Viewing profile — swombat

> like there's some kind of existential crisis occurring over there If you're running a Saas, especially a SaaS whose market is developers, and you're NOT having an existential cri…

Bitcoin's success is extremely easy to understand. Socially: Some people don't trust governments to handle one of the most powerful collaboration technologies ever invented (money)…

Feels like a misleading headline. The author created another templating language alternative to ERB, found that it was slower than ERB, then optimise it until it was roundabout as …

Seconding Omarchy. Not only I'm progressively migrating from my Mac onto an Omarchy linux setup... but I've even gone and beaten my Mac into behaving more like Omarchy (with Aerosp…

Not even that long, but I agree on the "underwhelming"... "Oh I found some niche issue that bothered me and wrote some code to fix it." -> HN Front Page

Granted, he did. At the same time, Asimov was well known to be a groper, and even wrote a satire book called "The sensuous dirty old man" which would probably have landed better as…

No, only if you have some kind of terrestrial TV set up or if you watch Live TV online via BBC's iPlayer or one of the major channels' live TV players.

I look forward to the updated book too (bought the Kamal 1 version!) :-) Thanks for writing it.

I've been working with RoR since back in 2008 (Rails 2.1 yay!). I'm still working with RoR. It's still an incredibly quick, powerful, flexible, versatile framework. I'm able to bui…

With love, please consider - the "shame" you're describing is really something else in a mask. Perhaps... a longing? Maybe this stranger has helped you find the place where you do …

Identification & Authorisation are a better pairing here than Authentication and Authorisation. This way, if someone says "Oh yeah we have an auth module on this site" you don't ne…

Similarly, AlphaGo and Stockfish are only able to simulate reasoning their way through a game of Go or a game of Chess. That simulated reasoning is enough to annihilate any human p…

The story gets way more deep and interesting as you progress. If you feel like giving it another shot, the remaster also makes it look super-pretty and improved the gameplay somewh…

The Last Of Us has been mentioned, and I'd also add a recent entry, Baldur's Gate 3.

Go look up "fair use" under copyright laws.

A saying that's stayed with me recently is: > You can only change the past. The future is unchangeable. Which is an interesting reversal of the usual perspective, I think. You can …

The Aztecs and Mayas built an empire of stone buildings, sure. And they were still proudly building their stone buildings in the 1500s, almost 7000 years after the pyramids. Lack o…

Oh yes, sorry, thank you, good correction!

> Because he cannot bear that "...Europeans just lucked into it. " His thesis is precisely that, so he can definitely bear it. Ultra-summarising: - The Americas fell behind because…

For anyone interested, I highly recommend George Carlin (not the comedian)'s podcast series (4 episodes iirc) about the Mongolian conquests. Really interesting. Also, on the "almos…

There's a lot of silliness in this comments section. I guess it's what the article is talking about.

Yes but, as Diamond argues, they didn't have large enough animals to domesticate because large american mammals that hadn't co-evolved with humans were exterminated in about 1000 y…

I read Diamond a long time ago but what he was contrasting was that the Chinese Empire was centralised and so when they decided not to expand, that applied to the whole empire, whi…

The Roberts explanation is subsumed by the Diamond explanation. More fragmentation meant more competition. This helped ensure that states which, like China, might have sub-optimal …

Our norms and values include that we treat sentient creatures that we deem inferior as if they had no moral value. So that's not very comforting tbh.