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xena

https://xeiaso.net

Near 400 posts, writing about a lot of stuff. Here's some of my favorites over the years:

- https://xeiaso.net/blog/anything-message-queue - Anything can be a message queue if you use it wrongly enough

- https://xeiaso.net/blog/a-weapon-to-surpass-metal-gear - A weapon to surpass Metal Gear

- https://xeiaso.net/blog/%F0%9F%A5%BA - : the best sudo replacement

- https://xeiaso.net/blog/sleeping-the-technical-interview - Sleeping Through the Technical Interview

- https://xeiaso.net/blog/experimental-rilkef-2018-11-30 - I Put Words on this Webpage so You Have to Listen to Me Now

https://xeiaso.net/feeds to subscribe. Been considering an email list.

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Xe, thank you so much for your work. I love reading your blog, it’s calming and makes me laugh. I look up to you as someone who I would like to be in my professional life. Best wishes :)

Very thoughtful adblocker message. I disabled my uBO for your website :) thanks for the content!

Thanks! I recently just got a new lens for my camera after all of the income from last month came in. It's a very used 35mm lens for my D3300 and the autofocus is a bit broken, meaning that I'm forced to do the focus manually (which is something I want to get better at anyways).

So the ads don’t just pay for the debilitating server costs and the cost of your text editor? :winking Unicode emoji:

In all seriousness, I really enjoyed the sudo replacement post. It was fun to read

That combined with Patreon does! I'm likely going to spin up a small corporation so that I can funnel my side income through there and avoid having to go through the logistical nightmare of double income tax because of imperialist IRS policies. Sometimes I justify fun purchases that I could afford anyways (eg: very used camera lens or that Anbernic Win600 that I ended up liking for 2D games but couldn't hold comfortably enough to use the sticks) with ad/Patreon income. Sometimes it ends up on the blog anyways. Stay tuned!

Speaking of the ad-block message, perhaps it is worth adding who/what ethicalads.io is. I too un-blocked them on yours site, partially because their approach seems more justifiable than others I've run across. I wouldn't even mind un-blocking ads that are self-hosted by a site I like, but nobody does that any more. Anything that smells of surveillance capitalism can stay on my shit list though.

Ethical Ads (https://www.ethicalads.io/) looks interesting, wish there were more ad-tech companies like this. Would love one focused on the travel niche.

Loved the sleeping through the tech interview post you highlighted. Very amusing. Great writing style.

Thanks! I have been working on that style of writing some more. I have another story in that "universe" called Protos (https://xeiaso.net/blog/protos) that you may enjoy. I'm working on some more, but it's a very subtle kind of magick that you have to poke at from all angles simultaneously. It takes effort.

I'm sure I'll come up with something eventually, I might do one about spatial computing. That seems like it could be a fun topic for this kind of satire.

That post reminded me (and perhaps is a contemporary of) "Hexing the Coding Interview" by aphyr/Kyle Kingsbury.

Very intentionally. Those posts stand out to me as a brilliant level of technical writing that I want to reach some day.

Your blog gives me hope that personal quirky interesting places on the Internet are not dead

Here's hoping! I have also been bringing that energy to the work blog (eg: https://tailscale.dev/blog/headscale-funnel), and it's been working really well. I'm working on turning the user personas that we're tracking in DevRel into Socratic characters. It's a slow process, but writing is never fast consistently.

Never fast consistently or consistently never fast?

I find the latter.

It depends.

I second that. It's got so much personality.

I love your blog! One of the best websites I encountered

Thanks! I try. Hacker News isn't my primary target audience, but I've come to peace with the fact that I'm well-loved there. I could really do without the harassment from the less tolerant side of the userbase, but I figure that this is the price of success.

I really like your website/blog! It's one of my fav blogs out there that I'd wholeheartedly recommend to anyone. I also like the fact that the ads are not intrusive at all

Another long time reader chiming in to appreciate your great work.

https://xeiaso.net/blog/paranoid-nixos-aws-2021-08-11 is one of my personal favorites, as well as https://tailscale.dev/blog/headscale-funnel

Can you explain how sleepsort is constant time when it requires looping through n items?

The runtime is bounded by K, where all numbers you sort are less than K.

From an analysis perspective, I do not believe you can call an O(n) algorithm constant because you could run it on a computer with n cores.

From a practical perspective, I do not believe it is bounded by K, where all numbers you sort are less than K. Consider an array of one hundred trillion items, each being the number 1. This is bounded by the array length, not the number 1.

Realistically, I don't know what the complexity of that algorithm is or if it's possible to have one. Making the argument it is constant time is intended to be a bit of a joke at how difficult it is to give it a time complexity. My interpretation of it as constant time (temporal multiplicand multiplied by the largest value in the list) is going by wall clock time, which is arguably the time that matters in an interview.

Wanted to chime in, been a long time reader, it's great work.

...but you also dunk on hn folks on twitter *ducks* ;)

Only the bad takes. I've been meaning to make a podcast or something where I debunk bad orange site takes and explain why they are wrong.

God knows there’s enough material

An endless resource. If handled well, it could improve matters somewhat.

I think I might pay money for such a service.

I love your writing and website! Thank you!

You're welcome. I try. ^^

Nice seeing you on HN again. I really like your blog posts and I hope you'd post them here more often :)

I've found out that self-posting on hacker news gets you super deranked. If you really like the writing, please be the one that posts it here.

People are welcome to post their own stuff as long as it's part of a mix of unrelated/interesting submissions. What gets accounts "super deranked" is when they only post their own stuff or use HN primarily for promotion (this is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Your account hasn't been doing that at all, so you're fine, and certainly welcome to post your articles if you want to.

Edit: I sent you repost invites for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36211059 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35881175, both of which are great HN submissions. If you use them, the reposts will go in HN's second-chance pool, so they'll get a random placement on the front page. If you don't want to be bothered in this way, please say so and we won't do it again!

I link your blog around to my colleagues quite a bit, thanks for the interesting and informative articles!

Could you disclose how much you make through ethical ads?

It's just enough to be a headache tax-wise, but not enough to be a viable replacement for my dayjob. Something like $50-$200 USD per month. Slow months are less, months where I post bangers are more. Combined with Patreon (consistently $200 per month), it's enough to make all of my hosting costs covered. It's seriously incredible that I can have that much support for not a lot of work. I am also looking at further cost-optimizing things so that I can move my website to something like Fly. My server that my website is hosted on is like 55€ per month and the main reason it needs something that chonky is because Tokio performs better when there's more runner threads.

Otherwise I've also been considering pooling money for a bit and buying a proper server to drop into a datacentre near where I live. That could be fun!