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Neff

95 karma · joined August 15, 2013

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Neff··on Show HN: CheapFoodMap – A map of good meals under $10
I like that I can filter by a specific area, but I wonder if people would be better served to get down to regions instead of a city. Dallas is pretty big, and I don't want to drive from Love Field all the way to Lakeside for lunch...

It would be great to somehow either

- Get to the map from a city list

- refine the city to a neighborhood level

Neff··on Show HN: I designed an espresso machine and coffee grinder
My brother in Christ... $1400 for a coffee grinder and espresso machine?!

I am into mechanical keyboards and IEMs and that feels outrageous to me. I'll spend $40 on a pen, but that price point feels insane to me.

Maybe I just like my garbo Aldi's whole bean coffee with cream & sugar, so I am not your target market... I hope you find your niche - I am sure it is out there if you went this far. But man.. I couldnt ever spend that much on the tools to make coffee.

Neff··on Tell HN: Alaska Airlines website exposes passenger data
I have connections with people at Alaska. I will send this their way and hopefully someone will reach out. Make sure there is contact info in your bio
Neff··on Ask HN: How to learn UI/UX as a data/BE engineer?
As others have mentioned, there are differences between UX and UI.

On the UX side, the main goals are to

1. Understand the needs of the user

2. Understand psychological principles of perception and cognition.

3. Present the information in a way to enable the user to accomplish their task with the least cognitive load possible (typically.. there are edge cases where you want to introduce more friction but we will ignore those for now)

Start by getting a good understanding of the core Gestalt principles - https://careerfoundry.com/en/blog/ui-design/what-are-gestalt... - which influence how people perceive things. These principles are a core building block for UX and need to become an instinctive tool you use for arranging information and interfaces to achieve specific goals.

From there I'd suggest reading the following

- Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug

- The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman

- Everything by Edward Tufte, which as a data person you might have already read

Getting a foundation of understanding how people process their world will be crucial to growing a UX competency. The color and wording part will come after that foundation is built.

Neff··on Bop Spotter
Rickrollin on dubs?
Neff··on Bypassing airport security via SQL injection
Get lucky and get an interline agreement with a larger pax-facing carrier? Sure no one is going to ride on your little cargo planes but your crew gets to fly on someone elses metal.
Neff··on Taking my diabetes treatment into my own hands
Ahh you are right, I had the situation reversed in my head. It would be the false high reading that would be the issue.

That is good to know there are some safeguards in place to prevent an over-correction.

And I agree about the constant wake-ups. The Dexcom system will sometimes not stop alerting when it detects a low, even if she has taken glucose tabs and knows it will be taken care of. If she doesnt interact with the notification it continues to alarm every 15 minutes or so. There is a recompiled APK for the dexcom apps that changes some of the notification behaviors but she hasnt needed to use that recently.

Neff··on Taking my diabetes treatment into my own hands
My wife is T1D and she is really scared about the idea of moving to a closed loop system with a pump, but her endo is constantly pushing her towards it even though she is keeping her A1C at like ~6% with her Dexcom CGM.

The concern is the the G7 CGM seems to have times where it is so wildly off with readings that a closed loop system could kill her. This weekend the CGM was saying she was all the sudden at 40, but she was at about 115. I am scared to think what would happen in the night if the closed loop system thought it needed to raise her blood sugar... Logically I know it wouldnt raise it to a point that would cause medical harm, it would still put it higher than would be ideal for her health.

Maybe there are differences between the different brands, but the G7 from Dexcom's big selling point was "no more calibrations" and the FDA approval for that tagline, and we've been seeing a need to calibrate more than the G6, which is disappointing. Granted... sample size of n=1 so...

Neff··on Yet another project management SaaS
The gradient on your section headers is nearly illegible towards the end of the word. The "Ready to dive in? Start your free trial today" at the bottom of the page is the worst offender

You might also want to update your copyright since we are now in 2024.

Neff··on Ask HN: Most successful example using LLMs in daily work/life?
Oh yeah, since there is a built in feedback loop with the person I am interacting with, I was able to start recognizing patterns of how to shift ways that I inherently think/phrase something to be better received by others.
Neff··on Ask HN: Most successful example using LLMs in daily work/life?
Interpersonal Communication - My employer is a big fan of the Clifton StrengthFinders school of thought, and I have found that generative LLMs are really helpful in giving me other ways to phrase asks to people that I tend to find difficult to successfully communicate with.

I usually structure it like: --- My top 5 strengths in the Clifton StrengthFinders system are A,B,C,D,E and I am trying to effectively communicate with someone who's top five strengths are R,T,∑,√,S.

I need help taking the following request and reframing it in a way that will be positively received by my coworker and make them feel like I am not being insensitive or overly flowery.

The way I would phrase the request is <insert request here>.

Please ask any questions that would help provide more insight to my coworker, other details that could resonate with them, or additional background that will help the translated request be received positively. ---

While the output is usually too verbose, it gives me a better reframing of my request and has resulted in less pushback when I need to get people to focus on unexpected or different priorities.

Neff··on Byte-Sized Swift: Building Tiny Games for the Playdate
This is great to see more resources being made for the Playdate. It is such a fun little console and the games made for it are such a breath of fresh air

I hope Panic is able to either retrofit or make a v2 with a backlight. I realized how low the contrast on the screen was after my cataract surgery and seeing details in some of the games becomes near impossible in less-than-ideal conditions.

Neff··on Bookish Diversions: Do Audiobooks Count?
One approach I've seen people take is to get non-resident library cards to large library systems like the NY Public Library or the Chicago Library. You can put multiple library cards into Overdrive/Libby/whatever and then you can see availability for all the valid cards you have.

And isn't this "available digital copy" issue at the heart of the lawsuit the Internet Archives is dealing with when they stopped placing copy limits on digital books at the start of the pandemic?

Neff··on Mr. Rogers' music was intricate (2020) [video]
I really like his breakdowns of pop culture music. His videos on The Peanuts and Cowboy Bebop are such fun dives into unexpected intricacies
Neff··on Home Taping Is Killing Music: When the music industry waged war on the cassette
And then there are sites like https://bt.etree.org/ where artists allow for free and open trading of live shows.

Back in the day before high speed internet became common, you used to subscribe to mailing lists and send "B&Ps" (blanks and postage) of either cassettes or CDs to the person with the original copy and they would burn the copy onto your media and then mail it back.

With bittorrent now it is a lot easier to get copies of live music, but it feels like the community that was there faded.

Neff··on Firefox address bar
I have no doubt that Google is hamstringing performance on Firefox. But that is far outside of my sphere of control so I am focusing on the things I can effect.

Another member recommended disabling hardware acceleration so that is the first thing I'll try. If you have any other recommendations on how I can reduce the impact of the issue I'd love to hear them.

Neff··on Firefox address bar
I haven't. That was recommended to me by someone else and something I am going to look into.

I would have assumed that offloading the video processing to the dedicated GPU would be a good thing, but hopefully that helps with the problem.

Neff··on SF's Anchor Brewing Company shutting down after 127 years
I wonder what will happen to the term "Steam Beer" now.

If I remember correctly, after the end of prohibition Anchor claimed ownership of the term "steam beer" even though it is a name of a style of beer and forced any other brewery to use the names "Steam Ale" or "California Common".

With Anchor being shuttered it would be great for Sapporo to release ownership of the style name so the BJCP can update the category back to the historically accurate title.

Neff··on Firefox address bar
Funny enough, I just posted on Mastodon looking for recommendations of other browsers to try.

While I love the flexibility and openness that Firefox brings, there is a resource issue for me on my macbook pro. I have to spend a lot of time in Google Meets for work, and video conferencing via Firefox seems to redline the computer... It sounds like a jet engine and I wind up thermal throttling to the point that my machine becomes completely unresponsive.

I'd love to stay with Firefox - especially for the cross-device tab sharing and search - but the need for something stable is superseding my want to use a non-Google browser.

Neff··on Show HN: Micro Chat – Private group chat
I would love to see some screenshots or examples of the service on the landing page. Right now the landing page is sparse and I have no idea of what the experience will be like. There will be a huge hurdle to get people to leave the assortment of networks they are already on. What makes this different than Signal, WhatsApp, Discord, Facebook Groups, Telegram, or any other messaging service?

Few suggestions - The "Get started" button should take me to the sign up form, not the login form. My assumption is I am clicking the CTA to start without having an account. Going to the login form results in an extra click for the user. - Once I click "get started" the app breaks the back button. I can't go back to the landing page - Make your terms of use & privacy policy accessible from the landing page. Claiming to be "privacy first" but not having an accessible privacy policy feels in conflict

Neff··on Niche Museums
For those in Chicago - I highly recommend the International Museum of Surgical Science: https://imss.org/

Tons of old surgical implements, some death masks, and a lot of really interesting information.

Neff··on The Sourdough Framework
This reminds me of the Fermented Hot Sauce repo - https://github.com/aweijnitz/recipe-el_fuego_viviente

I love to see people share these sorts of experiments and document their evolution

Neff··on Game Over: Steam won’t Run on Windows 7 and 8 after January 2024
Yes, the release of the Steamdeck did wonders for pushing AAA gaming forward on Linux.

There was just an article on the front page earlier today about 75% of the top 100 games on steam running on linux, with the remaining 25% mostly being due to anti-cheat software that isn't updated to support linux yet.

Protondb.com has a database to search for compatibility and if adjustments to command lines or a specific version of Proton are needed for getting games running.

Neff··on Show HN: An all-in-one app designed for deep work and to build atomic habits
One thing that may help is standing up a simple product landing page to describe what the product is and linking off to the app store.

When I tried to search just for "Pixelist" on DDG I didn't see the app on the first page. Once I added iOS then it was findable.

Your app seems really neat. It reminds me of the everyday calendar that Simone Giertz made.

Neff··on Ask HN: What sub $200 product improved your 2022
In a similar vein - Ratio by Michael Ruhlman does a great job of breaking down the whys of recipes so you can start exploring and making things your own.

https://smile.amazon.com/Ratio-Simple-Behind-Everyday-Cookin...

Neff··on Ask HN: What services/apps are you self-hosting?
How have you been enjoying Foundry?

I was using Astral for a while to provide maps and combat tracking for the games I run, and it felt really easy to throw together encounters on the fly. When they shuttered I got a free year of Roll20 and I have not been liking the change - everything, to me, feels overly complicated and being able to quickly integrate things that come out of rollplay into the encounter feel like they take many more steps.

I've been testing Planar Ally (https://www.planarally.io/) and it is interesting but rough around the edges.

Neff··on Ask HN: What services/apps are you self-hosting?
I just was introduced to Tdarr the other day, and it is a great addition to the *rr stack. It does a great job in optimizing media files based on what you value (size, bitrate, container, etc)

I'm aiming for moderate bitrate, 1080p, hvec containers. In running through 900 of the 5000 media files I've already saved 3.4TB of storage space.

https://github.com/HaveAGitGat/Tdarr

Neff··on You Might Also Like
If you haven't seen it yet, NoTunes[1] does a great job of fixing the hijacking of the play button or when bluetooth headphones are connected or disconnected.

1: https://github.com/tombonez/noTunes

Neff··on Ask HN: What's your favorite board game?
I enjoy crunchier board games, but the fun from games usually comes from playing them with others and most of the people I know don't enjoy games that take a non-negligible time to set up and explain the rules.

When playing with others, I'll grab games like Tsuro - https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/16992/tsuro - put down a tile, move tokens along the path, try to stay on the board the longest Skull - https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/92415/skull - a bluffing game where you can see the moment people grok the need to lie to win Monopoly Deal - https://smile.amazon.com/Hasbro-B0965-Monopoly-Deal-Card/dp/... - A questionable quality board game turned into a great pub card game

I have Long Shot - https://www.perplext.com/long-shot-the-dice-game - on backorder at the moment, but it seems like a simple roll & write game that people can quickly pick up.

I'm solo playing Bruxelles 1897 - https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/275913/bruxelles-1897 - before asking my partner to try it. The rules are dense and it seems hard to explain the phases at the moment.

If you are looking for tons of board game reviews, https://www.shutupandsitdown.com/ and their youtube channel do a great job IMO of covering a wide range of game types.

Neff··on Senator Warren proposes sweeping ban on location and health data sales
The phenomenon of responding to a statement with a "well what about {quasi-related|unrelated topic}" is called Whataboutism[1].

I think most people use it because they feel there is a larger systemic cause not being addressed by treating a specific symptom, but it does tend to read as a way to shift conversation away from the topic at hand.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

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