msluyter

I think this -- whether something should be illegal because it could be used to harm others -- isn't a particularly helpful way to frame things. I could drop a refrigerator from a crane onto the jerk who lets his dog poop in my yard, and obviously refrigerators and cranes shouldn't be illegal. OTOH, "you could set off an atom bomb, should atom bombs be illegal?" (Yes, for ordinary folks, obviously.) And "11 year olds could drive a car and have an accident, should 11 year olds driving cars be illegal?" (Yes, obviously.)

I think you have to look at from a broader viewpoint. The government regulates many things for a variety of reasons (public safety, mitigating negative externalities), and aside from libertarian cranks, I don't see anyone shaking their fists at the government for having seatbelt laws or food regulations or speed limits. It's not "because criminals could drive their getaway cars really fast" that we have speed limits.

(Perhaps that's actually what you're implying... not sure.)

> So what should it do? Continue futilely braking to a likely-fatal accident when it impacts the truck? Or swerve to avoid?

Just speculating, but I'd wager we end up with a suboptimal solution to particular instances like this in favor of a general policy that is a) predictable, and b) minimizes liability. IOW, the car will be programmed to brake rather than swerve, because swerving opens many unpredictable cans of worms, as you've noted. Braking may be the worse answer here, but as a general matter, I think you're going to have an easier time in court arguing that the car did its best to brake to avoid a collision vs. arguing that the fact that it swerved and, say, hit a schoolbus or went over a cliff.

Is this actually legally viable? I'd be worried that you could be technically considered to be under contract and get fined for late fees/penalties on top of other charges, get referred to collection agencies, etc...

I think one example where duplication > abstraction is in tests. I personally find tests that have a ton of extra helper classes/functions to do stuff like set up fixtures or do assertions to be painful to deal with. Taken to an extreme you end up with a mini test framework that obscures the actual test cases and is as hard to understand as the code in question.

I'm not against shared test fixtures or some utility functions, but IMHO, it's better to have some duplication but clearer tests.

Random story.

I used to have a pretty intense phobia about returning things, and 90% of the time I'd opt to just eat the cost rather than doing so.

When we had our first child, we bought this automatic rocker/chair thing. I got it out of the box and put it together -- it had these locking joints where like a spring pin would pop into internal slot, such that once put together it was impossible to disassemble.

Once I'd finished, I put our daughter in it, and when turned on, one part rubbed against part of the structure, making an annoying clicking sound. My wife, half mad from lack of sleep, took one look/listen and told me to get it out of the house. (In much more colorful language).

Just then, our daughter, who was still in the chair, who was wearing diapers a size too small because we'd run out of her normal size, pooped. We quickly got her out but there was a quarter size stain on the fabric. We cleaned that as best we could, but it was still visible.

I collected the pieces, which no longer fit in the box because you couldn't fully take it apart, put as much in the box as I could, and took it back to the store. As I stood in line for the return with this overstuffed box with various rods & parts sticking out all askew, I kept replaying horror scenarios in my mind. Like the clerk taking it out of the box and shouting in front of everyone "YOU CAN'T RETURN THIS, YOU MONSTER, IT HAS POOP ON IT!"

The clerk barely glanced at the box. I'm no longer afraid of returning things.

FWIW, I think Scott Galloway has an interesting take on this:

https://www.profgalloway.com/work-from-office/

One of his arguments is that for younger employees, in that it provides an opportunity to create social connections. For example, it appears that ~20% of people meet their spouses at work.

I'd be really curious to see a non-anecdotal exploration of this thesis. (My own anecdata points in the opposite direction.) I ran across this study via random googling: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318649651_Correlati...

Concluding paragraph:

"Therefore, the data tabulated is sufficient to allow this study to draw several conclusions and inferences. First, it is reasonable to conclude that Mathematical ability of the students could be the basis of admissions for BSCS program. Second, students who performed well in math can, therefore, performed (sic) well in programming courses. Third, the Mathematical ability could be a predictor of student performance in programming courses."

Of course, it'd be nice to see some other studies confirming/disconfirming this conclusion.

"Limes Against Humanity." ;)

Weird, having bought/sold a number of houses in the last ten years (our family moved several times), I can't say I've ever run into a real estate agent that seemed like a "high pressure" salesman. Perhaps its just the market so they don't really need to try, but IME the best real estate agents -- on the buyers side, at least -- were the ones that listened carefully and did a good job of finding houses that matched our needs. Definitely requires soft skills/empathy, but not really a sales role.

Do such things exist? Are there real estate agents who are like "and if you buy today, we'll throw in this grill!"? Genuinely curious.

On the general utility of real estate agents... Really knowing a market and understanding construction/houses/permitting, etc... is a pretty important knowledge/skill set. I had one excellent agent figuratively drag me away from a condo that she understood to have serious foundation/construction defects. The good ones will help you understand what's good/bad about a house, problems to be alert for, etc...

Like a lot of middle men, I think they do provide some service of value. Now, is that worth 3%/6% of a houses value? In many cases, undoubtedly not. We sold a house in Austin when the market was so hot that we got an eye popping offer the day after the agent put a "pending" sign in the yard. I think he did like 4 hrs total work. So afaict, the profession as a whole acts as sort of a rentier over the MLS listings.

Are you assuming that the intent behind feedback is always benign?

IMHO, in work settings it can represent a sort of a power play, esp. if done in public. I, wise, experienced, and objective, have the perspicacity to critique you, a humble, inexperienced, unskilled clod. See how awesome I am?

This likely to be quite a bit more subtle than I've framed it above, of course, but the dynamic remains. And, these dynamics aren't mutually exclusive -- one may have a genuine desire to help and get an ego/status boost from it, (which makes it sometimes tricky to handle gracefully if you're on the receiving end.)

I feel seen. Diet Coke is my albatross, and it has all the hallmarks of a serious addiction. I'm currently going through another round to trying to stop, and I'm seriously always thirsty and craving it.

This is why I no longer play it -- it also suffers from a severe kingmaker problem. But like others have noted, for me, Settlers was sort of a gateway game that led me into wider world of eurogames and many years of enjoyment & camaraderie with my gaming group.

A compelling narrative on the topic that went around a number of years ago:

https://slate.com/human-interest/2005/12/my-coffeehouse-nigh...

Unmentioned reason: for the lone developer, the temptation to be "clever," or do interesting experiments is harder to resist. For me, sometimes that's driven by boredom. I've occasionally found myself switching paradigms ("This time I'm going to try a functional style (in python)...") just to keep things interesting, even if in the long run it might not be ideal. Even in the same project! Or, without the guardrails of peer criticism, I'll think "ok, this is a great time to try new library/framework X."

IMHO, there are some benefits to the above! Experimentation and trying new techniques/frameworks is how we learn and progress. The danger arises when the experiments congeal into half-baked production code.

I have keratoconus and scleral contact lenses reduce the flaring enough to make night driving possible.

I've been trying Github copilot. It's especially good for suggestions based on localized context. For example, if you have this:

    def do_thing():
        print('doing a thing')
    
    def do_thing_2():
        print('doing a thing 2')
    
    def do_thing_3():
        print('doing a thing 3')

(Which, btw, do_thing 2 & 3 were autogenerated). If you type:

    def do_all_the_things():

it will auto generate:

        do_thing()
        do_thing_2()
        do_thing_3()

which is great if you have localized patterns in your code. It has also perfectly generated tests for things like a wrapper around a publicly known api.

Where it starts to get a little suspect is in some of its inferences where it doesn't have the localized context or a well known api as its corpus. It can spit out disastrously incorrect code on occasion. Still a time saver, but you have to remain alert.

This article overlooks the potentially positive impact of your peer network. All of the things that the article suggest you shouldn’t do are things that make you valuable to your peers. And your peers may be instrumental in helping you find your next job.

"1. You can’t have enough new content every month, subscribers therefore don’t keep the subscription year round."

For our household, this is true of all streaming services. We rotate them, or subscribe for short stretches. For example, I got Paramount+ for a couple of months, watched all of the Star Trek content, and then cancelled. Amazon Prime is the exception (because free(-ish) shipping.)

I wonder to what extent the big streaming services are aware of this phenomenon and how they hope to mitigate it.

IMHO, I think this is by design, with the goal of moving people to Apple Music. These days, it's all about rent extraction (aka, subscriptions).

Indeed. Thirteenth amendment, section 1.

You can also add a comment for searchability, as in:

    > big hairy command with --lots --of arguments  # foobar

Then you can search for 'foobar' via fzf or whatnot.

My first real job was for a sdet position and I was asked how to test a function that takes 3 numbers representing lengths of sides of triangle, and determines whether the the numbers can form a possible triangle. E.g. (in python),

    def is_triangle(a, b, c) -> bool:
        ...etc...

One of the things an ideal candidate would realize is that the triangle inequality needs to apply (a + b >= c (for all permutations of a,b,c)), and that if a developer naively implemented the above via:

    if a + b < c:
        return false

it'd run into this exact problem.

I'd thought this question had gotten stale / overdone, but perhaps it's still a great interview question.

Related: anecdotally, morning sunlight really improves my overall sleep. Learned about it here:

https://hubermanlab.com/sleep-toolkit-tools-for-optimizing-s...

I think it may hinge on whether you use wrist pads. I use them and definitely can't wear a watch when I work.

I once made the mistake of doing something like ‘viewed as a binary representation of a number, where pyramids on their side are zeros and those standing are ones, such that the number is odd.”

After that my friends wouldn’t play Zendo with me.

Thank you for introducing me to this rabbit hole. Here's a NYTimes article from 1976 -- note, many issues with the OCR, but still interesting and entertainingly written:

https://www.nytimes.com/1976/12/26/archives/why-nothing-work...

I recommend this Huberman Labs podcast about ADHD:

https://hubermanlab.com/adhd-and-how-anyone-can-improve-thei...

Huberman is a neuroscientist and everything he recommends appears to be backed by peer reviewed research. He does also promote various products, but afaict, he does a good job of keeping that from biasing his recommendations.

Wow, this brings back memories! My roommate in college was really into Brian Eno, and I recall many a night when we'd go to sleep to this. HN is pretty great sometimes.

"HN Who's hiring is probably a low priority platform."

This has always surprised me. At several companies I've suggested to the hiring folks that they post on HN and I've rarely seen it happen. But IMHO, although you may not get a lot of candidates that way, I would imagine the signal/noise ratio is high, relative to the average recruiting channel. (Would be curious to see that (dis)confirmed.)

I think that's mostly correct, and at beginner/intermediate levels of play can very much be true. Back when I used to play, I'd often run into people who specialized in weird gambits like the Grob or the Latvian, because even though those probably won't win many masters levels games, they're full of traps which can trip up lesser players.

But even in mid-game, it might mean that if you know that your opponent prefers open / tactical positions, for example, you try to force a closed position, even if it may be slightly suboptimal.