floverfelt

That is not what I’m saying at all though? The article is literally a defense of the existing system which allows those that own valuable assets to keep them and price them accordingly.

The closing paragraph was more to point out that if you do want to encourage development of domains and prevent squatting and overcharging - regulation could be a way to achieve that. I’m not endorsing the view just commenting that that’s a way real estate deals with the problem.

Yeah fair point.

What's the alternative if not based on commercial activity? Lottery?

This post crops up enough and annoys me enough that I wrote a full response to it: https://floverfelt.org/posts/it-is-your-responsibility-to-re...

It's pretty sad that we've reached the point of spamming close friends just to get their attention, though I understand exactly what he's talking about. I just don't think it translates at all to a knowledge work setting.

Shameless plug, but I used mermaid.js to create a pom visualizer maven plugin [0] and it was honestly pretty great.

Like some of the other comments say (and after working with it quite a bit) it definitely has its warts. It's not super well documented, it's not as feature rich as I'd like, and the syntax can be a little wonky. All that said, it "just works" for creating simple visualizations and fit my use case near perfectly.

[0]: https://github.com/floverfelt/pom-visualizer-maven-plugin

Yeah that's a good point. The randomness is introduced by the opposing player and is not intrinsic to the game itself.

As opposed to Sudoku or something where there's only a single player and thus no room for randomness to be introduced at all or games where's it's intrinsic (poker, backgammon, etc.)

> cognitive science, linguistics, and anthropology.

Would love to hear your thoughts on this, esp. the linguistics and anthropology piece.

Yeah, I'm actually a pretty big fan of Java programming. It gets a lot of hate on HN for things that have been mostly solved or can be solved if you implement it a certain way.

Exactly, it would've made total sense to pull it out into an interface in other situations, but simply felt like a preference here.

I feel like the responses to this comment are somewhat proving the point around most things being preference. ;)

Yep exactly! I think if you broaden the concept of "authority" beyond literal authoritative sources it gets even more murky.

Are you appealing to the authority of speed? Compilation time? Readability? Functionality?

I dunno, and it often (especially around readability) comes down to the developer's/senior engineers preference.

Yeah it does. Software is basically a mental model and different people have different mental models of the world so we make up languages/practices/etc. that fit those models.

The point of the examples I gave (and a lot of browsing HackerNews) seems to suggest that 95% of the profession is not on board with our most basic practices around unit testing, version control, etc.

I did say that to be fair, I just omitted it from the post.

The question was more of a jumping off point for my thoughts on the practices vs. preferences question.

Yeah, I told him that, but by and large most developers don't work on those problems.

Right, but your definition of discernment is itself a preference for readability over conciseness. Another developer could say "if it works a month or a year later, then you're practicing a best practice."

Yup, I 100% agree. The point of the post wasn't to bemoan practices, more just that it's frustrating to be told repeatedly that a certain thing is a "best practice" when really it's just what the developer who wrote it preferred.

Software Engineers should just say "this is how we like to do things" and not pretend that there's a holy grail of correctness when really it's just what they like.

100% that's true! I'm not saying developers having preferences and everybody abiding by them is a bad thing, more just that a lot of what constitutes "best practices" are often preferences and we should call them that.

Agreed! I finished it recently and it did a good job explaining how to make the memory palace really work instead of just explaining the technique.

That's a good idea! I think the biggest issue right now is the regex. It's super naive and just matches against anything containing the word "secret" or "password" which like you said results in a lot of false positives.

Let me take a look at that repo...

Hey all, I created Gistsecrets.io and use it pretty regularly to alert people when they've checked in plaintext passwords on Gists.

All the app does is scrape the public Gists feed every few seconds and looks for the word "secret" or "password". It has a lot of false positives but I've found a few legit usernames/passwords checked in. It's a fun thing to browse at work when I have downtime.

If you don't know what a Gist is, you can read more about them here [1], they're essentially mini-git repos to quickly share code.

I'd love any feedback.

[1]: https://docs.github.com/en/github/writing-on-github/creating...

Since this is picking up some traction, I'm the author of this. Inspired by @pieterhg, this job board runs purely on PHP & Apache.

I built job board job board while job bored. Let me know if you have any questions.

Agreed. It seems silly to post jobs at my job board on jobboardjobboard.com when jobboardjobboardjobboard would suffice much better.