Fishkins (u/Fishkins)

Fishkins commented on Pixel 10 Phones blog.google/products/pixe... · Posted by u/gotmedium

coldpie · 4 days ago

Eh, I've gotten over the headphone jack thing. I just buy a dozen adapters, stick one on each of my headphones, and replace them as they wear out every couple months. Good enough.

Fishkins · 4 days ago

It isn't nearly as big of an issue as the phone size, but it is still a nuisance. I know there's no chance of it ever coming back, but I'd like it to.

I still have a small amount of hope that someone will make a modern, well supported ~5" Android phone. But that's also feeling less likely.

Fishkins commented on Pixel 10 Phones blog.google/products/pixe... · Posted by u/gotmedium

coldpie · 4 days ago

I prefer Android. Unlike iPhone, the Android notifications system actually makes sense, and I can use real Firefox on Android. But, I prefer phones sized to fit in a human hand even more, so I'm stuck on an iPhone 13 Mini. Please make a ~4.5" screen Pixel phone, Google :(

Fishkins · 4 days ago

Yeah, the main news I want to hear is the release of smaller Pixel phone. Secondarily, I'd like the return of the 3.5mm port. I don't care about any of the stuff they actually announce.

I do currently use a Pixel, but I hate how big it is.

Fishkins commented on White House prepares order targeting banks for "unbanking" for political reasons reuters.com/sustainabilit... · Posted by u/ivewonyoung

hightrix · 18 days ago

I'm curious, how often throughout history has a statement like "that guy is an idiot" had an unnamed person been so easily and widely recognized.

We all know who you are talking about, just like everyone know what "guy" I'm talking about.

Fishkins · 17 days ago

I'd say a large part of the country had the same sentiment about George W Bush. I'm not sure whether that was true or just an act, though. In politics, I think the opposite of Hanlon's razor has often been applicable. It's easy to feign ignorance to avoid responsibility.

That being said, I believe there has been an increase in genuinely dumb people in American politics in the past ~15 years.

Fishkins commented on Google spoofed via DKIM replay attack: A technical breakdown easydmarc.com/blog/google... · Posted by u/frasermarlow

guluarte · a month ago

Is Google Sites used for legitimate purposes? I've only seen them used for spam and phishing.

Fishkins · a month ago

At one point the org I work for used it for internal documentation. They migrated off of it many years ago, though.

Fishkins commented on How to Get Foreign Keys Horribly Wrong hakibenita.com/django-for... · Posted by u/Bogdanp

aidos · a month ago

I’ve done a lot of interviewing and I’ve discovered that many devs (even experienced ones) don’t understand the difference between indexes and foreign keys.

My assumption is that people have used orms that automatically add the index for you when you create a relationship so they just conflate them all. Often they’ll say that a foreign key is needed to improve the performance and when you dig into it, their mental model is all wrong. The sense they have is that the other table gets some sort of relationship array structure to make lookups fast.

It’s an interesting phenomenon of the abstraction.

Don’t get me wrong, I love sqlalchemy and alembic but probably because I understand what’s happening underneath so I know the right way to hold it so things are efficient and migrations are safe.

Fishkins · a month ago

Huh, that's interesting. Mixing indexes and FKs is a major conceptual error.

FWIW, I've also asked everyone I've interviewed in the past decade about indexes and FKs. Most folks I've talked to seem to understand FKs. They're often fuzzier on the details of indexes, but I don't recall anyone conflating the two.

Fishkins commented on Breaking Git with a carriage return and cloning RCE dgl.cx/2025/07/git-clone-... · Posted by u/dgl

leipert · 2 months ago

https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/pull/229423 or brew install git --HEAD

Fishkins · 2 months ago

Thanks for making that PR! A regular `brew install git` installs 2.50.1 for me now.

Fishkins commented on The Zen of Quakerism (2016) friendsjournal.org/the-ze... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

wiseowise · 2 months ago

I always more of a Quake guy than Doom. Probably because I started with it first.

Fishkins · 2 months ago

Early on at my first full-time job I requested a week off to attend a Quaker conference. My manager approved the request without comment. After I returned from vacation he asked how the competition went. He'd never heard of Quakers and had genuinely assumed I was attending some Quake tournament.

Fishkins commented on Antiviral chewing gum to reduce influenza and herpes simplex virus transmission penntoday.upenn.edu/news/... · Posted by u/gnabgib

Henchman21 · 5 months ago

What are? Let me make a cynical guess:

1. Reducing costs by hiring fewer people.

2. Increasing profits by decreasing care.

Did I nail it or what?

Fishkins · 4 months ago

You're on the right track with money, but that's not exactly how I'd describe the goals. My impression is the primary goals are getting things coded and billed properly and thoroughly, and getting things documented in a way that minimizes legal liability.

Fishkins commented on Reasons Not to Refactor thoughtbot.com/blog/reaso... · Posted by u/chmaynard

einpoklum · 7 months ago

Peeves about the items in the linked post:

> 1. The change is not really a refactor

Is anything ever really just a refactor, though?

> 3. Another refactor is already in progress

Ah, but - in large and poorly-maintained codebase, it is always the case that some refactoring is already in progress, likely stalled for weeks, months or years as priorities have shifted without it having been completed.

> 4. The code is unlikely to change

If the code is unlikely to change, there's a good chance you might want to refactor it out of your repository anyway, into some low-frequency-of-changing library.

> There’s no benefit to improving code that never changes

Oh, there are lots of benefits to improving code that never changes! And that's because other code _uses_ the code which never changes. And if originally the use is clunky, but you manage to improve it by your refactor, youve' done well indeed.

> 5. There are no tests

A repository which lacks test coverage is extremely likely to be in dire need of all kinds of refactoring. Waiting until someone (maybe even yourtself) writes tests for most code, before doing anything in the mean time - well, it basically means giving up on yourself.

> we can start by writing some tests!

Well, that's nice, but - if we do that, then no refactoring would get done, and we'll have to write code based on ugly and unweildy older code, which only adds stuff to refactor later. Plus, who's to say the tests don't fail _already_? :-(

Fishkins · 7 months ago

> Ah, but - in large and poorly-maintained codebase, it is always the case that some refactoring is already in progress, likely stalled for weeks, months or years as priorities have shifted without it having been completed.

This is true, and something I also thought of when reading that point. I don't think it's necessarily a counterargument, though. It's probably a better idea to spend your time helping to complete the previous refactor instead of starting your new one. Codebases in which many refactorings are started but not completed can be worse than ones that aren't refactored at all.

There could be exceptions if your new changes is very small, localized, and unlikely to interfere with the other changes going on.