Hacker News: wizofaus

New comment by wizofaus in "Google OAuth is broken (sort of)"

wizofaus — Fri, 22 Dec 2023 09:03:38 +0000

Turns out, once I got to read it on desktop machine, they weren't links at all but captions for images that weren't showing for me on mobile.

New comment by wizofaus in "Google OAuth is broken (sort of)"

wizofaus — Thu, 21 Dec 2023 18:24:33 +0000

Anyone else unable to access what I assume are supposed to links for the centred bits of text throughout that article? I had a hard time understanding parts of it...

New comment by wizofaus in "South Korea to see population plummet to 1970s levels, government says"

wizofaus — Sun, 17 Dec 2023 18:46:54 +0000

Pretty sure your maths is off - even if it did steadily fall by 20% every 20 years, it'd still have a population of 16 to 17 million in 100 years' time. So no, not especially dire.

New comment by wizofaus in "South Korea to see population plummet to 1970s levels, government says"

wizofaus — Sun, 17 Dec 2023 18:41:10 +0000

It was the period of the most rapid population growth globally. And the period during which antibiotics became widely available.

New comment by wizofaus in "Why do everyone's logo fonts look the same? (2020)"

wizofaus — Sun, 03 Dec 2023 19:56:09 +0000

I don't care for the use of terms that imply appreciating the fine arts is somehow on a "higher plane" and places those who do so above those who don't, but I do think it's worth acknowledging that it takes significant time and effort to develop such appreciation, and that the rewards are subsequently substantial. Personally I've invested significantly in the study and appreciation of Western classical music and I believe what I've gained from that could not be achieved simply by listening to top 40 hits on the radio - but I don't believe those who do only the latter are in anyway "lower" on any sort of ranking system, just that their brains are wired differently, and their cultural background etc. is such that it probably wouldn't make sense for them to make the same investment into music appreciation that I have. It's almost certainly true that they've invested considerably into appreciating other worthwhile aspects of life that I haven't - we can't do it all!

New comment by wizofaus in "How to ripen and store avocados"

wizofaus — Thu, 30 Nov 2023 18:48:38 +0000

Definitely not my experience - the flavour definitely deteriorates too, often becoming quite bitter.

New comment by wizofaus in "How to ripen and store avocados"

wizofaus — Thu, 30 Nov 2023 18:45:25 +0000

Commercial avocado dips seem to avoid turning brown - admittedly they're usually pretty tasteless but I'd be curious what stops the discoloration.

New comment by wizofaus in "World Appears on Track to Triple Renewable Power by 2030"

wizofaus — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 19:07:34 +0000

Yep, they're definitely still rising, despite a slight drop in 2020 (thanks, COVID). Not sure there's any point in talking about per-capita emissions. That US emissions have been falling since ~2007 (and China appears to be leveling off) is some reason for hope but the likes of India, Indonesia and other large developing nations are more than making up for the difference.

New comment by wizofaus in "Ask HN: are ChatGPT 4 results worsening since this weekend for you?"

wizofaus — Fri, 24 Nov 2023 21:36:24 +0000

I haven't upgraded to ChatGPT 4 yet, but given it can now supposedly do web searches (including searching github?) I've signed up for the wait list. Is it worth it, based on feedback here? I'm particularly interested in how it might be able to help me with source code found on github. Does anyone know how much of that source code is part of ChatGPT-3's training data? I asked about it about a few slightly esoteric classes/ids etc. but it didn't know about them.

The other thing I was hoping to do be able to do is process much larger inputs - e.g. ~20k of HTML I wanted it to simplify for me. Is that realistic?

New comment by wizofaus in "I skipped to the ending"

wizofaus — Fri, 10 Nov 2023 20:25:06 +0000

Well there's certainly a conceivable one, and it's one probably many would agree would be much nicer one to live in. But accepted, not a realistic one any time soon.

New comment by wizofaus in "Cursorless is alien magic from the future"

wizofaus — Fri, 10 Nov 2023 18:39:49 +0000

Curious, how did "received" end up with multiple spellings then?

New comment by wizofaus in "Don't disable buttons"

wizofaus — Wed, 08 Nov 2023 10:18:47 +0000

"almost always" - agreed, but the specific case where your application has clearly gone into a temporary mode where no user interaction is permitted (other than perhaps "cancel") I would think was the exception. But simply adding the disabled attribute to the existing input controls probably isn't the best way to do it if it's an issue with screenreaders etc. Though it's not clear why such tools couldn't deal with it in a better fashion.

I'd also say I'd have no issue with a button showing as disabled provided when you attempt to click it or hover over it, it tells you why it's not yet a permitted action. But again, might be an issue for accessibility etc.

New comment by wizofaus in "Optus cell and internet down across Australia"

wizofaus — Tue, 07 Nov 2023 22:32:17 +0000

How would that explain the voice/phone network being out? And you'd think packets would still be able to make it through the network even without DNS.

New comment by wizofaus in "Optus cell and internet down across Australia"

wizofaus — Tue, 07 Nov 2023 22:29:23 +0000

It baffles me how they can have one single point of failure for their entire national cellular + fibre voice & data network, and for it to take so long to fix.

New comment by wizofaus in "Who invented file extensions in file names?"

wizofaus — Thu, 02 Nov 2023 19:17:34 +0000

Isn't iOS still essentially the same way? It was one reason I stopped using iOS devices as I frequently wanted to open, for instance, pdf or image files from multiple apps.

New comment by wizofaus in "Rob Pike’s Rules of Programming (1989)"

wizofaus — Wed, 01 Nov 2023 18:54:16 +0000

Good managers for dev teams should have enough technical knowledge themselves and demand explanations from participating devs why a candidate is or isn't good enough to see through that though. Further personally as a tech lead I've always been keen to take on new devs that clearly are a cut above, as they usually mean an opportunity to work more effectively as a team. And I really don't want to spend even more of day doing reviews of mediocre code.

New comment by wizofaus in "Rob Pike’s Rules of Programming (1989)"

wizofaus — Wed, 01 Nov 2023 18:45:49 +0000

And yet some of the worst performance issues I've had to deal with were in code typically dealing will merely 100s of items, but using algorithms and slow network-based operations that caused everything to run sluggishly most of the time and not infrequently making the resulting user experience intolerable.

I do agree though that a lot of time is wasted on premature or even completely counterproductive optimisations for situations where the data being processed is too small to cause noticeable slowness in processing.

New comment by wizofaus in "Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education"

wizofaus — Wed, 01 Nov 2023 06:14:49 +0000

Oh I suspect it was quite common in much of Europe for fairly long periods too, when there very limited options for travel for vast majority of people, who were in fact farmers. Yes, the farms were small, but most of your energy went into tending those, and interactions with those even only a km or so away was possibly often only once a week. I don't think it's an environment most people would thrive in though.

New comment by wizofaus in "Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education"

wizofaus — Tue, 31 Oct 2023 19:25:50 +0000

Arguably any period of history where the majority of people lived as subsistence farmers and rarely interacted with others not part of the household was an anomaly though, and very different to how pre-agricultural societies lived.

New comment by wizofaus in "Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education"

wizofaus — Tue, 31 Oct 2023 19:21:19 +0000

I was curious to know what sort of studies had been done in that regard, I didn't notice anything mentioned by the article, though admittedly I only skimmed the 2nd half. FWIW I don't think I've ever met or known of anyone being home schooled in Australia, though I'm sure it must happen.