rrwo

It's not an obsession, and the commit history isn't perfect by any means.

But don't underestimate the value of a good commit history, especially if you are using git blame to understand a change from several years ago. Wading through small typo fixes gets in the way.

Git encourages you to use branches, and rebasing allows you to squash simple typo fixes and minor changes, so you can review a change with a few commits that are easier to understand instead of a dozen.

Used with cherry picking, you can also move commits to other branches. I often find that bigger features changes turn into multiple branches and PRs, which is easier to review.

The cost isn't very much. Maybe a few minutes at most reorganizing a branch.

It also forces me to review the branch before submitting a PR. Sometimes I catch issues or use that as an opportunity to split into multiple PRs.

Yes, and in some parts of the world they are obligated to run background checks on their employees or contractors.

Yes. I've had this once when moving to a new city and arranging to have my medical records transferred.

My new doctor read the snarky and incorrect internal notes to me.

I'm wondering if the decline after the mid-2000s isn't due to computers so much as the internet.

Once somebody has an internet-connected computer at their desk, they have more distractions (from internal applications like email to external ones like Facebook or reading news online). They also have more kinds of problems that can interrupt their work (server failure, network problems, viruses).

Interesting, but what about accents or non-English letters such as ø, þ pr ð?

Also, considering that so much is written in Braille, how many people use this?

A better question is: what languages and frameworks do you prefer for developing web applications, and why.

Parents cannot and should not be watching their teenaged children 24/7, and if they tried, the children would find ways to hide things from their parents.

Most people find the parents that deny their children any privacy as abusive.

It's healthy for children to have time away from their parents, so they can learn and practice being adults.

The vast majority of teenagers have managed to do this without becoming pregnant, alcoholics, drug addicts, or join violent street gangs. (And some that do still manage to sort their lives out when they get older.)

What's changed in recent years are unregulated, algorithm-driven social media

- that guess people's moods to get them addicted to content and purchase products, including harmful products;

- that pushes content full of misinformation, conspiracy theories and violent extreme politics;

- allows random adults on the other side of the world to reach out to children for exploitation (sexual or financial) or recruitment for violent political causes;

- 24-hour interaction, so there's no break from the drama or abuse of school when you leave school for the day or weekend;

Supposed child-friendly platforms like YouTube Kids or Roblox are attractive places for people who want to exploit children. The profit motive encourages companies to take a hands-off approach, and the scale of users and content means that it's difficult to control.

Social media and ad networks are so short-term profit driven that the algorithms recommend things to kill off the very users that they are earning money off of.

This system is broken.

I'm very happy using Perl with web frameworks like Mojolicious, and database ORMs like DBIx::Class.

You can get a working prototype up quickly, and recent versions of Perl along with OO libraries like Moo/Moose allow you to quickly create well-written code.

There's also a lot of mature testing libraries.

> It alleges that, in 2020, Roblox connected a young girl called S.U. with adult men who abused her for months, manipulating her into sending payments using Roblox currency called Robux and inducing her to share explicit photos on Discord and Snapchat through 2021. As the girl grew increasingly anxious and depressed, the lawsuit alleges that Instagram began recommending self-harm content, and ultimately, S.U. had to withdraw from school after multiple suicide attempts.

This reads like the synopsis of a Philip K Dick story.

Americans can handle complicated stories with ambiguity and no clear good v evil.

But there are loud camps of culture warriors who raise a fuss if it's not "safe for kids" and a whole industry of grifters who amplify this, because getting people angry improves their TV ratings and the political campaign funds.

There are a lot of managers in the arts and culture industry (editors, producers, museum directors etc) who are rarely rewarded but often punished for resisting the culture warriors.

Yes.

And even if it's "bad parenting" why can't someone write a scene where this casual bad behaviour happens in the background, without having to explicitly point it out as bad?

You should be able to write about a scene without moralising or having to give an origin story or explanation for behaviour.

The need to do this in American movies, TV and books ruins a story.

There is a reason that Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer was published in France.

> Rebase has become so integral to my workflow, it's hard to imagine living without it.

Same. I use it to reorganise branches before submitting change requests or merging:

- Combing or splitting commits so that each commit contains a small unit of a logical change

- Reordering commits to related changes are near each other

- Reordering commits so changes that are depended on by later commits occur earlier.

- Rewording commit descriptions to have a lengthy explanation, if needed

- Removing small commits that fix minor typos

It's a great way to turn the commit history of a project into one of logical changes, rather than a simple temporal log of every change.

(I had a colleague who was so used to CVS and couldn't get his head around not using version control as a time tracking device.)

> This is why massive companies like Meta and Alphabet needs to be nationalised.

Nationalised by what country? US? UK? France? Russia? Saudi Arabia? India? China?

Would we have country-specific and isolated social media and search engines?

Even in nominally free western countries, do you really want the government controlling what can be in a search engine or posted on social media?

> upwards of 75% of the time I see better ways to do something. It's often small things, like making what's being build more configurable / hard coding less, abstracting differently so code is more reusable, naming things better, organising the code in a more logical way, etc. Other times I simply don't agree with the change because it adds complexity with little benefit.

Are there general rules about this that your colleagues can learn from (and are learning from), so that their PRs will improve over time?

And are these general rules documented somewhere in a coding standards document, so that less experienced developers can refer to it?

Or are the "better ways" you see of doing something different from case to case?

If you cannot write down general rules that can be put in an agreed-upon coding standards document, then it's possible you are not as good a developer as you think you are, and that you may not be good to work with either.

> You know those requests, "could we make this button green with larger text in this one specific place"? My answer to these requests are typically, no, because unless it's extremely important it's just adding complexity and making thins harder to maintain down the road.

Is your codebase so brittle that you can change the format of a button without "adding complexity and making things harder to maintain"? Or are you being a control freak about minor stuff?

I used to work for a company that had a few developers who were full of themselves, and nitpicked at every PR, often being given contradictory changes between PRs and even told that "I know it when I see it" when confronted about this. They were so obsessed with making code that was clean and easy to maintain, but the codebase was an insecure and inconsistent mess, and they painted themselves into corners that made bug fixes or refactoring difficult. It was a toxic place to work, with a significant turnover of developers.

Yes.

I used to work at a company that invested too much time and effort into an ELK stack that handled specialist log formats sent over a custom UDP service. It was brittle and fell over in all sorts of strange ways. This was all for monitoring a handful of servers.

The only good that came of it was when we realized that the support staff could search the logs and diagnose 95% of customer complaints without bothering developers. ("Your transaction failed because you entered a bad card number.")

But that was because the text logs were more useful than the metrics.

I meet a friend who also works from home for lunch or a coffee break during the day.

Otherwise I walk my dog or run errands in the middle of the day, just to go outside and get some exercise and see other people.

Excel-readable is a bad thing. I wonder how much data is ignored or misinterpreted because Excel misinterpreted the input to be something else.

(I actually know biologists who have run into this problem.)

> I really dislike the idea that EU regulators would know what's better for consumers than consumer electronics companies and the consumers themselves

This isn't something created by faceless bureaucrats behind closed doors.

The "regulators" are the EU Parliament, who are elected by residents in the various countries. The issue has been talked about for a few years, and was voted on 603 to 13, that's over 96% (including abstentions).

> If there is one thing that drives EU legislation ideas, it is the convergence towards open and common, market-wide standards. This reduces the barriers to entry for small players and leads to more innovation as a result.

Too many people don't understand that trade agreements are about common standards and accountability.

There is a lot of noise about EU regulations made by people who are stuck in 18th century mindsets about trade and who fancy themselves as "free traders".

It's not going to affect existing phones.

Recently posted at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33055669

I think it's healthy to lose touch with people as our lives evolve.

Keeping in touch with people you would otherwise forget about is depressing.

Seeing friends and family turn bitter and hateful is depressing.

Seeing friends and family fall down the mad rabbit hole of conspiracy theories or religious cults is depressing.

In other words, "I'm a pusher but I won't let my children use narcotics."

Wasn't there a similar case with the Obama Hope poster? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_%22Hope%22_post...

People throughout the Americas has mnemonic writing systems, but apparently that doesn't count.

The people I mentioned and their work are intentionally overlooked because it doesn't fit a dogma around Platonic Realism and Classical Logic.

And Gödel, of course.

Companies cannot legally provide a lot of services to minors.

For other services there is enough bureaucracy that it's easier to avoid by not providing the service to minors.

It's also easier to ban accounts for life when they lie about who they are. You don't run the risk of aiding fraud and being fined if you make a mistake, because you banned them.

There was nothing preventing the kid from creatibg content. It was in using Ad Sense to make money off it.