prhn

Wow, that's fun. I wish I could articulate why the music and dying sound effect are both so great. The gameplay has a great rhythmic feeling to it. It's also really tense. I scream every time that damn ghost catches me.

The best part is when I die I feel like I made a dumb mistake, and that if I improved just a few things I could be way better.

Too many games these days give you the allure of depth and complexity by making things difficult in the wrong ways.

My intuition tells me that if you need to explain your UI before presenting it then you've probably failed at designing it.

Maybe I'm too old school in that "Design of Everyday Things" sort of thinking.

Nobody has to explain to me what to do with a cup because it's not shaped like a banana.

Adaptation is one of the gems of Postmodern cinema. I really like what that film did to my brain the first time I watched it. It's hilarious.

It's a keen insight into the process and emotional rollercoaster of creative work.

The layered hilarity to it all is that it's based on the real experience of Kaufman trying to adapt The Orchid Thief.

If you're not an avid cyclist please take this article with a grain of salt. It's largely understood that disc brakes are better, full stop.

A few guys in my cycling group who are still on rim brakes will not take the really fun descents, even when it's completely dry. They don't trust them. Pad fade, overheating brake surfaces causing de-lamination and popping inner tubes.

So, sure, if all you're ever going to do is ride on a flat surface in dry conditions rim brakes are fine, but not better.

It's arguable rim brakes are slightly more aero. I like my bones unbroken, so I'll take the penalty.

I also find servicing hydraulic disc brakes to be more intuitive. Having to fiddle with the tension of rim brakes' mechanical cables to get them just right was always much more cumbersome to me.

> "Intelligence" is a word we made up

So is all human knowledge. They're all things we "made up" to describe the world around us. That's a really cheap way to reduce something. There's a mountain of psychological literature that intends to describe and measure intelligence. Saying it doesn't mean much of anything is a bit of a postmodern hot take.

> If an LLM can compose a poem found in no existing book, paint an attractive picture that no one has ever seen, or write a program that has never run before, it's intelligent enough to be called "intelligent."

Painting pictures and composing poems aren't good ways to measure general intelligence. That's creativity. They're correlated but not the same.

There are specific tests for measuring general intelligence, and there's absolutely no way current gen LLM would score highly on them because they don't even accept visual input. Yes I've seen that they can score highly on verbal-only tests. That's obvious anyway because they have seen, written down, and have access to the answers during the test.

Even if they did accept visual input they would only be able to solve problems for which they've previously been given the answers (trained on the dataset). Even then I'd have my doubts given how terribly wrong ChatGPT4 is when I ask it to produce a very simple Kubernetes manifest which has a strictly defined spec.

I'd agree with some other comments here that you are pretty far away from rock bottom.

Rock bottom is a complete dismantling of your life. Failed relationships (romantic, friendly, professional, etc), lost job, bills piling up, apartment a disaster, inability to build a mental model that can cope with your current situation.

It looks more like you're in a relative minimum. From what I understand about psychology a healthy balanced life generally follows a pattern of building yourself up to a relative maximum, getting something completely wrong that challenges the framework you've built to orient yourself in the world, hitting a relative minimum, and learning to build yourself back up to a new relative maximum.

Consider the alternative, where there are no relative minimums. That would imply you either know everything, in which case your trajectory would be completely flat or ascending indefinitely. Well, that certainly can't be the case because not even the most brilliant people in history knew everything.

There is no advice or shortcut we can give that your therapist hasn't given you. These things take time. There is something about life that you've gotten wrong. This is your opportunity to learn what it is, fix it, build a new mental model, and prepare yourself to not make the same mistakes again.

You're in the fortunate position to have a lot of opportunity. More people are in the dysfunctional family history boat than you think. Sounds like you've done well, despite that.

Keep going.

I'm sorry, I don't like this one bit.

> I love and accept myself, exactly as I am.

> I am enough. I have enough.

> I am in the right place, at the right time, doing the right thing.

How the hell are you supposed to assess and improve on the infinite dimensions of yourself when this is your inner monologue?

I 100% agree with your criticisms. That was my point. Strava’s main feature is the social element, but they are not really maximizing the leverage they have with install base.

Compare Zwift. I can log in and join a group ride at just about any time of the day.

Now, I know that’s not a completely fair comparison because Zwift is online so it always has access to way more riders, but where is the analogue in Strava?

This is really cool!

Any of the code open source?

I think you're mostly correct here, but Strava's main selling point isn't the data store and interface (which in my opinion is not great). It's the social feature.

I've met a massive community of cyclists: rode with cycling "celebs," trained with really strong amateurs, met a ton of people, learned about weekly group rides, learned about the best rides in the area, and made some very good friends.

Most of this was facilitated by Strava. I'm glad it hasn't devolved into just another shitty social media app, but I do feel like they are not capitalizing on what makes them unique. Right now that is being the de facto cycling social media network.

> Is it bad that I don't feel sorry for the Americans getting scammed

yes

I love Java.

I focused on front-end for 10 years. Starting with motools and IE6, jQuery, into React + Redux. I moved on exclusively to backend development after a few years of the latter.

You couldn't pay me enough to maintain a highly available/scalable system that wasn't written in a "verbose," strongly typed and compiled language. I'm done with that pain. If you're going to pick Node, I hope you're using TypeScript. Python, no thanks.

Refactoring and implementing new features in Java with IntelliJ feels like cheating, in comparison.

Even Go, which I actually really like, starts to lose specificity at large scale due to its intentional terseness. I deeply dislike implied interfaces, and the error handling in a large codebase is really noisy (one of Java's main complaints), without much net benefit.

There definitely was a learning curve with Java. To the untrained eye it looks very noisy and magical, but once you learn to visually parse it and understand what all the annotations do you can move very quickly with low risk.

Your mileage may vary. If you can move fast without breaking things using some other technology, go for it. But I hope you're prepared for success, when 30+ devs are contributing code to your house of cards. You'll want all the natural protections you can get from your choice of stack.

To me, HN delivers on what I'd hoped the internet would largely become.

Happy Thanksgiving

> dramatically increases site performance, accessibility and the end-user experience

Where are the metrics? Who is the target audience? What is the distribution of hardware among this target? A dramatic increase in performance on a potato might be imperceptible on the latest hardware, lessening or even eliminating the impact of your technology choices.

A dramatic increase in accessibility and end-user experience is also pretty hand-wavy. How did you come to this conclusion? Any examples? I don't see how HTML-only is tied to these things. You can accomplish or fail both with or without heavy CSS and JS.

None of the sites she links to make the case for these assertions. Am I missing something?

> Why all this backlash against HTML-only websites?

What backlash? I see the HTML-only rhetoric so often these days that it's clear this position is becoming rather fashionable.

Replace

> All I want to do is look at my phone and consume more content.

with

- Lift weights

- Run a marathon

- Bike a century

- Write a story

- Paint a picture

Change your relationship with the things you cannot control.

That was my exact experience as well. I think the first time I studied anything with diligence was during a trip, and I've taken that ability with me to current day.

I also feel immensely thankful for it. I nearly dropped out of high school and I bounced around manual labor jobs for a few years. I'm so far away from that fate now it's sometimes hard to reconcile internally.

Even if you had unlimited time it’s unlikely you’d become an expert in many things, even if many only means 3-5.

I know this isn’t very scientific, but as someone who’s struggled with this same question I would suggest just diving into any one of the things that you’re interested in. From there let your instincts and intuition naturally decide what you continue doing and what you abandon.

I’ve learned that it’s hard to force continued work in any area that feels like a slog. Our personalities are tuned to prefer certain activities or fields of study over others.

Find what feels natural and go, go, go.

What are the modern, accepted software principle, architectural or design patterns, and security best practices?

What is the best source on these topics?

I’m not being cheeky here. I’m genuinely interested, because I see these terms thrown around a lot without reference.

We just hired two junior devs, and we could have hired more if we had the recs.

Please tell me where all these seniors are coming from, because we certainly couldn't find a single qualified one during twelve+ months of interviewing.

I also haven't observed "remote work makes onboarding and training more challenging" in companies that are dedicated to their remote workforce (which is basically everybody right now?). I've been remote for almost 10 years.

Attrition of senior devs will always be a problem because managers don't properly incentivize sticking around. Most senior devs will never put in the long hours to reach Staff Engineer. I don't blame them, but there needs to be a way to see professional and financial growth for senior engineers who are doing their jobs well.

And lastly "everyone's understaffed" because management never lets the calendar breathe. There's always more work scheduled in a given quarter than there are engineers, but management doesn't adjust the schedule accordingly. You could hire 5 senior engineers and they would still make this mistake.

I use socat daily.

Nearly all of the microservices we develop have a way to be run locally with all dependent services using docker-compose.

The problem is most teams don't provide a way to do efficient local development for their particular service. Some do remote debugging into the built/running container (slow and requires rebuilding docker image for every change). Some inspect logs to debug (yikes!).

When I want to debug a particular service in IntelliJ, I simply remove it from the docker network and replace it with a container running socat, forwarding the appropriate port to host.docker.internal (the host machine). This is on a MAC, of course, where Docker runs in a VM.

This allows me to do in-IDE debugging of any service that runs in the docker network without having to rebuild the image every time I make a change.

I know there are IntelliJ plugins that provide a similar workflow, but I believe they all build an image and deploy a container to the network for every change. I could be wrong.