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sbennettmcleish

54 karma · joined March 18, 2011

not much to know .. just you're avg aussie developer or maybe a wee bit above average ;-)

sometimes I write about some recent development i'm doing: thecuriousdev.com

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sbennettmcleish··on Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
I was going to say "how about github?" ... but, maybe you're right
sbennettmcleish··on Dropbox is an obvious PE Target?
I'm still a paying customer from somewhere before 2010, don't use it consistently but I've got a ton of things in there. Every time the anniversary rolls around in November I ponder how much effort to move off it for the not insignificant cost, but then the desire fades until about the next November :)
sbennettmcleish··on Ryanair fined €256M over ‘abusive strategy’ to limit ticket sales by OTAs
At least it's a wonderfully round number :)
sbennettmcleish··on JetBrains cancels Fleet
Quite timely, I cancelled my personal all-products yesterday, likely going to re-direct those $ to a Claude subscription.

In recent times it seems like IntelliJ has become what I ran away from Eclipse for, i.e. bloat and non-performance.

sbennettmcleish··on US hits $38T in debt. Fastest accumulation of $1T outside pandemic
(not an American) .. but only if there was a group of people with lots of extra money just sitting around invested in things growing in value ;-)
sbennettmcleish··on At 17, Hannah Cairo solved a major math mystery
the factory must grow ;-)
sbennettmcleish··on XSLT: A Precision Tool for the Future of Structured Transformation
I'd say damn near 20yrs. I used it quite extensively about 10yrs ago and it was an odd one then, but was very useful for the purpose we had (semantic validation of XML payloads).
sbennettmcleish··on That's a Lot of YAML
When it comes to AWS Cloudformation, I love YAML. Can't think of any other positive use though.
sbennettmcleish··on A SpaceX team is being brought in to overhaul FAA's air traffic control system
LOL ... well that's more than a tad ridic. An additional private generator might be in order if you're in the US.
sbennettmcleish··on Vehicle emission declines decreased deaths, study finds
Interesting that for a largely US focused article the stock image is of Perth, AU - https://www.google.com/maps/@-31.9678004,115.8467131,376a,35... :)
sbennettmcleish··on Form Energy reveals the chemistry of its long-duration battery
Yes, we're not gonna run out. WA ships nearly a billion tons/yr.
sbennettmcleish··on Microsoft Irish subsidiary paid zero corporate tax on £220bn profit last year
220bn profit? Really? Surely they mean "revenue"
sbennettmcleish··on Factorio 1.0
oh ... and the only game where i've regularly hit 2am and thought "one more thing..."
sbennettmcleish··on Factorio 1.0
It's an uninterrupted treadmill cos you just spent 3 hours extra doing seventeen other things and realise you still haven't actually "fixed the copper" or whatever the heck it was you were meant to be doing :)

1600+hrs in ... still pushin' all my buttons.

sbennettmcleish··on Pocket Casts Is Now Free
Bought the app, well worth it! Currently using two phones and my progress syncing perfectly ... like one should expect!
sbennettmcleish··on Instant scale with AWS Lambda (2017)
I appreciate that AWS Lambda has been a win for various people but this case study doesn't really mention what they tried to do with scaling. Whilst 0 to 100k sounds good, they also had seemingly chosen just one scaling solution of a big instance - several smaller instances behind a load balancer which scale up/down would surely have served the same outcome?

Lambda has been sold on "saving costs" but what seems to be often neglected is the developer time spent re-jigging into a "serverless" model. Developer resources are far, far more expensive than mere EC2 instances.

sbennettmcleish··on Terraforming 1Password
Initially I was that way too, only took a couple weeks and a few reference templates that demonstrated the constructs to get past that and haven't done JSON since. Definitely more efficient to develop with.
sbennettmcleish··on Terraforming 1Password
Absolutely agree! Have been smashing out YAML templates for 12mths with pleasure (3yrs of JSON templates beyond that), comments are the winning proposition, allows neat sectioning of various parts.
sbennettmcleish··on Your Mother’s Maiden Name Is Not a Secret
good summary. Only bit missing would be the recently / soon to be phased out $2 non-bank ATM price gouge
sbennettmcleish··on A preview of the U.S. without pensions
These "company managed" pension schemes have always fascinated me and would seem ripe for corruption / raiding by the company if they're short a few $$$.

Seems like in Australia we're in a pretty good position with "superannuation" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superannuation_in_Australia being compulsory since 1992 and is typically managed by completely unrelated parties to your employer.

The payments are generally made directly by your employer into the fund of your own choosing.

The biggest thing is once you've had this contributed to YOUR account, it is YOURS (drawable from age 65) and doesn't matter what happens to the fortunes of your employer(s) in the future.

sbennettmcleish··on Drip
"weird" wouldn't be my first choice of word, desperate for a "hip", short domain and willing to take any name maybe.
sbennettmcleish··on Mozilla Acquires Pocket
They slot 'sponsered content' blocks into your stream of saved items, it's done very well IMO. These have to make some decent $$$ surely.

However, I just checked my queue and couldn't see any.

sbennettmcleish··on Ask HN: How long is your daily commute?
It used to be 1hr each way and getting worse [https://audit.wa.gov.au/reports-and-publications/reports/mai...], then moved and am now 7-14 minutes away (depending on trains at a level crossing).
sbennettmcleish··on Ask HN: Do you still read RSS feeds?
Yes, for which I use NewsBlur.
sbennettmcleish··on Why I like XSLT
Agree 100%. I've been using XSLT very extensively in my current role for at least two years now and I love it!

However, I can say with certainty that I'm the only one within my team that shares this view.

Using it for transformation of XML to HTML, semantic validation (does my XML contain A and B when C='Individual'?) and mapping from one XML flavour to something JAXB friendly. Implementing much of this stuff in Java or other would be a nightmare and/or unproductive process with a LOT more code required.

sbennettmcleish··on Marriage finances for the modern era: a proposal
My wife and I took the cue from Scott Hanselman & his wife Mo a few years back. Pay all income into one account and then pay yourselves an allowance for "guilt free spending" for all the little things you want to just buy.

http://hanselminutes.com/216/geek-relationship-tips-with-sco...

sbennettmcleish··on Pin Payments is Australia’s first all-in-one online payment API
Great stuff! Good to see this coming out of Perth and hopefully they can get a good foothold on the market from support of businesses here before the bigger US/EU competitors (finally) arrive.
sbennettmcleish··on Microsoft fined $731m by European Commission over web browser choice
Whilst it is Microsoft with bags of money and all that, I don't really see how such a huge fine (even for M$) is warranted.

Yes, they stopped offering the browser choice, but at what point did someone from EU-HQ contact MS-HQ and tell them they'll be fined if they don't put it back in? Surely it would only take a few weeks at the most to actually re-instate the "feature" once they were threatened with a huge fine.

It might have been better for Microsoft to have actually been forced to give money to the other browsers to promote their products, or alternatively, just bundle Firefox/Chrome with Windows and be done with it.

sbennettmcleish··on Choosing a name for your computer
I've long been a fan of collective nouns, you could almost never run out even if you choose only birds .. Murder anyone?