Hacker News Reader

3dprintscanneron Docs like code in basic terms

And fruit flies like a banana

3dprintscanneron You Don't Batch Cook When You're Suicidal (2020)

Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn’t. When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit ’tasty’. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. Let’s have three pennorth of chips! Run out and buy us a twopenny ice-cream! Put the kettle on and we’ll all have a nice cup of tea! That is how your mind works when you are at the P.A.C. level. White bread-and-marg and sugared tea don’t nourish you to any extent, but they are nicer (at least most people think so) than brown bread-and-dripping and cold water. Unemployment is an endless misery that has got to be constantly palliated, and especially with tea, the English-man’s opium. A cup of tea or even an aspirin is much better as a temporary stimulant than a crust of brown bread.

George Orwell - The Road to Wigan Pier

3dprintscanneron Never pay for online dating (2010)

Interestingly the Chinese government does something similar:

https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2017/06/27/China-lau...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/comrade-me...

3dprintscanneron Guest WiFi using a QR code

A QR code by itself is completely unreadable to a human. Can't this have the SSID / password too? All too often you see what should be simple textual data wrapped in this obtuse form which only specific machines can read. Text and a QR code can be read by everyone.

See: <https://twitter.com/adambowie/status/1521078234057695233> for context

3dprintscanneron I visited a friend who is watching Breaking Bad. Now clips appear on my YouTube?

I listened to a podcast which mentioned a relatively obscure topic in passing using the basic samsung music app on my phone which didn't have a SIM card in, location turned on or an internet connection.

Later that day I see an advert for said obscure topic served on a web page.

Is it possible that there is someone transcribing podcasts or at least scraping databases of their RSS feeds and somehow my music player app is broadcasting that I've listened to a particular file(after receiving an internet connection)? The alternative is that the machines really are listening.

3dprintscanneron R number for UK below 1 for first time since August

Is having the virus without symptoms really a case? The Coronavirus act says so. However, there's only tenuous evidence of asymptomatic and presymptiomatic transmission of the virus.

3dprintscanneron Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

Been working with a group building a mobile COVID testing laboratory and have written a Rails app for managing the test data & laboratory flow.

https://github.com/UK-CoVid19/opencell-testing https://arcane-island-35232.herokuapp.com/

Also a set of mini-sites built on eleventy / netlify for local community COVID voluntary groups in London.

https://islington.coronacorps.com/ https://github.com/3dprintscanner/coronacorps

3dprintscanneron What is the Strategic Petroleum Reserve?

Two jet engines mounted on a tank ! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7Ss3BMrscE

3dprintscanneron A Starter Kit for Emergency Websites

I've been using exactly the same approach for spinning up local COVID-19 support groups around London, one nice example is at https://holloway.coronacorps.com/. Really like the branch to subdomain mapping feature from them.

3dprintscanneron 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated

Another mention of this fantastic cycling website: https://www.sheldonbrown.com/harris/

3dprintscanneron Why Do American Houses Have So Many Bathrooms?

Reminds me of this gem of a comedy sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npEwra5344s

3dprintscanneron Luis von Ahn, co-founder and CEO of Duolingo

Duolingo works reasonably well when used as a supplementary aid to learning a language. I've found that it has reasonable utility when combined with taking a physical class as a low-effort boredom filler for building familiarity with the vocabulary of a language.

What I find pressingly missing is any meaningful way of learning about the grammar of a language. When learning German there was absolutely nothing in the lessons which even hinted at the rules of tenses, cases, conjugations etc and the lack of that content stunts the possibility of building much more than a rote-learning knowledge of a language.

The app does seem to have a great gamification mechanic and is good at driving user engagement, so I guess they have that though.

3dprintscanneron Who wants to play the status game?

This reminds me a lot of the idea of Transactional Analysis. It's a study of the Ego state of people interacting with the world around them and whether they act as a figurative Parent, Adult or Child in a certain situation and can explain why people might play a particular status game in some situations and not in others. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactional_analysis

3dprintscanneron How to Download Live Images from Government Weather Satellites (2018)

You can also download fairly up-to-date ESA imagery and radar images from https://scihub.copernicus.eu/. This covers a fairly large area worldwide.

3dprintscanneron Ask HN: Solo devs, how do you plan your development?

For 1 person, you can keep most of it in very short form. Currently I use github projects for a prioritised list of items to do, a new board per release and an ongoing Evernote file for notes & ideas.

3dprintscanneron Digital Exile: How I Got Banned for Life from Airbnb (2018)

Even better you can make a subject access request (SAR) to Airbnb and get the internal communications about the person in question.

3dprintscanneron The Road to Scala 3

Having recently jumped into a Scala team from a mainly OOP background, I'm starting to see the light with the language. Using the type system to handle code you would otherwise have to write defensively. Letting the compiler take more of the strain of the second order functional concerns of the program and leaving what's left to be an accurate description of your problem domain is a refreshing perspective on coding. Your code looks a lot more like the problem you are trying to solve rather than 75% if(x==null) and 25% business logic. That said, the learning curve is steep and the quasi-hidden nature of implicits never sits well with me. It seems like a way of adding semi-defined behavior to your code and is one of those language features that should be treated with care.

3dprintscanneron How Complex Modern Headlights Can Be

Headlights are also slightly biased to the nearside of the car so more light is cast upon road signs and the side of the road.

3dprintscanneron Abu Dhabi Bets on Food Delivery Boom with Investment in Glovo

I wonder whether this constitutes a golden age of wealth transfer from oil states to the average persons pocket. Food delivery is notoriously difficult to make any money in with few market players able to turn anything resembling a profit in this area, however consumers get to enjoy effectively subsidised services at a great discount. This surely has to come crashing down when interest rates rise.

3dprintscanneron Ask HN: How do you use Windows as your primary development environment?

WSL now works wonderfully for W10. Additionally you can get VSCode to run inside WSL rather than in windows so accessing the file system / debugging works a lot better and you're not relying on complex toolchains and dependencies in windows land.

https://code.visualstudio.com/remote-tutorials/wsl/run-in-ws...

3dprintscanneron Ask HN: How Do You Optimize Your Intake of Information

It's usually better to make a bad decision than no decision at all.

Really the internet makes it too easy to have too much choice by making it easy to consume so much shallow information, and the real value comes from cutting through the noise.

Consider exploring interests serially rather than in parallel and going deep for a few months on 1 topic whether that seems the best or not.

3dprintscanneron Ask HN: How do you deal with making coding errors at work?

If you are recognising the error, you now have something that you didn't know before. Also your tooling and process should be sufficient that a single error shouldn't have a negative impact on the business, it should ideally be caught in testing or code review. Sometimes it can be productive to think about how bad code can break the product and use that to feed back into your development process.

3dprintscanneron Ask HN: How do you create a successful community from zero?

Depending on the constraints of your community, it can be quite effective just to go out and talk to people in the physical world and show them / get them to try your service. You can use nearby meetups and similar events that already have your intended audience and a place which they will be happy to give you the time of day. This gives you the benefit of immediate feedback and a local set of users that you've personally met and have built rapport with and will scale just fine to a few hundred users. I've been trying this approach with my London based events sharing community https://onlythebestevents.com and have been pleased with the results so far.

3dprintscanneron Climbing the Wealth Ladder

It's taking the approach that the best way of gaining wealth is to convert earned income into unearned (passive) income over time. That once the basic necessities are covered the bulk of your nontrivial expenditure should really be investments and that your elective consumption should be pegged to some nominally small percentage of your overall wealth. I think this has to come from a place of having something to fall back on at a certain level of wealth, you can take the risk on those investments if the downside wouldn't be any worse than losing your current 'level' of wealth.

3dprintscanneron Sand Theft

The 99% Invisible podcast ran a good episode on this subject, and particularly the effects of sand theft. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/built-on-sand/

3dprintscanneron Meetup.com alternatives

One site that I've found with a wide-ish breadth of events is https://evensi.com. They however seem to have too much choice and it's difficult to narrow down to a small relevant list of events. There sometimes are too many options that are vaguely interesting but too few that are genuinely engaging. Meetup works quite well in this respect as you can select your interests and it's not too difficult to scan the entire list if that doesn't offer a decent choice and it's certainly something Eventbrite lacks even though they have vast inventory (It's better designed for ticketing rather than discovery). I've tried to crack this and have put together a site to recommend you 5 interesting events each day over the next week. (Also all free entry with some food and or drink). Currently in fairly early stages and covers London. https://onlythebestevents.com

3dprintscanneron Meetup.com alternatives

As a small side project I've been working on a tool to find interesting events in London that also have some food or drink provided, I found that there was sometimes too much choice and not an easy way to pick the best upcoming events. https://onlythebestevents.com