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steadicat

611 karma · joined February 1, 2008

OpenAI. Previously led Developer Experience at Coinbase. Before that: Facebook, Storehouse, Bevel (YC F3), WorkFlowy (YC S10), Cloudant (YC S08).
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steadicat··on Nano Banana Pro
What?!? The tower was slightly straightened for safety reasons. It was never intentionally made to lean more.
steadicat··on In Praise of RSS and Controlled Feeds of Information
This app made me fall in love with RSS after years of trying: https://feeeed.nateparrott.com/
steadicat··on Myocardial infarction may be an infectious disease
Almost all? I just checked and Act, Crest, CloSYS and many others are all SLS-free and alcohol-free. The only one with SLS I could find is Listerine Cool Mint.

Maybe you’re thinking toothpastes? SLS in toothpaste is indeed hard to avoid.

steadicat··on Frequent reauth doesn't make you more secure
One time I led a project and ran daily standups by screen-sharing our Asana board so the team could review in-progress tasks. Every day, right in the middle of the meeting, Asana logged me out. I’d rush to log back in to finish the review, thus ensuring we’d repeat the cycle exactly 24 hours later. This silly dance lasted the whole project.
steadicat··on Changes since congestion pricing started in New York
I think we just have a different idea of what it means to be closed to cars. I live right by the stretch of Broadway you mention, so I’m very familiar. This is what it looks like: https://flatironnomad.nyc/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/4.2-Pla...

There is no restriction of through traffic. Effectively pedestrians are still confined to tiny and overcrowded sidewalks.

By comparison, here’s what a pedestrian street looks like in the non-US city I grew up in: https://sana.ae/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Corso-Italia-Stre...

Keep in mind that cars are still allowed for emergency services and (night time) deliveries. But the difference is night and day.

This is exactly what “the US can't imagine itself without cars” means to me.

steadicat··on Changes since congestion pricing started in New York
You’re kind of proving the point here. NYC has fewer car owners and yet NYC doesn’t have a single pedestrian street or street closed to through traffic. Sounds like a city that can’t imagine itself without cars even though it’s completely realistic.
steadicat··on Cats are (almost) liquid
I tried this but cats, being (almost) liquid, can very easily wrap around the soft collars and reach pretty much any part of their body.
steadicat··on On tea and the art of doing nothing
White tea is actually closer to black tea than the name implies. Because – unlike green tea – it is not steamed to stop the oxidation process, it oxides naturally as it dries. This puts it somewhere between green tea and black tea in terms of oxidation (which is also where oolong is BTW[1]). Some oolongs and white teas – if brewed similarly – are very very close to black tea in terms of flavor.

[1] The technical difference between oolong and white is simply that white is processed naturally, whereas oolong has more “steps” (oxidation, drying, steaming, etc.). The steps can be manipulated to give the tea a different character. Oolongs are often roasted, for example.

steadicat··on Why do arrays start at 0?
When talking about discrete things, 0 has a specific meaning: it is the absence of things. It does not make sense to count the 'first' element as the 0th. When you encounter the 'first' element, how many elements do you have? 1.

This is of course different for continuous quantities. When counting seconds, for example, we should absolutely start from 0.

steadicat··on We memo all the things (2020)
The team actually became part of a company-wide effort called Client Foundations! And no, we haven't changed our mind on this. (BTW we're hiring. :))
steadicat··on Azlo Is Closing Down
I just signed up for Brex. The application process was fast and smooth. A couple things to note:

- It looks like they use Radius Bank under the hood

- There is no Plaid support (this is almost a dealbreaker for me, as I want to use accounting tools like YNAB)

steadicat··on Azlo Is Closing Down
Bummed about this, but there seems to be a plethora of alternatives:

- Rho: https://rho.co/

- Mercury: https://mercury.com/

- Radius Bank: https://radiusbank.com/business/

- BlueVine: https://www.bluevine.com/

- Novo: https://banknovo.com

- Wave Money: https://www.waveapps.com/money

- Brex Cash: https://www.brex.com/product/cash-management-account/

- Wise: https://www.wise.us/

- Relay: https://relayfi.com

Now if only there were a clear way to choose one. If anyone has any tips, I'm all ears.

steadicat··on New JSX Transform
Interesting. Why not make that special symbol a tiny NPM module with a single published version that any library wishing to support JSX can import?
steadicat··on New JSX Transform
I'm curious why the compiled version is still referencing React code, instead of defining a standard JS data structure that JSX would compile directly into? This would remove any dependency to React itself, with the added benefit of skipping function calls at runtime. It doesn't look like there's much happening at instantiation that couldn't be done after the fact on plain JS objects: https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/master/packages/react...
steadicat··on Cat vs. panel heater: which is better?
Unfortunately, in my experience, cats are endothermic. Give a cat a heat source – a sunny patch, a heated blanket, or a warm belly – and they will cling to it until all the heat is absorbed out of it. Cats need heat sources to thrive, so they will be very unhappy if operated as a heat source.
steadicat··on Time to Upgrade Your Monitor
The article is all based around this premise:

> Times of low-resolution displays are over. High-resolution displays are a commodity now.

I reject that premise. 4K is basically the maximum number of pixels you can get for less than $1K, and that's only a handful more pixels than a 16" MBP screen. It does not make sense for most people to shell out the $$$ just so that they can see the same number of pixels from slightly further away.

It is absolutely not the right time to upgrade your monitor. Wait until 5K+ becomes affordable again[1] so you can actually get the benefits of an external monitor (more usable screen space) without having to sacrifice the sharpness and quality of retina.

[1] https://tidbits.com/2018/11/16/what-happened-to-5k-displays/

steadicat··on Driverless cars are stuck in a jam
This is an odd comment considering how humans have lived hundreds of thousands of years without cars, and only a few decades with them. You’re saying that a solution that’s as old as time - and used by billions of people today - is not as realistic as a technology that hasn’t been developed yet?
steadicat··on Corsica's 'fox cat': On the trail of what may be a new species
The order is still flipped for noun-noun pairs in romance languages. A "pesci spada" should be translated as "swordfish", not "fish sword".
steadicat··on Microsimulation of Traffic Flow
Lane change behavior looks completely unrealistic to me. I see cars switching lanes on deceleration into a traffic jam, which doesn't buy you anything (both lanes are stopped) and is extremely dangerous (you're cutting off cars approaching fast from behind and braking at the last minute). Never seen this happen in real life, except maybe at toll booths.

On the other hand, there is no lane switching when traffic on adjacent lanes clears up. In real life, drivers will quickly switch if a nearby lane starts moving. They can't see whether their own lane is also clearing up ahead, and most people won't take any chances.

steadicat··on The TypeScript Tax
Yes. As a matter of fact, I'm currently working on a large JS codebase that is a decade old. We switched over all the code to TypeScript in one go, and we are gradually fixing the type errors over time. VSCode does an excellent job of showing you type annotations and type errors inline, so the typing is very useful even if you have thousands of errors elsewhere in the project and never even run the type checker globally.

In fact, out of the dozen or so TS codebases I've worked on, I've rarely seen one completely free of type errors. And yet no team has ever doubted the value of the type system. It's a very pragmatic approach which works very well for many teams in my experience.

steadicat··on The TypeScript Tax
I think grandparent was referring to the fact that you can tell the compiler to ignore type errors if you so choose. The TypeScript compiler is perfectly happy to compile the code in your example, if you disable strict type checking and treat type errors as warnings. On top of that, there are simple annotations you can add that let you silence warnings as they come up, e.g. `const testVar: any = {}; testVar.asdf = "asdf";`. This is not too far off from a linter with comments to disable linting when you don't want it. So yes, technically, you can just run JavaScript through a TypeScript compiler.
steadicat··on Future of TypeScript on ESLint
Yes. All JS code – including recent ES* flavors – is valid TypeScript.
steadicat··on TypeScript at Google
TypeScript 3.0 fixed this: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/typescript/2018/07/30/annou...
steadicat··on SFMTA Offers Two Permits for One-Year Powered Scooter Pilot
Operating a scooter service was not illegal at the time. It was only made illegal as a retaliatory response. SFMTA and the supervisors would have liked those companies to proactively ask for permission, hence the retaliation. Skip is the only company (AFAIK) that made it a point to ask for permission first – and they’re getting rewarded for it – but I’m pretty sure they only did that with the benefit of hindsight. They were late to the game, saw the backlash against the early players, and saw that as their opportunity.
steadicat··on SFMTA Offers Two Permits for One-Year Powered Scooter Pilot
Bird/Lime/Spin have a very poor history only because they’re the only ones with any history at all. They just happened to be around when the controversy started. It seems unfair to penalize them for that, and give them zero credit for previous experience. Scoot’s been around, yes, but with a very different service.
steadicat··on SFMTA Offers Two Permits for One-Year Powered Scooter Pilot
Can’t help but think that spite factored in significantly in the decision. There’s a row that conflates “applicant’s history in complying with city regulations” with “applicant’s experience in operating and maintaining shared mobility systems”. Bird, Lime, and Spin all got “poor” for this row, even though they obviously have experience operating and maintaining such a system.
steadicat··on Show HN: All SF Scooters on One Map
Migo doesn’t seem to have Bird. Transit has all three: https://medium.com/@transitapp/welcome-to-scootopia-we-now-a...
steadicat··on Show HN: All SF Scooters on One Map
Loyalty != preference. I bet parent – like me – has a preference for the better scooters and software (Bird) over the shitty ones (Lime), but he’ll grab a Lime if no Bird is nearby.
steadicat··on Where Yegge’s Wrong
Not to mention that UIs are visual, i.e. defining what is “correct” in terms a computer can understand is very hard. There are dozens of criterias (colors, spacing, borders, shadows, fonts, behavior, etc.), and often what is accetable is fuzzy and sometimes even subjective.

Take spacing: if something moves 200px it's probably broken. But a couple pixels off are usually fine. Unless those 2px are the vertical position of an icon inside a button or two things that need to align. Where do you draw the line? Humans are pretty good at spotting when things look off just by looking at a screen. Computers, not so much (yet).

steadicat··on ‘I made Bannon’s psychological warfare tool’ meet the data war whistleblower
To be fair, Facebook announced they would, 2 days ago:

> We are suspending SCL/Cambridge Analytica, Wylie and Kogan from Facebook, pending further information.

https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/03/suspending-cambridge-an...

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