johnh-hn

There is a bug on the current openings page:

1. Click to open either the Department or Location dropdown

2. Click, and hold, with the intent to drag the scrollbar

Expected: I can scroll through the options.

Actual: It selects the item under the mouse cursor.

Browser: Latest Firefox.

I'm not sure I'd call it furniture, but are you maybe referring to the luggage?

I appreciate your insight, even if the workflow seems alien to me. I admit I like the idea of freeing myself from a desk though. If you don't mind me asking, how much does this all cost per month?

Edit: I see you've answered this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46839725 Thanks for being open about it.

Dapper is fantastic, and I'm happy to see it getting some love. It does exactly what I want: provides strongly-typed mapping and protects against SQL injection. It makes it easy to create domain-specific repositories without leaking anything.

In contrast, every company I've joined that used Entity Framework had enterprise products that ended up being a tightly coupled mess from IQueryable<T> being passed around like the world's favourite shotgun.

Ah, I was wondering about that. Flagging didn't seem like quite the right thing to do, but at the same time I don't see a reason to leave bots hanging around.

Thanks Gary, I'll use that next time.

This is a bot. It's even copied the typo from the top comment.

If the checkbox you're referring to is the "Use AI to suggest tabs and a name for tab groups" one, then I can't see what setting it changes. It's not the browser.ml.enable flag. I tried unchecking it, restarting the browser, and that flag was unaffected. This is in version 144.0.2.

Searching for "AI" shows one other setting: "Quickly access bookmarks, tabs from your phone, AI chatbots, and more without leaving your main view." But I'd already disabled that apparently. Despite that, there are plenty of flags that were enabled mentioned in the article.

In your address bar type: about:config

You can search for the configuration options mentioned in the article (e.g. browser.ml.enable) in there.

Just in case you never came across it, I think the second game is much better than the first one. Enjoy the nostalgia trip!

You nailed it. Well done!

I just came here to say the same thing. The raise and lower tools in particular reminded me of it.

For anyone who hasn't heard of it before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Populous_(video_game)

It reminds me of a quote from Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann. It goes something like, "For distributed systems, we're trying to create a reliable system out of a set of unreliable components." In a similar fashion, we're trying to get reliable results from an unreliable process (i.e. prompting LLMs to do what we ask).

The difficulties of working with distributed systems are well known but it took a lot of research to get there. The uncertain part is whether research will help overcome the issues of using LLMs, or whether we're really just gambling (in the literal sense) at scale.

Seconded. I went with C# + Playwright. I tried iTextSharp, iText, PDFSharp, and wkhtmltopdf, but they all had limitations. I had good results with Playwright in minutes, outside of tweaking the CSS like you mention.

I documented the process here[0] if anyone needs examples of the CSS and loading web fonts. Apologies for the article being long-winded – it was the first one I published.

[0] https://johnh.co/blog/creating-pdfs-from-html-using-csharp

I think this is only half of it.

Years ago, I worked at a company where my time was split between working on a bespoke platform for an older client and a generic platform that would be used for all clients going forward. The bespoke platform was essentially being used to fund the development of the generic platform.

The contrast between the two was stark: the bespoke platform was legacy in all its weird glory, and the generic platform was considerably higher quality. Seeing that contrast up close, and flipping between working on each one, was immensely useful to me. It made it clearer why I favour certain approaches over others, and it made concepts easier to explain to others.

Since then, I'm of the opinion you should aim to work with both the good and the bad to clarify the "why" of things.

Much appreciated! I'll give this a go and see how far I get.

Thank you for creating and open sourcing this. I have a question if I may.

If a person has the goal of getting into a field like computer vision or machine learning, would they be able to build useful things right away if they completed this book?

Thank you!

Sorry for the late reply. Thank you for the consideration and for your research too. I am actually largely fine with development as a whole. I've created many workarounds that make working about as comfortable as it can be.

My current problem is different: getting interviews at all.

> You're in the UK: take advantage of the various schemes that allow people with disabilities to get guaranteed first interviews.

I didn't know about this! For anyone else who might benefit, it looks like it's the Disability Confident Scheme: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/disability-confide...

Thank you so much.

If you think there is a better way, explore it and find out. I mean that sincerely. What is obvious to you isn't necessarily obvious to anyone else. You never know what may come of it.

I've had one idea in mind for a few years now. It's outside of my normal skill set so it's risky to pursue at the moment. But maybe I should start putting a little time into it even if it's just to help recharge my batteries somewhat.

It's not obvious what a better method would be.

Thank you for the thoughtful comment. It's funny you mention this, because I've wondered about something similar. But I'm not sold on computers being controlled primarily through voice while CEOs demand a return to the office. It would make an office too noisy which makes me think remote work would be a necessary precondition for it.

You're correct about becoming an independent developer though. This whole experience made me realise that needs to be my goal if the tech industry can toss me aside at a moment's notice. I need a job to do that safely though. It's too risky on its own.

Same wishes back to you too. I'm glad you found something.

This could've been written by me. I hope you're doing well.

This is my experience too. It didn't used to be this way. I always used to research a company, tailor my CV and add a cover letter. I'd be hired within 1-3 applications.

Now? It seems a waste of time because no one responds anyway. I'm incentivised to apply to as many as possible in the hope of having a conversation with someone.

I've been out of work coming up to six years. I had to look after my dad during the pandemic. I've been looking for work in London, UK, since January. During that time I've had a total of 2 interviews. Recruiters, who seem to do a keyword search only, message me from time-to-time on LinkedIn. I reply and they almost invariably never respond, presumably because they look more closely and see the large gap in employment.

What complicates things for me is being legally blind. I have enough vision to use a computer, but not much else and so I don't have the breadth of career options available to me that most people do. I need a way back in.

I keep reading, and I keep playing with code like I always have. I'm comfortable with C#, JavaScript and their respective ecosystems. It's like riding a bike. But convincing other people of that, recruiters especially, is proving to be a problem.

As for how I'm coping, I'm very up and down. It's hard not to feel that my career might be over. So when interviews have come up, I'm extremely nervous despite never having that problem in the past where I'd usually interview well.

Somehow, at least for now, I've kept going. Thanks for starting the thread.

I went to the .NET Developer Conference (NDC) in London at the beginning of the year. Mads Torgersen (Lead C# Designer, for anyone not in the know) gave a talk about some new proposed features. After describing a proposal to introduce new syntax to make defining extension methods easier, he asked if anyone had any questions. I asked a question along the lines of:

"I understand we sometimes need to address deficiencies in a language, but when we do stop? More syntax is leading to daily decision fatigue where it's difficult to justify one approach over another. I don't want C# to become C++."

It was interesting listening to the discussion that took over from that. The audience seemed in favour of what I said, and someone else in the audience proposed a rolling cut-off to deprecate older features after X years. It sounded very much like Mads had that discussion internally, but Microsoft weren't in favour. I understand why, but the increasing complexity of the language isn't going to help any of us long-term.

I try to avoid using them. If I can, I prefer to configure my environment to not need them, but that does take a fair amount of work. I get by because of my technical knowledge. I don't know how other people cope.

> Yeah, it probably has something to do with this. In X11 sessions, the display server does not typically handle scaling. Instead, the desktop environments provide scaling preferences to UI toolkits that then do the scaling themselves. In Wayland, the display server does handle scaling.

Presumably this leads to a more unified scaling experience. This was one thing I was concerned about before, as it didn't seem that way. That's a solid improvement on its own.

> Also possibly useful: if you like the KDE Plasma session, it has a built-in magnifier; just hold Ctrl+Meta and use the scroll wheel.

This is useful yes, along with the rest of your comments. Thanks for your help.