I had to check what the gold standard McMaster-Carr does: their torque wrench drive size widget is sorted 1/4", 3/8", 1/2", 3/4", 1", 1 1/2". Glorious. https://www.mcmaster.com/products/torque-wrenches/
I'd expect nothing less from them. The right thing to do here is to implement a sorting key for different categories here. Since McMaster-Carr seems to be going to a category when you search, they seem to have better control over the available filters.
I've found that on a site like Amazon or Walmart that'll let you do a more freeform sort, the filter options becomes absolutely god awful.
Well done by McMaster-Carr. I assume they control their inventory a bit more than a marketplace like Home Depot, Walmart, or Amazon, so that's also an advantage.
The schemas for Amazon and Walmart's product information are absolutely bonkers and constantly missing features that they demand be provided.
Here's the XML Schema Definition for "Product" on Amazon [1]
This is joined on each of the linked category schemas included at the type, of which each has unique properties that ultimately drive the metadata on a particular listing for the SKU. Its wrought with inconsistency, duplicated fields, and oftentimes not up-to-date with required information.
Ultimately, this product catalog information gets provided to Amazon, Walmart, Target, and any other large 3rd party marketplace site as a feed file from a vendor to drive what product they can then list pricing and inventory against (through similar feeds).
You are right that the control McMaster-Carr has on their catalog is the strategic and technological advantage.
Very interesting how nearly half the list is (assumedly) every single chemical listed under California Prop 65. Do they really need to specify exactly which chemical it is? I've seen thousands of prop 65 warnings in my life but I've literally never seen it tell me what chemical its warning me about. I just commented to a friends a couple weeks ago i wished they'd tell me what so i could look it up myself!
McMaster-Carr's website is actually pretty impressive given how unassuming it is. It does a ton of pre-loading on hover and caching to make it feel like you're just navigating a static site. I didn't even realize that the page had a loading state until I enabled throttling from my network tab and immediately clicked on a link as soon as I hovered over it.
Mouser et al also do it right for mixed unit lists, eg. component dimensions are shown in their specified units but sorted as: 11mm, 12mm, 0.5in, 13mm, ...
No. You are likely and automatically extrapolating the attention to detail seen in the outcome into believing that it is a reflection of the attention , thought and method of their internal workings.
Which is a good indicator, but you can’t be sure of. Additionally you may imagine liking it but not enjoy it in life, even if true.
I think inertia and determinism play roles here. If you invest months in learning an established programming language, it's not likely to change much during that time, nor in the months (and years) that follow. Your hard-earned knowledge is durable and easy to keep up to date.
In the AI coding and tooling space everything seems to be constantly changing: which models, what workflows, what tools are in favor are all in flux. My hesitancy to dive in and regularly include AI tooling in my own programming workflow is largely about that. I'd rather wait until the dust has settled some.
totally fair. I do think a lot of the learnings remain relevant (stuff I learned back in April is still roughly what I do now), and I am increasingly seeing people share the same learnings; tips & tricks that work and whatnot (i.e. I think we’re getting to the dust settling about now? maybe a few more months? definitely uneven distribution)
also FWIW I think healthy skepticism is great; but developers outright denying this technology will be useful going forward are in for a rude awakening IMO
Yeah, exactly, like Ctrl+Alt+T opening Xterm in Ubuntu. If I am not mistaken, if you have a file explorer open it will automatically open terminal in that specific folder(i.e. kind of like `cd`ing there first)
Owning is only more expensive than renting if depreciation + interest + maintenance exceeds rent. And in most US cities, depreciation is negative in the long run.
Lots of advantages to owning and having a mortgage too: deduct mortgage interest from taxes, use equity as a line of credit, you can actually make substantial changes to your living space, and so on.
> you can define a function that only exists at runtime, so even in principle it wouldn’t be possible to type check that statically
Can you say more, maybe with with an example, about a function which can't be typed? Are you talking about generating bytecode at runtime, defining functions with lambda expressions, or something else?
You seem to be in agreement with the top-level poster, then. "Margin is inversely correlated with value to humanity" corresponds to "low margin is the good outcome", presuming that you see value to humanity as the good outcome.
Funny thing about this digression is that MLS is quite centralized, to an extent unparalleled in American major sports. Teams are all owned by MLS; "team owners" own shares of MLS with a license to operate their team; players sign contracts with MLS, not the team they play for. Revenue is shared and teams are allocated money to spend from that shared revenue by byzantine rules (look up "GAM" or "allocation money" in relation to MLS for more info).
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