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> Flying isn't hard

Most of the time. Sometimes you get a double bird strike when you've barely cleared the Hudson river, or similar.


In an "application" model rather than a "document" one, like MS Word online or draw.io or similar, there's no clear semantics for "back" but there is a risk of the user losing data if they can navigate away without saving.

This is a consequence of sites being allowed to hijack back in the first place. They can still fix it.

For your use case all you need is the page to get notified so it can save. Remember that on Android your onSaveInstanceState gets called and you have to save your state or lose it.


> 37K LoC per day across 5 projects

I remember the days when we talked about mythical man-months and why LoC was not a good metric to measure programmer output. And then Ken Thompson said [1]

> One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code.

Or the famous -2K LoC story:

> Bill Atkinson, the author of Quickdraw [...] had completely rewritten the region engine using a simpler, more general algorithm which, after some tweaking, made region operations almost six times faster. As a by-product, the rewrite also saved around 2,000 lines of code [...] it was time to fill out the management form for the first time. When he got to the lines of code part, he thought about it for a second, and then wrote in the number: -2000. [2]

[1] disputed: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/43800/did-the-c...

[2] https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html


Before we had Trigger Warnings as a term, we had movie and game ratings that said what you'd see if you watched/played: violence, blood/gore, nudity ... steam still does this, and as long as you don't use the politically charged TW expression, no-one seems to mind. For example, "Skyrim contains Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Sexual Themes, Use of Alcohol, and Language."

"TW 1.0" as I remember it - the first time I heard the TW term - was a thing where professors told students in advance if a lecture contained material that could upset some students, I think it started when someone teaching a course on criminal law in a law degree told students in advance "[TW:] next week we will have the lecture on the law around rape and sexual assault". Properly practiced, that's not exposure therapy that's being polite to your students (though why not put your whole syllabus up at the start of term, if you can?) It was also not intended to let you skip that topic - it's pretty important to know about if you're training in criminal law! - just to let you know in advance when it's coming up.

If you're teaching a course on the history of the British Empire in India, you're at some point going to need to cover the Bengal famine, the Amritsar massacre, the mutiny (aka. first war of independence), the practically-a-civil-war during partition, and a lot of other things. Mind you a "content note: British Empire" at the start of the course would probably cover all bases.

The choice of "trigger" that already means something in therapy was perhaps unfortunate, and nowadays I think "content warning" or even "content note" is preferred.

The real problem though was how students, who were neither trained therapists nor seemed to have consulted any, redefined and enforced their version of TW to the point that the term got tainted in the public view.

Basically, if you have anything like PTSD, you need an actual therapist not the collective hivemind of twitter (instagram these days?).


Generally agree with basically everything you wrote.

For me it's not even really political - I certainly am not aligned with the "heterodox" community that has been so actively against them. I think if people want to put trigger warnings on things, they should be able to make that choice, and people should be able to abide by them if they think they want to as well.

The issue is how it is framed as being important for helping people heal, like several people have spoken of it being important for in this thread. And I don't think the game/movie ratings ever really purported to be a part of that - indeed, it's always been more of an age appropriateness thing from my understanding.

If all of this was just "People should be able to make informed choices about the content they consume" and no one on any side was making claims about the mental health benefits for people with PTSD or similar, I think it would be a nonissue.

> Basically, if you have anything like PTSD, you need an actual therapist not the collective hivemind of twitter (instagram these days?).

100%. Far far far more likely to get through it and overcome the trauma with a good professional guiding you through the process. Social media is just going to have you doing silly things like writing gr@pe or gr*pe as if somehow using a euphemism that you already map back to the original word is helping and it wasn't originally just trying to get around content filters.


This is why I generally prefer CW/Content warning; it is basically saying "this is what this contains", instead of putting any implications of it being triggering. So CW: suicide, for example, is just for anyone who doesn't really want to read about suicide at the moment, whether it's because they want a more upbeat story or somebody they knew just died

Programs were distributed on stacks of diskettes, towards the end of that era on CD-ROMs. There was no licence server to phone home to on the internet.

You bought Borland C++ compiler, installed it and used it - you were free to buy the next version when it came out or not.


There are plenty of programs where you can still do that, that gladly accept one time license payment.

However think on your own salary and how many copies you need to sell, at what price, per month, to receive the same monetary amount after taxes.

Add to it, the amount of new user acquisitions per month, to keep a sustainable salary level.


You’re right about that. But now put the users in the equation. If you’re making and marketing a B2B tool, it’s fine. But for a B2C tool, that tool will have to be so good that people will be willing to keep paying an ongoing subscription. That means that you’re now also competing against other cheaper alternatives (OSS) and people’s other life expenses (including other subscriptions).

It depends on the niche you’re targeting but I’d go as far as to say it might sometimes be better to sell 100 copies at once every now and then, than get 5-10 people who are willing to subscribe and might all cancel their subscriptions a few months later when some other subscription-based tool shows up. For most people it’s easier to justify a one-time $10 purchase than locking in a $10 monthly subscription.

But I agree that there’s no universal solution and it depends on what tool you’re making and in what niche.


It was hard enough to spell Français correctly.

> The [bitcoin] mining was co-located with my cannabis grow/operations

HN quote of the day!


So its true what they were saying about bitcoin. It is used by criminals.

I know this is culture-war stuff, but on the balance I think it's true that the FAA deprioritised applicants from the AT/CTI programmes, that is training courses speficically to become ATCs.

My main source is https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-fa..., and I'm assuming in particular that the screenshot of the letter in footnote 1 is genuine. In the section ended by footnote 16, there is a claim than in 2014 the FAA sent out just short of 3k job offer letters whereas in 2019 that had dropped to below 1k.

That sounds like cutting off your own recruitment pipeline.

It's also evidence that the FAA did not drop the standards for qualification and certification, which is reassuring.


There's an xkcd for that ;) https://xkcd.com/934/

big player + (standard) linux desktop may well be coming, but that means losing the semi-anarchist bazaar mentality. Will the standard be gnome or KDE or XFCE or ...? If gnome, version 2 or 3? Firefox or chrome as the default browser (or derivatives like waterfox or plain chromium ...)? AI integration?

The moment you're developing for people with no IT experience and no CS degree, you're going to have to make tradeoffs like Microsoft or Google or Apple have to make today, and somehow deal with the "curl ... |sh" problem.


Why does there need to be a standard application for everything? Is there a default pencil vendor? A default printer vendor? Paper? Car manufacturer? Taxi company? Just let people buy/get whatever vendor/application they like. I rather see more interoperational standards.

I guarantee you, in a large enough organisation, there will be exactly one approved pencil supplier. That's how corporate purchasing works.

There's a lot of cases where this actually makes sense for compliance, support, and service level agreements between your org and the vendor's among many other cases. It just gets annoying when you absolutely cannot buy coffee beans from shop B on the team consumables budget because we have an exclusive contract with shop A.

In a governmental organisation, you might even need a public bidding process for any supplier contract big enough to cover printers and their ink/toner, as well as a support contract if something breaks.


Yeah, and this is fine. This is basically what I meant, a company can just select and potentially make a contract for a specific application. That's how it works for everything. My point was that there doesn't need to be the unique single global vendor/application a priori.

> but that means losing the semi-anarchist bazaar mentality.

The places you mention are already receiving huge doses of industry funding funnelled through the Linux Foundation. Honestly, it looks like the standard is going to be KDE. Even microsoft is copying it for their next DE: https://www.webpronews.com/microsoft-windows-ripping-off-kde...


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