yallpendantools

I know this thread runs the gamut of armchair experts, pretend experts, and actual experts and there's no telling who is which but I really want to know why the downvotes and why this is not a good idea.

The idea is to notify for crucial settings, replace vocal confirmation (probably) already in the SOP anyway, reducing mistakes in bad faith or otherwise.

Don't some planes already have an automated announcement for seatbelts on?

Only reason I can think of why it's not there yet is the cost (whether $$$ or design opportunity) of cramming that in the already-cramped cockpit.

Being that I don't judge books by their covers, I don't really have a strong opinion on these trends. I do have, however, a very strong visceral repulsion to a few of the covers presented here. They are fugly as heck:

- "My Year of Rest and Relaxation" looks like the first time I discovered background images and `<font color=""></font>`. The title, of all things, is unreadable with that color. I googled and there are better versions (still with the pink color scheme, mind you) of this cover.

- "Disappoint Me" (or should it be written "DISAPPOINT ME"?) looks like the first time someone made a meme after they learned how to lasso-cut a portion of an image into a new layer. There is, again, that poisonous pink that does readability no favors. FWIW, it has successfully disappointed me indeed. There seems to be a version of the book that doesn't fit this trend but reads so much better.

- "Seduction Theory" I'm glad Clippy seems to have found a job at graphic design after that long stint as an office assistant. Alas, old habits die hard, I guess. Unfortunately, neither the Brush Script MT(-esque) label telling me it is a novel nor the Word Art effects give a seductive mood. It gives a very puberty vibe, however, as it reminds me when I designed the Christmas Party poster in my freshman year, and pop has just upgraded the family computer to MS Office 2003.

> 2. Ensuring that people who said “I’m going” actually end up going.

Super interested in how people solved/compensated for this problem. The approach I've found works best is to make the event, basically, "open-doors" (i.e., the RSVP is not actually required, chance attendees always welcome), and hope for the best. Someone mentioned personally messaging people but, well, that's a lot of work for something not my dayjob.

Been hosting a weekly meet-up for over a year now and there are some factors which I think contribute to this problem:

A. We set-up an auto-recurring meet-up event. People sign-up for the events happening within the next month; hence they fill-up quickly. However, as more people discover the event, they find them already fully-booked. These people end up booking for the waitlist and/or the next events that are not yet full (i.e., event slots more than one month ahead). This creates a negative feedback loop. (This January, I had sign-ups for up to May!)

B. With a long waitlist from [A] people who signed-up would tend to cancel last-minute. At that point the people in the waitlist have made other plans already and end up a no-show or just canceling too, sometimes after they already got a slot. This, again, creates a negative feedback loop.

This year, aside from open-doors policy, I've started overbooking the event on purpose to combat [B]. It's sort of effective though every week I'm playing the airline overbooking problem. This calendar year, I've only been "overbooked" once. I'm also, naturally, wary of first-timers who might be a nuisance (e.g. but not only: parent's [5] but s/organizers/attendees/) but so far I wouldn't really say that has been a problem. Maybe the type of our meet-up organically filters for it (we're an art hobby group and if you can't sit still just trying to draw for 2h, or are not interested at all in learning about art and drawing, you will have a very awkward 2h).

The Paradox of acheron: In order to point out character sequences that are insufferable in a comment, one's comment must also bear the insufferable character sequence.

There is no final word on the matter yet and there are counterpoints to the "Transformative use" argument.

https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/judge-meta-case-wei...

> "You have companies using copyright-protected material to create a product that is capable of producing an infinite number of competing products," Chhabria told Meta's attorneys. "You are dramatically changing, you might even say obliterating, the market for that person's work, and you're saying that you don't even have to pay a license to that person."

> "I just don't understand how that can be fair use," Chhabria said.

https://ipwatchdog.com/2025/05/12/copyright-office-weighs-ai...

> Stylistic imitation even without substantial similarity would likely be implicated under such a [market-dilution] theory, which could be considered as a market effect under factor four that diminishes the value of the original work used to train the model.

What really bothers me with the article---something I think I share with top-level commenter dpkga---is throwing away perfectly fine articles of clothing (i.e., "tennis shoes"). Not to mention, expensive. These, presumably wouldn't cost a fortune to transport even overseas. I get it that maybe the student had to make a choice between, say, bulky books/notebooks/school work which may come in handy for the future but that's where the "expensive" part comes in; why even buy something expensive if there was any chance you'd discard it before its service life is up? (Other commenters have provided answers elsewhere that I consider plausible.)

The furniture (i.e., "bean bag chair") I can totally understand why they'd discard it. The only thing that bothers me then is, will they buy a similar item for next year? Because if they will, then this stuff doesn't "doesn't matter" and therefore the problem actually exists, if only because it feeds into the mindless consumer attitude which leads to over production of goods that end up in landfills if not in someone else's hoard pile.

There's a line between rude/toxic and direct/pragmatic. The whole world at large would be much better off if we made that distinction. Also, that both tones can be found in the same piece of prose; we don't have to label a whole piece as one or the other.

> If you want a dataflow graph compiler, build a dataflow graph compiler. > This is not 6 layers of abstraction, it's 3 (and only 2 you have to build).

This is direct and pragmatic. It states the writer's justified true beliefs and opinions as plainly as possible.

> Plz bro one more stack this stack will be good i promise > bro bro bro plz one more make it all back one trade type beat

This is just toxic. The writer is making assumptions about other people's position that he does not (and probably could not) substantiate.

Ironically, sprinkling in toxic comments and back-handed insults in any piece has the effect of making said piece less direct and pragmatic.

I have an amusing anecdote to share. It's definitely related to your question but, anecdotes being what they are, I'm not presenting it as any form of final word on the matter.

I got my current job through the SO job board. When I applied, the first person to reply to my application was the technical lead of the role. He was also deeply involved in my hiring process, present at even the HR interview.

He was also very hands-on (in a good way) during my onboarding. In one of the first actual technical tasks he set me on, I was doing the usual SO research when I happened upon an important caveat with an orange amount of upvotes in one of the answers' comments. It was posted by my technical lead.

Our hiring practices have changed since. We now have the usual indirection layers of "Talent Acquisition Consultants". From what I know of the company now, posting on SO Jobs was very likely the initiative of my first TL.

----

I've always had the impression that most of the non-$BIGCORP posters on SO Jobs were there because they had a certain affinity for engineering. I've been to other interviews from companies posting there and while I didn't always end up talking to a technical committee, even the "usual headhunters" were surprisingly[1] technically-literate. Maybe I just got lucky. Maybe it was the zeitgeist of the 2010s. Most likely a combination of both.

Though I'm still pretty satisfied with my current job, I was genuinely disappointed when they shutdown SO Jobs.

[1] "surprisingly" is carrying a lot of YMMV-weight in this statement.

I've had similar ideas throughout the years of my personal mathematical journey:

- When I took my Discrete Mathematics course, I began to keep a separate notebook to compile proofs that I found to be particularly clever or, I thought, illustrated a particular concept/approach clearly. It was partially inspired by Erdős' concept of The Book.

- I did something similar for "Leetcode" problems but in this notebook I would only document solutions I personally came up with for when I feel like having solved the problem gave me considerable "XP" if not outright leveling me up. They ended up mostly dynamic programming problems and clever applications of number theory---I never really felt like I grokked these topics even now so it was useful when I detected similarities to past problems.

- Lately I've decided to give signal processing a deeper shot and a grid notebook has been my invaluable companion for the task. The last two notebooks were very neatly organized but this one is more like lab/field notes but for mathematics. It's gritty and dirty in there. There isn't really much point learning signal processing only from books so I'm always in front of my computer (with a lecture video or an interactive Python script) when I'm working on this notebook. Being able to formulate hypotheses/intuition, writing down thoughts to be considered later, annotating graphs/proofs where things don't make sense to me yet---it has been an extremely liberating learning experience. I've only been on this endeavor for a few weeks but I can definitely say it has allowed me to interact with the material at a deeper level.

The only way my signal processing effort could be better was if I had a teacher whom I can ask my noted-down questions to. I know the suggestion is gonna come up and I'll be lying if I say it hasn't crossed my mind so I'm just gonna address it unprompted (pun intended): I don't bring my questions to a LLM because I'm not yet smart enough to detect bullshit in this field of study. I don't think setting-up my own agent to ingest my notes would make any sense because then I would have to structure my notes and the core reason why it's been so liberating/has enabled me to interact deeper with the material is because I gave myself the freedom to be unstructured.

> not stuff that's going out into the public!

Well, the problem is, in almost all the examples here so far, said stuff was not meant to go out into the public. If your customers end up seeing your product's test data and---heavens above!---variable names, there is an organizational issue that needs to be addressed, cutesy stuff or no cutesy stuff.

Also, isn't the point of QA testing just to throw all and any data to your system? Would you rather have a system that's tested against the eventuality that someone abuses UTF-8 in a textbox or a full SeriousBusiness system with zero whimsy and cutesy stuff? Someone's whimsy cutesy stuff is someone else's street address.

I think you just put a finger on why I absolutely loathe SeriousBusiness Banking Software: they were designed, implemented, and tested in a vacuum that even normal users end up putting a toe out of line that just breaks the assumptions of the spec. You have to be extremely average down to your name to peacefully coexist with them.

I still have an old laptop with a spinning disk, going almost 9 years now.

It helped me ditch Windows completely because the start-up experience for Windows 11 was just atrocious even with the smart/cached shutdown thing they're doing (I forgot the official name for it). I'm glad to see even some (un)official confirmation from this article that hogging resources at start-up is pretty much best practice in Windows land.

In Linux land today, FF and Chrome (but Chrome especially) take ages to start-up at first but system boot is as smooth as can be expected.

I thought I've made myself immune to UI bloat because, like all true programmers, I do everything on the terminal (short of browsing the web, like TRUE programmers). Until I noticed that whenever I invoke my terminal, it takes ages for the prompt to even appear, not to mention accept keyboard input.

After much frustration, I figured out that the culprit is---drumroll---NodeJS. Don't quote me on this but I think Node brought Windows best practices into the Linux terminal.

Fortunately, Linux being Linux, I managed to patch my system such that Node doesn't actually do anything unless I invoke it myself. The downside is that I have an odd script every now and then that relies on Node and these scripts would fail if I run them without having ran `node` beforehand.

I fundamentally disagree. You are basing your tenets on two overly-broad ideas that don't make for a good basis for an actionable framework. You are kinda motte-and-baileying.

First of all, I dispute that "human autonomy" is the basis for the immorality of slavery. Rather, it is the preservation of human dignity. The subtle difference being, you can cede a certain amount of your autonomy without losing any dignity such as when taking on a specialized role to function in a society (in other words, a job). Actions that violate another's autonomy has some overlap with actions that violate another's dignity but "some overlap" is all that is really there to it.

"Human attention is sacred" therefore...what? Would, for example, schools count as a violation of human attention? A good book? A perfectly fine movie with a smattering of product placement? There's no telling what the blast radius of your principle here is.

Rather than thinking of human attention as a sacred inviolable thing, it is more akin to a currency each of us can spend. We just have to facilitate wiser spending.

It's easy to call that a "tell" in light of Matt Mullenweg's recent activities. No one was saying shit when Wordpress was the darling of Web 2.0.

Justifiable evidence of Matt Mullenweg's unhealthy/excessive narcissism only surfaced within the past year or so (I'm fuzzy on the timeline, cut me some slack ya?). Automattic the company has been so named for, goodness, close to twenty years now.

It could be Matt's been a narcissist from the start. But people also change and not always for the better so maybe he became a "narcissist" much later in life and his chosen company name just so conveniently fell into the narrative.

There are CEOs in bigger spotlights with a bigger case for narcissism who don't put their names on any of their companies (emphasis on the plurality). One of them has a name with a similar inflection pattern to other well-known albeit fictional narcissist, Tony Stark.

I don't know what "Automattic" as a company name says about Matt as a person. I'll tell you what it is though: a damn good pun, one I would gladly score myself given the chance.

I learned to love uv because of this usecase but I still find it against the Zen of Python that an official (and, dare I say, extremely useful!) PEP is not supported by the official Python tools.

This is the first time that Python didn't come with "batteries included" from my POV.

Now I also have two Python dependency managers in my system. I know there are volumes to talk about Python dependency management but all these years, as long as a project had a requirements.txt, I managed to stick to vanilla pip+venv.

Yay it seems I don't have to wear the Dunce hat but also, honestly, I'm not even trying to be pedantic on what counts as "git" here. I'm more annoyed that the contribution calendar is considered inherently "git". I doubt Github can even patent that---it's more a habit-tracker thing.

(Okay there's also `git` in the URL, I noticed, which means whoever made the page had that mental mapping in mind but still...)

I just feel clickbaited that this item is at the top of this forum. I'll stop engaging with this now. Nothing of interest for me here.

Sorry it might be my turn on the Dunce hat but what is so "Git" here other than the contribution calendar popularized by Github then copied by Gitlab?

Honestly, after ~13y in this, I only know a handful of items from the famous latency table, notably those I've used a lot (mutexes cost 25ns, is only 1/4th of main memory reference tho, then disk seek is x100K of that). I'm "DevOps" (and titular variants thereof) in most of my resume.

That said, I'm not above your bar as each cloud provider have their own pricing model. I'm not even above your bar for AWS---which I've used the past six years---just for the sheer diversity of their offerings, not to mention regional variations. I know how EC2 servers are priced relative to each other but when we include ECS, DynamoDB, Lambda, etc., I'm gonna need a cheat sheet.

I had a tangential experience to this phenomenon lately. I moved continents a few years ago. Eventually I had to switch my Play Store country to where I moved. That restricted my access to certain versions of apps but my downloaded apps continued to function anyway.

Then, a few months ago, I finally bought a new phone. I quickly found out that there was no way I could get this one banking app from my home country on the new phone (other than switching my country setting again, which isn't worth the potential hassle right now). Fortunately, I could still do online banking with on my browser...right?

I try to login to my online banking. They say they will send me an OTP on my registered mobile number. Makes sense, and, thanks to the wonders of roaming, I will be able to receive it. Except...instead of just sending me the actual OTP like any sane platform would do, I had to first confirm that I was, indeed, trying to sign-in to online banking by replying "YES" to their SMS prompt. And due to the wonders of SMS roaming protocol, though I could receive their messages, I simply could not reply to them no matter which gods I invoke.

Security design by committee. I curse the manager who though this was a necessary and valuable addition to the whole OTP scheme.

It's not so much a "convenience tax" as in the article but, I guess, a penalty for moving countries. I have no choice now but simply to just settle this when I go on vacation to my home country. There is probably no convenient resolution to this even when I am in the correct geospace.

PS. I have two banks from home country and I was able to install the other bank's app in my new phone without a hitch. I try to avoid cynicism but this simply has the stink of Managerial Software Engineering Best Practices all over it.

I agree on two points in your sidenote. The first is that online moderation is rarely, if ever, "censorship". The second thing is that the majority of us have no idea what it's actually like being terrorized or assaulted.

That said, words can take on different meanings depending on context. We can only imagine the tyranny of being a prisoner of war but we can also complain about the tyranny of noise pollution in modern cities; that doesn't mean I think they're equal. I know some people suffer assault domestically but I can also label some perfumes as an assault to the senses; it doesn't lessen the gravity of the former. And yes, Calvin, you are allowed to think your household is a den of censorship and oppression (https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....).

My problem with gatekeeping words is that it is performative. We can indeed chill out on using these words save for their most extreme interpretations but it doesn't really help anyone suffering from these things and just makes language less colorful for the rest of us. And, once more, nor does their usage dismiss the extent of any of these situations because you don't need to be a genius to know that words can have subtle changes in meaning depending on context.

Is it just me or is that response actually...nice and good spirited? I haven't read these annals of computing history for more than a decade now and I expected a bit more vitriol from Linus "Fuck You Nvidia" Torvalds. I mean, okay both sides fire zingers but with far less density than average HN.

Also there's https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.minix/c/wlhw16QWltI/m/tH.... It was, unfortunately, not this young lad's last flamefest. See second sentence of last paragraph.

Goodness, the internet really was a nicer place back then. Nowadays, you quote forum etiquette on someone and you get called an idiot for it. I'm touching grass today and I'm gonna be grateful for it.

> but writes incredibly well!

The post actually has a lot of small grammatical errors typical of someone not so fluent in English:

>> My reasoning went as follow: // My reasoning went as follows.

>> Is there any other numbers where this happens? // Are there any other numbers

>> I didn’t had paper at hand // I didn't have (any) paper on hand.

I'm not here to proofread a fun blog post but it's far from incredibly well-written English.

> that requires incredibly deep knowledge of the type system.

I think the solution needed more clever maths than deep knowledge of the type system---the type system knowledge can be self-studied from documentation. The clever maths, one can get used to if you Leetcode properly (you don't even need Leetcode Hard to get exposure to that).

If anything doesn't track in this respect, it's the claim that author doesn't have any kind of formal education. Not even high school? That will be extremely impressive. But maybe something got lost in translation there, or just careless exaggeration.

> Here's a viral calling card that would almost guarantee countless interviews (including from my company!) and they aren't capitalizing on it.

>> I don’t have anything to sell just yet, I am not a tech influencer so all you got was this post about a somewhat challenging FizzBuzz.

Yeah, not everyone is out to sell something, not every blog post is written as an opportunity to self-promote.

The story is definitely rather strange, even without taking into account the language barrier and the general absurdity of most tech interviews, but it's not outside the realm of possibility.

Cool hack if I've ever seen one in this place! I love how "steampunk" it looks (for lack of a better term). Though I feel like if they're gunning for global appeal they would have to streamline the looks a lot.

This is so awesome I might have to watch "3 Idiots" again.

I'd have to forego my saddle bags and maybe my mudguard for that one.

I would hazard a guess, more in the vein of the much-maligned "Windows Registry".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Registry

??

> TikTok’s LA employees have 10 paid sick/personal (PSSL) days per year in addition to 15 PTO (paid time off/vacation) days

> This week, TikTok’s LA staff are being asked to use their personal/sick days if they cannot work from home due to power or Wi-Fi outages, or if they’re under evacuation orders ... This leaves them fewer days later in the year to use in case of an actual illness or other personal emergency, like staying home to care for a sick child.

> And yet, TikTok’s LA-based employees are being told to either continue their work from home or use their personal/sick days if that’s not possible, while the company’s LA office remains closed due to power outages caused by high winds.

In other words, in this case, employer is unable to provide a safe work environment (i.e., is not even "on their feet" at the moment) and their answer to that is to force employees to compensate for it using their own time off.

I would call this behavior vindictive but in my book, to be vindictive first you need to have a soul.

First of all, funding arts/sports != livable wages for the artists/atheletes. There's an overlap but wage is just at the tip of the iceberg of funding.

Provide livable wages to athletes and artists who represent your country (i.e., Olympians and national performers/artists). Fund development programs from as early as possible; this means grassroots efforts like summer camps, higher-level contests/tournaments, providing funds for national and international exposure, and providing for easy access to decent gear, among others. A lot of the participants in these programs wouldn't do this for life---won't make it to the Olympics or to the National Opera---but it will do a lot of other things like keep children off the streets and, not to mention, develop other skills/connections that could still come in useful later in life. If anything, sports could give them a love for exercise which, I heard recently, is the most potent medical intervention.

And yes, your son is an artist as long as he imagines himself to be. Ideally he has access to these development programs that could pave the way for him to a professional art career if he's so determined.

Your garage band is an artist group; what you may not be is a professional artist group. Same goes for the subway busker.

Speaking of which, when you went to the flip side, you kinda went from oranges to, not quite apples but lemons. Professionals like Swift and Brady should be far far less the taxpayer's concern compared to Olympians and other amateurs.

> I’d love to see that energy and drive applied to something that mattered.

>> I'd love to see that energy and drive rewarded and respected by society like self-actualization mattered, not just the next paycheck.

FTFY.

Let's not be condescending to athletic pursuit. Is that drive and passion really any different to the fuel of many a start-up hustler who, when their funding ran out, didn't really manage to change the world, with neither disruptive business model nor novel technical developments to show for it? Are they really so different from publish-or-perish academics toiling on some obscure edge of human knowledge which is more likely to either be a dead end or a small brick on which a cathedral of a grand discovery will be built upon rather than being THE paradigm-shifting, theory-unifying, revolutionary thesis?

Let's not be condescending to athletic pursuit because it's "just" entertainment. For a lot of people that struggle for faster, higher, stronger is inspiration, just as the early days of AirBnB/Facebook/Google is spoken of in hallowed tones in all-hands meetings, start-up mixers, and conferences, as motivation. Yeah, the ethics of the hustle might be questionable but fact of the matter is, at the end of the day, we all need heroes to look up to to some extent.

If code can be poetry then surely so can a gutsy maneuver, a clever tactic, or a sonofabitching Hail Mary of an opportunistic play. Sports---just as science, math, business, or literature---are narratives of struggle, human ingenuity, and achievement.

> When you have to manually search for files and then Ctrl+F to find functions, lookup docs in a web browser (which I hear is how people who don't use IDEs still do that), or manually run a linter/compiler to see warnings in your code, you're just being really inefficient. I can't understand that at all. Why don't you use automation to help your job when the whole point of your job is automation?

To each his own. I use the tools depending on the project. Meaning: most greenfield stuff (even at work) and my personal projects, I can handle with just Vim, a handful terminal tabs---where I grep, run linters (which send out OS notifications), and compile---and a web browser. The main dayjob codebase with all its 10+ years of legacy I wouldn't even dare look at without an IDE.

That said, I find the UX of IntelliSense + autocomplete to be extremely distracting (and don't get me started about Copilot). It's just a necessary evil because, distracted as I am with them, I am simply less productive in the dayjob codebase without it.

Hence, really, your Kung Fu is no better than mine, nor vice versa.

> The platform uses Hibernate - for this, you need to create your entity class, a mapping class and a SQL script, and these things have to be somehow in line to each another to make it work; before LLM, you had to type those files.

Do you really need an LLM for that? Sure LLMs can do that but they're overkill, no?

My internship and first proper job (2011-2012) was at a consulting firm that used Hibernate. They managed to auto-generate all these things with an Excel macro. I'm willing to bet some JetBrains plugin can do that too without LLMs.