and made a word game
Looks like the developer is aware there may be limitations.

> <!-- When the player pressed Enter it should start the guessWord. Need to test on phone -→

Hopefully a new version will be released free of charge for current customers.

doytch··on Algorithmic price-fixing of rents is here
In the article, one of the lawyers quoted states that "enforced compliance is the hallmark feature of any cartel."

Is that part of the legal requirements for a guilty judgement or breaking up a cartel? In the US at least? Would RealPage be fine if they treat their recommended prices as mere suggestions?

doytch··on Our Founder – Momofuku Ando
Oh /that's/ where David Chang got the name Momofuku from...? Interesting!
doytch··on The Story of Samsung's failed deal with iFixit, as told by iFixit's CEO
This site turned my phone into a radiator (and knocked off four percent of battery), so it’s just stuffed to the gills with this stuff.
doytch··on How long does music stardom last? A statistical analysis
> Using this "cross-verified database," we find that music stars have one of the shortest lifespans of any profession, with an expectancy comparable to boxers, military figures, and race car drivers.

Although according to the chart directly below, the life expectancy is more comparable to chess players and poets. Probably isn't as fun a sentence to write though.

doytch··on NASA cancels $450M mission to drill for ice on the Moon
People put valuations on lives all the time in risk analysis and I've never seen a cost even close to $100m.

DOT puts it at 13.2m: https://www.transportation.gov/office-policy/transportation-...

doytch··on Third Places and Neighborhood Entrepreneurship: Evidence from Starbucks Cafés
IIRC (I read this study a few weeks ago), they compared areas where a Starbucks opened; areas where Starbucks planned an expansion but were prevented by things like city planning snafus; and areas where Starbucks opened in non-traditional (eg low income) areas through their partnership with Magic Johnson.
doytch··on Uncomfortable truth: How close is "positivity culture" to delusion and denial?
From your snippet I was wondering whether he was butchering the concept that pessimism is suffering twice (both in anticipation and when your pessimism is confirmed) whereas optimism is only suffering once.

But the context of Elon's tweet actually makes more sense than I was expecting from a tweet from Elon. If everyone's pessimistic about the future and doesn't even try then we'll never accomplish anything.

There's nuance to this topic - we shouldn't strip it out.

doytch··on Simple sabotage for software (2023)
> Build complex “self-service” systems for stakeholders in other teams.

Is the sabotaging bit here the "complex" part?

doytch··on 3M executives convinced a scientist forever chemicals in human blood were safe
That would be ideal. But I'll bet people won't do this though. I wouldn't. I don't have time to do the due diligence. So the downside is that you have a lot more "dead" capital that isn't doing anything productive and is slowly losing value due to inflation. Dead capital means it's harder to fundraise, to borrow money for your mortgage, etc etc.

Now I'm not saying that's necessarily /worse/...but we should be clear about what the real downside is.

doytch··on 3M executives convinced a scientist forever chemicals in human blood were safe
Matt Levine's common refrain [1] of "everything is securities fraud" is useful here. If as a stockholder you suffer damages to your investment because a company did illegal things and hid it, you can sue for those damages if you argue that you invested in this company because you were assured they were not doing illegal things.

These lawsuits have been decently successful as far as I can tell from what stories make it to the media.

[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-26/everyt...

doytch··on Professional Corner-Cutting (2016)
Not only would a professional carpenter use plywood, it may be a sounder choice because of its stability/weight ratio.
doytch··on Quitting engineering to pursue art full-time
I think the argument here is that hate (which is a subset of passion) is not the purely negative thing that we immediately think it is. Especially in art. When people _hate_ art the art has served its purpose. Art's intention (to paint with heinously broad strokes) is to create emotions and drive thoughts. That's a very different intention than a product/service and they shouldn't be compared in that sense.

But also:

> Afterall, it’s good for engagement and the Instagram algorithm.

doytch··on A day in the life of a Walmart manager
That's a really good point. After reading your profile, I'm tempted to ask if you've bookmarked any articles/books about that topic?
doytch··on A day in the life of a Walmart manager
Oh for sure, the intangibles kind of /are/ the job once you're past a mid-level position. But think about her job in the context of your description.

You think she doesn't have useless meetings she's invited to that every manager in the region needs to attend even though it could've just been an email from the regional director? The stress from the lights busted in the parking lot brought on by worries that a darkened parking lot and a random crime that night might trigger a spurious lawsuit? Doomscrolling about physical retail being replaced by online? That she's falling behind in understanding where robotics might move? That if that particular store was shut down in a strategic shift, she's wedded her entire marketability as an employee to a single company on a single ladder and that she can't really just easily grab a job from a company across the country?

We're not so unique!

doytch··on A day in the life of a Walmart manager
Time-management is probably the single most important skill in these higher-paying jobs and...well...given the amount of self-help books there are on this topic, I'm not so sure I'd agree.

People who do well in higher-level jobs know /exactly/ what they're best at or uniquely positioned to do, and do that. Meanwhile, you need to delegate the rest to whoever's in the best position to do so (growing people if there aren't enough) which is itself a tricky calculus.

doytch··on A day in the life of a Walmart manager
She runs a shop that employs 300 people; needs to worry about short-term and long-term logistics and planning; works cross-functionally with the trades; probably frequently needs to manage upwards; interacts directly with customers; etc etc...

Damn, she deserves that $240k more than a lot of us software developers. This is a hard job.

doytch··on Create More, Consume Less (2021)
The units the article is concerned with is time spent, not output.

Spend more time creating than you do consuming.

The only one of your options examples that doesn’t then make more sense is the software developer, and as a software developer myself, I’m very content with not putting my creativity against those other examples.

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