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dstroot

1,628 karma · joined March 10, 2012

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dstroot··on Baseline: a unified view of stable web features
Are you making this comment as an individual, perhaps building personal web projects? Or, as a representative of a (for profit) business? If so, was this a business decision?

I am not sure the disabled analogy holds. I agree with wheelchair ramps because being disabled is not a choice. However, using a “disabled” browser •is• a choice. One my business has decided isn’t worth supporting and can use the time to add features that the majority of users want.

dstroot··on Smartphones with Qualcomm chip secretly send personal data to Qualcomm
Outrage is not going to bring about a solution. Either “the gov’mint” has to step in and regulate or consumers have to vote with their wallets. Many of us own iPhones because we choose to trust Apple’s ecosystem over Google’s.
dstroot··on Deming Paradox: Operationally rigorous companies aren't nice places to work
One of the worst cognitive biases which humans suffer from is the belief that observations about individual people can be generalized. How much faulty thinking, including racism and sexism, stems from this simple error? An extension of this common mistake is thinking of people as interchangeable, or fungible, when planning work - pretending who does the work doesn’t matter.

A pattern I've repeatedly seen is companies will plan out the next few quarters of work and then assign some number of people, one person for one quarter to a project, two people for three quarters to another, etc. This process enables executives to make decisions about costs, priorities and project funding. This works for it's purpose, however, the roadmap creation and review process perpetuates the fiction that people are interchangeable, that people can be generically abstracted over.

dstroot··on Ask HN: Why is TSMC so competitive in semiconductor fabrication?
Many years ago I sat next to the CTO of Broadcom on a plane. We struck up a conversation and when I learned he worked for a chip designer I asked the question that I assumed was the most difficult part. I asked how the engineers laid out the circuits physically on the chip. He laughed and told me the engineers write software that defines the parameters and functions and the software lays out the chip (I know I am oversimplifying). I was dumbfounded to learn that hardware design was really software development. Today I think Google has an open chip design effort where you write chip specs in Python (from memory).
dstroot··on The early 90s tech scene that created L0pht, the legendary hackerspace
I was only “hacker curious” back then. I always wondered - was it pronounced “loft” or “low fat”? I know dumb question but I always wondered…
dstroot··on Full-Stack TypeScript with tRPC and React
Thanks for sharing this. I haven't tried tRPC yet, but I do use Prisma. I am slightly curious/puzzled why I would need both in the same project. Doesn't Prisma get you most of the way there? Or, is this for creating a CRUD REST API that talks to the DB via Prisma, and to the Client via REST/tRPC? Seems heavy to me.
dstroot··on An end to typographic widows on the web
Just sharing that there is a react component I have used called "React Wrap Balancer" from Vercel that does something similar and works today:

https://vercel.com/blog/react-wrap-balancer

It does add another dependency which I am not fond of.

dstroot··on DuckDB – An in-process SQL OLAP database management system
Storing data in Parquet files and querying via DuckDB is fast and kind of magical.
dstroot··on Natives in Tech asks Apache Software Foundation to change name
I had always heard that the original name for the HTTP server was because it was just “a bunch of patches”. Seems a better name for the foundation is a good thing.
dstroot··on The Tyranny of Nicespeak (2001)
> in a world where a notice can announce in all seriousness: "In order to better serve you, we are closed this afternoon."

This is so spot-on. I am not sure this qualifies as "nicespeak" but if you pay attention you will hear this type of messaging everywhere. As we hear it we seem to just nod along and miss the fundamental irony of it.

dstroot··on Southwest cancels 5,400 flights in less than 48 hours
Then you are senior enough to know what “ then-CEO now-chairman Gary Kelly” really meant was “I haven’t funded our technology team well enough to have resources to test a scenario like this”.
dstroot··on Tailwind is a leaky abstraction
This. Tailwind and react work very well together. Components then become portable to other tailwind projects. The best part is tailwind then only ships the CSS you actually use to the browser. Much cleaner than older CSS approaches like bootstrap. Has made me much more productive overall.
dstroot··on My Trip to Space Filled Me with Overwhelming Sadness
I watched it live. It was uncomfortable and heartbreaking. William had a very profound experience and he wanted to explain it and thank Jeff. Jeff could not even focus long enough to let William get a few sentences out. Jeff’ s “team” (I think led by his significant other) was essentially throwing a frat party behind him - screaming ”whooo” and drinking/spraying champagne. It was sad.
dstroot··on Glassdoor not so anonymous
This. One cannot post anything on Glassdoor today without first establishing an account. Nearly all companies that create accounts use services to “enrich” your user data via the IP, email address, etc. so they grab and keep that data. It is certainly no longer anonymous if it ever was.
dstroot··on Implementing "seen by" functionality with Postgres
Since the author works for an organization that is built on Postgres I imagine this started out as a content marketing idea for Postgres. Somewhere along the way it went off the rails and became a piece about HLL technology (which is independent of the underlying DB tech).

I do like articles like this that attempt to solve real world challenges though! Keep up the good work.

dstroot··on Teams is killing my Mac every day
How?
dstroot··on Thoughts on the potato diet
Learned about this diet from Penn Jillette. He has a book out on his weight loss called “Presto!: How I Made over 100 Pounds Disappear and Other Magical Tales”. I tried it for a week and the point that preparing that many potatoes for consumption is spot on. It was a bit of work! After a week I could not eat another potato. I think the point about trying a variety of potatoes might have helped. I think the biggest issue is this clearly is not a sustainable strategy.
dstroot··on Asset-Level Transition Risk in the Global Coal, Oil, and Gas Supply Chains
Came to mention this book as well. I am halfway through but while reading the book this research is very complimentary.
dstroot··on The end of the world is just beginning for shipping
> … emigrate if they can.

Where are you recommending they go?

dstroot··on The collapse of complex software
Software complexity in most cases is a direct reflection of business complexity. Changing requirements, overly complex processes, “approval” steps, etc., etc. if you can build it faster and cheaper - great! But you will end up in the same place eventually.
dstroot··on Apple Passkey
Such a great point. I forget all the time. Next auth service I write will remember this for you and prompt you based on the service you used last time. Take my upvote!
dstroot··on Why Google is so unbearable, and how to fix it
I still use Google every day. I was really hoping this advice was for real. Like maybe how to filter your Web results by size since they started off with example of a 9 MB website maybe you could filter your queries down to websites that are 2 MB or less? Since I use pi.hole and the first results are ads my top links are always dead. It is time to switch - Is DDG the best alternative?
dstroot··on $3B in Bitcoin was sold in a last-ditch attempt to save UST from collapse
Eyebrows raised. What this is showing is that both tech stocks and crypto were being propped up by the same investors/behavior (speculation) and are highly correlated. I thought this was a good test regarding crypto being a “store or value” since inflation devalues fiat currency, one hypothesis was crypto would rise with market turmoil and high inflation as “digital gold”. I guess that hypothesis was incorrect.
dstroot··on $3B in Bitcoin was sold in a last-ditch attempt to save UST from collapse
Does anyone have insight to what legal exposure (if any) creator Do Kwon has? In an regulated market does he just walk away?
dstroot··on Half a million people watch me study on TikTok
Thank you for putting into words exactly how I was feeling. I often find myself wondering how much time people spend on social media and wonder how much loss to society all this “wasted time” is - but of course it’s not “wasted” for the participants. They get something in return. It is no different than wondering in previous decades how much time people spent watching TV or reading books. It all depends on what content you consume and why. Come to think of it I spend a lot of time on HN….
dstroot··on Jepsen: Redpanda 21.10.1
> A KafkaConsumer, by contrast, will happily connect to a jar of applesauce14 and return successful, empty result sets for every call to consumer.poll. This makes it surprisingly difficult to tell the difference between “everything is fine and I’m up to date” versus “the cluster is on fire”, and led to significant confusion in our tests.

This tickled my funny bone. Never expected humor in a Jepsen writeup. Kudos!

dstroot··on I employed a California resident, so now I’m subject to its regulations
He’s fortunate he didn’t hire a second employee in NY.
dstroot··on Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources
This nailed it. Public companies have to "grow" and if growth is bot-driven then combating it is not goin to happen. By taking the company private Elon could (in theory) throw out MAU metrics, engagement metrics, etc.

He could "Make Twitter Great Again" by killing the bots, and rage-engagement, and making Twitter interesting and fun again. If that raises Twitters value by 10% he gets a $4.5B return.

dstroot··on $5939 per meter "Audiophile Approved" Mains Cable
Back when I was deeply into this sort of thing we purchased hospital grade power cables (green dot) for less than $20. You get a well made cable and connectors. https://www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight/q/qualtek/hospi...
dstroot··on Apple's M1 Ultra comes with a 32MB TLB bottleneck
Tweet storm coincided with an uploaded Video to YT at the same time about the “issue”. This is promoting their content.
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