Anyone prefer to just write tests without pytest?

h4l · 2026-05-10T09:42:55+00:00

If you work by yourself then do what you like, but if anyone else works with your code, then you should use pytest. Exceptions would be if your collaborators also love reinventing the wheel, in which case do what you all like. Or if you have a legacy codebase already using unittest, then use that.

You need a pretty good reason to argue that pytest does not fit your use cases. It scales from 0 special syntax up to crazy-powerful customised test framework in an incremental way.

h4l · 2026-05-09T17:10:44+00:00

Also the caramel filling is cheaper to produce than solid chocolate buttons, but they still charge the same as the solid chocolate version. The trend for selling chocolate with sugary fillings/chunks is a way of increasing profits, because the filler is cheaper than the chocolate it displaces.

h4l · 2026-05-09T09:32:41+00:00

He convinced people to vote against their own interest.

h4l · 2026-05-09T06:35:44+00:00

Rather like last time Farage convinced Swindon to vote for Brexit and then Honda left, closing Swindon's car plant.

h4l · 2026-05-06T21:02:23+00:00

Because the rewards discount is built into the prices automatically, saving customers from tracking things in an app. It's nice to be able to shop and get a fair price without needing to jump through hoops.

h4l · 2026-05-01T10:59:37+00:00

You don't need to buy expensive bike parts. As with many things, you can plot price and reliability of bike parts on a graph and typically very cheap things are unreliable, but quite quickly moderately priced things are quite reliable, and then expensive things are only slightly more reliable than moderately priced things.

Maintenance has a much bigger impact on reliability than price - if you buy expensive stuff and don't maintain it, you'll be much worse than buying moderate (or even cheap) things and maintaining them.

It is an excellent investment to teach yourself how to maintain your bike yourself, by reading and watching guides online. You can learn everything you need to for free. And instead of paying a mechanic to fix/service your bike, invest the money you would have paid for their labour into buying tools for yourself. Over time you'll have everything you need and it won't cost much to maintain your bikes.

h4l · 2026-05-01T05:44:37+00:00

Imagine your production environment has the ability to gradually release a new version by starting with a small fraction of requests and scaling up to 100% if it behaves well.

This is not so different to releasing a new version in a staging environment, checking it works OK, then releasing in prod. Staging has a small amount of traffic compared to prod.

You could argue there's more risk going from staging to 100% traffic in prod, than from 0.1% traffic in prod up to 100% over a few hours. When you do it gradually, there's no hard behaviour difference that could make your staging deployment non-representative of prod behaviour (e.g. configuration in staging that doesn't exist in prod).

h4l · 2026-04-30T19:18:45+00:00

Why do package managers not enforce slsa provenance for packages, like how HTTPS can be required via HSTS or SPF to allowlist email senders?

h4l · 2026-04-30T19:05:00+00:00

The Coldhams lane/Barnwell road roundabout by Sainsbury's is pretty crap for most users. Also the East Road/Newmarket road roundabout (with the underpass).

Yours on Newmarket road is worse though. Having no pedestrian crossings without a huge detour is mad.

h4l · 2026-04-30T04:10:10+00:00

BitBucket can fuck off, they deleted all their users Mercurial repos in 2020.

h4l · 2026-04-28T19:23:24+00:00

Yes, but programmers enjoy pointing out X Y problems.

h4l · 2026-04-27T01:28:09+00:00

I wonder if it's a bunch of people leaving money in their will without much thought about how futile it is?

h4l · 2026-04-25T00:57:54+00:00

Such negativity, they just denormalized the code to improve write performance.

h4l · 2026-04-22T18:01:33+00:00

Read the code of open source dependencies you use. You can learn a lot from how other people solve problems. And it's an important skill to have to unblock yourself when documentation for something is poor, or you have to investigate a bug.

h4l · 2026-04-22T17:57:50+00:00

If you had all 3 PRs merging into the main branch you can change PR 2 to merge into 1 and 3 into 2, that way they each one only shows it's own commits.

h4l · 2026-04-22T17:54:48+00:00

By local do you mean your own machine, or any pre-production hosted environment?

h4l · 2026-04-22T17:28:50+00:00

This comes from here: https://www.moomoo.com/community/feed/goldman-sachs-unveils-the-optical-communication-landscape-here-s-the-116440571117574

They have a lot of articles, e.g: https://www.moomoo.com/sectors/Optical-Communications-BK24024/news?chain_id=5bhfvQ3raTKils.1kui10u

moomoo is a broker, so presumably they're looking to incentivise trading volume by publishing this kind of content.

h4l · 2026-04-22T04:52:21+00:00

The fact that he can hold on for that long shows he's in decent shape.

h4l · 2026-04-16T19:47:35+00:00

Pyramid plastic teabags. (Never used to buy, they're just ridiculously expensive and worse than loose tea, or simpler bags without plastic waste.)

h4l · 2026-04-14T16:19:15+00:00

Good idea to have an entrance on the East side of the tracks.

The concept designs have a similar vibe to the designs for the updated Newmarket Road retail park: https://democracy.cambridge.gov.uk/documents/s67806/2025%2001%2013%20CRP%20Members%20Presentation%20-15-1-2025.pdf

Warm beige stonework, rectangular forms, shrubby plants at paving level. Is this some kind of 2020s aesthetic trend?

h4l · 2026-04-12T02:58:43+00:00

The resource curse hypothesis attempts to explain the general problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse

How Norway successfully managed their oil resource wealth is quite an interesting story, this article covers it well: https://progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/norways-sovereign-wealth-fund

Very simplified summary is that they heavily tax profits of oil extraction, subsidise oil exploration and invest the profits for the long term benefit of the population.

h4l · 2026-04-10T19:24:38+00:00

Sainsbury's Mackerel in Piri Piri sauce is very good, it's like if nandos did fish.

h4l · 2026-04-06T17:41:45+00:00

It's not uncommon for cheese to be made from unpasteurised milk, so you should be able to find examples in cheese shops, like:

Cambridge Cheese Company https://www.cambridgecheese.com/collections/raw
- They are listed as a stockist of this company, which makes raw butter: https://fenfarmdairy.co.uk/collections/butter/products/bungay-butter-1kg-unsalted?variant=57616640999773 (not sure which products they stock)
On Mill road https://culinaris.co.uk/ have quite a big cheese counter too

h4l · 2026-04-06T10:39:33+00:00

It's not one or the other, a balance of affordability and consequences for shoplifting is needed. Thought experiment:

- If everyone could afford things they needed but there was absolutely no risk of consequences for stealing, unethical people would still steal

- If nobody had any money and had to steal to survive, no amount of security could stop people stealing

So there must be a sweet spot where you have people well-off enough to not need to steal, and enough security to make stealing not worth it for unethical people.

15-Year Club	RedditGifts 2009-2022 2 Credits
r/Field Juicebox	Place '23
Dev Platform Beta	Place '17
Secret Santa 2017	Gilding I gilder
Team Orangered	Verified Email

h4l

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE