athenot · HackerTrans

Maybe it's not practical for day-to-day use but the way this hacks the font to produce something completely different is amazing!

athenot

last monthdiscuss

Money.

Typical amount of commercials time per game:

    NFL                          60-65 min
    NBA                          40-50 min
    MLB                          40-50 min
    NHL                          25-35 min
    MLS/Premier League/World Cup 10-20 min

athenot

4 months agodiscuss

> I'm not even sure what exactly "Microsoft Copilot" entails anymore

It's highly reminiscent of "IBM Watson" a few years ago. Basically the add-on brand to make them look cooler.

athenot

4 months agodiscuss

One of my favorites being Micros~1, in reference to how Windows had to mangle file names for DOS's 8+3 character limit.

athenot

5 months agodiscuss

A more appropriate signature would be "Please excuse any auto-correct errors that my ducking phone might have added."

athenot

5 months agodiscuss

> We ultimately need optimized DSLs and aggressive use of stateless sub-modules/abstractions that can be implemented in isolation to minimize the amount of context required for any one LLM invocation.

Containment of state also happens to benefit human developers too, and keep complexity from exploding.

athenot

6 months agodiscuss

This is a fun app.

One way I deal with people talking on speakerphone, is inviting myself into their conversation and making comments as if I were an active participant. That usually earns me a weird look, and then they go off speaker so I can't hear what's been said. Success.

Similar with folks watching reels on speaker, I fake a laugh or make comments about the content. It's awkward enough that they usually stop because they want a moment alone, not an interactive session with a stranger. Which ironically is the same thing I want too.

athenot

6 months agodiscuss

> You can write boring code in Scala, but in my (limited) experience, Scala developers don't want to write boring code. They picked Scala not because it was the best tool for the job, but because they were bored and wanted to flex their skills. Disregarding the other 95% of programmers that would have to work with it.

Intersting observation.

So basically Scala is to the JVM what Perl is to scripting?

athenot

7 months agodiscuss

This is Postel's Law, aka the Principle of Robustness:

    "be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept"

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

athenot

7 months agodiscuss

In a similar vein, as the industry matured, we went from having teams of wizards building products, to teams of "good-enough" developers, interchangeable, easy to onboard. Perl culture was too much about craft-mastery which ended up being at odds with most corporate cultures.

Unfortunately, as a former Perl dev, it makes a lot of other environments feel bland. Often more productive yes, but bland nonetheless. Of the newer languages, Nim does have that non-bland feel. Whether it ends up with significant adoption when Rust and Golang are well established is a different story.

athenot

8 months agodiscuss

Only in France. For some reason, the names for Gruyère and Emmental got swapped there.

athenot

9 months agodiscuss

You're being downvoted but yes, this is about risk mitigation. The IT department at a health care organization has to balance matching the requirements of payers, admins and clinical staff, do so in a way that fits inside the allocated budget, and de-risk the unknowns as much as possible.

Even if the vendors are only half accurate about the solution they offer, by being paid suppliers, they are on the hook (to varying degrees). These systems are highly customized and serious headaches arise from interoperability and security. If some of that can be shifted to a vendor, it's a net positive insofar as the IT department and the compliance departments are concerned.

Some healthcare organization have invested in the technology side and become leaders in innovation but those are the exception.

athenot

9 months agodiscuss

Same here. Perhaps what I've enjoyed the most about Perl was the humanness and art of it. Cleverness and expressiveness were at the service of elegance.

Sure you can write amazingly obscure foot-guns in Perl but that's also true of any other language. But honestly I'd rather a few lines of obscure Perl code WITH a comment block explaining why, than a dozen classes with bits and pieces of business logic spread all over the place.

athenot

10 months agodiscuss

The setup that I adopted 15 years ago and still use today is the "bar desk". It's a standup desk that's positioned in such a way that my elbows rest naturally when I'm standing.

But instead of a fancy mechanism to make the desk go up and down, I have a saddle stool. When sitting on it, my head is at the same level as standing, and my spine is straight. (Key point is monitor position.)

What I like about that is I can swap between sitting to standing in a few seconds without even thinking about it and without waiting for the desk motor to go up or down. This was originally a poor man's standup desk because I didn't have the budget for a motorized desk; now it's a choice.

athenot

10 months agodiscuss

Perhaps you can add a product in there "Contribute to this fun site" in various amounts, and let that one take a real payment.

athenot

10 months agodiscuss

The author made that point, in considering frequency of use as a criteria for whether to use an animation or not.

athenot

10 months agodiscuss

When expressing nuanced ideas, a series of short sentences is harder to follow. Not always but often. The short sentences are less connected. The connection between those sentences comes across flat. Nuanced ideas apply different weight to different concepts.

Generally, when expressing nuanced ideas, a series of short sentences doesn't convey weighting of concepts as fluidly as a longer sentence which can paint a richer and more detailed picture with selective emphasis.

athenot

10 months agodiscuss

That stood out to me as well. Bell Centennial† used that for phonebooks; here I suspect the light-on-dark display has some visual bleeding that this compensates for, especially for tired pilots.

† https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Centennial

athenot

12 months agodiscuss

June and July have the most amount of sunlight so that makes sense. The numbers look a bit different in December.

Still, diversity of energy production is a good thing. There's no one silver bullet. Solar + Wind + Nuclear + Fossil + Hydro all have their pros and cons.

In particular, during hot and dry months, Solar will shine while Hydro will be a trickle of power (no pun intended), also affecting Nuclear and Fossil power plants near rivers.

athenot

last yeardiscuss

It's also a Product issue: "fast and snappy" is almost never on their list of priorities. So product managers will push devs for more features, which satisfy the roadmap, and only get concerned about speed when it reaches painful levels.