arooaroo

I put my phone’s brightness down to minimum at night. Nonetheless I use HN purposely as a dim light when the phone’s torch would be too bright and a beige glow does the job splendidly. (Typically, when I’m moving around the house late at night and everyone else is asleep - when pitch black the torch is too extreme.)

That said, given the amount of time I spend reading on the site I do wish there was a dark mode option.

Amen. This is an issue at the company I work at. Common typos when looking up has keys will return nil - this has a tendency to silently keep working and blow up with a runtime error further down the chain. I am trying to insist on using .fetch to force an exception.

When the company switches to 3.2 I will insist on everyone using the new Data class for value objects rather than hashes.

A couple of things jump out:

1. Dahl had already made changes to the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The early editions had African pygmies as his free labour. I don’t think the world was “woke” back then.

2. This is being done by a corporate publishing house in order to maximise the revenue of one of its key IP assets. It’s not mandated by government/regulation; there is no viral social media furore or press campaign. It’s not censorship nor anything like 1984 where works are being revised and all traces of the previous version cease to exist.

I’m on fibre. Last month I had a lot of video calls on zoom, Google Meet, MS Teams and even WebEx. Google was by far the most reliable and MS Teams was frequently a complete mess with participants unable to converse and merely an observer. And every person who set up a Teams meeting with me began with a preface about the miserable experiences they’ve been having with Teams of late.

I don’t use it myself so can’t really give a good review but my window into the world of long term users would suggest that saying you were cut off wouldn’t strike anyone else as unusual.

I immediately like this project for being “framework independent” rather than agnostic. It’s odd how computing has fashioned a completely different sense for “agnostic” despite perfectly adequate and well understood words already existing.

Manning also have a book on Lucene, the library that powers Solr and ElasticSearch. IIRC the book covered how Lucene actually works under-the-good and would therefore act as a good reference on the subject in general.

Anyone have recommendations on storing crypto outside of coinbase?

I’ve used them to buy a small amount and they make it pretty easy, but concerned that they are not necessarily the best place to store once acquired.

TIA

Keeping the temperature of the bedroom cold made a big difference for me.

I’ve been listening to audiobooks and podcasts for years and that helped better than not, but turning the radiator off and ensuring the bedroom was cold meant the vast majority of nights meant I went from listening at least an hour a night to often falling asleep within 15mins or less.

I had read Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker and I highly recommend it. Changed my attitude completely - it’s now higher priority.

This is bring back a lot of memories - in a former life I took care of digital products for dictionaries at Pearson Longman, and one of my favourite projects was developing a generic dictionaries platform for iOS apps, that allowed me to produce about eight dictionary apps published on the app store. All long gone now - no trace of them which is a shame.

The Longman brand was associated with English as a second language, so all our digital products came with audio pronunciations, plus a lot of photos/illustrations. In some products we also had a simple quiz engine to test comprehension. So a lot of data to cram into each app.

Like now, it seems that SQLite does a lot of heavy lifting. A lot of time was spent making a pipeline that could get lexicographic material in to a searchable database, plus the associated sound and image assets. I recall that the SQLite lib built-in to iOS wasn't good enough, so I had to compile my own build and bundle within each app.

The Longman dictionary data was really good. At the time a lot of the free dictionary apps were using WordNet (which isn't even a typical dictionary) because wikitionary wasn't where is it now. I bet there are more avenues to acquire decent, free, lexical resources.

And it’s not exactly a UX paradise if one is a premium customer either. I really find the UI hard work on desktop and mobile.

If and when Apple Music introduces a Duo equivalent tariff I will jump ship, for many reasons but a significant one is that I use Spotify exclusively for music yet it’s UI takes up a significant amount of premium space for podcasts. Apple had seen the light and spun off podcasts to a separate app from music.

Dart is also a Google conceived language but it’s not exactly what I’d call popular despite only hearing positive things about the language itself.

Unlike Swift or Kotlin that are heavily entwined with the main mobile platforms, nobody needs to use Golang for any particular reason. As far as I can tell its developer experience is pretty good so people have opted for it because it fits their needs.

I was a happy client of Maslins when I switched from sole trader to limited company. I was doing freelance software development so the switch was a doddle. You get a FreeAgent account as part of the deal and they have access to it to oversea your accounts. They will also do your personal self assessment for you too.

I’m sure they will be able to advise on your situation.