From earlier post (2018):
https://www.uber.com/en-CA/blog/keplergl/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17181879
Readit Newspeterb commented on Ask HN: How to get an accessibility tester job as a blind programmer? · Posted by u/blindprogrammer
With your skillset, I’d highly recommend starting your own consultancy. There’s likely an incredible demand for you can offer.
I’m also interested in connecting to see if there’s any opportunity with the projects that come my way. I’d love to keep in touch. Cheers!
+1. Accessibility is in huge demand right now and setting up a consultancy could be very interesting for you as you get to see issues and patterns across companies. Most, if not all, Fortune 500 companies are interested accessibility.
peterb commented on Write documentation first, then build reproof.app/blog/document... · Posted by u/maguay
A sufficiently detailed design document is essentially indistinguishable from code. How do you avoid the problems you encounter when writing code while writing the design document?
In my experience it is not one or the other. You can experiment first and then document, or vice versa. The point of documentation is "writing is thinking". The act of writing forces you to think through your ideas in ways that other modes of thinking do not. This is especially important when you are working on a team and need to share your ideas.
I agree that sufficiently detailed design documents are indispensable from code and should be avoided. However, clearly documenting the why, what and how of your work helps align everyone clearly. It also helps an individual clarify their ideas to themselves. It is hard to write clearly & succinctly. It takes time & practice, but I find it essential.
Hey, no need to lump Sgt. Pepper’s into this conversation!
The Beatles were obsessed with Pet Sounds. Sgt. Pepper was their response to it.
peterb commented on 37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home sciencedirect.com/science... · Posted by u/rustoo
I hate cube and half cubes or like at my current job before covid I had an office that I shared with 2 other people.
This. A big problem with office work is office cube design. I'm old enough to have had a closed door office in the 90s and it was the best. I also worked in large cubes which had moveable partitions as walls where you couldn't see your neighbours. They were also good, not great, but better than today's cubes. They even had large book shelves where you could keep your reference books!
At home, I can close my door and it is much superior for my personal productivity than an open office cube plan.
peterb commented on The Unreasonable Math of Type 1 Diabetes maori.geek.nz/the-unreaso... · Posted by u/grahar64
I'm a type 1 diabetic, and this was a helpful post at showing non diabetics why it is so. hard. Non diabetics typically think the difficult thing must be the shots and the finger pricks, right?
Not really. The majority of diabetics get used to those things quickly (of course there are some of course that deal with a major major needle phobia that can make it even harder). The hard part is that it never ends. Almost every moment of every day, your brain has a background process running that's evaluating every decision in context of your diabetes. There are no breaks. Your prefrontal cortex now has to take the place of a previously complex and automatic bodily process. It's the last thing you think about when you go to bed and it's the first thing you think about when you wake up. It's what you think about when you want to go on a walk, are about to enter a meeting, go into an interview, get on a plane, take a shower.
It's usually little things: "okay, where am I at now? which direction is it going? when did I last eat? do I have snacks ready? do I have enough insulin for the day? what if I start to go low during this meeting? should I pop some carbs and run high for this interview, so I don't risk a hypo partway through? why am I going low right now when I took the same dose I took yesterday for the same meal? why am I now skyrocketing for no discernible reason, I didn't even eat anything? shoot, I'm starting to hypo out of nowhere in the middle of this great conversation, which I now have to interrupt to eat a snack and recover for 15 minutes. I fell asleep with a perfect BG, but now I'm awake at 2AM half delirious because my BG fell all the way down to 50, and I'm in the kitchen shoving cookies down my throat because hypoglycemia activates a survival instinct to EAT EVERYTHING that's extremely hard to control, and I know that I'm gonna shoot all the way up to 250 shortly, which I'll have to treat with insulin, and I'm basically not going to get any sleep tonight".
And then the math often doesn't make any sense. There are so many factors that effect it. One day the same number of carbs + insulin may make you go high, and the next low, because of other environmental factors. (See the "42 factors that effect blood glucose" chart in the post.) You're constantly having to adjust.
I'm literally crying while writing this post, because it's so exhausting and it never ends.
This.
peterb commented on The Long Road to Today’s Cochlear Implant spectrum.ieee.org/cochlea... · Posted by u/sohkamyung
Great read. I'm a cochlear implant recipient. I live in Melbourne and had my operation at the Eye and Ear Hospital where Graeme Clark did his research, which I thought was pretty neat.
For unknown reasons my normal hearing deteriorated rapidly in my late 30s to the point where my right ear became "profoundly deaf". (My left ear only hears up to 1500 Hz or so.) I got the implant in my right ear in late 2015 and it was literally life changing.
With the combination of the implant and the residual low frequency hearing in my left ear, in most situations my hearing is almost normal. I can understand speech fine and appreciate music.
That is amazing, thank you for sharing. Given you had experienced sound before your hearing deteriorated, is it possible to describe the difference in sound with a cochlear implant? I always thought with the limited number of electrodes in an implant, the sound would be "buzzy" (less rich), but the brain is quite malleable and maybe adapts to the new sounds.
FWIW, the best intro to CUE I’ve found so far is:
https://bitfieldconsulting.com/golang/cuelang-exciting
…which does a nice job of starting from the problem, and building up from "how could we improve JSON for use as a config language" to arriving at CUE.
(Those types of explanations happen to resonate with me, including understanding the "why" first at least for me helps the mechanics and details later make more sense and feel more intuitive…)
I really enjoyed the article. Thank you for posting it.
peterb commented on MacBook Pro 14-inch and MacBook Pro 16-inch apple.com/macbook-pro-14-... · Posted by u/0xedb
Most import feature for me is that I want to be able to chat with local models, remote models on my other machines, and cloud models (OpenAI API compatible). Anything that makes it easier to switch between models or query them simultaneously is important.
Here's what I've learned so far:
* Msty - my current favorite. Can do true simultaneous requests to multiple models. Nice aesthetic. Sadly not open source. Have had some freezing issues on Linux.
* Jan.ai - Can't make requests to multiple models simultaneously
* LM Studio - Not open source. Doesn't support remote/cloud models (maybe there's a plugin?)
* GPT4All - Was getting weird JSON errors with openrouter models. Have to explicitly switch between models, even if you're trying to use them from different chats.
Still to try: Librechat, Open WebUI, AnythingLLM, koboldcpp.
Would love to hear any other suggestions.