mablopoule

Not really 'product launch', since it's about delivering a school project for my engineering school a long time ago.

I don't remember the subject, but I had to implement an image processing algorithm of some kind, it was all Matlab, and there was a particular function that just wouldn't work. I would read the same lines over and over again, but still not figure out where was the issue. The deadline to send the report with the code was at this point just a few hours away.

So I asked a friend in my class for his report, tried with his implementation of that particular function, and everything ran smoothly, which allowed me to write and generate the report.

Once the report was done, with the proper data, graphs and comments, I still couldn't figure out where was the issue with my implementation, but I also couldn't send my friend's implementation. The deadline approached fast.

Hence, the hack: since we needed to send the project code as a zip file, and this specific function was in a separate Matlab file, I had the last minute idea of opening the .zip archive with a hex editor, search for that file name, and edit the data following it with random values.

And just as I hoped, if you tried to extract the archive, everything but this file would be extracted, with a warning message about a corrupted file.

That way, I was able to send my projects basically 5 minutes before the deadline, while having a excuse to fix my function later if the teacher complained about the corrupted file (which didn't happen in the end).

It think it's the only time I cheated for an exam or a project, and, while I abhor cheating, I'm still damn proud of that hack.

+1 on a bookmarking system you can trust.

A few years ago I wrote a simple bookmarking service for personal use, and I don't know if it's the (barebone) tagging system, or the fact that it's not bound to a particular device or account, but since then the HN-induced FOMO I have when there is an interesting article or discussion is dispelled the moment I save it using that particular service.

It doesn't of course have to be self-made or even self-hosted, but your bookmarking service just need to be trustworthy enough (as in, you know you'll be able to quickly find an article again in the future, even on another device) for the stress-relieving magic to actually happen.

(Disclaimer: I only suspect I have ADHD, I don't have a formal diagnostic)

"The road to hell is paved with good intentions.", "Perfect is the enemy of good", and more generally idioms that sound like either paradoxical assertions or obvious platitudes.

It wasn't until late teens/early twenties that lots of those piece of wisdom went from "cliché phrases you've heard all your life", to (often) deeply impactful aspect of human conditions.

The "road to hell" idiom explicitly didn't click until I had enough experience with counter-productive efforts who looks good on the outside, but actually fail to take into account a more nuanced reality.

It also kinda works with the distinction between "values I believe in" and "arguments articulated around shared values". Being able to disagree on something even when (especially when) it's invoking values I believe in is one of the most important thing I've gained as I matured, and yet it needs experience to 'click'.

Thank you so much for those links. It resonate a lot with a previous experience I had in a company which was so obsessed with doing things "the right way" that they ended up with the most over-engineered abomination I've ever seen*.

They applied all the rules and "best practices" they saw on Medium with maximum strictness (of course) and were very adamant on doing everything now in the "right true way" in the codebase.

I had trouble putting words on that behavior, describing it as "religious fundamentalism, but with code", so I'm glad to finally have a better word for that.

* It was a simple corporate website, with a few, simple forms (though with visuals bells and whistles added), and some semi-customized pages. It could have been a minor project (in term of technical complexity, not business impact), and somehow was so overcomplicated that there was like 5 or 6 front-end dev working full time on useless churn, like adding more configurability to their deployment process, or changing a library with another based on the number of Github stars.

Honestly, I love snap because it's the main reason why I've switched to Arch after a decade of Ubuntu, and I couldn't be happier about it.

Childlike is indeed the term, especially strange is the appeal that "Nerd shouldn't be bullies, we're the good guys".

In any case, it's yet another example of a counter-outrage, where the first 'outrage' could as well be a few tweets as most.

There is a truly excellent series of Podcast from the BBC called "The Lazarus Heist", explaining in detail how the cyberwarfare capacity of North Korea is constitued, and what kind of attack they have done; I cannot recommend it enough.

The short version: they take their best math-inclined students, and send groups of them in China, to learn about computer hacking (and the world at large, to know what or who to hack). The group aspect serves as a self-surveillance check, to minimize risks of defections.

I've got a few that definitely had an impact on how I act, or perceive a situation.

"Why did you do that?"

"I don't know"

"Then if you don't know why you're doing something, don't do it."

I've heard this convo when I was a teenager, and I believe that it nudged me into having a bit more self-reflection and thoughtfulness than I would have otherwise.

"When people say something to you, most of the time it means either 'I need help' or 'I love you'"

And, closely related: "Don't forget that the person in front of you might just have a bad day".

Those have been immensely useful when dealing with common annoyance from family and strangers alike. It doesn't mean that you have to accept everything, but it certainly help in avoiding getting angry as the default reaction.

Lawfare blog, and especially its podcasts: https://www.lawfareblog.com/topic/podcasts

Close second, "War on the Rocks" podcast: https://warontherocks.com/podcasts/

Lot of "National Security / Foreign politics" content has been a breath of fresh air, because while this is clearly biased toward an American viewpoint, there is an intellectual respect toward other peoples/states situation, objectives, and possibility of getting to those objective.

In practice, that means that when talking about Putin, they debates around why Putin is doing that, and why Putin would be doing it that way, what are the possible outcomes, and how the US/NATO/other parties can try to act or react in a way that's beneficial for them.

Another example: Lawfare where highly critical of the Trump administration, but they always approached their analysis by asking "What is his thought process" and "What is he gaining by doing that".

Once you get used to hear a bunch of smart people articulating their thought in that way, it's painful to listen back to a discourse centered around "our good values vs. their bad intentions", which is unfortunately the norm.

Totally different subject, but if one is interested in religions, I highly recommend the Youtube channels "Religion for Breakfast" and "Let's talk religion", who goes deep into a variety of subjects, while disclosing what is still contentious in the academic term, and try to be as unopinionated as possible.

Yeah, I've been saddened by the depreciation of SMIL for animation, for example. SVG can be rough around the edges sometime when it comes to cross-browser support of less-used features :/

Apart from font-icon, a nice way to handle icons in a website is to leverage the underutilized <use> SVG element:

  <!-- Should be in all your pages -->
  <svg style="display: none" aria-hidden="true">
    <defs>
      <symbol id="icon-circle" viewBox="0 0 20 20"><circle fill="currentColor" cx="10" cy="10" r="10" /></symbol>
      <!-- other icons here -->
    </defs>
  </svg>

  <!-- In some other template -->
  <button>
    <svg class="icon"><use xlink:href="#icon-circle"></use></svg>
    <span>foobar</span>
  </button>

  <!-- in your CSS -->
  .icon { width: 1em; height: 1em; }

This approach I feel has most of the advantages of inlined SVG (mostly context-dependent colors) while avoiding most of the clutter, and is not heavily reliant on a specific JS-based workflow (thought we do need to includes our <def> somewhere in all pages)