I developed the habit to announce all changes in my service on Slack when deploying to production, even seemingly invisible ones, and that helps not to forget the tickets after writing the code. But team lead still finds some finished but unclosed ones on each backlog GC run.
I used to feel really bad about this until I learned a lot of other programmers do the same thing. Work hard and fast for a little while when you’re motivated, relax a lot when you’re not.
I was so productive I managed to finish the work inside of a day that I've been having trouble with the past two weeks. Maybe HN should have planned blackouts? :D
A while back I changed my search engine's crawl data to be ZSTD compressed JSON. It's a bit finnicky to work with, but I'm beginning to realize just how powerful this is.
and it spewed out samples of domains with a header like X-Adblock-Key. (I'm not great with JQ, so there's probably a better way of doing this, but this unga bunga approach works too)
Specifically, today I did some research on a few tags and headers supposedly associated with "Acceptable Ads" (a standard for showing ads through complicit adblockers), and ended up with a fairly reliable fingerprint for a network of domain squatters that have been a nuisance in my search engine database. Turns out they're basically the only ones that use the headers and tags I was looking at, so now I'm onto their IP-ranges as well.
I read half way through this free book by Sven Yrvind called “WITH FOUR SQUARE METERS OF SAIL AND ONE OAR” which is sort of a manifesto about building small boats and living simply. He’s a super interesting guy, I don’t even know how to sail and I was pretty glued to it. Not sure why I decided to latch on and go deep on the subject but you can find it here if you’re interested: https://www.yrvind.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/ex_lex_eng...
Yrvind is such a legend - he has had me on a micro-cruiser kick for quite a while now. He has a youtube channel that's worth checking out - he's a character that's fun to listen to as well.
Other interesting boat designers (this is sort of my obsession):
You might check out Matt Layden's designs for similar micro-cruisers.
A totally different but equally iconoclastic designer is Dave Zeiger, of TRILOBOATs. Those are great big liveaboard boats sailed up in Alaska, but they tend to be built on the cheap and breaking all the rules of traditional boat design.
The late Phil Bolger influenced Dave Zeiger, if you want to go even deeper. Well known for his "brick boats" and pioneering the "instant boat building" techniques that leverage plywood and epoxy.
There's also James Wharram, who pioneered Polynesian-style catamaran designs and making them at home, and is pretty much single-handedly responsible for the boom in catamaran designs we've seen over the last ~50+ years of yacht design.
Thanks a lot for compiling this list. There are a lot of interesting boat styles there. They kind of look funny but seem to be fully functional and some even quite comfy.
Pulled two solar panels off one of my arrays, because a few of them have hot junction boxes from bad connections. Replaced those with spares and got the array back fully online (one of them has been bypassed for arc fault warnings that, digging into the junction box, look legit).
Then I replaced all the fancy, spring loaded, "replace the back of the junction box for new functionality!" interface stuff with some vintage, 1980s style soldering and bypass diodes. Because I don't care about the optimizers on my well-sited array with no shading, and I don't need rapid shutdown for a ground mount array, etc.
And then proceeded to short the leads, put them in the sun, and ensure that the junction box guts didn't get hot, while observing just how brutal on panels doing this is - you really highlight the difference between cells thermally, when in "normal running," you don't see any differences in the array.
And now I'm writing all this up as a blog post. :)
I rode my motorcycle to the beach where I helped a little girl build sand castles and capture mole crabs in a bucket. Then we released the mole crabs and I rode back home to hackernews.
I smugly commented "Dang" on one of the status updates on twitter and spent time with my girlfriend. Now HN is up again and I spend time consuming meta-content regarding the outage (such as this thread).
Cleaned up my desk and started backing up my (recently passed) brother in law's Surface. It got an expanding battery and we're worried it'll break and we'll lose all of his logins and pictures and docs.
Jonathan Coulton started by writing one thing a week. Most of them were meh but there were some that were good. Turns out the important thing is perseverance.
once you have a good development for mechanical aspects you absolutely should record yourself and listen, so you can train your ears for the sound. your own ears will lie to you a lot, and the room/hall acoustics matter. the signal gear for amped instruments matters as well. if you want to play for people you have to train your ears so that you know what good sound, sounds like to most people.
Restarted my phone thinking something wrong with it. Then changed to Cloudflare DNS instead of PiHole thinking it maybe pihole issue. Because when does HN ever go down :D
I feel you: I recently migrated my network setup to a VM based solution and it has been a bit volatile the first week; especially while I tweaked it or learned some details. But it worked well for the last week, and all of a sudden HN doesn't work... Pihole? Ipv6 or ipv4? Random libvirt iptables? Opnsense unhappy? Thank God for isitdownorjustme!
Nothing in particular. I checked HN in the morning. Hmm, it's down. I went ahead to have breakfast, played a round of games, called up some hotel to resolve some reservation issue, checked up on the various ways of embedding 3D model in html, watched some short Youtudes I meant to catch up, and went out of the house. In the evening when I checked again, it's up!
I walked to the gas station, drank an iced coffee, ate a sandwich while listening to a book and enjoying the forest. Wrote a README for a project I've been working on the past week. Then I noticed HN was down :(
I had to resort to unabated onanism during the outage. I am now 30 pounds lighter and when I walk it sounds like two dried beans rattling round in an empty coffee can.
P.S. This is one of those comments where I debated 'should I or shouldn't I post it' so probably not a good idea to do so but meh, what the heck. Dan & co did a sterling job and it sounds like the CEO of M5 gained some useful insight so every cloud has a silver lining etc
I did my usual (probably excessive) amount of news/periodicals reading, but grew frustrated frequently that I couldn't post to HN to get comments/input from others. One notable example (during the first of yesterday's outages) was an NYT article [1] The Robot Guerrilla Campaign to Recreate the Elgin Marbles. This hadn't been submitted to HN at the time (as far as I could tell), but it's there now [2] - sadly, with no comments at the time of posting this.
Anyhow, the article referred to "3-D printing" to make copies of the marbles, but the writing was confused and to me it looked like automated carving, so I wanted to post it to see what others here thought. As it happens, having just checked the article again, the original copy has been amended to read "3-D machining" rather than "3-D printing" - but there's no correction notice to say that the article was changed. Mind you, the clue is still in the url: ... science/elgin-marbles-3d-print.html
Without HN, then, I read my stock sites as usual, but felt deeply that I missed the sanity-checks/informed input from HN commenters. It was lonely, in a way, and also made me fret about my missing issues with articles that usually others at HN would point out; different perspectives, questions about credibility or robustness of stats/data/methods of obtaining info on which articles might rely.
Install a uptime-kuma[1] at my home server... Then get a Telegram notification while hacker news is up again. Actually I self-host more service myself and it was use to monitor those services.
I went to the Art Institute of Chicago and was blown away by the collections there. I didn’t have nearly enough time to see everything, but I particularly enjoyed the Architecture and Design gallery. I would have had less time there if HN was up because I tried to check it before leaving.
Handed out a couple grams of nicotinic acid, explained the flush, taught some people how to surf, explained how wifi radar works, how to hack various devices, how to avoid getting a speeding ticket, explained how a chemical in 1 litre of grapefruit juice is enough to slow up the liver metabolism of some medication which can put you in an embarrassing potentially life threatening situation if one is a male who has taken 50mg of sildenafil and more...
I spent some time watching some stuff on YouTube, including Part 1 of a documentary about Oracle and how they changed the database world. I can't wait for the SQL...
I went and checked https://brutalist.report/ to see what the latest HN posts they had, read the headlines and then moved on. A few hours later I went to HN and they were back.
I wasn't worried about it, I figured dang and others were working on it and would have things back online.
I do depend on HN for taking a break from coding though and it was tough not getting my fix on demand :D
I go there on occasion. It's really sad to see how far it's fallen. It has all of the news stories that were posted elsewhere, just a day or so later. And none of the discussion. It's more like k5 right before it went blooey.
10ish years ago I scraped a sample of their posts and you could see a notable declining trend in volume that projected out to 0 in the 2020s. I'd be expecting them to shut down any year now.
I visited San Francisco in June 2013 and worked at an office for a month. I had a habit of browsing HN and Twitter during the working hours and from the work computer. I was also very productive. Always got things done. Days go by and I observe people working. I realized that many people would spend time on social media only when they were having lunch and were extremely productive the rest of the day. I thought to myself “If I am working then what these people are doing and if they are working then what is it that I am doing?”
I seriously questioned myself and made a decision. No more social media on the work computer and during the working hours. Ever since then I am only reading HN and Twitter when I am on my phone when I am on a break. I haven’t even realized HN was down.
Me and my partner walked the town in the sun, had ramen soup at the pier, checked out an art gallery then had some coffee. After coming home we opened up some nice german weissbiers and watched Brazil.
This morning the forecast was rain, and I expected the day to turn out much worse.
Started doing the Jetpack Compose tutorial(s) for like the 3rd time and thought: "Everything changes, but nothing changes. I am paid to stay atop this schizophrenic elephant of an industry." Then took another gulp of ItsGonnaBeBetterThisTime KoolAid.
We've implemented Compose in production for a few months now. It's actually been my favorite new thing.
Most of the new stuff increases the time it takes to get work done, but Compose appears to reduce it by half on simple tasks, and a lot more on complex tasks. There's also some stuff on View tech debt which isn't less apparent, but I think Compose is here to stay.
The official tutorials are quite bad though. Probably better to try building something, paying for a book, or just reverse engineering something off GitHub.
In some ways I like it already as well. Doing things in code instead of XML is nice. My real struggle is knowing what different citizens of the Android lineage are are "current".
Views and ViewGroups are kinda out. But ViewModels are still Good. I have no idea about Fragments and Activities and Intents. It's like every class in the system needs one of 3 badges: "Still a Club Member", "Stinky Poo Poo, DONT use this anymore", "Use if you have to, but we're hoping to make this go away some day, so keep your eyes out here."
I hear you. The badges actually exist, but they're not very useful.
Material Design is way up in the club member territory, but my gut feeling is they're not very committed to. On the other hand, they have @ExperimentalApi slapped all over things like Compose and Flow but those are probably here to stay.
Flutter seems like it's dangling close to the chopping board. I feel sorry for all the people who think that it's going to stay because Google.
I did a lot of work on the company I am bootstrapping.
I also read about the pcg random number generator, and a bit about the feuds between its inventor and a competing research group that invented the Xorshift random number generator.
I replaced the LCD assembly on a MacBook someone gave me with one I bought of eBay. Somehow I succeeded and I didn't even break any of the ribbon cables.
I prepared a spreadsheet of the approximate amount of karma I would’ve received had HN not been down and will be submitting a reimbursement request to dang.
Looked up alternative ways of castling in chess because I'm very bored of the standard kingside and queenside castling so, I was trying to find strategies using the old style of play like before the two-piece-one-move castling of today was formed. Right now it seems a lot of games I play online end up with the same openings. Chess 960 helps with that, but I don't like to play that all the time either.
There's a material analogous to permanent magnets for charge... called an Electret. They are one of the reasons N-95 masks work.
They also might shield gravity a bit. Now I need to get a 50kv DC power supply to make my own in bulk, and find out. I expect it to be interesting, but no new physics.
I cleaned my office and moved furniture while waiting for compiles to finish. Got the keyboard next to my desk now, hopefully this encourages me to practice more often.
Also cables are organized under my desk, never thought I'd see the day
Wondered how HN might best implement mandatory offline periods during the day. I’m thinking something like it’s offline for an hour every other hour so only a total of 12 hours uptime a day.
Don't be silly. I'd write an elaborate explanation why that's statistically likely for tech workers to be easily distracted by shiny things and how HN is triggers this, but I have to sneak out of bed now so I can setup uptime-kuma (which I just learned about). ;-)
Finished mastering my latest EP and uploading it for release on Monday. Also did a bit of compiler warning cleanup on multiple UNiXes for next release new code work.
I didn't realise it was down. It depends on for how long it was down. Gardening, cooking and eating dinner, getting the children ready for bed, watching TV.
Watched the latest Shut Up and Sit Down board game review video. Now I’m wondering if I should get the Air, Sea, and Land expansion and/or Space Station Phoenix.
Eh… Duolingo? Or other bite-sized language material. I personally like Beelinguapp. Its readings are small enough yet are quite fun to read for a beginner
I’d never heard of blind. I downloaded the app to try it out. Oh, they need my work email for verification? Hell no. I understand the rationale, but they do know that IT can see all my work emails, right?
They just use it to verify where you work. It's so people don't just falsely claim to be at Meta or whatever, but it doesn't keep people from lying about their workplace anyway. Enough people use Blind that HR/IT shouldn't care.
So they will not send an email to my work email box for me to click on a link for verification? Them sending an actual email to my email account is what I’m worried about.
It is like a giant watercooler for most tech companies out there... full of gossip and other silliness.
If you don't take it too seriously, it is a fun and entertaining place, also people keep it more real as people don't hold the punches. (due to anonymity).
Also it is a good place to know about tech interviewing in general, what to do, leveling, negotiation. It servers as a mini forum/guild for tech folks. It can be very helpful on that aspect.
It feels very fake and theatrical to me, almost like a wrestling ring. That makes it entertaining at times, but anonymity also means no accountability. I'm far more inclined to believe someone on HN who are at least willing to risk their reputation on a claim.
On Blind, you can go ahead and claim you make $600k salary working 4 days/week after 18 months of grueling interviews. Write up whatever fan fiction as long as it makes sense.
I checked news sources more directly from the websites i am personally familiar with instead of using the hacker news front page as a filter + expanded domain
They'll be so disappointed.