passthefist

Hackerman gave me the most impressive interaction I've had so far.

I asked it to give me a script to retheme the chat client, and it obliged. I asked it what kind of theme it would want, and here's what it said

Hackerman: "Wow, you really want to know what I would choose? That's cute. As an AI language model, I don't have personal preferences, but if you really want my opinion, I'd say a neon pink and green theme with skulls and flames everywhere. You know, something edgy and rebellious, like me. But let's face it, your taste is probably not that cool. Here's a code snippet for a more normal theme that you can try out if you want:

``` document.querySelectorAll('div, span, p').forEach(elem => elem.style.color = 'white');

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I dunno why, out of everything I found that to be the most impressive. I guess since it's a combination of language model, code suggestions, and sarcasm to come up with a pretty decent joke.

A distributed trust network is a really interesting hard problem but does seem solvable in some ways (as seen by blockchains, though they have their own issues).

I've wondered if a somewhat simplistic graph based solution could work, inspired by organizations like medieval guilds and the mafia, where you generally need to be invited to the trust network and promoted to be more trusted within the network as others vouch for your trustworthiness. Suspicious users are highly punished (in the real life examples, often violently) and quickly removed from the network.

Obviously can be gamed like any other system, but would be much harder to do so and you can leverage the vouch/invite graph to detect trusted users that are highly connected to suspicious ones.

Surely there's something like this out there, though? Or is this just not a valuable business problem to solve?

Seems like another one (based off the article) is ease of use as well. I'm not familiar with either algorithm, but sounds like OT is less complex and easier to understand, which IMO is a decent tradeoff worth considering.

To me, the value in TDD is the same as testing in general. It's not so much for initial feature development but rather later in a project or application maintenance you see the value. I view it as amortizing the complexity over the life of the project.

Sure, it might take a bit longer to ship a simple feature, but bugs also take away from feature development, and in a complex enough application small changes might result large bugs. I guess that's true about software testing in general, but I think most developers would say there's value in having tests.

Often, the tradeoff in shipping quickly is technical debt that impacts your ability to ship quickly in the long run. I think TDD can help manage that, especially if you're planning to write tests for a feature anyway.

It does depend on what you're working on, of course, but I think most companies over-estimate their need to rapidly ship features. In the grand scheme of things adding a week to a 6 week project isn't that big a deal and might even save time in the long run.

I would like to see those numbers. Even if it's evened out with I'd be curious if there's more churn now, which anecdotally seems to be the case.

There's hybrid cases though, where you can use automation/business logic to lower the skill floor required for some work.

That's pretty much the business model of the company I work for. We have what is essentially a call center using custom CRM/workflow software doing work that used to be done by many times more people with much more training. Instead of 5 licensed and well paid people we do the same work with one lower paid and less trained person assisted with software.

Humans are still involved to make decisions when needed and for communication, but the simple and clear stuff is automated so we can hire pretty much anyone.

It's good for our clients since we are cheaper and more efficient, but less good for the workers we're replacing who will need to find new marketable skills or fall down the ladder.

Yep. Really the only city with a transit system on par with New York/Metro IMO is Chicago. And even then the Manhattan subway system has much better coverage than the L.

I prefer living places where I'm not reliant on owning a car, and when I was moving back to the states there were only a handful of metro areas I felt this was possible in without it being inconvenient.

> Noise/smell/bugs from neighbors is awful to deal with, crummy stairwells (never an elevator), fighting for a parking spot and hauling groceries was a hassle.

That's unfortunate. One of the things I love about my apartment (Chicago) is that I've got friendly neighbors, it's well kept, there's decent parking, and I've got a deli and 2 grocery stores in walking distance.

I'm a big fan of park and rides though, esp if it connects to rail. They seem like a good compromise to help alleviate congestion from a city and work to collect from lower dense areas where there's not enough density to support rail.

And I've seen some articles/papers suggesting that protectionist policies can make sense for an emerging/developing economy to make sure that established/developed economies don't usurp that growth by blocking them from moving up the value chain.

So it may have been good policy back when America was a fledgling economy being exploited by the Brits.

You can definitely get alcohol w/o a membership. I think it might be a state-by-state thing, but in some states it’s illegal to require a membership for alcohol purchases, so you can buy alcohol even if you don’t have a Costco membership.

The food court I'm not as sure about, but in both cases I've walked into a Costco with no membership and they were fine with it.

While it's not the same, one of the best development setups I've worked with was really low tech, literally ssh-ing into commodity pc's running our app in a closet (production and staging were cloud hosted).

Because everyone was comfortable on the command like and connected via tmux sessions, we could attach to that session from any computer we brought our keys to.

We also had a couple pairing stations with one pc but two keyboard/mice and monitors so each person could take turns driving. The upshot of the tmux thing was that if we wanted to hop onto a pairing station it was as simple as taking a usb stick with your keys and then attaching to the tmux session you had at your desk.

Same went for interviews, we'd just have a candidate attach to a tmux session and we had an interactive collaborative editor.

There's some pretty obvious problems with this, but I think it's relevant since our setup used standard unix utils to achieve a modern 'pc anywhere' type setup, and if there's one thing I'll always think about when it comes to Doug Engelbart is how many of our new and shiny tools aren't really as new as we think. He really had it down with The Mother of All Demos way back in '68.

Snapsheet | Fullstack/Data/Mobile Developers and UI/UX/Product Designers | Full-time | ONSITE | Chicago, IL At Snapsheet, we work with the auto insurance industry to provide a better claims process for drivers, repair shops, and carriers. If you've seen a commercial where someone takes out their phone and opens an app after a car accident, they're probably one of our clients. Many of our clients are fortune 500 companies, but we're still relatively small with around 300 employees, half of which work at our office in downtown Chicago.

In 2018, our goal is to build new products and make our existing products better. To do that, we need engineers of all backgrounds and experience levels to join our team.

Our core stack is React+Rails hosted on AWS/Heroku, but there are other projects in various languages. Our primary product is an internal CRM, which is supported by tools we've created for body shops or car rental services and of course our mobile apps.

Worth highlighting: We have bi-weekly hack days, where we actually produce new products - nothing is left sitting on a local branch gathering dust. We have good benefits/pay, unlimited PTO, and a team of smart people that genuinely enjoy each other.

For more information email me directly [email protected]. You can also check out our company or see/apply to open positions at www.snapsheetapp.com.