lmm

> at $156B market cap someone sure is making money.

So 50x Pets.com or 2x Enron.

> judging a mega-corporation on lemonade-stand level accounting is a fool's errand.

Disagree. Unit economics matter and can help you cut through a lot of hype and nonsense. "Where's the money coming from?" is always a good question to ask. Sure, sometimes a megacorp loses money on each transaction and makes it up on float or whatever, but that's at least worth knowing if that's what's going on.

> What's bad about them? There is a sensible default and users (in particular those with poor eyesight) will adjust them to their needs.

16pt is a sensible default on some screens and very much not on others.

> users (in particular those with poor eyesight) will adjust them to their needs

In the real world they won't though, much as we might both wish otherwise.

> What's wrong with the following CSS snippet for example?

It doesn't achieve a reasonable readable font size which was presumably the goal. Your padding won't be the right size for all screens either. (And personally I hate excessive line height).

> respect the browser's default font size

The browser's defaults are also bad. But they shouldn't be. The browser is in a position to actually fix this; the webdev isn't.

What a pointlessly provocative and unproductive thing to say.

I am in the same boat as GP, and I wonder if it's one of the reasons I migrated hard to ebooks and online magazines/newspapers as soon as that became possible and never looked back.

There is no way to specify a good size in CSS - a size that looks good on current computers will be too big on old computers, and a size that looks good on old computers looks too small on current ones. Browsers and users are the ones who can fix this.

Only any who hypocritically want protection for their own models (are there any?). The morality of scraping everyone is arguable; it's when you object to being scraped back that you reveal yourself as a scoundrel.

This isn't about the app being unfinished, it's about Google deliberately half-assing support for open standards. They want you to be stuck in their calendar ecosystem so they make sure there's more friction adding a calendar from outside than adding someone else's Google calendar.

It has other uses. But the point is that saying "we" when one is not, in fact, a sovereign, is extremely pretentious.

> I literally can't imagine generating a script with an LLM without testing it at all.

Then you're extremely unimaginative as well as unusually fastidious.

Certainly someone - several someones - are generating lots of scripts and not testing them, given the PRs I'm seeing.

Talking about the "royal we" is a correct, established (if somewhat sarcastic) way to complain about this kind of usage. It highlights the presumptiveness of the author in their use of "we".

No, that is exactly GP's complaint. Their whole point is that OP has written things like "we throw everything at a model and hope it gives us what we imagined, without ever having to understand how any of it actually works" when the honest statement would be "I throw everything at a model and hope it gives me what I imagined, without ever having to understand how any of it actually works".

> IT projects that cost billions are incomprehensible to me, outside of frontier work

Getting a large bureaucracy to agree on a question where any answer will disadvantage some members of it is frontier work. No-one has a good general solution. Very few people even have approximate solutions for a few special cases.

> is there no space in the market for a good software consultancy? Or are they just outcompeted for getting the contract?

You can't grow big enough to bid on these big projects and stay good.

> Credit card entry, I think you should know a few basics like don't put it in MongoDB?? Or nah? It's just like any other user data?

> How about a background check - can anyone take a user-entered DL and randomly Google stuff to see what they find?

> Can I store your SSN in plain text in a text file? Why not?

You wouldn't be touching any of those unless you work for a handful of providers where that's their whole business. Usually you add the dependency, use their widget, and that's it.

> It’s a contract

Many kinds of contracts are illegal, including those that are anticompetitive in certain ways.

> Should I be allowed to pay a landscaper less if I agree to not do part of the work myself?

No?

Trade ins are fine. A contractual commitment to not buy hardware sounds like illegal restraint of trade.

What are these orgs that have unused meeting rooms? Everywhere I've ever worked has had a chronic meeting room shortage.

Most hardware has an exponential (memoryless) failure distribution in practice. The bathtub curve is a myth.

That's been a common claim, but I don't think I've seen anyone provide actual evidence.

Shinjuku isn't the worst - it's big, but every part of it has its own distinct feel, you never get confused about where you are. I actually think Ikebukuro is the worst - there are too many places where you can rotate 180 degrees, or move up or down a floor, and find yourself looking at an exactly identical scene.

> why the hell does a TUI need to run in terminal React by way of JavaScript

Because React is the only UI framework that takes the problem seriously. Everything else is stuck in the dark ages.

How HN gets this so badly backwards I'll never understand. Everyone on this site talks a big game about "there shouldn't be so many competing tech stacks, why can't everyone work together on one framework that does things right", and then as soon as that framework actually appears this site hates it more than anything.

> I think it's profoundly uncool to love your country in many parts of Europe—think the UK and especially Germany.

I think that's because you're focusing on outward displays in exactly the way GP was talking about. It's profoundly uncool to be a flag-shagger, but Brits do very much love their country deep down, in the ways that really matter.

Shimano is famously a company that people in about four seemingly random/unrelated fields/hobbies think of as a specialist brand in that hobby (e.g. fishing).

(They are or at least were originally a bearings company, specialising in things that need to spin with very low friction, and all their seemingly unrelated businesses started from that)

I don't know what specifically is wrong with the US-centric numbers you are citing, but I know they don't match the lived reality of the UK, which compares favourably with not only Mississippi but with the US as a whole.

Presumably because he thinks (rightly or wrongly) that the one is damaging his reputation while the other is not.

If there was enough soap residue to matter you'd notice the taste.

Imagine using an ftp program to transfer files.

> there's a long line of well-known names from Alan Kay to Steele, Matz and Goetz, etc. who publicly said great things about the grand idea of Lisp.

About the ideas, yes, helped by being such an early language that it can lay claim to being the originator of a great many things. About the syntax, rather fewer.

> Apple, Cisco, Netflix, Walmart, CircleCI, Nubank and many others have successfully built and maintained large projects

There are a great many success stories and just as many failure stories. 60+ years on, Lisp continues to exist but remains niche.

> rigid, ceremony-heavy, anti-interactive approaches consistently faded, while the dynamic/interactive/symbolic cluster that Lisp has pioneered keeps getting re-adopted.

Yes and no; the pendulum swings but the oscillations get smaller. At this point the programming world has pretty much converged on present-but-lightweight typing with inference and optional annotations, for example; there are no new serious pure dynamic languages being made, and all major dynamic languages are putting huge effort into retrofitting typing. Long edit-deploy-test cycles aren't coming back but nor is live-editing your production system.

> What serious programmer ever ignores Lisp influence or importance?

That's quite a different thing from saying that it's pleasant or even good. Every serious critic acknowledges that e.g. David Foster Wallace was influential and important, but many openly hate actually reading his work.

> actual, pragmatic, lived experience

Hardly. You've built this a whole edifice of beliefs that wouldn't withstand 5 minutes outside the Lisp bubble.

> why all of a sudden does management need to micromanage my tools?

Because doing so increases the value of their stock options. They might privately think it's as dumb as you do, but apparently the stock market disagrees.