FunnyLookinHat

I built one of these with my dad (the version with only a single skirt) in the sixth grade - it was awesome! Unfortunately, the skirt we created wasn't quite even around and couldn't hold enough pressure for me to ride it, but that didn't stop my younger sister from riding.

Building this started a several years long obsession with hovercrafts. Multiple science fair projects, digging on the internet, etc. My family ended up taking a trip to Europe and I was able to ride across the channel from Calais to Dover on a giant hovercraft. Literally a dream come true at the time. Too bad I was also 14 and super embarrassed by my parents' attempts to take pictures, etc. ;-)

I thought it was accurate - k-cal are usually represented as Calories (capital C) as opposed to the individual unit of measure: calories.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorie

At the time we picked CloudFlare, Fly.io wasn't really on ours or anyone else's radar yet. I've been meaning to experiment with Fly.io and Fastly - thanks for the reminder!

> So while AWS has 17 ways to run containers and 7 ways to do async message processing, all overlapping and reinforcing and supporting each other, Cloudflare will tend toward introducing singular primitives, stuff them in a box, and try to ship those boxes to as many places as will possibly take them. If they could install Cloudflare on your mobile phone, they would (this gets them dangerously close to being a real life Pied Piper).

I think this statement resonates with me the most - it feels a lot like how I prefer to design systems (ahem, thanks Unix!): simple pieces or types, chained together into systems that are easy to understand, maintain, and scale.

We're still only using Cloudflare's workers and it's integration with caching, but it's getting close to the point where I'd have enough primitives to ship some of the functionality of our system architecture to Cloudflare and gain a net-win for latency and simplicity.

> It's one thing to buy into something that does have wide portability like a postgres but much harder to buy into the platforms that aren't open source.

I tend to feel the same as you - preferring portable solutions that I can host anywhere. However, the reality that we're all building CI/CD pipelines as much as we are actual software nowadays, and moving those from one cloud provider to another is no small feat. Even if you're using some infrastructure-as-code tool to manage all of your resources (e.g. terraform), you can't really `SET TARGET=GCP` and re-run the script (so to speak).

I guess the lesson is: spend as much time picking your infrastructure provider as you do your core technical stack. They're not easy to replace! :-)

Anecdotal evidence, I know... But there were several things that just didn't work right for me on vanilla Ubuntu that Pop made right when I switched 3 years ago. Mostly graphics related in my case.

I think it's important to remember that System 76 has been "making Linux work on hardware" for over a decade now, which is a totally different mindset to building a distro than most maintainers have.

I've been wondering why we don't all have squid proxies setup for NPM or other centralized dependencies. When I run npm install, I'm hitting the local cache 99% of the time, so I'd imagine that it's a perfect use case and would let us all keep doing our job when this happens.

Am I missing something?

Oh that's awesome! I still have my TI-89 - maybe I should find some weekend time to do some projects on it... that sounds like a fun one!

So many fond memories hardware hacking my TI-85. I remember learning to solder so I could add an extra battery pack with 4 D batteries (played too many games!) and writing apps to play music out of the jack.

Hacking on my TI-85 and wanting to build websites for gaming guilds (Diablo, Starcraft) is what drove me into computers and software development. There was certainly something unique about that era!

> The US can barely afford to school its children

Ironically, I was just listening to this today: "Why Does the Richest Country in the World Have So Many Poor Kids? (Ep. 475) " [1]

There really isn't any excuse - it's all a product of our politics and culture, or vice versa... I'm not sure.

1) https://freakonomics.com/podcast/child-poverty/

Add to that the added benefit of "as long as I make my payments, this place is mine forever" - which is certainly not the case with renting.

There's a whole slew of intangibles that come with "owning" your home that I think have made my quality of life significantly better (and certainly worth every penny): being able to make whatever changes I want, knowing that what I do to the property could outlive me (in the sense of taking care of the planet), and having a sense of accomplishment when I fix or upgrade odds and ends.

I think Juju (and Charms) really shine more with bare-metal or VM management. We looked into trying to use this for multi-tenant deployment scenarios a while ago (when it was still quite popular in the Ubuntu ecosystem) and found it lacking.

At this point, I think Juju is most likely used in place of other metal or VM provisioning tools (like chef or Ansible) so that you can automatically provision and scale a system as you bring new machines online.

I've had similar experiences with git or other tools - not being able to help a junior dev because the GUI they're using is obfuscating whatever it is the underlying tool is trying to do. I think the irony is that we've got this insanely complex version control system that actually could have several valid use cases for what is likely a common path for users in a GUI.

I'm also not sure referring to people as "noobs" is going to help you empathize with their difficulty. ;)

We got an alert in Jefferson county letting us know specifically that there was no Tsunami.

That was certainly the perception I used to have, but this demo video changed my mind. :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fn3KWM1kuAw

What an awesome Summer of Code project! I wish opportunities had been around when I was learning to program. I remember constantly looking for open source projects to contribute to, but each had such a high bar for entry that there was no low-hanging-fruit that I could cherry-pick (sic) to get involved.

While it's certainly useful to learn by rolling projects from the ground up, you can learn a whole lot more by contributing to an established project and experiencing how their code standards, review process, etc. all feel in comparison to other projects. One big thing I lacked was simply having someone say "We write static functions LIKE THIS because they have THAT ROLE within the scope of this project."

This seems to work really well in cases where you're just laying down boilerplate. A few cherry-picked comments seem to suggest that React components are an ideal use case - which makes sense, that's a lot of munging and syntax to just render some strings.

However, I find the process of writing these sorts of functions cathartic and part of the process to get into zen-mode for coding. I think I'd feel less joy in programming if all of this was just done by glorified commenting and then code-review of the robot.

I like to think of coding in terms of athletic training, which usually is comprised of difficult tasks that are interspersed with lighter ones that keep you moving (but are giving you a bit of a break). Training for soccer teams often involved lots of sprinting and aerobic exercise - and in between those activities we would do some stretching or jogging to keep our body moving. These sorts of small functions (write a function to fetch a resource, parse an input payload, etc.) are when my brain is still moving but getting ready for the next difficult task.

Ironically, our last one was this past Friday.

That was announced a few months ago along with the opening up of most US States and the soon-to-be-widely-available vaccines.

I can't speak for everyone where I work, but this felt like an appropriate time to shift back to normalcy in that regard. In any case, we have a very generous PTO policy that should make it easy for anyone to continue to transition through the rest of the year as they see fit.

This is excellent.

My workplace (Moz) has been giving us the third Friday of every month off since April of 2020 due to COVID. The CEO called them "Breather Days" - a day to catch our breath, catch up on chores or home life, help get our kids school straightened out, etc. More importantly than simply getting the days off, the empathy that it demonstrated reassured everyone that we would find the work/life balance we needed even in extraordinary times.

Yeah no disagreement there. I had totally forgotten about the JS POC - ugh!

The JavaScript argument is interesting to me in that it's already flawed. I suppose I'd rather focus on the security issues with browsers running code on my computer more than anything else since it's effectively the "but what about ___" answer to so many threads like this one.

I've seen a few other comments suggesting per-process rules to enable or disable branch protections. That's an interesting thought, especially considering you could apply it to either "trusted" or "untrusted" code depending on it's source.

Should we have a debate as to whether or not Spectre mitigations matter for some (or all) desktop computers? I know that, theoretically, I could install a piece of software on my Linux box that is malware and could try to read my memory via those methods, but let's be honest - we're all mostly concerned with servers that run code for dozens or hundreds of different clients.

I'm a foil hat as much as the next - security is of the utmost concern to me, but for once I actually just don't care and would take the performance back on my local dev machine.

I've been looking for some new tech podcasts - thanks for sharing.

I've also been enjoying On The Metal - which is put out by the people who started Oxide Computer.

https://oxide.computer/podcasts

System76 released one recently - https://github.com/system76/recognizer

You're right though - we have a home rolled one where I work that is very robust and could easily be generalized, but it's also fairly simple (to build). I suspect most engineers jump at the chance to get to build a project like this rather than vendoring in something external (whether FOSS or commercial).

I've done a few things with workers years ago - and I remember thinking "someone is going to make the socket.io of workers someday, because this is verbose!". I think this delivers!

I've had an idea for a fun little JS game for a while now - seeing this is going to give me an excuse to build it and try workers at the same time.

Thanks for sharing!

Replacing the functions that required the older version of glibc might seem trivial, but I've seen countless devs beat their head against the wall trying to get conflicting NPM packages to work for what is essentially the same problem.

Criticism of the NPM / Node ecosystem aside (leftpad, etc) - this is a great reminder of a lesson I should be including when mentoring other devs: never hesitate to dig into a dependency, figure out how it works, and even rewrite it yourself if/when it makes sense. Removing the "magic" of libraries and dependencies is a really enlightening moment for new developers!

"son"

Because women can't be hackers, I guess?

> Squash merge has the major disadvantage of getting rid of valuable meaningful git history.

I think the main point of the article is that the Git history is often *not* valuable (because it's hard to enforce good commit messages). Your later points are very valid, however, and that's why I argue for smaller pull requests (and never merging a PR into main that leaves it in a broken state).

I've never been into Goodreads or similar sites much, but my wife definitely has and reads a lot. She has switched over to The Story Graph and has really liked it (minus the lack of friends that are present).

https://www.thestorygraph.com/

Sorry you are correct - I should have been more specific in my wording.

We should give people an educated choice. With unknown side effects we are not doing that. Thank you for pointing that out.

I guess I wasn't being specific - good correction. Reporting medical side effects can easily lag with new treatments, especially when we're not sure what we're looking for.

I suspect that, as soon as we start looking for blood clotting post-vaccine, then you'll find more cases that may have not been caught otherwise due to their not being severe enough to be noticed.