bartread

6 ms·

61.
by bartread 3mo ago
Yeah, it's funny they never really took off as a data storage format the way zip disks and CDs did. To me a MiniDisc would have been far better than a Zip disk but I never encountered MiniDisc used in that context. Certainly, whereas a
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by bartread 3mo ago
There was a time when, for me at least, the 3.5 inch floppy seemed like the pinnacle of portable storage technology, especially as compared to the cassettes and 5.25 inch floppies I’d been used to. I made regular use of 3.5 inch disks as po
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by bartread 3mo ago
It's not immediately more enlightening if you do click through either, except in the most general terms - some issue with changes to their Ts & Cs is alluded to in the first paragraph, and then there's a wall of text that prob
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by bartread 3mo ago
It's always fun to remember how rude people were about Dropbox on here. More seriously though, in many ways HN is a pretty broad church. You're always going to get a spectrum of opinions, and some portion of people are always goin
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by bartread 3mo ago
All of this depends on the problems you’re solving though. There is no one size fits all approach to database development.
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by bartread 3mo ago
Yeah, exactly. I think the best approach is always to know SQL and know the ORM. Most of the time you’ll be able to simply use the ORM, but every so often you’ll inevitably come up against a situation where a custom query gets the job don
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by bartread 3mo ago
Your 3rd paragraph: I wondered if something like that might be the issue, hence my somewhat tentative musing. Legacy of all kinds seems always to be so expensive to deal with.
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by bartread 3mo ago
It’s an interesting thought. One wonders if a lot of the utility infrastructure they need would be more readily available and/or be less negatively impactful to build as well.
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by bartread 3mo ago
This isn’t a bad approach but it’s not a panacea: small companies can be pretty messed up too, albeit perhaps in different ways.
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by bartread 3mo ago
One of the items near the top of my to solve list for a small startup I’m advising is prompt injection via the various routes that user input and user generated content can find their way into the product. It’s not right at the top of the l
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by bartread 3mo ago
Sounds about right. I approached this in a different way in my office. The walls aren't straight, either vertically or horizontally, and they're not even consistently wonky along any given axis. So I installed uprights vertically,
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by bartread 3mo ago
The takeaway from this for me is that, using an LLM to score anything takes multiple (maybe even many) runs and the result you’ll get is, at best, a sane-ish distribution. Which sort of sounds workable until you scale it up to larger datase
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by bartread 3mo ago
Well, at least they learned from the experience, and that’s good. The more interesting question, I think, is what proportion of businesses will choose the learn from Ford’s experience without first choosing to relive it? Often people, and t
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by bartread 3mo ago
I’d imagine precisely because they might be collecting regexes from user input such as parameter values or search terms, and the user may not know or care which technology your tool or service is built with. However, they will need to know
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by bartread 3mo ago
> That is just your preference. Did you think I hadn’t realised?
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by bartread 3mo ago
I agree. I loved DOOM: it was so over the top. Tons of monsters to kill, loads of great weapons, enough ammo around that you didn’t have to worry about it too much, and it was all so colourful and gore. Quake felt much more subdued to me. N
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by bartread 3mo ago
In the UK it used to be one form and a fee of £25 or something like that. I think, nowadays, that's probably just done online as well.
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by bartread 3mo ago
Yeah, and also inevitable that a product designed to so efficiently separate people from their money would be overrun by grifters and scammers from the influencer/creator world. What does make this instance perhaps a bit surprising is
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by bartread 4mo ago
So much of what I’ve worked on in my career has proven to be utterly ephemeral. I’ve learned not to dwell on it too much, in part because one of software’s great strengths is its malleability[0]. However, I was quite surprised a few weeks a
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by bartread 4mo ago
I think the point is that people have different preferences: those didn’t matter before COVID but they do matter now. There are at least a couple of trade offs here. 1. Companies compete for applicants, and applicants - even good applicants
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by bartread 4mo ago
> I don't understand why tech companies are so reluctant to go back to in-person interviews. Tech companies probably aren’t that reluctant, but I’d bet a lot of job applicants are.
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by bartread 4mo ago
That's cool - I'm glad it was useful. I also should say, I like the fact you've come back after a decent chunk of time and posted it again with changes. It's very rare that happens with Show HNs, but it's really nic
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by bartread 4mo ago
I mean... I like it. I remember your post from last time where, apparently, I got the top comment. It looks like you've dealt with the UX issues I ran into previously (e.g., back/forward behaviour), but I did almost immediately sp
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by bartread 4mo ago
It becomes tricky when all your passwords are randomly generated, 24 characters long, full of symbols, special characters, casing variations, etc. All of mine are an absolute nightmare to type manually. I suppose that becomes a pretty stron
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by bartread 4mo ago
> Have your PRs the right size? I’ve noticed that large PRs aren’t just a problem for human reviewers: they’re a problem for AI reviewers too. If I submit a 100 line PR I’m likely to get some useful comments back from both humans and LLM
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by bartread 4mo ago
> This question is for us: will we keep using Blacksmith, despite them giving us an unpleasant surprise and a prickly support exchange? Interesting question, and I think it makes sense they’ve chosen to be pragmatic. However, I wonder if
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by bartread 4mo ago
I had assumed the comment you’re responding to is tongue in cheek but it’s honestly hard to tell sometimes.
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by bartread 4mo ago
I think the community is divided. But I think it’s less A/B and more a spectrum. There are plenty of more balanced comments rolling in from people who’ve been using it for a while and have experienced both the advantages and disadvanta
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by bartread 4mo ago
I suppose one could argue that VCs develop a taste for it after speaking with so many founders. But, of course, you often don’t find out what lay down the road not travelled, except for those companies that get funded elsewhere, so it’s not
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by bartread 4mo ago
I agree with this take. My immediate thought on reading the piece was along the lines of, “Yeah, but lots of the people who pick what we should work on aren’t very good at picking the right things to work on, and even the ones who are a bit

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