mileza (u/mileza) - Readit News

mileza commented on I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing daverupert.com/2023/01/sh... · Posted by u/stilldyl

Semaphor · 3 years ago

> "An elegant weapon for a more... civilized age."

One of the ideas people had back then was having a product catalog in XML that your tool would give you, and that you could upload to your website and display as a nice website via XSLT.

It was such a fascinating technology when I learned about it, but I’m not sure if it ever saw any serious use? Maybe in enterprise?

mileza · 3 years ago

I don't know if that's related to your question, but I've used XSLT templates with Apache FOP before to render PDF documents.

mileza commented on Taking over a Dead IoT Company blog.kchung.co/taking-ove... · Posted by u/pulisse

anigbrowl · 3 years ago

This was really interesting - a well deserved spot at the top of the front page. It's rare to see an article that combines the technical and business analysis so well.

It's amazing to me how quickly the company loaded itself up with staff. Being kinda familiar with ESP32 development, I thought at the beginning that the company would have 4-6 people - 1-2 technical, 1-2 production, 1 business/sales/marketing, 1 admin. It seems like they opted to target the luxury nostalgia market with the $600 price point rather than a more value-driven $300, and wrapped themselves in an aura of success rather than growing it naturally. The descriptions on the resumes of the former marketing staff juxtaposed with the business reality was...quite a contrast.

It's especially sad as the basic idea was good and seems sustainable at a lower price point - with a metal/plastic housing it might have been an easy sell to businesses near subway stations, for example, and developing cosmetically different versions for other large cities would be quite feasible. I wonder what made them take the 'growth corporation' approach rather than crowdfunding the prototype > product route, which was fairly well established even 5 years ago. That offers a fairly clear roadmap for new ventures and is sufficiently familiar to consumers that innovators can do some market segmentation and have a cushion of patience to get them though the design to manufacturing transition.

A great case study for anyone thinking about launching a product for fun or profit.

mileza · 3 years ago

I think the 600$ price point was inflated with the Pi and the Arduino being used. Simply changing some parts for cheaper ones would have allowed to reduce the BOM cost and thus reduce the price. The author mentions this in his post.

Also seemingly not a lot of people paid 600$ for the sign, with a lot going for a lot cheaper than that.

mileza commented on Lyrics in ogg/vorbis and MP3 files cweiske.de/tagebuch/embed... · Posted by u/severine

extheat · 4 years ago

Seems like a simple problem to solve as long as there’s support for arbitrary metadata in the file format. Just store the LRC data in as plaintext in one of those fields and call it a day. Of course without a proper written standard it’s going to be a hodgepodge of everyone inventing their own standard way of doing something catered to their use case. It’s an inevitable part of the software world.

If you absolutely need to pack the data into the audio file you can probably make a simple extractor program to read the audio file and extract the lyric data into a format that the player can read natively then feed it in to the player. Or patch the player software to support your format. The former is usually the easier option, of course.

mileza · 4 years ago

I think you're missing the forest for the trees. It's one thing to store the lyrics in the file, but the entire UX around the use of those lyrics is pratically non-existent.

Storing the text is the easy part. Procuring files with lyrics baked in or adding lyrics to your pre-existing library is another. And so far, almost no music player supports them, their UI isn't necessarily optimized for displaying lyrics, and there is no widespread standard for their format.

mileza commented on Explain the first 10 lines of Twitter's source code to me css-tricks.com/explain-th... · Posted by u/ohjeez

joshstrange · 4 years ago

I'm sorry but if a place I was interviewing for asked me this I'd end the interview and move on. This is about as useful as knowing how to write C boilerplate on paper from memory (something a college professor had us do for an exam), which is to say it's completely useless.

> The first line of every document’s source code is perfect for this interview because how much a candidate knows about the DOCTYPE declaration closely resembles how many years of experience they have.

This just screams "I have some esoteric knowledge and I'm going to lord it over you", sure I remember vaguely when the html doctype first came out but knowing what that does doesn't make me a better programmer. I write that line 1 time max in a project and then never think about it again. Why would you ever harp on that? Especially when most frameworks your are going to be using handle that all for you or it's in the default header block/index.html?

Talk to me about how I'd solve a problem or how I'd architect something but don't quiz me stuff I rarely need to know. Even PHP argument order (a near-useless skill) is more useful than this list. Give me 5 minutes on google and I'll tell you what every single one of the tags mean/do (the ones I might not know off the top of my head), that's a way more important skill then being able to spout off what they are from memory.

mileza · 4 years ago

> Note that since our technical discussion is a conversation. I don’t expect a perfect answer from anyone. If I hear some right keywords, I know that the candidate knows the concept, and I try to push them in the right direction.

You seemed to have missed the most important point in this interview. I agree with you that rote memorization is useless, but the goal here is to have a technical discussion on topics like mobile design, accessibility and SEO. And if you're not willing to have this kind of discussion you're doing the interviewer a favor by walking away.

You also don't need to know how to code those by heart, but you need to view at a glance what their use is if you ever need to diagnose an issue, even if it's generated by a framework, because a framework may not generate the proper code for you.

mileza commented on Explain the first 10 lines of Twitter's source code to me css-tricks.com/explain-th... · Posted by u/ohjeez

plandis · 4 years ago

I lead a team running very large scale distributed systems with almost a decade of experience and I could take a guess about what these elements and attributes mean but I don’t claim to fully know them.

I also believe I’m fully capable of googling the specification and understanding this in like 15-30 minutes, but by your definition I guess I’m a fizzbuzz failure.

mileza · 4 years ago

You missed the entire point of the article. The point is now to know whether you know those 10 lines by heart, it's whether you can have a discussion starting from just this.

Do you know why the document starts with a doctype declaration? What accessibility tags are and why they are important? What is OpenGraph and why SEO is important? What are CSS resets and why do we use them?

If you can take a guess you're already halfway there. If you can explain what you know about them you've aced it. It's not about knowing all of the meta tags or the OpenGraph attributes, it's whether you can have a discussion about mobile design, accessibility and SEO.

mileza commented on Thousands of Mazdas in the Seattle area are stuck on a single FM radio station kuow.org/stories/we-didn-... · Posted by u/walrus01

delusional · 4 years ago

Mazda already wised up and removed the touchscreen in their newer models, everything in the infotainment is operated by a little rotary/dpad-thing located near the gearshift. I think it's quite nice, input wise.

Software wise it's a complete mess. The software itself is actually pretty OK, the navigation is just very verbose and it's strange that I can't just update it myself. The startup is also quite annoying. It's an embedded computer in a car, it should be instant.

Android auto support is a trashfire. It occasionally (when i drive for more than an hour) crashes the entire infotainment system, forcing it to reboot (a 1 minute process). Thankfully it resumes from where it left off after the reboot.

mileza · 4 years ago

The touchscreen is still there on my 2020 model. but I always use the roulette to navigate. It's a bit akward at times but it's much better than taking my eyes off the road to try and line up my finger on the touchpad. It's disabled in Android Auto mode, and probably in CarPlay but I never used it.

I too had problems with Android Auto when using my old phone, it constantly crashed. When I switched to a Pixel 4a in 2020 I no longer had any issues. It works like a charm.

So I suspect it could be your phone, or something related (the cable, the type of USB plug, etc.).

mileza commented on Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web imlefthanded.com/2022/adb... · Posted by u/decrypt

MomoXenosaga · 4 years ago

Finding out if someone is running an ad blocker is not easy. After all a good ad blocker tries to be stealthy about it.

(anti ad blocker leads to anti anti ad blocker)

mileza · 4 years ago

There are plenty of websites that detect that I'm using an adblocker. It's mildly annoying, but then I get to decide if what I was about to read was worth it.

Most of the time it's journaldemontreal.com (and other Quebecor-related websites) that prevents me from reading their articles with my adblocker. Which is a blessing in a way, because it's basically a glorified tabloid with a lot of articles of dubious quality.

I'm on Firefox with both AdBlockPlus and uBlock Origin.

mileza commented on _Application.Run(Object, Object, Object, Object, Object, Object, Object, Object docs.microsoft.com/en-us/... · Posted by u/jamespwilliams

sevenproxies · 4 years ago

Another example is Java's java.util.Map.of. It's a convenient method to construct a map in a single statement.

https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/11/docs/api/java.base...

mileza · 4 years ago

This kind of function overload is present everywhere in the Java collection framework (and probably other libraries). It is a performance optimization (variadic arguments in Java require creating an array), and variadiac overloads also exist (Map.of needs a list of Map.Entry for type safety) for creating collections of any size.

https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/11/docs/api/java.base...

mileza commented on I Miss RSS wilcosky.com/d/20-i-miss-... · Posted by u/behnamoh

hnuser847 · 4 years ago

> At some point we need to stop trying defend the idea that capitalism is good for tech.

Why would a state-owned social media platform be any better? I can think of numerous ways in which it would be dramatically worse. And if given the choice, do you really think people would choose Fedbook over Facebook?

mileza · 4 years ago

Can you elaborate on your reasons why it would be a bad thing?

I think the argument for this is mainly that this would be funded by taxes, so it would not need to rely on advertisements and exhibit the predatory behaviours that Facebook and other social media do.

mileza commented on My Many Girlfriends thedailywtf.com/articles/... · Posted by u/BerislavLopac

Cthulhu_ · 4 years ago

I mean, naming machines is cute on the one hand, but on the other, once you scale up / out, who will remember that Neptune is from finance and the Pleiades is management? Like with microservices, it's probably better to name things for what they do or where they are instead of coming up with aliases, else you have to maintain a translation table.

When scaling up - hard- or software - it's better to be clear than clever.

mileza · 4 years ago

I've seen this multiple times, and there seems to be a pattern emerging.

At first, people name the machines after the software they install on it. Then, when you get to about 4-5 machines, you start finding a "cute" naming convention (Constellations, Star Trek ships, mythological figures). As long as there is only a handful of machines, it's easier to remember which machine does what.

Then, as you start to scale up, between a few tens to a hundred, finding names gets harder, so you switch to a more standard naming conventions. Something that communicates the physical/logical location and the organizational unit, as well as an index for duplicates / replicas / redundant machines.

So I think it's fine to be clever as long as it's manageable. The moment it's going to start getting out of hand you can switch to a more scalable approach.