skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Before I respond to your points - I conflate UX and design in my mind as I see UX being a subset of design by definition.

> Sometimes my feeling is that blogs, small businesses such as this one, well... pages, in general, are overly complicated.

You're not alone in this, and good design is achieved when you can't take anything else away from something because the only components that are left are necessary to function.

> Overly complicated is unfortunately often spelled professional.

Ain't that the darn truth =|

> But I disagree with you about the 'silly' part. I actually think this is an important question. If it is true that some sites are overly complicated without good reasons, what then?

As a design-capable engineer I think you're painting with too wide of a brush in this blog post... and even against your own interests/ego. Sorry to get preachy but I love engaging people on these topics for learning.

You state: "and I am not even a designer" - but you clearly are capable of solving a visual problem in a functional way. At some level, you are now a designer. And, frankly, it feels like you're dealing with some impostor syndrome here.

Your post felt like it was weird with "bad UX is good" then positing a very good example of UX that problem solves in an appropriate way for both your client and your audience. You did an outstanding job of creating functional design, which is aesthetically pleasing, given the constraints of the web/the original art/etc. The simplicity of it all means that it is functional to both your client and your audience - I can't stress this enough.

If I were to write a post on your post it'd be entitled, "designer hits mark 100% for client/audience but isn't sure it's good design because we over-complicate UIX in 2020". Or, "Let's all stop being so pretentious because people are conflating simple functional design with bad design..." Sorry if I sound aggressive. It's just a damn good site and I refuse to even remotely label it as "bad" outside of your image optimization issue.

> Also, I make the case that the Web should house these sites as well as more 'professional' ones

You're talking to someone who browses neocities daily because it's interesting so 100% agree!

---

All-in-all sorry if I was too harsh but I think you're being too harsh on yourself by writing this. As a 15 year design professional - You nailed it, and I'll be happy to crucify anyone who thinks otherwise. This is the definition of "good design". Period.

Just - whatever you do. Keep doing what you're doing - we need more people with your same design ethos out here building great tech experiences that are respectful and tasteful like your Headache Comix site. <3

PS: Fix those darn images. <3
I think you're misunderstanding the critique of the parent... In the software world we often tend to interpret "The perfect is the enemy of the good." as "If it's the only software solution it most certainly must be a good one.". But sometimes there are non-software solutions that are even better suited to solve the problem - engineering wise that MUST(!) also be taken into account.

What makes you think the team covered enough edge-cases to be "good enough" software? Do you think the presentation in a single blog post is enough information about a system to determine its quality and reliability?
Their point is you should have

const int MAGIC_THING = 0xdeadbeef

& then say MAGIC_THING throughout the code, rather than using 0xdeadbeef in all your expressions
> How do they handle this in China

Surprisingly (depending the depth of your understanding of China), Apple phones come out with no extra apps installed.

The phone number on the other hand is tied under your name. You would need an ID to get a phone number and/or sim card, so there's that.
The Analysis of Turkey's Big Plan: Train 1M Software Developers
I guess you missed the big discussion about the attempting-to-preserve-privacy Apple-Google app. You might want to read up about it before making lots of statements.
https://outline.com/CGsLnv

(But yes)
The second solution is safer than the first. While it will sometimes be slower, it will never be catastrophically bad. It may have a small, predictable overhead, but it will never unexpectedly bring down the whole program when you get a few unusually long strings.

When searching through a sorted list, your first instinct should be to use binary search. Your first instinct should not be "well maybe the list is always small, so linear search would be faster." Write the safe, predictable thing and save the optimizations for later.
Why would spotify even need spacex? I mean... it's just the internet...they already have access to that, and so does everyone else. 4g connectivity to your car is probably simple and could be done if needed or a lot of people just link their phone to the radio.
Myth was one of my favorite games as a teenager. The dark fantasy atmosphere really captured my imagination, and I still have a little giggle when I think about exploding dwarves. :D
I'm not familiar with app engineering, but wouldn't the location access be enough for that?
The Saudi royal family can make a profit at $10/barrel for a few years, then they lose control of the country and the oil because they had to stop most of the bribes (social services, etc) they were paying the population to continue to go along with the regime. (The Russian government is in a similar situation to some extent.) But yeah, someone in Saudi will continue to sell the oil, maybe after a few months or a few years of chaos, even if they can only get $10/barrel.
I like the word "disorganization", simpler to understand than "accidental complexity" especially for those who didn't hear that phrase before
Prisons Replace Ankle Bracelets with an Expensive, Dysfunctional Smartphone App
I've heard Indian and non-white British people use the term, and I've heard these people use it here in Denmark.

I think the Indians use it through knowledge of British usage, and some British people use it in a slightly snobbish way wherever they are. "Oh, we're expats. We'll go back to England before Rupert starts school."
And then they move on..., and then you move on..., and the earth keeps spinning. Humans will never destroy the earth, just ourselves.
Maidsafe don't market aggressively, it's not their way so I think you are mistaken. They did attend a could of bitcoin type conferences in person in the early days but I very much doubt they paid anyone to promote their coin.

IMO they are an outstanding team both technically and ethically. In fact it was the latter that got me interested in the project in 2014 and my impression then has been confirmed many times since.
A kind of side-note, but for similar reasons, most interventional trials in the oncology space aren’t double-blinded for that reason. If you have cancer and sign up for a trial, you’ve likely run out of standard treatment options, so being given a placebo in a potentially life-saving therapy is not easy to justify. The different arms of the trial tend to vary in inclusion/exclusion criteria and doses, but only very rarely is there a placebo involved.
Reading mode to the rescue!
Doesn't the existence of eudev disprove that?

(This is a serious question; I'm not trying to start a fight)
You're referring to raw string literals, right?
I always thought that I suck in SQL but if these are medium to hard then I am not that bad actually.
On first glance, it looks like a scam. I'd stay away.
كود شي ان لاقوي المنتجات
لاختيار العميل الي التسوق من موقع التسوق والحصول علي كافه السلع والمشتريات التي تحتاج اليها مع موقع الشراء المتميز والافضل الذي يقدم لكل عميل والوصول الي خصم الموقع مع سنتربوينت علي جميع الملابس ,والتصميمات, والمفروشات , لافضل السلع المختلفه والمتميزه عليك بطلب التسوق من موقع شي ان وتصل الي ماتريده من خدمات مختلفه للوصول الي افضل مشتريات تحتاجها فالان بامكان كل عميل اختيارك مايلزمك من سلع مميزه وافضل طريقه للتسوق لجميع منتجاتك التي تريدها ستصل اليك في منزلك من خلال اقوي موقع شراء يعطي كل عميل مايحتاج اليه من مشتريات وسلع مختلفه فطلبك الي التسوق من شي ان يقدم لك ماتحتاجه وتتعرف علي افضل طريقه لاختيار كود خصم شي ان 25 المنتج حيث جميع المتاجر تعرض لكل عميل افضل شراء لافضل سلع مميزه .
I'm going to assume you're not deliberately trying to misunderstand him for the sake of a hot take, because, that would be pretty lame. So instead I'll explain for you and anyone else who doesn't understand him what he meant.

What he is suggesting is that you generally not include literals in your code, and instead, use a constant/variable that can be traced back to a single place in order to make changes more visible and easier to deal with. That he makes exceptions for 1, 0, and -1 is explained by conventions in various languages where those values in context end up as generic and meaningful as any other language keyword and thus would not benefit from being referenced from a constant. That doesn't mean you wouldn't ever end up with constants that are 0, 1 or -1 though, just that you wouldn't assume every random place you might use those values (such as sorting algorithms) justifies a constant placeholder.

For further review on the topic, may as well start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_number_%28programming%29
> Basically all RP systems do have player-choosen character details and progression with gameplay consequences, be it a points system, a skill tree, just attributes that cause the game world to react.

A renaissance fair is RP without the G. Chess is a G without the RP. D&D is an RPG.
snaps are intended for non-power-users that don't want to deal with dependencies. Those users want things to mostly work without worrying about murky downsides. Auto-updating is exactly the right behavior.

If this is of concern to you, why are you using snaps? And why Ubuntu? What's the value-add over Debian?
Yeah, and I can't disagree with anyone who enjoy deltron3030. ;) Deltron 3030 is an epic album!
Nice write up Colin!

fwiw quadtrees don't make much sense when you're showing a tooltip for ~1 million points: https://roadtolarissa.com/scan-sorted/
What’s the reasoning behind not putting the prices up? For me that’s always a huge downer and means „that’s going to be quite expensive“.
These are easy enough to do in your head.

Also I would do a lot of them differently. And I don't think the answer to #6 is valid (in T-SQL at least).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_number_%28programming%29
It's insightful to learn that in their guide on pricing Sequoia cites Phil Libin, then-CEO of Sequoia-backed Evernote, who was later kicked out exactly because the company struggled to find the right pricing model.
There’s a series of examples further down the page — a jacket, a watch band, a watch. Not my cup of tea, but this critique seems a bit disconnected from the linked page.
Yes, if you include stock options
i saw it explained once to someone else that arch is more cutting edge, than bleeding edge. it's not like you're getting beta software or anything with arch - it just updates very frequently. it's a hacker's OS at the end of the day; the culture is that you're buying in to the high ownership/control of your machine, ergo you're going to put a higher effort into at least searching wiki/forums/main page for issues.

you can actually get a very stable system in the same way you would any other OS: install only the packages you can live with. you can install, say, xmonad and no DE and have a slick, solid, low resource dev setup, whereas ubuntu comes with some goofy ubuntu software store that's not removable (or wasn't when i last used it) - one wonders what other "goodies" are in there, esp. after amazon search behavior change. remember that deleted code is debugged code: the more spartan, the less chance for issues. so arch's actually a plus there.

FWIW my boomer parents run arch on 2 different desktops solidly, without much sysadmin work from me other than a few pacman upgrades whenever i remember to VPN back in, perhaps biweekly on average. yes the occasional breakage happens, see above re: website/forum/etc.

debian stable was OK as firefox was fairly regularly updated for vulnerabilities, but the actual version number was lagging a fair bit behind. ubuntu LTS just seemed like a worse debian. ubuntu non-LTS is a non-starter: probably 50% of the dist-upgrades i ran ended up failing and basically needing a clean reinstall for anything not in /home, so it's fairly admin hostile in that sense.
For the hospitalization ratio we don't have enough testing in many places but for those countries that are successfully pursuing test and trace strategies we can be pretty sure they're at least discovering the majority of contagious infections. So we can guess at the rough number even if we don't have it nailed down precisely.
If I was God, I would first create a very dense three dimensional grid in the void. Then in any point of the grid there is a gravity vector that points to a direction with the highest combined force of gravity calculated at that point. So gravity must be a three dimensional vector field.

Now, the direction and length of those vectors have to be continuously updated due to moving particles so that we can efficiently move particles arriving at any point.

The most logical explanation is that our universe updates its state at frequency that is directly linked to speed of light. This update frequency dictates the maximum distance any particle can travel in one cycle. Similarly gravity vectors cannot be updated faster than this frequency dictates. So gravity must propagate as spherical waves at the speed of light.

Similarly the system needs to continuously calculate electromagnetic field vectors for all points.

So when you place any fundamental particle in points X in the grid, it is immediately moved based on the direction and amplitude of the vectors in that point - but only by vectors that have been defined by rules to have an impact on this particular fundamental particle. We can e.g. define particles that are not effected by gravity at all.

So at very minimum we need some fundamental particles, forces and a way to calculate how those particles move in the grid. The system has an update frequency which defines the maximum speed in the grid.

Then you need to define rules what happens when two or more fundamental particles come close enough to each other.

When you have those rules and they produce an evolving system that stays in motion when fed with enough "input data", you have cracked this problem.

Solving this problem is the key to understanding theory of everything. So although the initial models aren't exactly correct, this exercise forces you to think like a God.
It is the self-collateralization that is circular, not my thinking! Not all credit markets work like this; instead expecting as collateral something you actually own, and making margin calls when the value of that collateral falls.
I just have "Debugging.docx" with stuff stored in a hierarchy by language. Having related error messages near each other lets you browse them to see solutions that worked for other problems. Example:

PYTHON

--Problems with error messages

NameError: name is not defined
You tried to use a class before you defined it.

--Problems without error messages

----IDLE won't give a command prompt

Ctrl+F6, or kill that instance of IDLE and start a new one

SQLITE

--Problems with error messages

...
So it did exactly what you requested it to do, no surprises at all. Got it.
How much of an impact does this have?

I prefer the look of things snapped to pixels; I didn't realize it also speed things up!
I've been at a startup with strong sales people and it definitely work to get clients, and pretty big ones. But the catch is that they were selling at a higher level than the operational teams, to not very technical buyers. Needless to say the usage was then often disappointing.
It's not app engineering, it's a comparison of GPS accuracy (especially indoors) vs a bluetooth beacon. Beacons work great no matter where you go.

I'm currently on the 11th floor of a building. GPS accuracy in the vertical dimension is much worse than horizontal. A bluetooth beacon will tell you if I'm in the same room with someone else.
He made bank off the 2008 crisis - literally. Invested in a ton of big banks and made huge returns. He's more than been here before.
SQL for Smarties is the book that has proven, without a doubt, I am bad at SQL. https://www.amazon.com/Joe-Celkos-SQL-Smarties-Programming/d...

If you want to get undeniably good with SQL, this is the book.
Good call. We signed up to see inside. Seems pretty basic. We’ll see if anyone else knows anything.
Are you alluding to possibility of an update containing malicious code?
Is that because the update's authenticiry is in question or is that because of original developer went rogue? Leaving the system unupdated is insecure. I do not see how auto-updates make it insecure, but themselves.
I was going to recommend the Four Pillars of Investing by Mr. Bernstein.

https://www.amazon.com/Four-Pillars-Investing-Building-Portf...

I'd also recommend The Richest Man in Babylon, but not as the only book on personal investing you read. I tried reading it when I first did the deep dive into personal finance and it didn't quite seem worth it since there were very few specifics about actual investment vehicles. But I revisited it after reading several other books and thought it was really good at driving home and solidifying the big picture and major principles of personal finance.
Code to Write to Start a SaaS
Yeah, that's an imperfect strategy:

https://www.picclickimg.com/d/l400/pict/283188235055_/16oz-A...
You ever deal with very large sets of large text files? You really CTRL-f through multi-GB files? Have you never needed to transform data between formats or yank out subsets of data for processing? You may have just working on business systems that did not deal with significant data volumes or data you did not control (coming from some other organization, for example).
Their head office is round the corner from my office in Newcastle, UK, and I occasionally bump in to their devs in the local pub and at the JS meetup. They're very good at what they do and lovely people too.
People are extracting more oil from the planet than people are currently consuming.
>Americans, on the other hand, tend to pounce on admissions of failure or ignorance, and engage in shaming and humiliation of the person that admits an issue.

Shoutout to all the foreigners working in the US that don't say that know everything, are quiet in meetings when everyone is yelling out stupid ideas, regularly give up their design when a competing one gets promoted loudly, then never get promoted. Eventually you'll learn never to admit failure or ignorance and eventually start demanding who made the error.
Wayland is the default display server for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. I have been running Wayland for the last 2 years and have never had any problems. (Admittedly I haven't used Nvidia)
It's a solid choice because you can get a good used prius for under $10K that will get 50mpg and last for many years without requiring expensive repairs. If you don't mind dealing with some repairs you can get one for much less than that.

If cost is no object and you want to optimize fro avoiding fossil fuel use it is not the best, but for most of us who do need to consider cost, it's very hard to beat mild hybrids.
proof that you had these items in your hand would also be nice.
I always wondered why when it comes time to create data structures we rarely if ever use a doubling of the constant factor to fix or at least reduce some of these issues.

I suppose you could call it a generational hash table, but really it's a Hash Table interface wrapped around 2, occasionally 3 hash tables.

Create a read-write hash table A. When A hits capacity, create a second read-write hash table B (a constant factor 1.0 < n < 1.5), and stop writing to A. Create a read-only hash table R, dump A into it. During this time, all reads look at [B, A, R] in sequence. Once R is created, swap the list to [B, R]. When B fills, create another RW hash C (again resized) and dump R and B into a new read-only table S and swap the list to [C, S].

During resizes you only ever have 3 places to look. The Read-Write hash has to handle tombstones (and keep a count of them to keep resizing costs O(1)). I believe the main thing not handled here is if concurrent mutation traffic is faster than the copy constructor for the read-only heap. As near as I can tell the cited paper here has no solution for this.

I need to re-read Cliff Click's description of his lock-free hash table. If memory serves it has flavors of this and also answers the back-pressure problem (amortization across writers). But I suspect you can do something rather pedestrian and get similar results.
What is $666.000 a year?

Is this $666 per year? I think you’re missing a comma somewhere.

;-)
Kids (1995)
Gentle Return released his new album on May 1st, so the timing was perfect. I've heard from musician buddies that even with the normal fees, Bandcamp gives them a much larger cut of song/album sales than iTunes, and apparently streaming revenues from Spotify, Apple Music, etc are a joke.
Just as XM has use case specific hardware just for audio in cars and semi trucks, you’d need a StarLink terminal to get just audio content over StarLink’s constellation. Hence, a deal with a content provider (Tesla did this with Slacker radio in their cars).

Not every vehicle might need or want a full blown satellite ground terminal that can provide IP service.
Every time I see an article such as this it reminds me how much I deeply abhor SQL. It is an ugly language, closer in feel to COBOL than something that can at times approach elegance, like Ruby or Scala. With languages like those, you can loo at your work after you are done and be proud of it beyond its purely functional aspect. SQL never elicits a response beyond “the task is finished and it does what I want”, typically with a “finally” in there somewhere.
https://www.scottlogic.com/what-we-do/

;)
,,grammar should be redundant. You’ve all heard people say that statement terminating ; are not necessary because the compiler can figure it out. ''

I'll stay with my non-redundant Julia language, thank you very much. It gave me a lot of joy to programming, and I don't remember having big problems with error messages. Even if I have, syntactic errors are trivial to find.

The hard parts of efficient programming are memory management (garbage collection), controlling vectorizing instructions, balance between ease of GPU programming and efficiency, parallelization, not semicolons at the end of a line.

All programming languages have to decide on how low level control they give to the computer resources, and how they abstract them, to make high level programming possible without sacrificing too much efficiency.
Debian used not to work easily on hardware that require proprietary drivers, did it change recently ?

I left Ubuntu almost ten years ago, after 5 years of using it, when they started using MIR instead of Gnome2 and I replaced it with Linux Mint and I haven't looked back. This whole snap thing looks like the new weird decision made by Canonical to make their faithful users leave :/
This seems like such a narrow viewpoint. Consider a business problem -- like a misconfiguration of an Amazon S3 bucket -- that is needlessly costing a company an extra $30k per month. Say you don't have the expertise on your team and hire an expert for 1 hour @ $20,000/hour to fix it. It would be well worth it to stop the bleeding.
I'll probably get one of the PCI-e ones that they recommend. This is one of those $10 Amazon ones.
> "assertion about how it's conserved like energy"

Look at the sorting algorithms: there's always going to be some minimum amount of complexity / algorithm code, to sort in n log n.