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danhite

Re:Double Buffering with Cloudflare Queues on Saturday October 31, 2026 @04:40AM (#50314231)
> env.QUEUES[1 + hour % 2]

// results in index 1 or 2 as js has precedence for */% over +-

So something like the following, for your desired visual succinctness? ...

env.QUEUES[hour % 2 ^ 1]

// results in desired js index 0 or 1

I wonder if any of you using AI code assistance regularly might tell an old hack like me if your code review tools would have caught such a bug?

Re:Tiny Little Office on Thursday October 15, 2026 @01:36AM (#50099619)
FYI, I see the story behind this is given by the co-founder at:

https://aboard.com/introducing-tinylittleoffice-com/

It seems they had the idea originally 6 years ago and did versions of it, but

> We moved on, and sadly, those sites fell off the web, and the old links all broke.

Re:Example.com Just Launched the Biggest Redesign in Decades on Monday October 05, 2026 @11:57PM (#49973979)
So they made a prior tweak to reduce fetches of favicon.ico ( by link rel="icon" href="data:," ) but why do they still serve the overlarge meaningless html page to requests for robots.txt ?!

Given that they have gotten spiked by automated requests lately, aka agents, wouldn't this at least be respected by the big players?

Also, as they are using Cloudflare, wouldn't a discussion (or a note from IANA or CF) about how they configured CF request rejection and how one should love CF's flat rate static serving be appropriate?

Am I missing something?

Re:Yikes example.com has changed to run JavaScript on Monday October 05, 2026 @10:09PM (#49973342)
sorry!

BTW, it took me more than 11 minutes fighting HN's mysterious rejection criteria, in order to be able to say anything here.

Also someone recently posted this thread with lots of HN comments, in case you haven't seen it : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49971921

Lastly, when I posted 6 days ago re example . com the new html and js were over verbose garbage (machine made) and are now merely soso (disturbing to see churn even if I prefer the clean up). Pity I didn't archive the yucky one.

Yikes example.com has changed to run JavaScript

I used to trust that example.com was safe inert noscript so I am a bit shocked at this change not being pure CSSsee example.com/s.jsSorry, please note that HN does not allow me to link to example.com for your click convenience, Dang it!

( Read More... | 4 comments | on HN )
Re:Squeak/Smalltalk 6.1 Release Notes on Tuesday August 11, 2026 @06:15AM (#49255826)
or, if you're a stoned bird, perhaps bootstrap your modern skillz by ...

a session prompting Claude to quickly write all of:

  a forth style assembler for wasm 
  targeting a forth written in 6502 machine code (not assembly) 
  targeting a 6502 emulator/debugger written in Rust
  that Rust being compiled into a wasm browser project with 
  a typescript ui for display api support for all the nested contexts 
personally I've only ever done the forth-like in 6502 machine code task, but then I am old and useless (er, "retired") and wouldn't want to mislead youngsters onto my failed path
Re:Google Search Is Dying. What Comes Next Is Worse on Tuesday August 11, 2026 @05:47AM (#49255587)
> This should be "This should be 'You're thinking'." don't you think?

Reflexively, I think it should be more like ...

  javascript: `This should be "You're thinking".` ; 
  // to preserve the original character use and to avoid '...'...' parse foos
  // however `"...".` also possibly deserves a [sic] to critique the original 
  // i.e. ~grammar police say the period belongs within the quote marks, no?
... but then that's just me, in [my] quirks mode.
Re:The AI Apocalypse Is Here on Sunday August 09, 2026 @08:16AM (#49230722)
[delayed]
Re:Zed DeltaDB on Wednesday August 05, 2026 @06:43PM (#49190068)
also from ^ article on Lockheed Martin Corp space shuttle software group ...

  Importantly, the group avoids blaming people for errors. 
  The process assumes blame - and it's the process that is 
  analyzed to discover why and how an error got through. 

  At the same time, accountability is a team concept: 
  no one person is ever solely responsible for writing or 
  inspecting code. "You don't get punished for making errors," 
  says Marjorie Seiter, a senior member of the technical staff. 
  "If I make a mistake, and others reviewed my work, then I'm
  not alone. I'm not being blamed for this."
Re:What Rose Petals Teach Us about Induction on Friday July 24, 2026 @04:18AM (#49032656)
> The exercise didn't necessarily feel easy to deduce within the 20 minutes I tried,

I admire your breakdown, and I felt your pain.

My frustration was with opening a new tab for each sample because I was too lazy to transcribe rolls (for review) -- so once I'd opened and revisited about 16 tabs I got rather annoyed and just started rapid rolling looking for high values ...

After about 30 seconds of this pique I rolled a Yahtzee 55555 value 20 and went: Doh!

My takeaway is that using "induction" to illuminate Human ~vs LLM may be wrong framing when Eureka moments are possible.

Matrix Reloaded (2003) ...

  Neo: Hiya fellas.
  Agent 1: It’s him.
  Agent 2: The Anomaly.
  Agent 3: Do we proceed?
  Agent 2: Yes.
  Agent 3: He is still...
  Agent 1: ...only human.
  Neo: Hmm--*upgrades* [beats all three nonetheless]
Re:Advertise in ChatGPT on Tuesday July 21, 2026 @07:24PM (#48999736)
Apropos, from Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One (2018) ...

  The shareholders won't be happy.
Sorrento:

  It's not our job to make them happy. 
  It's our job to make them money, 
  but once we launch this little baby, they're gonna flip!

  We call this Pure O2. 
  This is the first of our planned upgrades. 
  Once we can roll back some of Halliday's ad restrictions, 
  we estimate we can sell up to 
  80% of an individual's visual field 
  before inducing seizures.
At least one human has functional tetrachromacy (ie 4 cones of retinal perception not 3) ...

The dimensionality of color vision in carriers of anomalous trichromacy (2010)

https://jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2191517

So I suppose we could look forward to genetic enhancement in order to perceive better display technologies

> I think the editor just liked the juxtaposition of "humanoid robots" and "human workers".

or perhaps we are far enough along this timeline that the AI editor preferred the distinction for the story title?

Re:Notes on Software Quality on Tuesday July 07, 2026 @07:07PM (#48825226)
> It is based on the premise of making work easier for workers. The objective is to thoroughly eliminate waste and shorten lead times to deliver vehicles to customers quickly, at a low cost, and with high quality.

^ = from your linked Toyota Production System philosophy

Thanks for that link! I find those two early sentences to be an insightful and relatively complete loop of process.

When considering using automation or ~A.I. we can easily ask: which part of this loop is our addition improving (or messing up)? Where is the balance that works?

As you point out, answering these what-works/quality questions are not solved problems and expertise is needful, but careful consideration does not seem to be a popular mode in our age of fountaining funny money and magic genies.

I grew up in the '60s where the science fiction/future was always: march of progress and you'll have so much time and choices! Now I am in the future and the reality is close to: who has the time?

More insidiously/invisibly: you have plenty of time for endless momentary thrills, but no one has time to make things better.

Once upon a time there were customer complaint departments and the Production System would get fixed. Then it became suggestion boxes and returns. Then pleading for a Return Merchandise Authorization. Then it's your call is valuable to us recordings before click call hangups. Oops, unhappy customer?--give 'em a coupon to keep up the addiction, it's cheaper than Quality Control.

The latest devolution seems like fire the workers but use AI to mesmerize customers, or just mind control ~investors and ~regulators, since who needs cover-our-costs-paying-customers anyway?

Will the pendulum swing back?

Re:Best Simple System for Now on Friday July 03, 2026 @05:52PM (#48780461)
The hover-text for the OP's linked xkcd cartoon is :

  I find that when someone's taking time to do something right in the present, 
  they're a perfectionist with no ability to prioritize, 
  whereas when someone took time to do something right in the past, 
  they're a master artisan of great foresight.
or, loosely reinterpreted: Don't make me wait for my donuts!

In OP's terminology, I would add that the left-path ascenders are playing king-of-the-hill as they know that (in our current business environment) they can be the one to roll down rocks from the top to both crush those latecomers attempting to overtake them, as well as cheaply flatten paths up for the consumer masses.

Those masses will pay this King for an easy ascent because, above all, the Hormuz spice must flow.

Who has time to make their own donuts?!

From this kind of P.O.V. the OP's middle and right paths are often just losing strategies whose appeal lies in their comfort & morality (i.e. a luxury of personal preference).

To be clear, I am not personally advocating for Capitalist Utilitarianism here, but I find it worthwhile to see our current turmoil from this higher viewpoint and perhaps relevant to some personal software development decisions.

The Moon is a harsh Mistress.

Re:What Is a Dickover? on Saturday May 30, 2026 @10:41PM (#48342567)
In case you actually mean you want DF website font-size increased, Gruber actually has a page for that as a site-wide setting ...

https://daringfireball.net/preferences/

R.I.P. Copyright

It seems to me that copyright doesn't exist anymore as a reasonable notion and effective right for an individual creator--A.I. being the final stake through the heart

Re:Be Weird – Doing the opposite is now a strategy on Friday May 15, 2026 @07:32PM (#48155287)
> What used to look professional now looks generic. What used to look weird now looks human.

> The signal you want to send isn’t “I spent effort on this,” because that signal is now cheap to fake. The signal you want to send is “a human actually wrote/made this.” That one currently costs almost nothing to send, because so few people are sending it.

or, in other words ... "when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro" -- From Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971) by Hunter S. Thompson

P.S. so, was this, elegantly composed, brilliantly thought provoking, comment sufficiently Weird enough?

or am i ai ?

> Good documentation includes background and decision information that cannot be derived from the code. It is hard to imagine any foreseeable software or robot that could collect this information from the people involved with a programming project—at the very least it must understand natural language, which is still the Holy Grail to the AI community.

Re-reading this short essay (after many years) got me to wondering if those of you using AI coding assistance tools are using them to both analyze and document existing code (i.e. non AI gen'd code but AI gen'd coments/doc for humans to read) or only transiently (e.g. for your own quick understanding or to help the AI whip up an API etc)

I also (humorously?) wonder if any of you have automated AI using the git ~blame/history to email the humans who wrote some code asking for their rationales (or perhaps complaining?)

Re:The Sociable Robot – Proto Magazine (2009) on Wednesday April 15, 2026 @04:32PM (#47784844)
> "People think they want to interact with a robot that totally mimics a human, but they really don’t," Simmons says.

There were those used to try hard, carefully yet hopefully, to learn how robots, computers and "artificial intelligence" might benefit or harm people, especially for those with special needs.

But now I think we're in a harms race.

[FYI, Proto was a magazine published by Harvard Medical School's teaching hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital, from 2005-2022.]

Re:Thoughts on Slowing the Fuck Down on Thursday March 26, 2026 @05:32AM (#47528340)
> Maybe nobody will read it. These comments are now many hours old and HN has a way of walking away once they have had their turn shouting into the void.

  All that is gold does not glitter,
  Not all those who wander are lost;
  The old that is strong does not wither,
  Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
Google's blog post promoting what their Stitch AI can do for you to rapidly design and make a UI by voice in realtime has this gem [1] :

> You can easily extract a design system from any URL

[1] https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/go...

Re:The “small web” is bigger than you might think on Tuesday March 17, 2026 @02:22AM (#47409286)
Kudos on your site effort and I immediately see your point.

In fact I took your topmost entry with no helpful site/update tags and dove in a little to try to understand why a RSS friendly blogger might not be passing along ~ tags for better reader discovery.

Turns out my scarce info test case blogger has a mastodon that immediately lists all these tags about himself [I've stripped it down] ...

#FrontEnd Developer #CSS #Halifax #London #Singapore Technical writer and rabbit-hole deep-diver Former Organiser for https://londonwebstandards.org & https://stateofthebrowser.com Interests: #Bushcraft #Outdoors #DnD #Fantasy #SciFi #HipHop #CSS #Eleventy #IndieWeb #OpenSource #OpenWeb

I conclude if he knew such site and post tags getting to RSS would be of use, he'd probably make the tiny effort to wire the descriptions.

Nonetheless I merely crawled links for a minute to found this info, so I imagine something like the free tier of the Cloudflare crawling api might suffice over time for a simplistic automated fix to hint decorate blog sites.

I mean, given that we're not trying to recreate pagerank, but just trying to tip the balance in favor of desirable initial discovery.

Re:The “small web” is bigger than you might think on Monday March 16, 2026 @05:07PM (#47404898)
Isn't this a simple compute opportunity? ...

> March 15 there were 1,251 updates [from feed of small websites ...] too active, to publish all the updates on a single page, even for just one day. Well, I could publish them, but nobody has time to read them all.

if the reader accumulates a small set of whitelist keywords, perhaps selected via optionally generating a tag cloud ui, then that est. 1,251 likely drops to ~ single page (most days)

if you wish to serve that as noscript it would suffice to partition in/visible content eg by <section class="keywords ..." and let the user apply css (or script by extension or bookmarklet/s) to reveal just their locally known interests

Re:XML Is a Cheap DSL on Sunday March 15, 2026 @02:05AM (#47384736)
While XML/XHTML aren't spec'ed/evolved to support your fun font sans attribute challenge, certainly modern html does ...

  <p>
  <style>
  @scope { font-family: "Arial" ; }
  </style>
  Prospero: Where in the world is my teapot? Hello? I'm waiting! 
  </p>
I know one could argue that that css rule property is essentially an attribute, but it illustrates, like XML plists[1], that one can define the tags arbitrarily to have their content be meta upon sibling/nested content, subsuming attributes' role.

To wit, it seems to me a style issue.

[1] Apple has long used XML plists for data ~ interchange or even archival storage such as .webarchive (ie just a plist flavor). Of course they soon added a simple binary version to compress out some redundancy and encoding waste.

They used an XML nested tag approach, not attributes. Maybe not well rounded pegs and holes but it has worked for them on a large scale over a long time.

Re:US orders 2,200 Marines to Middle East on Friday March 13, 2026 @08:53PM (#47372097)
Some things never change ...

"Send the Marines" -- satirical song lyrics by Tom Lehrer (1965) and in the public domain

https://tomlehrersongs.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/send-t...

Re:MacBook Neo on Wednesday March 11, 2026 @11:08PM (#47345922)
Rather than just looking at Apple's motivations as to address ~new customers, I'd like to point out Mr. Gruber surprised himself:

> I am in no way arguing that the MacBook Neo is an iPad killer, but it’s a splendid iPad alternative for people like me, who don’t draw with a Pencil, do type with a keyboard, and just want a small, simple, highly portable and highly capable computer to use around the house.

My wife and I prefer iPads around the house as she is a pencil centric artist and loosely speaking I prefer touch to keyboards. But his framing points out Apple is expansively addressing broad market work/school/home computing needs/preferences and thus also brings up a question I think is under discussed...

What is Apple's user experience roadmap for Apple TV mass market home computing? And for home computing in general?

We are overdue for a leap up there, where Apple, as with the Neo, exploits their ability to profitably deliver higher end hardware which enables features at prices below any comparable competition.

I know folks are fond of pointing to Apple struggling to deliver Siri/AI advances but I view that like their Apple Maps fiasco: an ongoing priority roadmap that they will keep working at until it is better than good enough.

I believe Apple will soon accelerate the power ramp up in Apple TV both because they could now ~ Neo that device into very $/performance competitive vs game consoles but also because they likely predict an ever increasing demand for home compute by consumers.

Not just speech i/o and AI conversation but also active realtime cheap private application of compute, such as personalizing your sports game feed, for example:

a) continually show me where the ball is by [dynamic method] b) rewind to when player X had the ball c) freeze there and show me what might have happened if they had passed to Y d) dress all the players in tutus e) change to my cooking show but warp me back to this game if someone scores f) etc etc etc.

Their 5+ year planning and commitment to the Apple Watch and Vision Pro show that they are ardent bettors on personal computing continuing to evolve very rapidly if they can concoct a profitable multi-year course from niche to ubiquitous. [not just for a product but for their synergistic products]

Remember they build elaborate fake homes as test centers, and not just to film product promos. I would be very surprised to learn their current 5 year outlook ignores robotics. Look around the edges of their public activities and imagine how what you notice might also fit together with something new but hidden.

They are ambitious. Very Ambitious. What's next?

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