> Quick quiz, hot shot: what did you think of the surgery team metaphor?
Interesting side discussion -- I have just started reading the book, but I did think that the idea of the surgical team was an interesting and radical departure from the standard "two-pizza team" pattern of a few developers that are considered roughly equivalent aside from minor leveling changes. My personal thoughts were that it would be hard to see success with the model unless you made sure all the roles were recognized as being equally important towards the success of the team.
Having learned multiple Devanagari languages at school (including both Sanskrit and Hindi), I don't recall being explicitly taught stroke order as such. There's an intuitive way to write most Devanagari characters that usually corresponds to the "preferred" order you mention, which is only apparent in serif Devanagari fonts anyway. But for example, I have no idea what the preferred order is for U+0918 घ, and never learned one as such.
Side note: since you mentioned ballpoint pens, (at least 10+ years ago, things might be different now) we weren't allowed to use a standard ballpoint pen/biro; fountain pens were preferred and micro-point ink or gel pens were allowed.
Here is an index of different theories that astrophysics departments have developed to explain these FRBs (Fast Radio Bursts): https://frbtheorycat.org/index.php/Main_Page. There are links to all of the corresponding papers as well.
> I can't imagine providing a feature-rich web application in Lambda without this kind of abstraction.
This reminded me of a caveat about using some of these abstractions – which is that they are still subject to the limits and restrictions of the underlying platform.
We discovered this the hard way once when an automatically generated function name or something was over the limit in prod (this issue [1] describes a similar problem). We did not catch this in dev because "dev" is one character under "prod" and our autogenerated name in dev hadn't put us over the limit. That was an interesting exercise in leaky abstractions.
forge and github-review (https://github.com/charignon/github-review) have given me a near-immersion experience for bitesized code reviews in Emacs. They even work together, via github-review-forge-pr-at-point!
The only thing stopping me from using this with larger diffs is the lack of a good way to show more of the surrounding context in github-review. Wonder if there is any interest in making github-review a first-class part of forge.
For what one person's opinion is worth, I quite like the look of old-style text-and-hyperlink websites, so long as there's something interesting to read on them.
Not a personal website, but the text and hyperlink homepage of Berkshire Hathaway is unique. Don't think you'll find another multi-billion dollar company homepage like this: https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/
I switched from Linux to OSX/MacOS around eight years ago, and the better and (to me) more intuitive modifier keys have been one of the features that have kept me there; along with the convenience of Emacs/Readline keybindings for text editing everywhere.
Getting keybindings to work the same way in Linux currently involves a Rube Goldberg setup of GTK3 key themes [1] and AutoKey [2] for me, and some things still don't work right (Super-W closing a single tab in Firefox/Chrome, etc.) Also, it looks like key themes are going away in GTK4 [3].
The Hawck daemon cited elsewhere in the conversation looks promising, maybe that'll work better.
It’s weird to me to use Super to close a tab rather than for the desktop environment. Super is very consistent on my DE of choice: it’s not for application specific keyboard shortcuts, but for keyboard shortcuts of the window manager. That way there are never any collisions and things are easy to remember.
If, in about:config, you set ui.key.accelKey to 91, then Super-W will close a single tab (and Super-T will open a single tab etc.). This obviously won't work in Chromium, though.
Nearly 10 years ago (wow, time flies), as a weedy undergraduate, I was fortunate enough to do a research project [1] under one of the scientists [2] who worked on this survey. It was pretty cool to just be able to submit arbitrary SQL queries and get nice CSV files back.
With my imperfect knowledge of astrophysics and hacked-up scripts, it was pretty intimidating to stand up and present my "interesting-but-will-probably-need-more-detailed-research" to a bunch of people with literally decades of experience in the field and have them take me seriously and ask questions.
I do other things now, but it's a pleasant surprise from the past to see this on here :)
What are some alternative sites that send you guests? I have used hotels.com sometimes (has dark patterns too, but fewer of them). I would definitely prefer using something that was more...sensible.
I would naïvely think that booking directly with hotels would be cheapest, but I have definitely seen deals on these aggregators that were unavailable on the same hotel's own site – which is the only reason I even think about using them.
Oh, don't get me started on hotels.com. It's seems to be quite common for hotels.com to sell you the room with breakfast (in countries where breakfast typically is included) but when you get the confirmation, there's no mention of any breakfast and the booking code is for a room without breakfast. So when you arrive at the hotel and they say: "Nope, breakfast is not included" you have nothing to prove that you booked with breakfast, in fact, to the hotel your reservation is the very definition of a no-breakfast reservation.
This happened to me and we had to run through a lot of hoops to eventually get hotels.com to reimburse us. It helped that we had called them for parts of our reservation because all calls are recorded and the operator clearly stated that breakfast was included.
The same thing happened to my father who was a bit more alert and noted the missing breakfast from the confirmation. He then had to call them something like five times for a confirmation that actually said breakfast was included. Each time they sent him a new reservation but it wasn't until the last call it did say breakfast was included.
The aggregators I looked into working with (5+ years ago) required that you offer rate parity. You had to guarantee that for a given room+date+conditions you would give the lowest price to them as you would anywhere else.
The way around it was to offer more flexibility for direct bookings or throw in breakfast.
Interesting side discussion -- I have just started reading the book, but I did think that the idea of the surgical team was an interesting and radical departure from the standard "two-pizza team" pattern of a few developers that are considered roughly equivalent aside from minor leveling changes. My personal thoughts were that it would be hard to see success with the model unless you made sure all the roles were recognized as being equally important towards the success of the team.
I had wondered about (and rour comment inspired me to look up) whether people have had any experience trying it out, https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/3552... has some interesting references and pitfalls of the approach.