Published
Weekend Reading — Thingy brokey
Cheri “I took a tour of the Moore Theatre and spotted this list of affirmations posted on stage for the performers. ♥️”
Tech Stuff
metacat "average software engineer"
Typed Linting: The Most Powerful TypeScript Linting Ever When you want to use ESLint and TypeScript in the same project.
Rombo TailwindCSS plugin for adding animations (bounce, typewriter, shake, rotate, etc) with simple class names.
Animata 80+ cool animated components — buttons, cards, carousels, charts, etc — using React and Tailwind.
Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone Indeed. But also this is a well written exploration of zoneinfo that’s interesting and entertaining to read and you might learn a thing or two.
OK but the real question is what’s up with the two 1800 transitions. They’re synonyms for each other. It’s
Australia/Lord_Howe, which has a powerful 30-minute DST transition:
<+1030>-10:30<+11>-11,M10.1.0,M4.1.0
GreenMask Generate a Postgres database for development or testing from you production database. Greenmask basically dumps the data out, anonymizes and masks it, without changing the schema, so you get not-production but production-lookalike data for your dev/test database.
Pros of self-hosting: - You're in charge of your server and data
Cons of self-hosting: - You're in charge of your server and data
Don't Sleep on AbortController Solid post about the different ways you can use AbortController.
People make project maintenance sound like such a big deal, it's not! Mostly it's just writing some yaml to make sure the other yaml is still properly yaml'ing the old yaml.... :(
LaTeX Coffee Stains “This package provides an essential feature to LaTeX that has been missing for too long. It adds a coffee stain to your documents.”
congratulations on your computer science degree! here's your career options:
- make refugee seeking guidance systems for a bomb manufacturer
- develop spyware for a giant tech monopoly
- work 100 hours a week to make UIs on patient portal apps
Eye for Design
Say goodbye to large images This is a simple macOS app that does one thing and does it really well: compress images. $3.99 is a pretty good price.
Designing for anyone: The power of accessible products Bingo.
Here's a powerful idea that's changed my perspective: Accessible design isn't designing for everyone, it's designing for anyone. This subtle shift in thinking opens up a world of possibilities and challenged me to think more inclusively about our users.
How to turn the new Mac mini on/off.
This is not a joke. I repeat, I’m not joking
LDRS A large collection of open-source loaders and spinners built with HTML, CSS, and SVG.
Elevators are the UX gift that keeps giving. I just discovered this beauty. On top of that, the door closing times are very slow so it's very helpful to push a close button. I just stood and stared…
Peoples
How to write good.
- Avoid alliteration. Always.
- Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
- Avoid clichés like the plague. (They're old hat.)
- Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
- One should never generalize.
- Comparisons are as bad as clichés.
- Be more or less specific.
- Sentence fragments? Eliminate.
- Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
- Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.
- Who needs rhetorical questions?
People who wear glasses are disabled, BTW. We need disability aids to function as an active part of society. If you wear glasses, you are disabled; your disability is just one that happens to be highly (if not totally) accommodated. It is generally considered reasonable to insist that you need your glasses and cannot cope well without them, and glasses are readily available and prescriptions for them not heavily gated. Touching or taking them without your permission is considered rude and cruel.
Voting While Temporarily Disabled
Aside: when I used my phone again to display my barcode, the person at this desk said "you can’t sign your name but you’re tech-savvy?" I replied that I was a computer science professor who just happened to have an injured arm. I’m sure that people with more permanent disabilities get this sort of nonsense all the time. I’m contemplating filing a complaint.
PDF To Brainrot Learn (better?) by turning PDFs into TikTok-inspired brainrot (something something lack of attention unless material presented over Minecraft something something).
- interview with the vampire
- HR screening with the vampire
- technical interview with the vampire
- team interview with the vampire
- Good evening vampire, unfortunately we're not able to extend you an offer at this time. We'd like to keep in contact and notify you of any available positions in the future
Business Side
Ask HN: Who is pretending to be hiring? Perfect. No notes.
It is anecdotical, but I'm consulting with a startup in the Bay Area. We have 9 job openings listed on the website (and for some reason only 4 on LinkedIn). But in reality one position (senior dev) is really open, and the bar is sky high. By that I mean that the founders would hire the right person. But the other 8 positions are just there for signaling and nobody looks at the applications we get (and for one of these positions we got 1k+ applications last time I checked). For when I'm asked, the CEO told me to say that we are prioritizing finding the senior dev first (and the position has been open for 6 months).
I think the founders feel that it is the right posture to signal that the company is growing (external messaging) and that we are doing well (internal messaging).
Evan Spiegel battles to revive Snap’s fortunes
I wonder what happened, given that just last year — To Revive Snap, Evan Spiegel Promotes Hardcore Work Culture
But that was 2023, which is so much different from 2022 — This is Snap’s turnaround plan
No worries, 2021 was amazing! Snap is on a growth tear
I guess this all started in 2019? What's Behind Snap's Turnaround
Or did the turnaround start even before that?
I just know 2025 will turn into the year of revival turnaround and hardcode plan for Snapchat!
AI Slop Is Flooding Medium I think in this one case AI slop is working as designed because that was Medium’s main goal all along:
The blogging platform Medium is facing an influx of AI-generated content. CEO Tony Stubblebine says it “doesn’t matter” as long as nobody reads it.
I Attended Google’s Creator Conversation Event, And It Turned Into A Funeral Even the free lunch wasn’t all that good:
Google’s elderly Chief Search Scientist answered, without an ounce of pity or concern, that there would be updates but he didn’t know when they’d happen or what they’d do. Further questions on the subject were met with indifference as if he didn’t understand why we cared.
Google Street View Is Showing Strange "Businesses" in the Middle of the Ocean You probably don't want to just walk in a hardware store that’s “hundreds of miles off the southern coast of Iceland”. 🤯
Machine Intelligence
Inkeep Copilot for your product support pages. It's on the pricey side, but I think that's a fantastic use of LLMs, since most of support doesn't require talking to people (and such a waste of time if I have to call you up with a quick question).
LLMs don’t do formal reasoning - and that is a HUGE problem I don't know if it's a HUGE problem, but definitely LLMs can't do formal reasoning at all, they can sometimes fake it well, just not all the time.
Automate dogfooding for your team Chat with an LLM and it will write the test cases for you.
Video scraping: extracting JSON data from a 35 second screen capture for less than 1/10th of a cent Not even writing any code: he screen recorded himself scrolling through the emails, uploaded the video into Google’s AI studio, then asked Gemini to extract the text from the emails and convert them to a spreadsheet. Done.
Audioread The AI will read out loud articles, PDFs, emails, etc. in your podcast player. "Read" while walking, driving, cleaning, etc.
Storypitch This AI will help you write pitches. If you're raising money for your new business, that's competitive and I wouldbn't recommend using AI. But if you're a PM who's supposed to deliver a pitch to the exec team every few weeks, this looks like a great time saver.
Why AI coding assistants might not help devs much
Copilot also didn’t help mitigate burnout, Uplevel found. The survey showed extended working hours decreased for all developers across the duration of the survey. However, it fell 17% for those with Copilot access, compared to 28% for those that didn’t.
False citations show Alaska education official relied on generative AI, raising broader questions
Four of the document’s six citations appear to be studies published in scientific journals, but were false. The journals the state cited do exist, but the titles the department referenced are not printed in the issues listed. Instead, work on different subjects is posted on the listed links.
Richard MacManus “Tom Gauld on the ultimate writing machine”
Insecurity
Jon Henshaw “You either accept our cookies or you chat with us.”
This probably doesn't sound too bad unless you understand that Okta's entire service is authentication. They are a company you call when you don't want to write user authentication code for your app yourself. You just plug their stuff into your app and they do the authentication for you. Getting authentication right is LITERALLY THEIR ONLY JOB
Everything Else
Street Art Utopia “CLIMATE PROTESTORS NEED TO STOP BLOCKING ROADS!!”
I've taken to answering the phone "Potato" instead of "Hello", because a human will go "what?" and a robocall will fail to determine what language it should start its script in.
In England "booster shot" is spelled "borchestershire shot”
David Lynch “Ouch, apple emoji search. Ouch.”
My desire to be well-informed is currently at odds with my desire to remain sane.
Cassandra, but instead of nobody believing you, the curse is everyone believes you but nobody does anything about it.
Has Nintendo found a better way to wake up?
It turns out that rising out of bed to a round of applause from a red alarm clock called Alarmo might just lead to stronger sleep habits.
Did you know Wallace and Gromit's film "A Close Shave" inadvertently saved the Wensleydale cheese brand?
In one scene, Wallace says "Wensleydale" is his favourite cheese — mainly because pronouncing this word showed off his comical facial features. The creators didn't know that the Wensleydale cheese company was nearly bankrupt.
Luckily for the brand, the film was a great success and led to renewed interest in Wensleydale.
(To this day, they make a special WallaceAndGromit cheese.)
George Penney 👇 This is such a good story:
(Thread 1/3) I have just seen the most polite outright rejection of big business and hustle culture that I've ever encountered at a tiny ma and pa Japanese restaurant in rural Aotearoa NewZealand and it was so satisfying and heartwarming to see.
alex chinneck knots street lamps and twists a phone booth for his assembly bristol sculptures
When someone asks about your background and you tell them about your education, experience, hobbies, hopes and dreams...
but they just wanted to know what was behind you on a video call.
'Brat' named word of the year by Collins dictionary
Brat, the word redefined by singer Charli XCX and adopted by supporters of US presidential candidate Kamala Harris, was on Friday, November 1, named the Collins Word of the Year 2024.=
Dario recently forced me to create an account to continue using a blood sugar monitor I already own (😡), so of course I gave my name as "Fuck Off."
This turns out to have been an amazing decision, because they inject your name into their marketing emails. 😂
Apparently Connecticut is putting CR boxes in all their schools to filter the air? That's amazing news! Now I can't truthfully say not a single government in the world is doing that anymore, so good on CT
Hopefully more will follow their wise example. Air filtration in schools costs pennies per student per year and generates lifetime savings for societies on the order of millions of dollars
ADHD and Managing Your Reputation
Accept the Core Constraint: Rather than trying to fix what might be unfixable, acknowledge that consistently executing administrative systems will be extraordinarily difficult. This isn't defeatist; it's realistic resource allocation.
All Hands on Deck - 15 People Pitch Their Single Friend to a Crowd of Singles If your PowerPoint game is solid, why not pitch your single friend?
Serial returners send back £6.6bn of online purchases a year in UK, report finds You call then “serial returners”, I call them “there’s no shop I can go to, so I’m going to get them delivered to my house to try out and see which one fits me”:
There are also generational divides in behaviour, with younger shoppers more likely to over-order with the intention of returning a high proportion of the items. More than two-thirds (69%) of gen Z consumers said they had bought online in this way, compared with about a sixth (16%) of over-60s.
Mandu Related, “it's not stealing. it's called trying without buying.”
Voyager 1 onboard fault causes it to switch to a backup radio that it last used in 1981. NINETEEN EIGHTY-ONE. And it worked. Epic spacecraft gonna epic.
Turkey: 'Missing' man joins search party looking for himself Must have had one too many drinks:
A missing man in Turkey accidentally joined his own search party for hours before realising he was the person they were looking for, local media reports.
Tumbler For only $10m you can get your very own Tumbler! Only 10 will be made and sold … not street legal, but you — batman — are not asking anyone's permission, right?
Dead cat strategy With the election on Tuesday damaging the narcissist, next week will be full of dead cats:
The dead cat strategy, also known as deadcatting, is the political strategy of deliberately making a shocking announcement to divert media attention away from problems or failures in other areas. The present name for the strategy has been associated with British former prime minister Boris Johnson's political strategist Lynton Crosby‘
Ian Coldwater “I don’t know who needs to see this, but here is a baby lamb”
