ryangittins

> The "Doorman fallacy" is an argument that replacing them is impossible because of all the other things they do.

Respectfully, it is not.

Whether or not we find a doorman worth the cost is a separate issue from the reduction of a job to one of its functions. The Doorman Fallacy fan be completely true and we can decide that they are not worth their cost. It's not the same question.

In practice, including a unit test for any nontrivial regex in your application is very helpful. You can demonstrate which sorts of strings are expected to match and, maybe more importantly, which ones are not expected to match. The same goes for testing the capture group contents.

It may feel silly to have a whole unit test for a one-line regex, but that one line can be really dense. If you wrote a function to parse the string without regex, that function would be complex enough to warrant a unit test, after all.

Introducing regressions when tweaking a regex in your application is also a big risk which unit tests can help mitigate.

> The rest is just shorthands.

If you really want to get technical: ., ?, and + are also shorthands. The formal definition of a regular expression is very minimal on purpose.

`.` is just `(a|b|c|...)` - List of all literal characters

`x?` is just `(x|)` - "x or empty string"

`x+` is just `xx*` - "x followed by zero or more x characters"

Whether this is exactly how they are implemented in any particular regex engine is an implementation detail, but formally there are very few operations which aren't just syntactic sugar.

> what can be done by an intercom

The Doorman Fallacy is exactly this—thinking that one function of a job is the whole job. The doorman doesn't just open doors nor relay messages. They're eyes and ears, security, friendliness, an extra hand with bags, local knowledge, emergency response... The list goes on and on. Almost none of their functions can be replaced with an intercom.

There's a Firefox extension called Old Reddit Redirect which automatically sends you to old Reddit. It works great!

Well said! After a few years of LLM sycophancy convincing laypeople they've managed to make progress on or fully crack famous math problems it's satisfying to see a world-class mathematician really put it through its paces. It's all the more impressive that Tao seems satisfied with the conversation.

As I recall there wasn't an abundance of notice of Pivotal Tracker's sunset, but I did kind of expect someone to come up with a more 1:1 open-source replacement with a one-step migration tool.

We looked at Linear and other options but ultimately ended up going with Shortcut. We wrote our own small migration script and moved over the old Pivotal IDs to keep as much historical context as we could. Shortcut's been a good tool overall, though I preferred Pivotal's Goldilocks level of compactness as far as the UI was concerned, as well as the general design.

Pivotal's API was tidy and integrated nicely into our development process. We have some git aliases such as `git start <branch>` where the branch name will end with a story ID by convention. The alias would do the work of creating the branch, setting the remote to the dev's fork of our repo, marking the story as started, and assigning the dev as the owner. It saved a lot of manual steps, so thank you for your involvement in the project which allowed such a nice workflow!

> Pivotal Labs

RIP Pivotal Tracker, and thank you for your involvement! It was a nice piece of software.

Interesting, I hadn't considered that! You're probably right.

Hah, wow. A post with an ID under 10k. Meanwhile this one is over 47M.

I didn't realize I've been reading HN nearly its whole existence. For all my complaining about what's happened to the internet since those days, HN has managed to stay high quality without compromising.

This is the coolest place! I'm so sad to see they're in financial distress.

As a kid I would browse their website endlessly, just fascinated by all the weird stuff. It scratched the same itch that watching Mythbusters would scratch. In adulthood I rediscovered them and went to their Milwaukee location for the first time. We spent hours there, looking through all the cool stuff they have. It really gives you ideas!

You and I are what Kurt Vonnegut called Bashers:

> Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done they’re done.

I always found this frustrating in high school, as some assignments required submission of a first draft, second draft, and final version of a paper. I always wrote the final version first and then worked backwards to created a second and then a first draft by removing sentences and generally making it worse.