harrall

10 ms·

181.
by harrall 11mo ago
Google’s main ability is to win by pure technical prowess. They hire a lot of bright engineers. Google Search won over Altavista by pure algorithms. Google Docs (and Writely) were way more feature complete than competitors. You love a Googl
182.
by harrall 11mo ago
In the grand scheme of things, Microsoft had always spent more money on developer tooling than most other companies, even in the 90s. Hence even the infamous Ballmer quote.
183.
by harrall 1y ago
Google didn’t “win.” Google Books is currently a shell of its former self.
184.
by harrall 1y ago
I don’t entirely understand who this is for. - For one-offs, you would just use a GUI. - For regular edits where you want creative control, you would use a NLE GUI. - For regular edits where you want consistency, you would have a limited GU
185.
by harrall 1y ago
They are stable and predicable. If you lend them some money, you can expect to still have it next year. Not calling Dubai the devil but you could make deals with the devil if the devil was known to religiously fulfill his contracts. There a
186.
by harrall 1y ago
I know friends who describe a product more by its specs rather than whether they like it. I prefer to just ask for a recommendation. Looking at specs is often just a money sinkhole to me.
187.
by harrall 1y ago
Less than 1% of the hash maps I use have ever needed order. The underlying data structures between both are different. Ordered hash maps use more memory, are slower, and are more complicated. Knowing CS fundamentals, using an ordered hash m
188.
by harrall 1y ago
I’m not sure there is regulatory capture at play necessarily. I notice regular doctors and dentists do this too. They’ll bill my insurance for extras in case they’ll pay and when insurance says no, the doctor doesn’t bill me either. Everyon
189.
by harrall 1y ago
There’s actually different classes of errors though. There’s errors in the process itself versus errors that happen when performing the process. For example, if I ask you to tabulate orders via a query but you forgot to include an entire ta
190.
by harrall 1y ago
You're not wrong. Increasing font size is one method. Another method I like to use is to adjust the amount of words per paragraph depending on the medium. I will literally write more or less just to attain my personal favorite of 3-6
191.
by harrall 1y ago
You'll notice newspapers use columns and do not extend the text all the way left to right either. It's a typographical consideration, for both function and style. From a functional standpoint: Having to scan your eyes left to righ
192.
by harrall 1y ago
Until LLMs came around, I rarely saw other people use interrupting/parenthetical clauses at all, em dash or not. Kind of the same with semi-colons even. Or bold or subtle italics . I’ve always enjoyed the style that em dashes and semi
193.
by harrall 1y ago
300 CPM on its own is both meaningless and not high. CPM is a raw stat from the sensor. There’s many different designs of dosimeters and they all read differently so you have to ask “what brand and model did you use?” You then apply a funct
194.
by harrall 1y ago
Laws can’t fix this problem. The branches check each other but citizens are supposed to check the branches . “Can’t fix a non-engineering problem with engineering.” But your average citizen is consuming news sources like Fox News that pres
195.
by harrall 1y ago
The space race was not a scientific endeavor either. It was driven by a political need. It was to prove that your economic system could muster the correct machinery to get to the moon. Once we got to the moon, nothing significantly changed
196.
by harrall 1y ago
LC_ALL=C which gives you consistent sorting behavior. The article does mention it but in passing.
197.
by harrall 1y ago
I don’t have a deep understand of LLMs but don’t they fundamentally work on tokens and generate a multi-dimensional statistical relationship map between tokens? So it doesn’t have to be LLM. You could theoretically have image tokens (though
198.
by harrall 1y ago
Personal faves: - Mathematica - Maple - MathStudio (mobile) - Ti-89 calculator (high school favorite) Others: - SageMath - GNU Octave - SymPy - Maxima - Mathcad
199.
by harrall 1y ago
A good newspaper to me is one that regularly does their due diligence (fact checking, possibly considering things from several angles, giving background information) and has a consistent but reasonable bias. NYT and The Economist are very g
200.
by harrall 1y ago
Average newspapers have average content. But there are good newspapers just like they are good <any category of thing>. Although good newspapers still have bias, but as a reader, you can correct for bias. You can’t correct for sloppy
201.
by harrall 1y ago
People get into this field for very different reasons. - People who like the act and craftsmanship of coding itself. AI can encourage slop from other engineers and it trivializes the work. AI is a negative. - People who like general enginee
202.
by harrall 1y ago
I actually switched from 40 MHz to 80 Mhz when a friend complained about slow downloads on my Wi-Fi. So yeah, I do think speed is more important. Responsiveness doesn’t matter that often and when it does, plugging in Ethernet takes it out o
203.
by harrall 1y ago
One of my favorite subjects is politics. I enjoy reading books about politics, and keeping up on (geo-)politics, subscribe to political magazines and honestly don’t mind navigating office politics. Because at the heart of it it’s all the sa
204.
by harrall 1y ago
Let’s see… use the Arduino IDE, plug it in via USB, and press Upload. Your program starts on boot, every time, reliably and quickly. OR buy an SD card, learn what the heck “writing images” is, find a spare keyboard and monitor so you can se
205.
by harrall 1y ago
I have written it down but it is a checklist and there are thousands of those. Checklists are very personal so that’s why I suggested that you “do it for yourself.” That said, these are the 3 main lessons I got: - Everything needs a place.
206.
by harrall 1y ago
I tried long term backpack travel and it wasn’t for me but trying (many times) basically perfected my packing for all trips. Between a backpacking trip to northern Europe to 3 day quick trip to Chicago, I can be ready to in like an hour and
207.
by harrall 1y ago
Jobs brought product to the table, but I don’t he did so because it was niche. I think he chose the products because it was solved a personal problem. I remember a pre-iPod MP3 player where, to get to the 200nd song (a somewhat common thing
208.
by harrall 1y ago
It doesn’t happen because when a company replaces advertising with a subscription, people balk and then switch to a competitor that doesn’t charge anything by using advertising.
209.
by harrall 1y ago
Yeah but you also learn a tool’s limitations if you sit down and learn the tool. Instead people are quick to stay fuzzy about how something really works so it’s a lifetime of superstition and trial and error. (yeah it’s a pet peeve)
210.
by harrall 1y ago
Moving fast is fine when you’re building a prototype. Having to double check everything when you are spiking an idea slows you down too much. But once you get something going, go back, apply all your learning (because you will have learned

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