thom

6 ms·

61.
by thom 5mo ago
There was a period in the early 2000s where AskJeeves’ answer to the question “what is the meaning of life?” was an old Eliezer Yudkowsky essay saying that because we weren’t smart enough to work out the meaning of life ourselves, our highe
62.
by thom 5mo ago
A charitable view might be that changing which fingers you're using to plug the holes in the dike is a lot harder when the volume of water on the other side is increasing exponentially.
63.
by thom 5mo ago
While I wouldn't necessarily phrase it this way, there is a chart going around social media that tries to imply that GitHub had basically 100% uptime right up until the MS acquisition. All it takes is either 1) having been there or 2)
64.
by thom 6mo ago
Would this have been prevented by the Trusted Research Environment stuff Ben Goldacre always used to talk about?
65.
by thom 6mo ago
This is light on specifics, but is still directionally the closest anyone has come to describing my ideal future data platform. The founder Dan Sotolongo's work at Snowflake included Dynamic Tables which makes me think the proposal is
66.
by thom 6mo ago
I think you should play modern board games, but can we agree that there are both good and also heinously bad lessons to learn from them? Far too many board games want to be computer games, and seem to think it's trivial to have 20 diff
67.
by thom 6mo ago
https://archive.is/eXuD0
68.
by thom 6mo ago
I don't think chess engines are a solved problem for some use cases. Yes you can make something strong, maybe even the strongest, but can you create a chess engine perfectly tuned to actually teaching a player? Instead of superhuman pe
69.
by thom 6mo ago
I've been very impressed with Bazzite on my ASUS dual screen laptop. Honestly feel like hardware support is better (especially in the absence of crappy ASUS software) and nothing on Steam runs noticeably worse. Hard to imagine going ba
70.
by thom 6mo ago
I was under the impression Firefox randomises extension IDs on install, so hopefully not?
71.
by thom 6mo ago
Almost exactly, it's mostly how you use the REPL that differs, and then only because of what different editors prioritise. When I'm in Emacs, all my work happens against a running REPL - when I open or save a file, it's reloa
72.
by thom 6mo ago
This is already a strong theme in the Clojure ecosystem, e.g.: https://github.com/BetterThanTomorrow/calva-backseat-driver
73.
by thom 6mo ago
I spent part of my childhood in Winsford, a salt mining town in the UK (its other claim to fame being that it was where Neville Southall played before Everton). Every time I pass a yellow bin of salt for gritting the roads, I get to feel a
74.
by thom 7mo ago
Many years ago working on natural language to SQL, when we had ambiguities this is how we’d clarify things with the user (albeit with the minimal amount of brackets necessary).
75.
by thom 7mo ago
I’m sure somebody posted a link to E-Prime here recently (a form of English where all forms of ‘to be’ are forbidden) and this conversation is a wonderful example of the kinds of conflicts that it helps avoid.
76.
by thom 7mo ago
Things like string-set and string (repeating section headers on each page), counter and target-counter (embedding page number references) etc. Prince and pagedjs support all the CSS3 paged media bits I've found myself needing, just won
77.
by thom 7mo ago
Do you intend to one day support all the paged media bits in pagedjs? I assume it works with their polyfill but it’d be great to have a built in more performant option.
78.
by thom 7mo ago
When I saw this title on HN, I immediately thought it was going to be about The Salmon of Doubt.
79.
by thom 8mo ago
Left usenet, left IRC, left LiveJournal, skipped MySpace, left Facebook, left the blogosphere, will leave Twitter and BlueSky. You’re either in touching distance of grass or you’re not, none of this matters.
80.
by thom 8mo ago
One of the best writers of our generation. There’s no better deconstruction of UK lad culture than this: https://samkriss.com/2015/05/20/cheeky-nandos-or-what-wet-wr... .
81.
by thom 8mo ago
This is one of those things that I’m glad remains highly personal and stochastic. Programming languages thrive when people are able and willing to create value with them. People thrive when there are options and they can find a language tha
82.
by thom 8mo ago
It’s maddening that the Windows, macOS, iOS and web versions of Word all have completely random subsets of functionality.
83.
by thom 8mo ago
What do you do when you sort your washing?
84.
by thom 8mo ago
Lovely idea! You're going to be fighting against editors and linters but it'd be a very cool proof of concept.
85.
by thom 8mo ago
I'd love some version of these tools that could reliably round-trip pure text. Some heuristic or model that can actually recognise boxes, lines with anchors, parent-child relationships etc, so you can paste in pure text and immediately
86.
by thom 8mo ago
I too get less of a kick out of writing enterprise middleware than I did making games as a kid in the 80s. Why did the industry do this to me?!
87.
by thom 8mo ago
My experience was that enterprise programmers burned out on things like WSDL at about the same time Rails became usable (or Django if you’re that way inclined). Rails had an excellent story for validating models which formed the basis for e
88.
by thom 8mo ago
Either the models are good and this sort of platform gets swept away, or they aren’t, and this sort of platform gets swept away.
89.
by thom 8mo ago
Much easier to learn to juggle three clubs, and then swap them for knives. Really no harder than 3 balls but significantly more flashy.
90.
by thom 8mo ago
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