strict9

What is so incredible with successful multiple decade-spanning careers like the one Tony Bennett had is that you must continuously reinvent yourself and adapt to remain relevant. All while not straying too far from your self as to not alienate fans.

He did all of that and so much more.

Ask someone who has worked in a restaurant about the habits of diet coke drinkers. They always require 10x or more refills than water or soda.

Clicking the link for past records redirects me to a landing page to purchase turbotax products. I haven't used them in years.

Yet it's impossible for me see my own prior tax returns from a product I already paid for. I can't contact support for help without paying additional money to turbotax.

I realize this article doesn't match turbotax specifically but the entire industry is rotten to the core and shouldn't exist in the first place.

Instagram devs have given a lot talks about python and django at conferences. As far as I know IG is still running on django so it makes sense that the dev team would stick with it for something new.

HN is the only social network that I still use, if you can even call it that.

Effective moderation, thoughtful content, and a simple design that gets out of the way.

It's the only content source that hasn't been poisoned by demands of increased user engagement and tracking.

Please don't ever change, HN.

Remote work with lots of PTO available (no questions asked) is an order of magnitude more important to me than salary. I'll happily settle for a medium-sized company with a decent tech stack that offers freedom and flexibility.

There is (almost) no salary level that would make me trade the current setup remote work and lots of time off.

I am more motivated to work and be productive than when I worked in an office. And I'm happier about what I do.

>Every now and again (say I enter a house which has a no-shoe rule), someone will spot them and find the concept strange,

I find it more strange that people wear outside shoes inside. The same shoes that go on dirt, mud, who knows what else are used to walk on your floors and carpets.

Taking your shoes off at the door prevents a lot of dirt/who-knows-what from entering the house.

Glad to see this for the precedent, though Prime is far from the worst offender of employing dark patterns to cancel memberships.

I'd love to see FTC target cancellations that require you to call a phone number and speak with someone. There's always a very long wait, and once you speak to someone you have to do gymnastics to get them to cancel.

RFK Jr, presumably because he likes bitcoin.

I don't know. With Jack confidently predicting a conspiracy theorist will win the presidency, it tells me Bluesky isn't going to be my destination.

In fact I'm at a stage in my life where the idea of social media participation just isn't appealing any more.

I am of the same generation as you with a slightly different story but also found computers as a means of escape.

But then it was more exploratory. Learning about computer internals and talking to others on a BBS is not in the same galaxy as the perfectly honed and ruthlessly efficient addiction networks employed by social media companies.

It can still be an escape today but the real world and online world are no longer distinct entities as it once was. We had the gift of being forgotten or failing without everyone knowing.

It was a lot harder to compare yourself to others with more means or other attributes that particularly for girls can lead to a downward spiral of anxiety and depression.

For some it can bring hope and something positive but the older I get the more I think the result is a net negative for kids.

>They would roll out software updates and vehicle locks on 4 million cars across the U.S.

>In a statement, Kia said it has distributed more than 23,000 locks so far and would continue providing locks to affected owners.

In large cities the widespread ease at which these cars are stolen results in numerous high speed chases and lost lives. It sounds like they are continuing with the low-tech and opt-in approach requiring owners to use a special lock or initiate the fix on their own at the dealer which is unacceptable.

Not a great response from Hyundai and Kia.

Starting with This American Life, podcasts were a daily part of my life at home for more than 15 years.

Then the pandemic happened and for reasons I can't fully explain I just stopped listening to all of them. Part of it was the subject matter became less compelling. There were also internal drama issues like with Reply All and I just lost interest.

Kind of a shame as the podcast format is great way to consume media when you're primarily doing something else like cooking or doing the dishes.

It was a masterpiece. Apple deleting Dark Sky something I will never forgive them for. Maybe not enough to make me switch phones, but enough to make me look elsewhere when needing peripheral items.

The statement that Dark Sky features were incorporated into the native weather app was an insult.

I know I sound dramatic talking about a weather app, but it was in a class of its own and nothing else is remotely comparable.

I feel like I lost a friend that I consulted with daily.

I've been feeling a lot better about ignoring the countless recruiter contacts from the major tech companies the past couple years.

On one hand I felt like I was blowing major opportunities by not trying. But something just felt off when receiving so many sudden contacts from the largest of companies offering remote work, despite working in tech for over a decade and never hearing from them before.

Great article, particularly agree with the tests part. Sanity check tests (function doesn't throw an exception in common path) are essential but following all possible paths and verifying all outputs is the road to diminishing returns and subpar output.

>“Don’t Repeat Yourself” often gets interpreted as “Don’t Copy Paste” or to avoid repeating code within the codebase

When I think of the most difficult to understand code I've come across it was probably written by someone who lives and breathes that interpretation of DRY.

But it doesn't end with code comprehension. Extreme abstraction and countless files and components also lead to buggy and difficult to maintain code.

It's easy to lose understanding of branches and business flow when abstraction exists in the extreme.

>They completely butchered the contrast and initial readability to appease the 'flat' trend style. The personality died.

This line like most of the others in the article is hyperbole and subjective opinion presented as a statement of objective fact.

My own subjective opinion is that skeuomorphism is a lot of unnecessary elements that exist for the sake of design and the designer. Extra borders, boxes, gradients, and contrasting menu bars and buttons are unnecessary noise and useless distraction for interacting with content. I don't want to see a different colored fixed menu as I scroll that is always reminding it is it there. Flat design gets out of the way between reader and content.

lodash and other utility libraries can be helpful when backend devs who don't usually work in JS need to do something complicated on the front end.

That said, if focusing on front end dev work I think it removes knowledge of underlying apis which can be counterproductive in the long run. If you have enough knowledge to achieve in plain JS what is done with lodash, you are better set up for success when given a problem not yet solved in your code base or stackoverflow.

>Even packaged breads, including those high in nutritious whole grains, qualify as ultra-processed in many cases because of the additives and preservatives they contain.

However much I'd like to alter my diet to be more healthy, including flavored nuts or bread as ultraprocessed means I have nearly zero chance avoiding a sizable portion of what academic scientists label as ultraprocessed.

These studies and press releases seem counterproductive. If sliced bread or fancy nuts is in the same category as aerosol cheese or high calorie soda, a lot of people are going to struggle to understand what isn't ultraprocessed and give up trying to select better items at the grocery store.

Also a full time pedestrian. While I have near-zero trust for drivers, autonomous cars are not the savior.

At an intersection you can usually see where the driver is looking to help inform your frogger-like quest to not die. There's nothing to look at in an autonomous vehicle. You are operating on hope that the OS was designed to see you and stop accordingly.

Sending from US to Ukraine. I tried Wise (and WU) but the UI presented generic errors when attempting payment that didn't indicate what the problem was or how to correct it. The chat assistant was equally vague as to what the problem was.

It could've been my fault, I don't frequently send internationally. But the experience sending crypto was far and away easier and is now my default choice.

>The only use-case for it now is for the criminal underworld

You must not have a need to send money to recipients in other countries.

I tried every option I could find until giving up in frustration and sending crypto instead.

Not denying the negative aspects but it's a privileged position to assert criminality is the only use case.

Weird side angle to get in your political views known on HN, completely unnecessary.

>The only advice I can give to designers is this: try not to add to the problem.

I agree with this a lot. But one difficulty in adhering to this lies in our ability to process the additional cost beyond initial implementation.

It seems easy, even to engineers and builders, to add something small. But as the author points out increased complexity leads to fragility.

It may be easier to convince product managers and designers of product minimalism when approaching from UX angle: keeping features as bare bones as possible makes it easier for people to figure out how to use the thing.

>RSS feed can't limit only to subscribers.

This practice was common when RSS was popular and is still used today by newspapers and other media outlets.

An individual feed provides only a snippet view of the article which encourages you to visit the site where a subscription was required.

I still use it on a daily basis like many others.

But a revival isn't dependent on the technology or the type of apps that can consume RSS. It is the lack of outlets publishing on a regular basis. Social media's grip on attention has only grown stronger since RSS readers were more popular.

Blogs are mostly gone comparatively speaking to 10-15 years ago. Many authors do an email newsletter.

RSS is still around but it's a content supply problem and not a technology issue.

OK, but what I quoted was specifically advice on being an employee:

>Many asked how to know what programming language or stack to study. It doesn’t matter. There you go

And I'm saying the language/stack absolutely does matter when it comes to advice for new developers.

They are definitely the outlier and the version of php that fb uses can barely be called php when they more or less rewrote how it works under the hood.

But this isn't a dig at php, just stating chosen languages/frameworks matter a lot. I think it speaks volumes about a company's tech philosophy if they still mainly use php and jquery for web development.