samdk

Most of that stuff isn't necessary just to replace Plex, the OP's saying them Jellyfin started them on a journey they're presumably enjoying, not that they needed everything there to replace it.

I think you're right the bar is still too high for most folks, although I will note that I think it's dramatically lower than it used to be. A lot of the tools are all-around way easier to deal with, tailscale makes a lot of "personal cloud" use-cases much more feasible, and then coding agents (I'm using claude code) dramatically reduce the labor costs of getting this stuff all working and fixing it when something goes wrong.

It's not that postgres can't handle large tables, it's more that many of the ways it uses system tables aren't particularly optimized for them being large, so you're operating outside the territory the table/query design was probably built for.

Like most things postgres it'll probably still work better than it has any right to for a while, but it'd be extremely unsurprising if it caused you unexpected problems at some point. (And if it does, they'll likely excitingly novel and you'll probably have to dig pretty deep to understand what's going on.)

The Little Schemer was what finally got me to internalize how to solve problems recursively. I'd taken a couple of college classes and could do it some already, but it took a lot more thought than solving those same problems in other ways.

About a third of the way through The Little Schemer, things just clicked, and what had been hard became pretty instantly easy.

Some of that was it building on existing knowledge, but I found the structure very helpful. The narrative is really just the glue around a well-designed series of incremental problems.

Postgres doesn't natively support multi-master. (Although there are a variety of open source/proprietary offerings that add support for it to various degrees.)

I think it's unfortunate the first/often only exposure people get to FP is a build-up-from-the-foundations approach that emphasizes recursion so much, I think it leaves most students with a poor understanding of why functional paradigms and practices are practical and useful.

I've written primarily in a functional language (OCaml) for a long time now, and it's very rare I write a recursive function. Definitely less than once a month.

In most domains, almost every high-level programming task involves operating on a collection. In the same way that you generally don't do that with a while loop in an imperative language, you generally don't do it with recursion in a functional one, because it's an overly-powerful and overly-clunky tool for the problem.

For me the real key to starting to be comfortable and productive working in a functional language was realizing that they do actually all have for-each loops all over the place: the "fold" function.

(Although actually it turns out you don't end up writing "fold"s all that often either, because most functional languages have lots of helper functions for common cases--map, filter, partition, etc. If you're solving a simpler problem, the simpler tool is more concise and easier to think about.)

This is very reminiscent of Charlie Stross' Halting State/Rule 34

This is not the same thing, but you might be interested in taking a look at the excellent online Terra Mystica implementation (https://terra.snellman.net/) if you haven't seen it already.

It's a web interface, but the underlying representation is text-based, and you can type in the commands directly if you want. This leads to some nice features--for example, you can plan your moves several steps ahead of time, and you get a game log for free.

There creator wrote a blog post about that particular design decision: https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2014-12-08-command-lan...

Thanks for writing this!

One nitpick: the guide says "If you're curious why it's important to not have a phone number on your account, see the security key FAQ", but the linked security FAQ doesn't actually appear to say why it's important.

I use it on my laptop and am generally very happy with it, although I don't do all that much technical work there and certainly wouldn't want it to replace my primary workstation. (I'd be dearly sad if I had to give up xmonad.)

But it's made my laptop a far more pleasant place to get work done if I need to do so, and generally works far better than I was expecting it would. I no longer feel compelled to run a VM on my laptop to get real work done.

You can have Goodreads do something like this, in the newsletters and other mail section you can check the 'send me the monthly new releases email', 'only send this to me if it includes an author I've read', and click the customize button and deselect all of the genres.

And then you end up with an email which has new releases by authors you've read before.

I generally have no use for most of what Goodreads does, but this combined with the ability to pull my Kindle purchases in automatically is pretty useful.

"Back-end web understanding" seems oddly specific compared to everything else on that list.

Why that and not something more general which might encompass other kinds of domain-specific knowledge? There are a lot of companies on your list which seem like they might care more about other skills that don't really fit anywhere else. (Experience working with databases for example, for one of the 7 or so database companies.)

I've had issues with chrome/xmonad not regaining focus properly that were fixed by adding the code mentioned in the 'usage' section of this page: http://xmonad.org/xmonad-docs/xmonad-contrib/XMonad-Hooks-Ew...

Not sure if that'll help you with your specific program, but it might.

Have you tried contacting the Gnome Accessibility folks? (https://wiki.gnome.org/Accessibility/)

It's not exactly on-topic for them, but I bet you'll find some people there with ideas/contacts.

Finding out you spend all day in meetings still tells you something, especially with a few follow-up questions. Who do you spend your time meeting with? What about? How many people are typically involved? How long do meetings last?

(That said, most of the people I've been interviewed by were devs, so this was not really ever an issue.)

    Note: after 25 minutes answering questions for a job you really
    want it’s kinda hard to shift to a question-asking mode.

When I was looking for a job I found that it helped enormously to write down a set of questions ahead of time.

Some I liked:

What does a typical day look like for you?

What projects do you work on?

How long have you been at $company? How has your role changed since then?

If I were hired for this role, what would my first day/week/month look like?

Is there anything about $company that some people really like, but others might dislike? (For example, having an open-plan office.)

What tools do you use on a regular basis?

I think you may be under-weighting the value of Python being a great exploratory tool a bit.

For the (relatively small) amount of research I've done, the bulk of the time spent working with code was spent exploring large-ish sets of data to see what results came up. Python is a very nice language for doing this, and also has a great ecosystem of tools and libraries for doing it.

I think it's also true that the benefits of FP and static typing are most pronounced on large codebases. If you're writing small specific bits of code you can mostly hold in your head all at once you don't gain nearly as much from a language like Haskell.

Which is not to say I wouldn't like to see more people using languages like Haskell (my primary programming language is OCaml now), but I think the bad habits people in scientific fields have around programming are a lot more of a detriment than the specific language they're using.

My initial reaction to this post was similar to many of the other commenters here. There's a real danger in making "negative" comments taboo.

But I don't think Nick's saying "don't make critical comments" here. This sentence encapsulates the idea quite well:

    But I fear emphasis has shifted from critically
    reflecting on and examining our own beliefs to simply 
    criticizing and pointing out errors in other people’s work.

If someone proposes an idea and you think it's terrible, it's worth taking a few minutes to think about whether you're wrong or misunderstanding or missing some part of the bigger picture. It's not about accepting ideas un-critically, but instead about examining your own ideas and beliefs just as critically as you're examining others.

I suspect it's just always been the case that many people are bad at this. It's just that the internet has democratized and scaled up the process of getting poorly thought out negative opinions about your work.

You're missing some big ones, I think. In the last few years protest movements have effected regime changes in Tunisia, Egypt, and Ukraine. Those transitions have been at all smooth, but it's hard to claim the protests in each of those cases weren't hugely influential.

The protests in Ferguson, MO are still playing out so it's hard to say what exactly the effects will be, but I suspect not nothing.

In Hong Kong protests in 2003 helped stop the passage of a security law restricting activity that the mainland Chinese government doesn't like (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_1_July_marches). More recently protests helped prevent a "moral education" bill from being passed here also.

In general I think it's a bit shortsighted to look at protest movements and think they're ineffective because many of them do not produce change. Protests are (generally) a way for people without a lot of political power to have their voices heard. They're going to fail a lot of the time, because protest movements start when people don't have other kinds of leverage or power.

Also, I think it's important to remember that at least part of the goal of a protest movement is getting attention. The Occupy Wall Street protests didn't directly change much, but they did create a national (and international) conversation about equality that didn't really exist before. It's a lot harder to evaluate that kind of indirect result, but I think it would be a mistake to discount it. (The OWS protests also spurred the creation of Occupy Central, one of the organizations that's leading these protests in Hong Kong.)

Board game designers will very often give permission for things like this so long as there's not an official money-generating version in existence, or at least ignore their existence.

I think the most visible case of this happening is the deck-building game Dominion, where the policy was that it was fine to have free versions so long as they didn't use the artwork and so long as they're taken down when there's an official app. (Which has now happened on some platforms and I think is expected to happen on others soon.)

I also suspect that Vassal is so niche that most designers/publishers don't really see it as taking away very much from paid apps, even if those do exist. The people playing on Vassal are generally the kind of people who buy a lot of board games.

Did you read the article? The entire thing is about a school that for years did things like have teachers change test answers after the fact in order to increase their overall test scores. That's what I mean by gaming statistics.

edit: clearly I should have chosen a different word. I think you're all focusing on one specific word I used, and not on the actual argument I'm making, which is that if your model of assessment depends on a single Big Important Number, people will find ways to make that number what they need it to be.