lukey_q

Exactly, his weirdo vibe works because he pairs it with an incredible love for music and respect for the artists he speaks to. I think Drake said it best in the hourlong interview they have together, along the lines of "I don't do interviews because most people want to catch me slipping up and find some dramatic quote to drag me with, but with Nardwuar it's 100% about the music, that's why we're here"

Best example of this is probably the first Pharrell interview. This was before Nardwuar was famous at all, outside of Canada anyway, so Pharrell wouldn't have heard of him, and Pharrell spends the first part of the interview obviously a little weirded out at the goofy-looking guy in front of him and probably wondering why his manager booked this for him in the first place. About five minutes later Pharrell says "This is one of the most impressive interviews I've ever been a part of" and as mentioned in the OP article immediately calls Jay-Z and says hey you gotta talk to this Nardwuar guy.

A red message saying "Please enter a valid e-mail address" when I've only typed the first three letters

I agree with all of this advice, and would just add that if you find yourself turning in PRs that then need some changes before they can be merged, a strategy that worked for me early in my career was reviewing my own code as if I was reviewing another person's pull request. If you have turned in a few PRs that needed work then you already have a few examples of the kind of thing that your colleagues are looking for, and you can look at your own code with those things in mind. If you can, I would try to put a little time between writing the code and reviewing it so your mind can reset a bit. For me that meant wrapping up the code in the evening and then reviewing it first thing in the morning.

I like making digital art and little tools to help with creating digital art... happy to see this thread, here are a few things I'm proud of from over the years

An app for pen plotters focused on drawing and creating art manually more than the generative side of things [1]

A Ruby script that takes still images and recreates them entirely out of emojis [2]. Someone used it to make a music video [3]

And finally a Twitter bot that combines Marmaduke comics and Erowid trip reports at random [4]

[1] https://github.com/lilkraftwerk/lineboi3000 [2] http://lilkraftwerk.github.io/Emojisaic/ [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nq3eR4xHjLs [4] https://twitter.com/pharmaduke3000

I don't think there are stupid questions or even poorly worded questions. Even "bad" questions like "It's not working, help!" are a learning and a teaching opportunity, which I think is mostly up to how the more senior developer responds and works with the more junior one. It's true that "it's not working, help" is not all that actionable by itself, but I assume we all had moments like that when we were learning to write code. I certainly did. (and still do sometimes lol).

I think the tweet thread's thesis is "allow messing up," which I'd couple with the senior developer's responsibility to be nice and friendly and supportive. Anyone's first dev job is going to be a formative experience and if they ask "stupid" questions and are met with kindness it's going to echo through their entire career, the same way being met with rudeness would also have a lasting effect. I don't really have any hard or fast rules about how juniors should ask questions, I don't think they're really necessary as long as you make them feel supported and comfortable in a general sense.

As someone who also remembers Garfield being funny as a kid, I don't read the OP as saying it was never funny, but that being funny was a secondary concern to Davis after being marketable. I just looked up a random Garfield strip from 1988 [1] and I have to say, it's kind of a funny visual gag. Nothing groundbreaking but for a daily strip in a newspaper, it's not bad, and I'm an adult now, as a kid I probably would have found it hilarious. Combine decent humor like that with recognizable and cute characters appearing in the newspaper daily and it's not surprising that the strip became so popular.

[1] http://images.ucomics.com/comics/ga/1988/ga880101.gif

I created a similar task at my company as the parent commenter, building a small frontend to an existing API that can be completed in a couple of hours. There's no time limit for turning it in (we suggest two weeks but don't enforce it) and we specifically tell people that a good, concise solution to the problem at hand is perfectly fine, and even might be better than a sloppier solution that tries to add bells and whistles.

When I set it up the goal was to avoid a lot of the issues I've personally had or heard about with coding challenges: they take way too long, they're too abstract, or you feel like the company might just be using you to get a couple of days of free work on their actual codebase. For this reason I feel fine about not paying people, as it's just a small part of the application process and not free work for us.

I think it's worked pretty well so far. It happens after the initial phone screen and before the first technical interview. We send people the challenge, they return it whenever they want, and if we like it we set up a technical interview. Since the challenge uses our tech stack and is similar to the work we actually do, a large part of the first technical interview is discussing their solution. Why they chose certain patterns, why they added a certain library, how they'd consider testing it, why a certain function might be slow with 10k entities, and so on.

Totally unacceptable ask in my opinion, for reasons many people have touched on. I would also add that even from the company's point of view, it's a bad deal to ask you to work. The peace of mind you get from taking an unplugged vacation, and also from knowing that your company wants you to fully enjoy that vacation, is going to make you happier and more productive when you return to work. It's going to make you trust your company and think that they have your back as a human being. In the end this is going to be worth infinitely more than the two or three emails you would be expected to answer that week.

You've got it exactly right. It's something you need someone else's help with, and ideally you can just go ask them for help.

I totally agree with the idea that teams should remove blockers as they come up. If someone on my team runs into a blocker 10 minutes after the standup, I hope for everyone's sake that they don't wait until tomorrow's standup to say something, if only because being blocked for a whole day is not really what you'd call "morale boosting".

I'm not a huge fan of in-person standups, but if you're going to do them really make sure they're useful and efficient. I worked at a small startup once where the entire company (~12 people) did a daily standup, which meant listening to what the salespeople were doing every day, and then telling them which bugs I was fixing. Overall pretty useless.

I'm a team lead and every single person on my team has told me they feel much more productive and able to focus since lockdown and 100% remote work started. One of the people on my team would normally work in our office's "chill room" because he found it slightly easier to focus in there compared to his actual desk.

In my opinion an open plan office for developers (or anyone, really) would ideally be an option, but you would have to opt-in. There are situations where being able to shout over your laptop at your coworkers is going to be beneficial, but there are also situations where people should be able to zone out and concentrate (zone in?) for several hours at a time without having to blast white noise in their headphones.

I'm curious what you think makes this particular account a bot? To me it looks like someone who might not be particularly tech savvy who signed up for Twitter to find out about and discuss the ongoing global pandemic, which I guess you could call a "semi-political topic". To me it looks like Twitter's attempts to reach out to people who aren't already constantly online might occasionally work, which could result in a screen name or behavior that seems "strange" to people who are already very familiar with the platform

It is kind of funny to compare that early example of a notification, which was likely novel and rare enough to actually be exciting, to today's onslaught of notifications where at least for me it's extremely unlikely that any single notification is anything actually exciting or meaningful

Without any further details I would suggest that this is entirely a communication issue and not one of code quality. "Good code" is not really something that can be defined, and learning general design patterns might help you in a general sense but I don't think it's going to fix this problem you're currently having. If your team is outright rejecting your PRs then knowing one other pattern or learning functional programming are not going to help you.

Next time you're writing something of any significance, speak to the people on your team who will be reviewing the PR. If you aren't sure of how to design it, come up with a design collectively. If you do have an idea, ask them to approve it on a high-level before you write any code. The entire thing should be a collaboration, not you coding for however many days before finally exposing your code to your team in the form of a PR.

This can be easier said than done, depending on how communication works at your company and on your team, but if your team and the people reviewing your code won't guide you a bit before and during your implementation of something then again I don't think knowing a couple more patterns is going to solve this problem.

I always thought it was very strange to call them "sprints" since in my experience you start one immediately after finishing another. In real life following sprinting with more sprinting would be a good way to make yourself pass out (or worse) before too long

This is great, thank you for posting this. It seems like a good counterpart for Dark Patterns [1], though these examples are simply very confusing design choices rather than outright malicious ones. Anyway I'm happy to see Telegram's (and I believe Whatsapp's) decision to put archived chats at the top of the normal chat list here, that has always been totally inexplicable to me. I want these chats to go away, but not to fully delete them... on top of the chat list seems like the worst place to put them!

[1] https://twitter.com/darkpatterns

Awesome to see pen plotter stuff posted here with more frequency. This project is pretty amazing in its frugality, kudos to the author. I have another pen plotter and I'd highly recommend pen plotting to anyone who's into generative art or anything similar, it's really fun to write a few lines of code to generate some visuals and then watch the plotter as your design is made into something tangible.

I'm working on a (free) app around making drawings on your computer, putting some effects on them, and sending them directly to a pen plotter. So far it only works with axidraw because that's the only one I have, but ultimately it's just sets of coordinates so it could be adapted for other plotters pretty easily. I'll post it here once it's in a decent state :)

I was pretty astonished, reading the original article, that a poker game would allow having RFID chips in the cards in the first place. It makes sense from the POV of wanting to stream the games without needing a set of cameras for the table, but dang if it doesn't sound like an incredibly bad idea to begin with.

And yes, you're 100% right, just make the guy play under any other circumstances and see if he's still as good. A few people in this thread are pointing out that there's no conclusive proof, and while that might technically be correct, there are way too many independent red flags here to let this guy continue to play without checking it out somehow. I could believe that a random guy in Sacramento was truly the best poker player in the world without the part where the cards have transmitting technology embedded in them, but with all the facts here you have to admit something smells a bit fishy.

Really interesting story though, I'm convinced he's cheating and I'm really curious to see how (if) they ultimately figure out he's doing it. Seems obvious the RFID cards are responsible, but I'd like to see exactly what information he's getting (his opponents' full hands, or just "CALL" or "FOLD") and how he's getting it (hat? phone? microscopic in-ear audio transmitter? x-ray glasses?).

The article mentions the lack of drinking fountains due to the plumbers' strike, but not the fact that they only had the capacity to hook up either the bathrooms or the water fountains and Disney picked the bathrooms [1].

It's also pretty remarkable that they finished the entire thing in a single year. For a modern comparison the new Star Wars expansion took 3 years to complete with just one working ride (the second ride will be open in December, so 3.5 years from construction start). I wonder if that's due to more relaxed laws surrounding construction back then or another factor.

[1] https://mentalfloss.com/article/541360/disneyland-disastrous...

Ok, got it, thanks for the explanation :) I also really enjoyed the exploration and social aspect of the early part of the game back then, I quit when that was over and seemed as if the rest of it would just be re-doing the same raids over and over trying to get slightly better gear.

I haven't played WOW since the first version, which I guess is "classic" now. I'm wondering what the draw would be for something like this, as I assume the current version of the game is this plus all the extras and bonuses from the expansions over the years? Is it just nostalgia for the "classic" version or is there some other reason someone would want to play this instead of the updated version?

Oh my gosh, I clicked expecting to see the classic old version... this is an updated one!! It looks like this one even shows the progression of the sound of a genre or subgenre over time, not just the other genres that came from it.

Forgive my excitement but damn, the original guide was an absolute treasure of the early (at least for me) internet, and as a teenager getting into electronic music but with no real local scene or context for any of this stuff to say it was eye-opening is an understatement. Find a song or genre you liked (for me it was early French Touch/filter house) and you could see similar genres, plus what inspired it and what it inspired. And back then if you weren't familiar with this stuff everything with electronic drums or synths was lumped into "techno" (remember Eminem's infamous line about that) so it was great to figure out the actual names of the genres and subgenres I was into so I could dig deeper. Shout out to Ishkur, I'm obviously thrilled to see this today.

I used this list as a starting point when I went to Japan last year, ended up visiting a few of the ones on the list and a couple of other "music bars" as well, including a hip-hop/funk/soul bar in Shinjuku ("Bar Box" I think it was called) one in Osaka dedicated to 80s rock and hair metal, "FREAK." If nothing else it's worth it to listen to one of these hi-fi soundsystems if you (like me) spend your time listening to compressed audio from a streaming service on a normal pair of headphones... the difference is night and day.

I'm imagining the classic scene from movies where a teen boy comes to ask the dad if he can take the daughter to prom, except he just opens a pull request

A lot of high-profile outages recently. Can't actually remember the last time Twitter went fully down. Have to confess I immediately assumed an issue with my own connection, even though every other site is working.

Unrelated, but for some reason the phrase "I have no mouth and I must scream" just popped into my head

Uber will replace human drivers with robots the second they can and not a moment later regardless of how much organization their current human drivers have done

"They Live" is a great comparison. Of course this isn't new to someone on HN who follows this technology and the companies using it for a living, but for my uncle who just posts pictures of his dog it's a bit shocking to see that the computer knows that it's (likely) a picture of a dog next to a tree, even if he was aware on some level that computers these days are capable of that kind of classification.

Writing personal projects in a personal way seems just fine to me :) Looking at that file it's very obvious what's happening after just a cursory glance. I'd much prefer code that's very easy to understand without semicolons than the opposite.