antigonemerlin

Counterpoint: part of how I learned from smarter people was to copy their habits, and part of their habits was to read good books with good practices.

Learning how to read non-fiction books, as I discovered, is actually a skill that needs to be learned, as my historian friends who wolf down thirty books in a week will tell you (the trick is to read only the parts you need instead of reading cover to cover, though I am still learning how to learn).

And counterpoint to counterpoint: While fields in the humanities are 'book-based', CS is mostly 'article-based'. And furthermore, on the bleeding edge, textbooks don't exist yet, documentation is shoddy, and sometimes you have to read the original source code.

Reminds me of "ye", pronounced and meaning "the", in English, because medieval printers imported from Germany didn't have that letter "Þ' and 'Y' was the closest substitute.

Trust only answers from domain experts.

I think it is unreasonable to expect that hackers are expert assyriologists, material scientists, or sociologists, despite what we may think about ourselves. Some of us are fortunate enough to know many things and master a few more disciplines. Few of us have mastered everything.

I know that I'm a glorified glue monkey. On all other subjects, I am ignorant, and rely on the opinions of others.

After leaving reddit, I'm trying not to relapse into karma farming and speculating about topics which I have no expertise in, which just about leaves my own personal anecdotes about growing up Canadian. That, and asking the beginner's question. That's probably for the best for the health of the forum at large.

It occurs to me that metaprogramming looks awfully familiar in JavaScript.

    function process_item(item, action)
    {
        item[action]();
    }

(Also similarly forgetting the guard statement).

Probably not great code, but still.

Since there are no classes in JS and everything is an object, you technically have complete control over such 'classes' and 'methods'. This is probably why people keep trying on turning JS into a different and saner language, or better yet, are using another language entirely like TS. Which is a shame, because it's kind of fun to dynamically generate new functions on the fly and having complete freedom to do anything you want.

The lathe is honestly one of the most underrated inventions of modern civilization.

Though I can't recall of the top of my head, there are certainly more than a few inventions which were simply not practical to build before the invention of the lathe because the tolerances were not good enough with traditional techniques.

For the past few decades, Americans, and especially college-educated professionals, have been sold a distorted view of politics that essentially amounts to watching sports.

Most of us have never seen a working example of democracy. We have just sort of tacitly accepted a kind of benevolent dictatorship in most institutions, from our workplace to open-source (and please correct me if I'm wrong here, I know that there is a kind of democracy in forking and collaboration, but as I understand it, voting democracy isn't really found anywhere.)

I was just watching Car 54 where are you? the other night, and in it, you can see the members of a fictional police union voting on absolutely everything, from union dues, to where to host the christmas dinner. People voted, made speeches, and ran for office, and all of this within like a tiny local. This kind of general participatory democracy seems as quaint as the black and white film it's played on.

My advice to you is to join something. There's a number of civics activists trying to push for some local issue, like transit, or housing, or raising funds for a local hospital; all else failing, you could always volunteer for your local party and get to know the candidate. It's a really good salve to that feeling of general powerlessness.

Then, instead of feeling powerless, you'll know you're mostly powerless, but at the very least, you won't be alone.

It's articles that these that remind me of how much we English-speakers are missing in the full breadth of human literature. For every Shakespeare, there is a Jára Cimrman, and for every Jára Cimrman, there is another who goes unnamed.

A company I used to work for used react to build the app, and Wix for the site.

In one sense, parts of the old internet hasn't died; dwarf fortress forums seem to be still going strong, as are other forums, if you know where to look, while new forums are springing up using different models.

On the other hand, sites like reddit made it so easy to start a community that interesting people who would've built a forum instead hitched their wagon to reddit, like AskHistorians.

Speaking as someone else, I go on reddit because there are occasional domain experts. It's 99% repetitive drivel (I myself am guilty of the same) and 1% person who actually knows what they're talking about.

That number is proportional to %experts/%non-experts, and is inversely correlated with the size of a subreddit (though the AskHistorians subreddit remains an excellent exception), and is the reason why the NonCredibleDefense is usually more credible than the CredibleDefense.

I personally drifted to hackernews from reddit as a general "reddit", but I find it's probably wise to take with a grain of salt the legal/maths/physics/economics/"anything not related to computer science" opinions of the people here. It's probably a good general rule of thumb to only take advice from experts in their domains.

I think at the end of the day, it's because the modern way of designing things is just easier for developers.

I remember when that started taking off; it was honestly kind of a godsend because one of the laziest way of doing things suddenly became associated with professionalism. On the other hand, it's getting pretty bland as a consumer now that every site is doing it.

Compared to images as buttons of the 2000s, something adjacent to material design seriously cuts down on the number of graphical assets necessary for develop anything. Even games seem to follow that trend: compare Crusader Kings 2 vs Crusader Kings 3, with image buttons vs a general UI toolkit in the two games.

Yes, but I miss ctrl-f in real life.