Does anybody remember Cocoon? It was an XSLT Web Framework that built upon Spring. It was pretty neat, you could do the stuff XSLT was great at with stylesheets that were mapped to HTTP routes, and it was very easy to extend it with custom functions and supporting Java code to do the stuff it wasn't really great at. Though I must say that as the XSLT stylesheets grew in complexity, they got *really* hard to understand, especially compared to something like a Jinja template.
Readit Newsjbaiter commented on XSLT – Native, zero-config build system for the Web github.com/pacocoursey/xs... · Posted by u/_kush
jbaiter commented on Airbnb is in midlife crisis mode wired.com/story/airbnb-is... · Posted by u/thomasjudge
There are even more search issues that sometimes make it unusable:
- Impossible to filter / search by rating, which is a must-have if I am going to travel, no way I am risking staying at a first-time host, a lot of horror stories from forgetting bedsheets to outright scams.
- There is no way to see the precise location, which is understandable for safety in some places (mostly listings in areas with "single-family" similar neighborhoods, like Orlando suburbs, you don't want to advertise your home as "available"). But, in some cities, for example, in Rio, a large radius can make you uncertain if the apartment listing is beachside or in the favela's entrance.
As somebody traveling with small children, what's even more frustrating is that AirBnB seems to have a tag "Well reviewed by families", but refuses to allow you to search for it. Which means using more indirect filters (like "has a baby bed") and clicking through dozens of listings to find one with that tag.
I get why they do it (looking at more listing is great for them), but I feel like they're wasting my time and it sucks, researching holidays is a frustrating timesink as it is, and they make it worse.
jbaiter commented on Jepsen: Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL 17.4 jepsen.io/analyses/amazon... · Posted by u/aphyr
A company I was at had an internal blog where anyone could write an article, and others could comment on it. Zero requirement to do so, and it in no way factored into your rating. I think it was the result of a hackathon one year.
Anyway, I really enjoyed it, because I like technical writing. I found that if I wrote a deeply technical post, I’d get very few likes and comments – in fact, I even had a Staff Eng tell me I should more narrowly target the audience (you could tag groups as an intended audience; they’d only see the notification if they went to the blog, so it wasn’t intrusive) because most of engineering had no idea what I was talking about.
Then, I made a post about Kubecost (disclaimer: this was in its very early days, long before being acquired by IBM; I have no idea how it performs now, and this should not dissuade you from trying it if you want to) and how in my tests with it, its recommendations were a poor fit, and would have resulted in either minimal savings, or caused container performance issues. The post was still fairly technical, examining CPU throttling, discussing cgroups, etc. but the key difference was memes. People LOVED it.
I later repeated this experiment with something even more technical; IIRC it involved writing some tiny Python external library in C and accessing it with ctypes, and comparing stack vs. heap allocations. Except, I also included memes. Same result, slightly lessened from the FinOps one, but still far more likes and comments than I would expect for something so dry and utterly inapplicable to most people’s day-to-day job.
Like you, I find this trend upsetting, but I also don’t know how else to avoid it if you’re trying to reach a broader audience. Jensen, of course, is not, and I applaud them for their rigorous approach and pure writing.
It's funny, because I remember the early days of Jepsen, and it relied heavily on memes (the whole name is based on "call me maybe"/carly rae jepsen) and aphyr wasn't (and still isn't) shy about his colorful real life personality :-)
See for example https://aphyr.com/posts/282-call-me-maybe-postgres, which makes heavy uses of memes.
jbaiter commented on Python’s new t-strings davepeck.org/2025/04/11/p... · Posted by u/tambourine_man
Will this allow neat SQL syntax like the following?
city = 'London'
min_age = 21
# Find all users in London who are 21 or older:
users = db.get(t'
SELECT * FROM users
WHERE city={city} AND age>{min_age}
')
This would be the nicest way to use SQL I have seen yet.
Thanks, I hate it. While it's nice syntactic sugar, the difference between an SQL injection vulnerability and a properly parametrized query is now a single letter that's easily missed
jbaiter commented on I maintain a 17 year old ThinkPad pilledtexts.com/why-i-use... · Posted by u/Fred34
I am daily driving ThinkPad T14s Gen3 AMD that I bought off Ebay a year ago. It was opened but new with warranty until 2026 and I only paid for 600 British pounds for it. It is not as repairable as their other models but it has a premium quality build, a modern CPU and full Linux compatibility. It is also the first generation of T14 when they returned 16:10 screens, this aspect ratio is a must for coding. ThinkPads are seriously underrated.
I have the same, and I'll probably use it until it's dead. I love the screen for the same reason you mention. It's a damn shame that they put the ugly reverse webcam notch on the newer ThinkPads, it ruins the complete look :-/
jbaiter commented on Ask HN: What is the best method for turning a scanned book as a PDF into text? · Posted by u/resource_waste
China is much more peaceful nation compared to US. So, yes, I'd prefer China leading AI research any day. They are interested in mutual trade and prosperity, they respect local laws and culture, all unlike US.
"They respect local laws and culture" - I think people from Xinyang probably have a very different perspective on that........
The domain (digital) might be less important than the role.
As a contributor, you have to be an expert, but you're really not on the hook.
As a decider, you can be a generalist, but you're on the hook.
The traditional mid-life transition is from contributor to decider, into management or starting your own company.
In my lifetime, the value of contributors has diminished while the value of deciders has exploded, largely due to the pace of change and the leverage of capital. Contributor skills get stale fast, but deciders making the right decision at the right time is a gold mine, waiting to be tapped by capital leveraging the latest tech/policy.
Also, I think people mature more as deciders. It grows confidence and effectiveness. Contributors grow to become defensive and stuck, i.e., dependent on being specifically useful.
It's tempting to look for nearby opportunities, but it may be more transformative to ask what kind of person you want to be in 10 years (and what will the world be like). If you operate from that perspective, you're leveraging world change and relatively immune to personal difficulty. People respect that, and you can be proud of making your way instead of just fitting in.
Becoming a principal rather than an agent is something (like meditation) that applies at all fractal scales of life, so you can re-orient while in current roles.
And don't worry too much about realistic. Focus more on delivering value, and the principle of least action will arrange things for you.
Thank you for writing this, I really needed to hear this perspective.
jbaiter commented on Luigi Mangione's account has been renamed on Stack Overflow substack.evancarroll.com/... · Posted by u/OsrsNeedsf2P
Any healthcare system must deny healthcare. No healthcare system existing anywhere on this planet provides infinite healthcare to everyone. Denying healthcare is not violence.
In any economic system, units of economic organizations must sometimes dissolve, and people must be laid off. This is unavoidable. Laying people off is not violence.
In any society, debts are expected to be paid off. If people could just stop paying their debts, nobody would make any loans anymore. Forcing people into bankruptcy is not violence.
Frankly, your comment strikes me as exceedingly naive. "I only want ever nice things to happen, and bad things happening to people are violence". I suggest thinking about why these things happen, what would be alternative, and so we put up with these.
> Any healthcare system must deny healthcare. No healthcare system existing anywhere on this planet provides infinite healthcare to everyone. Denying healthcare is not violence.
Nobody argues against that, but United Healthcare had a denial rate of more than 30%, which is the highest among the major health insurance companies in the US. Coupled with the fact that they make profits off of those denials, it's hard not to call this non physical violence with the aim to generate more capital for share holders and executives.
> In any economic system, units of economic organizations must sometimes dissolve, and people must be laid off. This is unavoidable. Laying people off is not violence.
Again, absolutely agree. But it can be argued that doing so without any regard for individuals, their history with the economic unit and personal circumstances, is non-physical violence. Look at e.g. European employment laws for how this can be mitigated (not without some drawbacks ofc).
> In any society, debts are expected to be paid off. If people could just stop paying their debts, nobody would make any loans anymore. Forcing people into bankruptcy is not violence.
In every just society, the debtor has a responsibility as well to not lend money to people who cannot afford it. Giving somebody a loan they cannot afford and then bankrupting them is definitely non-physical violence.
> I suggest thinking about why these things happen, what would be alternative, and so we put up with these.
You put up with these because the US is a violent society with little regards for individual lives. Great for entrepreneurs and people with access to capital, not so great for much of the rest.
The alternatives have of course their own share of problems, but don't act as if the system is the only reasonable one.
jbaiter commented on The Impact of Jungle Music in 90s Video Game Development pikuma.com/blog/jungle-mu... · Posted by u/atan2
This series of mixes by Lee Gamble is a great romp through jungle history, highly recommended:
https://soundcloud.com/leegamble/sets/jungle-as-particle-acc...