ashrk

12 ms·

1.
by ashrk 8y ago
Yeah, I've got three of the little buggers. Thanks for keeping it civil, I could have been less blunt in my initial response. I'm a little sensitive to this one because my wife and several of my friends are teachers and I gather i
2.
by ashrk 8y ago
> Sometimes your kid will only eat sugary cereals for breakfast Present healthy food. Vary it day over day in case they really do have some strong dislike for something. If they don't eat it, they weren't very hungry. They will
3.
by ashrk 8y ago
I spent a lot of time a few years back reading some Russian world traveller's photo blog (he looooved taking photos of signs and fire hydrants and such, which I wasn't super into but was sometimes interesting, but also posted plen
4.
by ashrk 8y ago
In order—and mind I'm not like amazing at this so take none of this as best practice: - Stepping through with a debugger. Static analysis call graphs in stricter languages[0]. Runtime call traces and visualization in dynamic languages.
5.
by ashrk 8y ago
Mobile, probably a lot of data-analysis jobs provided you get to present results. Desktop work if you can get it. Non-traditional UI like voice. You can spend (what will seem like) a silly amount of time selling what you've done in bac
6.
by ashrk 8y ago
Sure, and man are the easy wins satisfying. Fixing shitty data access methods/patterns is one of the easiest ways to get a "WOW!" out of a client or product owner if you're stuck in the low-visibility silo of backend dev
7.
by ashrk 8y ago
No (or long-broken) tests and no easy (at least partially automated and otherwise documented) way to build and/or run the code locally are the norm for others' codebases I've inherited. Those two things qualify it as "aw
8.
by ashrk 8y ago
I see it on here from time to time on here but have never heard a person in real life mention it, so... maybe? Incidentally, I'd pick map & navigation data as the one big Web thing that really ought to be handled by government. Up-
9.
by ashrk 8y ago
Pretty sure it's from The Gateless Gate (I recognize it, which means it's probably from there). Zen tales tend to present a couple major challenges to the reader: 1) Going into them cold isn't exactly intended. The characters
10.
by ashrk 8y ago
The difficulty is you have to achieve traction and scale to compete with a company that's making tons of money exploitatively and user-hostilely strip-mining their own system and running on low margins with high reinvestment due to the
11.
by ashrk 8y ago
I'm not sure what exactly you're referring to, but as someone who's used Google since back when it had a bunch of serious competitors, I'd also pick 2008-2010 as about the time they stopped even appearing to match words
12.
by ashrk 8y ago
> HTML is the most popular language in the world. Like x86 assembly is, sure. Though way less well-suited to its modern purpose than that is. It's alive by accident and momentum, purely. If it did what we needed it to do we wouldn&#
13.
by ashrk 8y ago
The most valuable ones mostly aren't ad supported or paid anyway, and without competition from ad supported sites even more free ones for more purposes would exist and thrive (e.g. if Reddit died all those free volunteer run forums tha
14.
by ashrk 8y ago
HTML did stagnate, in part because JS was available. How many sites expose the built-in file upload element these days? It's clearly terrible, yet hasn't improved in many, many years. Tables should have (optional) built-in sorti
15.
by ashrk 8y ago
I think a hypertext browser that, by default, lets any document you load also spy on your session as clearly as if there were a camera over your shoulder is nuts, but inevitable without harshly crippling any document-accessible scripting la
16.
by ashrk 8y ago
Yeah, you'd have to prevent JS from catching a broad set of user events at all, and disallow modification of most of the DOM by it. Again, basically restrict it to tightly-context-constrained functions to do stuff like custom sorting.
17.
by ashrk 8y ago
HTML stagnated badly and this was exacerbated by the "we can just let Javascript and/or CSS handle it" effect. With a less-free Javascript it'd have been necessary to add things like sortable tables and better form eleme
18.
by ashrk 8y ago
> I was once asked by a client if we could capture people's email addresses in a sign-up form even if they didn't hit submit, so we could email them later. I am still quite proud of my response, which was, "Yes, we absolut
19.
by ashrk 8y ago
I just want to be able to have multiple, suspendible desktop sessions with different apps running and/or installed and different files available. Ideally I should be able to kick up more than one at a time to let them exchange data. Pr
20.
by ashrk 8y ago
Seems like there's either a speed of light and things can happen before we see them, or light's transmitted instantaneously. Doesn't make sense to talk about light's speed if the thing producing the light doesn't &q
21.
by ashrk 8y ago
Duke Mu of Ch'in said to Po Lo: 'You are now advanced in years. Is there any member of your family whom I could employ to look for horses in your stead?' Po Lo replied: 'A good horse can be picked out by its general buil
22.
by ashrk 8y ago
I've found I have to turn mathematics algorithmic to understand it, thinking through what each symbol does to the things passing "through" it. Attempting to understand equations per se does nothing for me. They're im
23.
by ashrk 8y ago
This is all stuff covered in my undergrad International Political Economy class in the early 2000s, and I'm pretty sure none of it was fresh then. The benefits of the market largely exist in the margins between awful centralized abuse
24.
by ashrk 8y ago
Huh. I hit a ton just trying to manage some files and burn a cd or two. Workflow inconveniences, crashes in various applications, little "some KDE service you've never heard of has crashed" messages from the system tray. Fire
25.
by ashrk 8y ago
Not the OP but my most recent attempt to ditch Windows on my gaming desktop ~6 months ago was tripped up when I discovered that core software like file managers and such still crash or wig out constantly (it's always been that way, I s
26.
by ashrk 8y ago
Re: [0], what about them do you hate? For my part, I've discovered since switching to Mac that I don't like having system packages managed alongside user packages. It's one thing when I'm all-in on handling everything fr
27.
by ashrk 8y ago
Looks like PostgreSQL has a foreign data wrapper for CSV. https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Foreign_data_wrappers In fact, seems it has several.
28.
by ashrk 8y ago
My unscientific observation has been that the opposite holds for French wine. They seem to ship the US their worst, but it hits our shelves marked up 4x what it'd be in France. Maybe it's a branding thing, and French wine's g
29.
by ashrk 8y ago
There's also the matter of difficulty keeping up with which products are tied to which bad actors, possibly far up their supply chain. Distributing responsibility for determining which companies are being ultra-shitty but not breaking
30.
by ashrk 8y ago
You got any suggestions for the Sumerian works? I've read The Literature of Ancient Sumer , and made it through, but didn't enjoy it at all and nothing stuck. Attempted From Distant Days (Akkadian literature) but just couldn&#x

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