zukzuk

I don’t think this is a fair characterization. The reason git is confusing is that its underlying model doesn’t resemble our intuitive conceptual model of how it ought to work.

This was classic Torvalds — zero hand holding. But he gets away with it because the way git works is brilliantly appropriate for what it’s intended to do (if you just ignore the part where, you know, mere mortal humans need to use it sometimes). I ended up writing my masters thesis a decade ago about the version control wars, and I (somewhat grudgingly) came away in awe at Torvalds’ technical and conceptual clarity on this.

Yes, you can definitely use it selectively.

I looked at Pi-hole recently but went with AdGuard Home. Nicer UI and nicer everything by all appearances. There's also a surprising amount of customization for something this slick, like being able to defer to my internal DNS for local private domain queries, etc.

I'm not entirely sure why AdGuard is giving this away, and maybe I should look into that, but seemed like a relatively low-risk decision to go with this for now. And I can't say enough about how much more pleasant using things like the NYTimes app has been without the obnoxious ads.

It’s almost guaranteed that advertising will find its way into whatever ends up replacing Google. Convincing/tricking people into buying things is a fundamental part of any free market consumer economy.

No thread about UUID is complete without a plug for NanoID! https://github.com/ai/nanoid/blob/main/README.md

I'd add "Into the Cool" by Eric D. Schneider and Dorion Sagan to that reading list.

I'm pretty sure that one was originally recommended here on HN, so I guess I'm feeding it back into the echo chamber. But well worth a read!

I still mourn the end of Freehand. Illustrator’s UI never matched Freehand.

Isn’t that usually to give pedestrians a head start on crossing?

I guess the point I’m trying to make is that there’s a big difference between “good time to buy” for the “average” buyer vs someone who has been hoarding capital waiting to jump in at a better time.

A recession probably will create a good opportunity for those who have been waiting and are in a position to avoid getting hammered by that recession. That is probably not the “average” buyer, but maybe more representative of some of the people here on this forum.

Worth noting that this way of thinking is true in the inverse too — when interest rates were super low, house values didn’t really go up, only credit got cheaper. In other words, the appreciation in costs is not about house value, it’s about the cost of a loan.

But underneath, it really is just under-supply of homes. People are competing for limited housing, but instead of hitting a natural ceiling of affordability, they’ve continued to compete on prices by out-borrowing each other to offer ever-higher bids.

We now seem to be hitting the next ceiling — buyers are unable leverage their bids any higher. I can’t wait to see what “innovations” the financial sector comes up with to create a new ceiling. I’m guessing fractional ownership or something like that.

If interest rates to drop again in the foreseeable future, it will likely be due to an old fashioned recession.

If that happens, both mortgage rates and home prices will fall (due to lower demand / ability to pay and possibly forced selling).

The article doesn’t mention this scenario, even though it’s entirely probable. If you are waiting on the sidelines, that might actually be a good time to buy.

Of course the catch is that if the recession is bad enough to crash the housing market, you may find yourself out of a job and unable to afford anything, so the premise of the article stands — it may never be a good time to buy a house, at least not in the average buyer’s circumstances.

I developed pretty nasty tenosynovitis in my inner wrist from using a Magic Pad over a year. I even tried switching to using it with my left hand instead of my right, and eventually developed the same problem in the other wrist.

It got bad enough I opted for cortisone injections.

This was about 10 years ago. I’ve avoided Apple’s input devices since, opting for proper ergonomic keyboards and mice, with no further RSI thankfully.

Typescript has a lot of momentum on all fronts and is almost certainly the future of Javascript.

The big problem is that it still requires transpilation, which can set up all sorts of shitty traps. Not to mention that the Javascript ecosystem in general is a horrendous mess, which Typescript on its own can’t fix.

Siri in its current form is constantly "hallucinating" all sorts of stuff as it is. "Hey Siri, turn off the lights in the kitchen." -- "Sure, now playing a continuous stream of U2 on all of your speakers!"

Because you lose all the stuff that’s nice about tRPC.

The experience of building a tRPC app is very different from building an app that talks to a traditional REST API. The front and back end with tRPC are very tightly bound. In a way the backend part of your tRPC app becomes the real consumer of your actual API.

I'd argue the opposite. For a lot of people, getting quick results is absolutely needed for motivation. Focusing on learning "the fundamentals" before getting to the enjoyable parts is bad advice for most, as it often leads to people dropping out before they get hooked.

I agree that you probably can't be a decent mobile dev in the long term without learning basic iOS/Swift or Android/Java(/probably Kotlin nowadays) but that is not a good place to start for people who are just getting started.

tRPC is not at all intended to ever be a public API, the way REST or GraphQL is. It's meant to be a tight, private connection between your client and your server.

If you use tRPC in your stack but want a public API, you will almost certainly need to build that out separately, via traditional REST, or GraphQL, or maybe gRPC. This feels all kinds of wrong initially, and there are some obvious and not so obvious disadvantages to this, but honestly it's not all bad when you get down to it.

Use TypeScript instead? (semi-joking)

The way I've been approaching this lately is TypeScript on the frontend, then a thing TypeScript layer on the backend (via Deno), with those two pieces connected with tRPC. The real backend guts are in Rust (or whatever), and the backend tRPC layer talks to the Rust stuff with gRPC.

So something like this:

    [(TS web client) <--tRPC--> (TS thin backend)] <--gRPC--> (Rust service)

This is a bit awkward, but honestly worth it for what you get with tRPC. One thing that took some getting used to is with tRPC the line between "client" and "server" gets blurry, which makes me uncomfortable for all sorts of reasons but in practice works well enough to make it not worth worrying about for now.

Absolutely JavaScript, in that it is easy to accidentally do horrifying things, but absolutely not surprising if you’ve spent any time working with it, as you quickly get used to how awful it is.

Yup! Complete with the inevitable government bailout that socializes failure while privatizing profits.

Do you also not allow loops, because they are the devil’s lettuce?

Metaprogramming is just a higher level of abstraction that lets you express things that would otherwise be tedious or repetitive. It’s not that different than using a loop to avoid having to write the same thing over and over again. Avoiding it at all costs is dogmatic and kind of silly.

That is very much not the environment sarracenia purpurea evolved in. I can't imagine it will survive very long. They need a lot of direct light, and they definitely need a winter dormancy period. They do not make great houseplants, at least not for more than a few weeks or months.

Tropical pitcher plants (Nepenthes) do make decent houseplants, although they struggle through the dry indoor Canadian winters here. They do seem to capture a lot of the fungus gnats I've been fighting with lately (I can see dozens and dozens in each pitcher), but not nearly enough to make a noticeable difference.

> …given all the success we've had with LLMs, it's weird that we can't use the exact same tricks with time-series data.

Forecasting works quite well when the series is forecastable. The fact that it often doesn't work — e.g. there really is no effective predictor of where the S&P 500 will be 3 months from now — might just be because the series really is effectively unpredictable (combinatorial explosion, chaotic complex systems, and all that).

One thing to note with LLMs is that they do things (e.g. generate text) that we know are possible. We know this because we consistently see humans successfully doing it, this comment being one such example (hopefully?).

We _don't_ see humans consistently predicting the stock market nor other notoriously difficult to predict time series. That's not to say that just because humans can't do it, it's not possible for an AI, but I'd consider it another clue that it may not be.

> …given all the success we've had with LLMs, it's weird that we can't use the exact same tricks with time-series data.

Forecasting works quite well when the series is forecastable. The fact that it often doesn't work (e.g. there really is no effective predictor of where the S&P 500 will be 3 months from now) might just be because the series really is effectively unpredictable (combinatorial explosion, chaotic complex systems, and all that).

One thing to note with LLMs is that they do things (e.g. generate text) that we know are possible. We know this because we consistently see humans successfully doing it, this comment being one such example (hopefully?).

We _don't_ see humans consistently predicting the stock market nor other notoriously difficult to predict time series. That's not to say that just because humans can't do it, it's not possible for an AI, but I'd consider it another clue that it may not be.

> …given all the success we've had with LLMs, it's weird that we can't use the exact same tricks with time-series data.

Forecasting works, to a certain degree, quite well when there is actually something to forecast. The fact that it often doesn't work (e.g. there really is no effective predictor of where the S&P 500 will be 3 months from now) might just be because the series really is effectively unpredictable (combinatorial explosion, chaotic complex systems, and all that).

Comparing the misc acrylamide and other byproducts of seasoning a cast iron skillet to the PFAS and other byproducts of teflon production is nonsense.

Yes, complex hydrocarbons are not good for you, but PFOAs and their ilk are really really really bad for you and the environment. It's like comparing spent nuclear rods with brazil nuts. Yes, both are radioactive, but there is zero equivalence.

"which stocks listed on the TSX are most closely correlated with real estate prices"

First result was "Plantir (PLTR)"

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Very, very few, I would wager.

Yes... in the same way that SF did: there were many calls for "defunding the police" in 2021/2022, but by 2023 the police budget in Toronto is higher than it was pre-pandemic. I understand that the same is true in SF.

One thing to note: Toronto's police annual budget is about the same as SFPD's, even though Toronto has more than 3X as many people. In other words, SF has much worse pre-capita crime than Toronto, even though they spend 3X as much on policing per capita.

Also, maybe for more direct comparison, Canadian cities.

SF has 4X the murder rate of Toronto, for example. (And Toronto has about the same murder rate as London, and less than Amsterdam — I can't find the comparative stat for Munich though)