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alanbernstein commented on Stop using icons in data tables   medium.com/@codythistlewa... · Posted by u/ctward
alanbernstein · a day ago
Stop using email newsletter popups.

Stop using images that I can't zoom in to.

alanbernstein commented on Shifts in U.S. Social Media Use, 2020–2024: Decline, Fragmentation, Polarization (2025)   arxiv.org/abs/2510.25417... · Posted by u/vinnyglennon
zhivota · 2 days ago
It's honestly a good thing. People should have social outlets where things are forgotten, not memorialized for all eternity.
alanbernstein · 2 days ago
It's not really a good thing for technical discussion and support topics though. Information that others might hope to find by searching the web is no longer discoverable that way.
alanbernstein commented on The Codex app illustrates the shift left of IDEs and coding GUIs   benshoemaker.us/writing/c... · Posted by u/straydusk
csallen · 6 days ago
> Imagine taking a picture on autoshot mode and refusing to look at it. If the client doesn’t like it because it’s too bright, tweak the settings and shoot again, but never look at the output.

The output of code isn't just the code itself, it's the product. The code is a means to an end.

So the proper analogy isn't the photographer not looking at the photos, it's the photographer not looking at what's going on under the hood to produce the photos. Which, of course, is perfectly common and normal.

alanbernstein · 6 days ago
Right, it seems the appropriate analogy is the shift from analog-photograph-developers to digital camera photographers.
alanbernstein commented on The engineer who invented the Mars rover suspension in his garage [video]   youtube.com/watch?v=QKSPk... · Posted by u/UltraSane
intrasight · 12 days ago
If you are an engineer and you haven't watched this video please do yourself a favor and do so. I watch very little TV or YouTube, but I ended up taking off the afternoon after this video unexpectedly drew me in. It was impossible to not finish it - so if you do start watching it make sure you have two hours to spare. This is easily the best and most enjoyable thing that I've watched in the last several years!
alanbernstein · 8 days ago
I bumped this video to the top of my watchlist because of your comment, thanks for that. My takeaway is that the rocker-bogie is one of the best examples of an elegant passive solution I've ever seen.
alanbernstein commented on Airfoil (2024)   ciechanow.ski/airfoil/... · Posted by u/brk
alanbernstein · 13 days ago
I really like this pure-math way of looking at airfoil behavior: https://complex-analysis.com/content/joukowsky_airfoil.html
alanbernstein commented on OracleGPT: Thought Experiment on an AI Powered Executive   senteguard.com/blog/#post... · Posted by u/djwide
alanbernstein · 16 days ago
Considering things like Palantir, and the doge effort running through Musk, it seems inconceivable that this is not already the case.

I think I'm more curious about the possibility of using a special government LLM to implement direct democracy in a way that was previously impossible: collecting the preferences of 100M citizens, and synthesizing them into policy suggestions in a coherent way. I'm not necessarily optimistic about the idea, but it's a nice dream.

alanbernstein commented on Why Big Companies Keep Failing: The Stack Fallacy (2016)   techcrunch.com/2016/01/18... · Posted by u/bobbiechen
dmoy · a month ago
Hmm, but you don't eat a sandwich layer by layer like you do with a stack.
alanbernstein · a month ago
I think they're the same? both are built layer by layer but consumed in vertical chunks, right?
alanbernstein commented on Why Big Companies Keep Failing: The Stack Fallacy (2016)   techcrunch.com/2016/01/18... · Posted by u/bobbiechen
wrs · a month ago
I call it the “sandwich fallacy”.

A lot of good bakeries decide to start making sandwiches. It’s an obvious value-add and adds margin. But sandwich customers are different from bakery customers, a sandwich shop has a different layout from a bakery, and making a great sandwich is a very different skill set from making great bread. So it’s not easy to stay a successful bakery and add on a successful sandwich business.

On the other hand, a great sandwich shop can pretty easily hire a baker and set up an oven to make exactly the bread that it needs to elevate its sandwiches.

alanbernstein · a month ago
After all, what is a sandwich but a stack of food?
alanbernstein commented on Show HN: Terminal UI for AWS   github.com/huseyinbabal/t... · Posted by u/huseyinbabal
deepspace · a month ago
Not a dumb question at all. I grew up using actual green screen terminals, and the advent of high-resolution colour monitors and applications with dark text on a white background felt like a blessing. I truly do not understand the regression to dark mode. It's eyestrain hell for me.

Unfortunately, I was unable to test in my light-background terminal, since the application crashes on startup.

alanbernstein · a month ago
If I'm working in a dark room, then light mode is eye strain hell. With dark mode, the minimum brightness I can achieve is about 100x lower than with light mode.
alanbernstein commented on Flame Graphs vs Tree Maps vs Sunburst (2017)   brendangregg.com/blog/201... · Posted by u/gudzpoz
Espressosaurus · a month ago
It's not as straightforward to compare area as sorted length.

Look at the example in the link and try to make sense of it.

alanbernstein · a month ago
I do agree that both styles of treemap shown in the article are inadequate for various reasons, but I don't think that applies to treemaps as a whole.

u/alanbernstein

KarmaCake day3060April 1, 2016View Original