mparramon

Great read on Meccano vs Lego:

>I’ve come up with a theory connecting three big zeitgeist things: the end of the zero-interest world, the ongoing AI panic, and the meaning crisis. I think it also connects all three to the climate crisis, but I’ll leave that topic aside for this essay since it’s too big.

https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/truth-in-inconvenience

The advanced trick is to grab the post-it stack with one hand, and with the other grab the top post-it and apply force in parallel to the stack, from top to bottom of the post-it. This way the post-it remains uncurled.

The green and red post-its have the same orientation, the adhesive is on the top for both. So when you peel the green one off, you're peeling the adhesive right-to-left across it, whereas when you peel the red one off, you're peeling it from bottom to top almost all at once.

It's there, 5th row from the bottom, 3rd column :-)

I love this <3

I read a tweet saying: if you want to test whether your service has real engagement, log out everybody and check how many of them log back in. This can be seen as a practical test of it.

I lived in Spain for most of my life, and plenty of people drink milk in various forms: by itself, with chocolate or other flavourings, with cereals, muesli, etc. Supermarkets have huge shelfs for many brands of milk, and they're sold mainly in 6-packs.

I saw that map some time ago together with the one here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactase_persistence. However, after having lived in Southeast Asia for a while, I can attest that either the theory is quite wrong, or many many people drink milk with tea and coffee and then have a bad time in the bathroom daily.

I think this is due to the extent of the maintenance efforts by the team that develops the app, not due to the gems themselves. A monolithic app means that no code is legacy code: a conscious, gardening-like effort needs to be continuously done to keep interfaces standardised, modules documented, code clean, and critical components (like user management) top-notch with focused testing and code quality metrics. I've worked in different teams on 5+ year codebases that hold up to this day by being disciplined on this terms and never buckling down on complexity.

What I've also seen is that a team with plenty of churn or no time for maintenance will have exactly the problems you describe. As knowledgeable people leave the team, the old code becomes "legacy", new people come and partially refactor it, maybe adding some new gem and planning to migrate the entire codebase later on to it (which is very hard to make it happen). Stakeholders' pressure will force the team to focus on delivering features and only tackling debt when it gets to an unattainable state, and then is when consultants are called. I think this is why many freelancers suffer the worst of Rails (or any other framework) if they don't usually work with greenfield projects.

I can’t find it now, but DHH wrote somewhere about optimising for engagement vs action. The idea behind Basecamp is to be a service that helps you manage a project in a faster and easier way, not a service that makes you stay "engaged" while not pushing the project forward. Having more engagement means it’s doing the opposite of of what it's meant to.

This can easily apply for many other services. The purpose of an email client is to surface the important information (filtering and maybe inbox zero?) and let the user act on it (reply and write with the write context). The purpose of a dating website is to find a match and create a connection. The purpose of a social network, on the other hand, is much more debatable.

Following Rubocop's Ruby Style Guide [1] to the dot helps a lot with this, and it's quite easy to enforce using the rubocop gem + a GitHub action

[1] - https://github.com/rubocop-hq/ruby-style-guide

I would love to find an MVC framework with the extense library support of Rails but for Javascript. Being able to simply `gem 'devise'` and have full authentication at your hands (including views, email templates, etc) is a godsend.

At many places where I've worked at this paradigm is exactly what is needed, but people know and want to use JS. If we choose to go that way then, we need to write a lot of glue code and think about setting up architecture standards, folder and naming conventions, ORM support, authentication, job queues, etc; all of this comes by default with Rails and makes life so much easier.

Lately some options seem to be gaining steam:

* RedwoodJS [1]: by Tom Preston-Werner (founder of Github), comes with React and GraphQL baked in, pretty new project though

* Next.js [2]: brings a lot of nice conventions to the frontend, but still some things missing on the backend side

* SailsJS [3]: similar to Rails, but small community

* Strapi [4], hapi [5] et al: plenty of backend functionality, but frontend agnostic.

Has anybody had experience with any of these (or others) and can report back?

[1] - https://redwoodjs.com/

[2] - https://nextjs.org/

[3] - https://sailsjs.com/

[4] - https://strapi.io/

[5] - https://hapi.dev/

Stack Overflow Trends seems to be pointing in the same direction: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=react-native%...

This reminds me of The Swarm [1], a fiction book that starts with freak events happening around the world's oceans. The first of them is about a species of marine worms that, together with bacteria, destabilise the methane clathrate in the continental shelf. This causes the continental slope to collapse, creating a tsunami that hits the North Sea's coasts and kills millions.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Swarm_(Sch%C3%A4tzing_nove...

This comment gives me https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 vibes.

When you say "foveated compression" do you mean >Apple will liberally use an already-known VR technique that involves using eye-tracking to render objects in the user's periphery at a lower fidelity than what the user is focusing on. ?

Don't forget foone: https://twitter.com/Foone

>Hardware / software necromancer, collector of Weird Stuff, maker of Death Generators. (they/them)

Their threads about obscure hardware are always a joy to read.

>The quote, "If citizens just blindly follow their party without thinking much about it..." sets of my BS detector, because it's one of those pat statements that (other) people are predictably dumb or gullible.

Smart people don’t think others are stupid: https://rochemamabolo.com/2015/06/21/smart-people-dont-think...

Beautiful homepage, great app UX so far. Will give it a try on my next call. Thanks a lot OP!

>Singapore’s parliamentary political system has been dominated by the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) and the family of current prime minister Lee Hsien Loong since 1959. The electoral and legal framework that the PAP has constructed allows for some political pluralism, but it constrains the growth of credible opposition parties and limits freedoms of expression, assembly, and association.

https://freedomhouse.org/country/singapore/freedom-world/202...

But they're doing a similar thing with Justice League: The Snyder Cut right now though. I wonder why then?

Maybe the author's first language is not English?

Obesity?

I think that the difference is that someone can have a similar experience to Gmail by using their own mail server and any mail client. The same cannot be said about Uber, for example.

gatekeeper much

This is starting to happen in the EU already: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-49281111

Very relevant film about the topic: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5688932/

Why not both?