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I love learning more about the ampersand, for obvious reasons.

I've used this unixname for a long time and it's always immensely satisfying when people realize it's just my real name.


I would have used it! :)


&, the artist formerly known as Ƭ̵̬̊, who was once known as Prince and had been born as Prince Rogers Nelson. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician)#:~:text=In%2....


I really dislike this meme of pointing out that Google has deprecated a lot of projects. Do people actually expect Google to staff people & resources running every project they've released forever?

A more interesting comparison would be open source projects that Google has abandoned or failed to properly hand over control of to the community, especially if we're talking about Go.


It’s not clear to me that Go would survive Google giving up its continued investment.

Go has the fundamentals to survive - it’s open source, it has a healthy amount of contribution from non-google employees, the compiler is written in Go (that’s important when you consider an alternative situation like a python or js developer who wants to contribute a change to their compiler (they need to learn c / c++ respectively), i strongly suspect that if google walked away tomorrow, the velocity of change to the compiler, stdlib etc would not massively drop in the short term.

Medium / long term though… would i bet on Go over Java? It’s not clear to me that Go has reached the level of market penetration to make that a simple question.

Edit: i meant to add halo projects like docker, kube etc. as reasons to suggest the Go community is healthy


I think we have some models of what would happen to Go without Google, it's probably similar to what happened to Java under the weaker period of Oracle's stewardship.

The tool as-it-is keeps chugging along pretty well and even improving in small ways, but it stops reacting to larger trends and misses the boat at critical moments. Some new language in the same space comes up and finds it easy to shear off a massive portion of its user base by doing "the same thing, but modern".

(Less obvious models would be PHP to backend JS, and PHP and Python to Go, which had similar community development arcs.)


I agree.

It is true that Google has some poor product management and has some hilariously inept examples or product coherency (chat being the biggest disaster). But people praise startups for pivoting (read: killing a product) and (in general) demand innovation over glacial iteration. Trying new stuff necessarily means killing things that don't work (or paying a whole bunch of engineers to maintain a dead product for eternity).


>> But people praise startups for pivoting ...

Yes, but you discount the size of Google. Some of the things Google has killed have been large enough to have been considered successful products for a startup. They kill a "tiny" product because it's only large enough to be what some startup hopes to become. Google Reader is my favorite example of this. Multiple companies now exist in the soil on top of that grave.


You can totally implement A/B tests on top of a feature-flag framework. Your “pass” function should be hashed on the User ID/Cookie/whatever and then you can distribute users into pass/fail. You should do this anyway for reproducibility. If you log whether they passed/failed and then have metrics, you compute experimental results.


Er, I don't really think dine-and-dashing is quite the same as being treated to your meal because you are on a date.


Do you have any resources on how you learned to create such loaders? I hacked together a custom loading animation for some tools I've built just using images & css transforms, but would love to learn to make things even slicker.


Not quite, I've learned it by looking at MDN and some other samples. Maybe I'll write up a tutorial for others.


You may like Tomorrow, which has several sub-themes and is available for dozens of apps. I use Tomorrow Night Bright for everything.

https://github.com/chriskempson/tomorrow-theme


That definitely does feel a bit better to me. I'll need to check it out in a language I've been writing more recently. Thanks!


Requiring users to know what sites they want in advance somewhat defeats the purpose of a search engine, no?


Not at all. You only have to fail the first request. It is an approach I took with my own attempt at a search engine way back! In fact I know personally that there is at least one patent out there that suggests initial 1st time request users being asked to provide the appropriate response as an efficient way to teach systems for future users.

Obviously failing first requests isn't ideal but for popular requests it quickly becomes insignificant. Wikipedia might (if they don't already) want to make a similar suggestion for users to contribute when finding a low content/missing page.


> Obviously failing first requests isn't ideal but for popular requests it quickly becomes insignificant.

The first request can also be called asynchronously, and display a message to the user that it is 'processing....'.


More often than not I have an idea which site a result might be on when I issue a query:

If I search for a news event it's a news site.

If I search an error message, I know the result is going to likely be stackoverflow, github issues or the forum of the library.

etc.

I don't think this strategy will get you all the way there, but it could be combined with other ways of curating sites to crawl.


since sites are so desperate to be indexed, doesn't it seem better to put the onus on them to announce themselves? it would be great if dns registries publshed public keys .. maybe they do in newer schemes?


That works once your search engine is more widely used, but not a lot of sites are going to register with a niche search engines. Many users on the other hand really want a search engine like this and would be willing to invest some time.


Certificate Transparency (CT) Logs are this.



I'm aware of Hack, but I don't have full control over the stack, so having all these features included in core PHP would be the only way in my case.


> I'm not entirely sure why buzz around "developer learns basic knowledge" has this on the front page.

Because it's a well written, humble account of learning from a mistake then using it as an opportunity to teach others to help them avoid the same mistake.

If anyone leads a team, I hope they might learn from this approach, rather than just bashing on people and implying they don't deserve any attention because they made a mistake a more experienced developer might have dodged.


Personally I find it trite but whatever floats your boat.


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