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WouterSpaak

26 karma · joined February 25, 2014

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WouterSpaak··on Ask HN: How to be alone?
I'm not the parent comment, but their username suggests they're in The Netherlands or Flemish Belgium.

Small bars and cafes around the corner are _very_ common here. Even the smallest villages have at least one or two local watering holes. It's incredibly easy to sit down at the bar, strike up a small conversation with the bartender, and have a beer or two. You make friends in no time. Most of them shallow, but a few of them turn out to be lifelong "true" friends.

For instance, I just drove a friend of mine and his sister-in-law to Schiphol Airport this morning, because I had a meeting in Amsterdam today so I had to drive out there anyway (we're on the other side of the country). I've known this man for the better part of ten years. Met him at my local bar, or "stamkroeg" as we call it.

WouterSpaak··on Asciinema: Record and share your terminal sessions
I fully agree, this would be pretty much impossible to demo with just plain text: https://asciinema.org/a/659042
WouterSpaak··on Epanet-JS
I'm no physicist, but I've worked as a software engineer on energy (and drinking water, which EPANET simulates) infrastructure network design tooling for the last six or so years. It has been my understanding that simulating and validating multimodal network designs, which take into account electricity, gas consumption, district heating, is extremely difficult.

Municipalities definitely have systems that document where everything already is under the ground (though especially in Europe there are many older cities where the data of old pipes is lacking), but for designing new energy networks, an "everything" simulation and solving model is very, very complex.

WouterSpaak··on Show HN: I Built a Document Conversion API to Cut Costs
Isn't this essentially a wrapper around pandoc?
WouterSpaak··on Globotipo: Making a typeface that is seen by 100M people daily
Typography is a huge part of communication, and by extension, brand identity. Companies value their brand. This is like saying: "why do companies create a whole unique logo for their brand?"

Bear in mind that most quality fonts aren't actually freely available, typography licensing is a complicated maze and for large for-profit companies often wildly expensive. Creating a custom typeface is expensive, sure, but it helps in establishing an identity and it also alleviates huge licensing fees.

WouterSpaak··on Water heavily polluted with PFAS in 15 km radius around Dordrecht chemical plant
Whipped up a quick little map: https://imgur.com/iMvuYz3

The purple/blue areas are drinking water (ground water) protection areas, the grey areas are protected wetlands.

One of those drinking water areas is less than 1,500 meters away from the plant.

WouterSpaak··on Why do recipe writers lie about how long it takes to caramelize onions? (2012)
"Lumps" being a nice euphemism for bugs.
WouterSpaak··on How the brain navigates cities
I wonder if there's also a preference in the mind to stay on a particular street as long as possible, because the street architecture, street furniture and amount of traffic stays roughly the same, and therefore predictable and easy to walk on.
WouterSpaak··on Comparing Svelte and React
Angular does not use decorators to manage state. It uses decorators to create compile-time instructions for the dependency injection system to wire components, services, and directives together (I'm simplifying a bit here). Should TypeScript ever drop their decorator implementation, this could all be fairly easily changed to do it with functions instead:

  export class AppComponent { }
  
  export const appComponent = Component(AppComponent, {
    template: '<h1>Hello World!>/h1>
    // other compile-time instructions
  });
How you want to approach runtime state has nothing to do with decorators.
WouterSpaak··on Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-out use of Excel
I believe Office will warn you when saving as .xls (or .doc instead of .docx, or .ppt instead of .pptx for that matter) that some data loss may occur. Problem is that nobody reads those warnings and just hits the OK button.
WouterSpaak··on How long does a freezer stay frozen when the power goes out?
I tend to chuck in a handful of ice cubes into my gazpacho, it doesn't dilute the mass all that much and really helps with the blender warming up the soup.
WouterSpaak··on F# Pipeline Operator in JavaScript with Babel
Fun fact: the `pipe` function from `rxjs` can be imported on its own where it will work on any value of type T, not just `Observable<T>`.
WouterSpaak··on B612 is a highly legible open source font to be used on aircraft cockpit screens
I would assume this is true. In French (where Airbus comes from) 'West' is called 'Ouest'. "5240O" would be a pain.
WouterSpaak··on Show HN: Learn and practice modern JavaScript
Cool app! Well done.

I would maybe reconsider using Fira Code, or add a font preference option. It's an awesome font but this app is clearly for beginners, and having >=, === and the like turn into ligatures might be a bit confusing.

WouterSpaak··on Python in Visual Studio Code
Can Sublime export a textmate theme? If so, yes, you can import a .tmTheme file into VS Code. https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/extensions/themes-snippet...
WouterSpaak··on Ask HN: Tired of working for startups, what are my options without a CS degree?
Really sounds like you'd be happiest at a large, well established corporation.

I've been in the startup world as well, really didn't like all the things you listed that are so prevalent in 'start up culture'.

I've been working as a senior engineer at a large financial institution for about a year. Programmers are not seen as these people who are expected to work insane hours under tremendous pressure. But they are seen as very valuable staff: our company recently decided they were a software company first, and a financial company second.

While the problems we're solving might not be as sexy as the Hot-New-Thing (we've yet to do anything with machine learning), they're very challenging and incredibly important -- not only to the company's bottom line but also to the millions of customers using our applications.

Sure, there's years of technical debt not everyone is a talented, brilliant programmer. But we do some amazing work and the many decades of experience the organisation has in HR makes for a very enjoyable, engaging and challenging workplace.

WouterSpaak··on Photoshop is not a verb
Yes, any Dutch student can get a full Creative Cloud subscription for €19,66/month. That's for the whole suite, I assume you can cherry pick only Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign for a fair bit less. You need either an education related e-mail address, which I didn't have when I went to college (The Netherlands doesn't have something like an .edu.nl extension), but a scan of a university card seems to be valid as well if you read the fine print.

https://creative.adobe.com/nl/plans?plan=edu&store_code=nl

WouterSpaak··on Sony and LG stop making 3D TV sets
3D films give me a headache. I think it's something to do with a slightly lazy right eye. I've not actually been to a blockbuster theatrical release in the better part of a decade. There were plenty of films I would have gladly payed a ticket for, if only they were released in 2D.