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tbwriting

303 karma · joined February 8, 2020

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tbwriting··on Show HN: An AI-Powered WordPress Site Builder That We Are Open-Sourcing Today
No shade to the creators as I'm sure the tool is great but if I didn't know better I'd say this seems like an astroturfed effort by WordPress to stay relevant.

Existing AI tools alongside other open-source builders (Puck for React, Primo for Svelte, etc.) equals all the good things about WordPress's "WYSIWYG-ness" minus all the unnecessary bloat that's piled up over the years.

tbwriting··on Mental Health in Open Source
fat (Jacob Thornton) has a great metaphor that makes this simple to understand. Cute puppy dog syndrome.

Someone adopts a cute puppy. A bunch of people like playing with it and feeding it. It gets really big like Clifford. More and more people want to play with it. Not enough of them want to put in the work to feed it anymore. The person who adopted it gets burnt out trying to do so.

We’re incentivized to take as much and give as little as we can get away with (companies especially) “because profit.” If you’re like “but socialism is worse!!1!” just know that you can either parrot that line or fix the problem but not both.

tbwriting··on Uber, Lyft to stop operations in Minneapolis over minimum wage law
They were literally caught red-handed doing this in New York. https://ny1.com/nyc/manhattan/traffic_and_transit/2024/01/19...
tbwriting··on The Layoff
well you did ask

https://boilingdown.ghost.io/thoughts-on-neuralink/ https://boilingdown.ghost.io/loyalty-program/ https://boilingdown.ghost.io/streetcred/ https://boilingdown.ghost.io/grow-up/ https://boilingdown.ghost.io/deluge/

tbwriting··on Ask HN: How would you approach mastering a skill ASAP?
four Rs: retrieve, rearrange, rest, repeat https://hackernoon.com/the-four-rs-how-to-become-a-good-prog...
tbwriting··on Show HN: SemAntics, a racing game with word embeddings
Thank you!!
tbwriting··on Show HN: Coffeehouse, one-on-one voicechat with random HN users
Agreed.

If voice chat isn’t your thing: talkkshopp.com

tbwriting··on Displaying Content as a Graph
wikipedia! https://wikijumps.com
tbwriting··on Things software developers should learn about learning
This is a fantastic piece. If you find yourself thinking “okay, so the brain is different — now what? What should I actually do to learn better?” I wrote about this last year. Pardon the clickbaity title, HackerNoon changed it up on me. https://hackernoon.com/the-four-rs-how-to-become-a-good-prog...
tbwriting··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (December 2023)
Location: Madison, WI

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Typescript (React/Vue/Svelte, Node, NestJS), Ruby on Rails, Kotlin, Python, Swift, SQL, GraphQL, HTML/CSS

Resume: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AvSPeKsFdeqwKvW1yZ1IyctQ...

Email: tyler [dot] berbert @ the big search engine company's email service

tbwriting··on When feeling worn out, rotate
Good stuff, very to-the-point. For the curious, I just wrote (https://tylerberbert.substack.com/p/breaks) about why rotating task types can have the added benefit of generating helpful ideas and insights about prior tasks.
tbwriting··on Show HN: Wikijumps, a 3D Wikipedia Browser
Specifically https://github.com/vasturiano/react-force-graph
tbwriting··on The Documentation Triangle, or, why code isn't self documenting
> No program exists in a vacuum. There is always some environment, some organisation, some process that it lives in or serves, and taken out of said context, it is entirely useless.

> Failing to recognise this is the number one leading cause of new users and junior devs being unable to do 'this simple task' (don't quote me on this, I have no data).

This. At all three startups I've worked at, founding/senior devs err on the side of assuming that any process not involving writing code is trivial and self-explanatory when in fact those things are some of the biggest time-eaters. Big organizational wins can be had by documenting them well.

tbwriting··on Ask HN: Where do I find technical writing opportunities on open source projects?
Great idea, thank you!
tbwriting··on Don't be that open-source user, don't be me
Wrote about this several months ago, and specifically the vastly larger scale on which corporations do it: https://tylerberbert.substack.com/p/cooperation
tbwriting··on The collapse of complex software
For those curious about what this looks like in the trenches: https://tylerberbert.substack.com/p/complexity
tbwriting··on Tasking developers with creating detailed estimates is a waste of time (2020)
Decomposing projects before you even start coding is everything.

The bigger the project, the more likely it is that some small thing - something in the original spec, maybe, or more likely, an unforeseen interaction of its pieces - will be missed and will take an inordinate amount of time to deal with. All it takes is one of these to thwart the entire estimate.

tbwriting··on Meat and mental health: Meat eaters suffer less depression, anxiety
Self-proclaimed hackers: Our trades rely on rationality and facts

Also self-proclaimed hackers: Let's all upvote this purely correlational study riddled with conflicts of interest because it makes us feel better about ourselves

tbwriting··on Deadly fungi are an emerging microbe threat
Imagine posting this in 2018 under an article about coronaviruses in bats.
tbwriting··on Deadly fungi are an emerging microbe threat
15th paragraph:

> Not all of our vulnerability is the fault of medicine preserving life so successfully. Other human actions have opened more doors between the fungal world and our own. We clear land for crops and settlement and perturb what were stable balances between fungi and their hosts. We carry goods and animals across the world, and fungi hitchhike on them. We drench crops in fungicides and enhance the resistance of organisms residing nearby. We take actions that warm the climate, and fungi adapt, narrowing the gap between their preferred temperature and ours that protected us for so long.

tbwriting··on Dogecoin Now Valued Higher Than Twitter and Ford
Huh. Guess I struck a nerve.
tbwriting··on Dogecoin Now Valued Higher Than Twitter and Ford
Anticipating some comments about how this is fine and market value is whatever people decide it is.

Is that really the world you want to live in?

Think about the other side of the coin: if the market is undervaluing something truly important in the long term like fighting climate change, do we really want to throw our hands up and say “them’s the rules, let the market be”?

tbwriting··on Vegan cheese has quietly but steadily infiltrated mainstream supermarket shelves
Heavily-subsidized dairy takes up multiple grocery store aisles: crickets

Vegan cheese simply appears: "we've been INFILTRATED"

tbwriting··on Facebook approves alcohol, vaping and gambling ads targeting 13-17 year olds
Drinking harms the adolescent brain.

Why comment about how “it’s legal there” or “teens already do it” or “it’s really the advertisers’ fault”? Where does defending Facebook’s behavior get you?

tbwriting··on Phones and apps reduce your ability to focus even when they don’t distract you
Truly curious: do you think every article based on a study showing strong evidence for something should have a title that implies "it can go either way"?

Personally I would trust readers to click on the article and decide for themselves. Otherwise, it's a bit infantilizing, no?

tbwriting··on Ask HN: What (side-)project are you working on?
Protecc, a minimalist Missile Command-style game: https://www.playprotecc.com

Whiteborb, a free multi-user whiteboard: https://www.whiteborb.com

tbwriting··on Ask HN: What music do you listen to
Hip hop/soul (e.g. Earthgang, Kaytranada, Solange, Kendrick Lamar, The Internet, Saba, Tierra Whack, Orion Sun), rock (e.g. Tame Impala, The Strokes, Beach House, Khruangbin, Crumb, SALES), and classical (e.g. Rachmaninov, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven)
tbwriting··on Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.
> Whatever your partisan opinion, at least 70M American adults, 48.5% of those voting, disagree with you and think you’re an idiot.

This is a site for hackers - people with a special affinity for technology, science, building things, and solving problems.

Openly supporting a president who gleefully ignores the advice of scientists and bans immigrants from Muslim countries is inherently harmful to the work of hackers not to mention life on this planet.

To pretend both sides have equal merit just because large numbers of people exist on each is dishonest.

tbwriting··on Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.
Yes. It is pretty amazing.
tbwriting··on Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.
I agree with the two party system being terrible, and wish the Dems had a more progressive candidate, but Trump’s effects on the democratic process and the climate and COVID deaths needed to be stopped.
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