HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

1ark

357 karma · joined September 22, 2017

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/1ark; my proof: https://keybase.io/1ark/sigs/n3EehrsAFNZRlVLolP9_NwfBW14uCnMJRfdR5xjSPXw ]
submissionscomments
1ark··on What makes Git so hard to use?
I feel an engineer is incomplete without knowing their daily tools more than the basics. I find it frustrating to work with people who don't make the effort to learn git. Urging them to relax and take some time to read up or go through guides. They are fine spending time learning new languages or frameworks on their spare time, that they then want to bring into work. But spending a weekend reading some blogs about git or the short manuals is somehow tedious. Many times they can't write a proper commit message, and when they get a merge conflict they kick and scream, and you have to solve it for them. It's not that hard to go from a beginner to an intermediate user of git. And the trade-off can be quite significant with the confidence in managing around git. Learn from the CLI first, then jump onto tools that fit you (shout-out to magit!)
1ark··on THC can transfer to milk when hemp is fed to dairy cows
Looking forward to all the branded stoner milk, stoner butter, stoner yoghurts coming soon!
1ark··on FTX tapped into customer accounts to fund risky bets, setting up its downfall
[2] https://archive.ph/d6uzR
1ark··on ZLibrary domains have been seized by the United States Postal Inspection Service
4-5 Bay hard drive enclosure (with RAID)?
1ark··on Meta stock price drops more than 20%
LINE has non-intrusive ads in their app, among hundreds of other things, everyone in Japan uses it.
1ark··on Inside the Proton
They have not seen our legacy code base.
1ark··on We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online
It sounds like it could be the guards, inside the cities, of UO.
1ark··on Ask HN: Should I log errors, throw errors or both?
I found this[1] recent discussion very insightful.

1. How “let it fail” leads to simpler code. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32080903

1ark··on The Church of Interruption (2018)
I think you could ask for permission to interrupt. From what I can grasp of the example:

Get attention from the speaker, raising hand or whatever

- "Can I interrupt you for a second?"

- "Yes."

- "I think we all understand most of this... Does everyone understand?"

Look for confirmation from others

- "Could we skip to the next item/solving the problem?"

In the happy path your peers (some of them meeks) are glad someone interrupted the monologue. Of course outcomes will be different all the time. Same with tangents. "I think we have drifted a bit from the topic, or is there a point?" It's easy to get carried away. But being polite there should rarely be an issue.

1ark··on The Church of Interruption (2018)
Reminds me of Bill Watterson:

"I wish I had more friends, but people are such jerks. If you can just get most people to leave you alone, you’re doing good. If you can find even one person you really like, you’re lucky. And if that person can also stand you, you’re really lucky."

1ark··on Japan makes giant humanoid robot to help with construction tasks
Long hours in Japan just means they don't want to go home many times. Work can be pretty slow in office settings.
1ark··on Japan makes giant humanoid robot to help with construction tasks
GDP is a scam, measures nothing about productivity, quality, or innovation.

Here is a good article about Japan and GDP: https://mises.org/library/myth-japans-lost-decades

1ark··on The Merge
There are only a handful of cryptocurrencies that have the same properties as Bitcoin. While being first sure is a factor, that's at least not how Bitcoin maxis argue.

- Permissionless chain. Anyone can join by just downloading software and start mining. Tbf it has moved beyond this quite a bit with ASICs but you can still validate.

- Fair launch (just filtering all cryptocurrencies on this criteria will result in ~10 or so)

- Devs, anyone can make a PR or write BIPs.

- No foundation/community/devs that extract a fee from the operation of the chain. Communities and companies operate outside of the Bitcoin network. - Hard cap on 21m coins.

Most others compromise on some of these to use less energy, be faster, enrich themselves, or all.

1ark··on The Merge
Peercoin is hybrid PoS+PoW, but for other reasons. Their university pages are well written for most people to read.
1ark··on Twilio incident: What Signal users need to know
What's the issue with that?
1ark··on Twilio incident: What Signal users need to know
It's ridiculous this is down voted. Client is a fork of Signal on all platforms. The fix is made, use it.

Arguments are usually just "ad hominem" against blockchain.

1ark··on Twilio incident: What Signal users need to know
There is also Session (getsession.org) which is a fork of Signal without phone numbers or centralization.
1ark··on Ask HN: How to make a native GUI with a modern language?
Many answers here are not well researched. There is not much of a selection of options for your requirement. I also imagine you want the app to be accessible then because of the three platforms? The only option then is Qt with whatever binding to your "sane language".

Cross platform GUI toolkit is a very underdeveloped area.

1ark··on Cramming 'Papers, Please' onto Phones
Speaking as a game dev, I think you can learn it, but it takes time. I was interested since a kid to make games. And as a teenager programmed some for the web, and trying to learn C++ reading Quake2 source or whatever I could find, also bought some game dev books. Not much came out of it I thought. At around twenty, there were enough tutorials in Macromedia tools to sort of guide me toward something. Then I struck luck getting into game programming at a tech institute. Finally I could make something, it took more than a decade to get simple games on the screen for me. But I get easily distracted, procrastinate and lack enough IQ. Those books and formulas were hard for a mediocre teenager.

Parallel to all this I was interested in music too. Fooling around in ReBirth and Fruity Loops. Many years later got a guitar and tried to learn that, you get a lot of music theory from that. That theory is much easier than programming, still takes a lot of time.

Drawing I'm not really good at, but got an eye for what looks decent and can play with colors. On a computer it can almost be like cheating because you can be "inspired" by others. But books and tutorials on art exists too of course, how far that rabbit hole do you want to go? And 3D is a bit of a mix between tech and art, you could draw a cute character on paper front and side with a pencil. And when you model, texture, rig and animate that; it can be really impressive.

What I am trying to say, it looks like genius but it is a lot of work over a period. But it is creative/craft work, and not boring. And you can learn the basics of all the areas and make something great. When making apps, all those areas of you are unused. No music, no art. At best some graphic design (UI).

If you want to really put it in a compressed environment where it is not (?) overwhelming, but still technical, try C64 programming. There are lots of resources and step-by-step guides, and you will get a taste of everything and can build from there. We are many that have the desire to make our own games. Some are indeed geniuses, or very strong in multiple areas. Others just stumbled across Unity and are going through whatever guides there are with desire. These days you can choose your difficulty and dedication level.

For simpler games, getting your game to run on desktop, iOS and Android is not that hard. Because most platform code will be some glue, and then you are off inside your own game code. It takes weeks/months to figure that out, but then you are done and carry it with you for every game in the future. Then when you put it all together plus the uniqueness of your game (because it is unique right?!), you get a great and interesting blog post like this one!

1ark··on Ask HN: Any solo game developers here?
Check out what people are using for Ludum Dare compo.
1ark··on What is the cost of a cashless society?
They were born yesterday, or actually, 3 months ago.
1ark··on What is the cost of a cashless society?
Stores will be closed. It's not far to imagine a Kaseya-like incident, or just a power outage like you mention.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaseya_VSA_ransomware_attack

1ark··on What is the cost of a cashless society?
In a way Monero has been good money last couple of years. Not fluctuating too much up or down compared to others. So using it as fungible money could be ok. Monero has trade-offs though, how many are mined and have there been exploits/bugs in the supply?
1ark··on What is the cost of a cashless society?
To continue on Canada. Or if you have you credit card/bank account frozen from being targeted by the government for protesting.
1ark··on My favorite iPhone feature was removed, long live its subpar replacement
Just checked a short video of Word Flow. Isn't it the same as Gboard or Microsoft Swiftkey?
1ark··on OmniEdge – an Open source P2P layer 2 VPN infrastructure based on n2n protocol
The GitHub page is better. https://github.com/omniedgeio/omniedge
1ark··on Ask HN: Is my software stack choice sound?
Go with the first option, since you have skills in C++. Flutter is well documented and a lot of hand-holding. If you find that you don't like that Wt backend after some time, you can rewrite it with the second option. By then you are familiar with Flutter and probably will only have to do some minor modifications. GraphQL is good for when you want to arbitrarily query/populate data on separate screens for example, where you need a subset och merge with other data. Since it is a side-project and you write the backend yourself, you might not need that, because you can edit that code in REST on your own or just make a new endpoint. A big strong point for GraphQL is that it removes the communication and development friction between frontend and backend engineers.
1ark··on A Tutorial on Portable Makefiles (2017)
Also a convert to xmake. Documentation is a bit hairy, but solvable. The code is easy to read and contribute to.
1ark··on Google CEO tells employees productivity and focus must improve
It sounds like a variation of “Gervais principle”.

The few times, in my experience, that competent top management has been directly involved in development has been very different. That’s when all the bullshit from middle managers evaporated completely.

1ark··on Google CEO tells employees productivity and focus must improve
Indeed. Might have been an alright a decade ago, but now we have all these services that you fill in every few weeks/months about performance, goals etc. so that managers can have an overview. There is nothing to hide behind anymore, managers have all the data, they need to learn what to do with. Butt-in-seat is not a satisfactory KPI.
← PreviousPage 3 of 9Next →