- Untit1ed parentYou certainly won't have to worry about them changing fonts as easily...
- Not exactly a database but the Australian government has a few available at https://www.yourhome.gov.au/house-designs
- I'm not sure whether it was due to changes in the algorithm, but at some point the logged-out front page that most people see became easily 50% outrage porn - a picture of a truck parking in two parking spaces, shaky video of someone being racist in public, most recently message conversations from horrible bosses.
When someone eventually makes an account and delves into the more niche subreddits, that's the culture that they're expecting and as more do it, it starts to change the culture of the niche subreddits as well.
Ironically the secret to reddit's success was that it was just left alone with very few changes for so long. The front page was already a dumpster fire at that stage, but a dumpster fire mostly contained to the top 20 subreddits. Now that it's more clever about pulling in posts from more niche subreddits that are doing well, or based on geolocation, it pulls people into the subreddits more which accelerates the Eternal September effect.
- I see a lot of people talking about reputational risk around this, but I'd be more worried about the legal implications. Most of us have contracts that grant IP of what we create to our employer at least during work hours - if you get caught doing this how do the IP implications unwind given that both your employers have the same rights to what you produced? Would it be legally equivalent to selling a bunch of IP that you never had the right to?
This whole phenomenon is just the pinnacle of the privilege that we enjoy as software developers. While warehouse or hospitality workers work two or three jobs to stay above the poverty line and have their every move tracked as they do, we choose to parlay our autonomy into occupying two well-paying jobs at the same time.
When our employers force us back into the office 5 days a week, it'll be the people who did this who made that happen.
- What's happened to NICTA and Data61 breaks my heart, but it's a lot of words to convey something pretty simple and well understood: Data61's strategy is to create cool-sounding press releases and photo-ops for ministers, and occasionally try to sneak in some actual science around the side. Trustworthy Systems got killed because a solid record of delivering incremental impact isn't going to get in the papers the same way that announcing millions of dollars for AI development (what exactly gets done within AI isn't particularly important).
To be fair I'm not sure what options D61 management actually have - they could focus on supporting solid programmes like TS but it'll only last a year or two before the government yanks their funding, because if D61 has nothing to put in the background of a ministerial announcement then its of no value to the government at all.
- I think the big difference is that Australia has managed to have zero cases for most of the last 18 months, which has allowed it to go on pretty much as normal for much of that time.
Although 170 cases is a lot less than 10,000 when you view it as a pure number, from an economic and lifestyle perspective the difference between 0 cases and 1 case is effectively more significant than 1 case and any number of cases greater than that - zero cases means that you can not only end restrictions, but also that people who normally wouldn't leave the house as long as there was any danger at all can go out and spend money without any fear of the virus.
So that's why there's so much emphasis on locking down even with only 170 cases - it's about trying to get back to zero ASAP.
There is an argument to be made for the fact that we'll have to live with covid eventually, but: 1. Vaccine numbers remain low 2. Given that people have seen lockdowns succeed in essentially ending covid before, and blame the government for both not locking down quickly enough in this outbreak and for the vaccination rollout, committing to living with covid now would be political suicide
- I wrote a blog post (https://blog.nichetester.com/the-assholes-guide-to-product-v...) and eventually made a web app (https://nichetester.com) to step people through a pretty similar process for new ideas.
- Yeah I find it really weird that he'd write this _now_, when most of the technology he's referencing is 5+ years old, and there hasn't been that much churn in the last few years. About 4 years ago I started learning React sarcastically wondering what the next thing I'd have to learn was would be, and four years later I'm... still using React, and it's still pretty cutting edge.
- I've had blog posts do well on Medium but sink like a stone on those platforms. It's a very different proposition submitting to medium and having it shown to people who are likely to be interested over a day, vs self-submitting to a site like HN or Reddit and watching it sink like a stone because the few people who are likely to be interested aren't looking at that particular moment.
Not to mention the fact that if you self-submit anything to those sites people tend to take it as an invitation to eviscerate you.
- Now is hit-and-miss for me. Works great for the most part but they seem more focused on moving fast than stability.
At one point they (without any warning that I could see) turned on a CDN for all my deployments that didn't take the host header into account... so suddenly all the various URLs leading to my landing page generator all returned a single customer's page. Annoying.
- We use this for https://search.data.gov.au and have just survived the easiest accessibility audit I think I've ever been through. It's nice using a set of components that make your UI _more_ accessible rather than less, which has been my usual experience in the past.
- This is important - techloaf (big fan here!) is obviously an outlier, but generally the bigger and more complex the product, the vaguer the landing pages get.
I always thought this was a shifty strategy to get you on the phone and have salespeople con you, but after reading _Mastering the Complex Sale_ I've come to realise that it makes sense - you want to understand a potential customer's needs before you actually try to pitch anything concrete at them.
- > If you're interested in kicking the tires and are comfortable with dev environments, then install the app via these terminal commands.
So is this actually an open-source project, or is the open source just intended as a preview, and it's expected that production workloads would always be in the SaaS version?
It looks great but I'm a bit confused by the intention.