Hacker News Reader

ZinniaZirconiumon Show HN: My lockdown project, HutSee – an alternative to Nextdoor

I don't want to share and talk with my neighbors. I don't know my neighbors names and I don't want to know. That's why my lockdown project was an anti-social solitary endeavor that can be appreciated alone in darkness. Lockdown didn't make me miss social contact. It made me appreciate solitude.

ZinniaZirconiumon Are We Living in a Computer Simulation? (2016)

If we're living in a computer simulation then what are the cheat codes for infinite bread and fish?

ZinniaZirconiumon Facing Fears and Learning to Code

What's next after learning to code? Learn marketing. Be social. Don't not be social. Build social capital. Blog. Network. Always sell yourself. Market your brand or your code might as well not exist.

ZinniaZirconiumon Uncanny Vulvas (2018)

Yes.

https://jango-index.tk/?search=boyfriend+in+drawer

ZinniaZirconiumon Stepping away from open source

I forked youtubedown because it has too many features. I don't want to download any files and I don't want to mux DASH formats. All I want is a script that prints the 360p video url as fast as possible. And JWZ broke support for premuxed video which I added back. And JWZ broke support for requesting a specific cipher which I added back. Basically youtubedown development went in a direction which diverged from my use case.

ZinniaZirconiumon Invidious is an alternative front-end to YouTube

Project has uncertain future.

https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/issues/1320

Consider alternative alternatives also.

ZinniaZirconiumon Stepping away from open source

I'm gonna reconsider using Athlon1600/youtube-downloader in my projects but from what I remember of benchmarks I did about 8 months ago my fork of youtubedown was faster like obtain a video url in 300ms faster. In my projects I lazy load the video on demand when the user pushes play instead of preloading video at page load so minimizing the time to obtain a video url matters to me.

ZinniaZirconiumon Stepping away from open source

There's also this which includes a frontend:

https://github.com/Athlon1600/youtube-downloader

I'm unaffiliated but I like to follow this particular project when I want to know if others are having the same trouble with YouTube when things break for me. I only ever implemented a backend myself when I chose to self host.

ZinniaZirconiumon Show HN: The Tree Table is a portable table that mounts on a tree's trunk.

I was so hoping this was a new data structure.

It's a laptop holder.

Funny thing is I rarely code on a laptop anymore. I find a tablet to be so much more portable and I'm adapted to the touch keyboard. So I could use a park bench or sit on the ground and still be productive.

One question I have is not in the FAQ. How do you prevent theft if you leave it strapped to the tree when you walk away to use the bathroom?

ZinniaZirconiumon Show HN: A time tracker to track and manage your personal overtime

Oh cool. I could have used this a couple of years ago when $Company was launching a new $product and I was working a lot of overtime and weekends. Not so much this year though with chroma virus there's not much work to do. Definitely not reaching overtime. Hope the future improves and overtime tracking becomes a thing again.

ZinniaZirconiumon Stepping away from open source

Yes except the whole invidious project is rapidly being abandoned according to discussion on GitHub. The next breaking change in YouTube could break invidious forever if the project is unmaintained.

I just need to remember not to be lazy and to continue maintaining my fork of youtubedown. The only obstacle for me is I really don't use YouTube frequently so mostly it's a matter of remembering to do the necessary maintenance.

ZinniaZirconiumon Adding features doesn't move the needle

So true. Adding features just makes more work for you. It doesn't mean more users or more active users. See I think when users request features the subtext is they're actually giving you an excuse for why they don't use your product more or don't use it at all. Features won't change lack of interest. And yet new features are so much fun to add when you enjoy your work. Just don't expect users to care. And don't expect to get paid.

ZinniaZirconiumon Stepping away from open source

There have been other alternatives in the past and there will be other alternatives in the future. I've found the most reliable option is to run my own and not rely on someone else's service which can break at any time and disappear at any time.

Interfacing with YouTube in any unofficial way is fraught with peril by its very nature because YouTube is always trying to stop it.

ZinniaZirconiumon 24M Americans fear missing next rent payment as benefits dry up

No. It's impossible for a coder to make money in software.

You forgot to add "as long as you're a shameless self promoting blogger and SEO spammer who spends 1% of the time coding and 99% of the time marketing." That is what you meant to say.

I'd rather be coding and let someone who wants to do marketing do the marketing. That's how specialization works. But your world as it exists today doesn't allow for social introverts who are skilled at coding to get paid one cent. Coding jobs require extrovert personality and marketing skill in addition to coding. Coding doesn't pay.

So I do something else.

ZinniaZirconiumon 24M Americans fear missing next rent payment as benefits dry up

That's exactly what I'm saying. You can't make money making software. Software is worth nothing. Coding doesn't pay.

ZinniaZirconiumon Stepping away from open source

Oh that's a shame.

> The API will continue to function until October 1st, to give time for any services relying on it to migrate to other solutions.

Aw no. I was thinking about using invidio.us in my own projects but now I guess I won't!

I have need of a YouTube streaming server, backend only, which I can embed on a web page. I made my own with youtubedown and bash but maintaining it is a pain since YouTube is always changing ciphers and also I forked youtubedown which means I need to adapt my changes to new versions when I upgrade.

So I was thinking of ditching my own and adopting an existing service. Trouble is existing services tend to stop existing. I made my own YouTube streaming server in the first place because I was using HMA YouTube proxy which was always breaking.

So this is a great reminder to me to keep maintaining my own YouTube streaming server.

[I'm using a different VPN today! Is it IP banned?! I don't know. Will this comment be [dead] on arrival?? I don't know!!]

ZinniaZirconiumon 24M Americans fear missing next rent payment as benefits dry up

They should learn to code!

But coding doesn't pay!

I worked for startups where I wrote the entire backend code behind the products that put the companies in business. Then the business geniuses ran the businesses into the ground and I got paid nothing. My code got released as open source which is what happens when code is worth nothing.

Rinse repeat. Coding doesn't pay. Code is worth nothing. Code is always worth nothing.

So I got a real job instead. And I code for fun. Open source of course. Because code is worth nothing. Coding doesn't pay.

So glad I learned to code!

ZinniaZirconiumon Individual Master File

Sure but COBOL can continue to run on S/360 in emulation. Alan Turing proved any computer can emulate any other computer. Emulation stories regularly appear on the front page of HN. If we can emulate game consoles and graphing calculators and personal computers from a couple of decades ago, why not taxes. I don't understand the issue of a critical skills shortage either. First of all, coding is coding. A real coder can adapt to any language. The required skills are the same to write code in any language. Only the specific syntax changes. And secondly if too few people know the specifics of COBOL and they need to learn it right now, open a COBOL boot camp. Seriously. COBOL can be maintained as long as people just care enough to do it.

ZinniaZirconiumon Does Having an Anime Profile Picture Make You a Better Programmer?

She builds a masterpiece of JavaScript around Yahoo YQL which she uses until Yahoo stops being relevant and YQL is abandoned. Undeterred she finds an abandoned PHP proxy and beats it with a rubber mallet until it functions as a YQL replacement. Satisfied she continues maintaining a single page web app designed around a single undecorated HTML form so plain looking that everyone who sees it asks "How can you have been working on this project for ten years and it still looks like crap?" She hosts her source code on an abandoned wiki farm instead of GitHub and never changes her profile picture. Same blue wig for a whole decade, yeah!

ZinniaZirconiumon Spotify CEO: musicians can no longer release music only “once every 3-4 years”

Yup. Musicians are releasing like 20 new tracks per hour to Jango. I know because I'm on a mission to collect all of it. And like 71% is from independent artists who will never make it big and nobody will listen to. Not even me even though I like obscure stuff but even I can't keep up with the amount of new music that gets released all day every day.

ZinniaZirconiumon Ask HN: Why Do You Downvote?

Ok. I can only speculate unless you want to document.

I'll guess again! My VPN just happened to be IP banned which I had no way of knowing before registering.

I'm sure new people appreciate being labeled as abusive trolls and spammers just for registering and I’m sure new people don't stay either.

ZinniaZirconiumon Ask HN: Why Do You Downvote?

Registering an account through a VPN is an automatic shadowban without warning. How is a new user supposed to know this?

Hacker News is a lot less hospitable in reality than it seems to an outsider. If you just register a lurker account and enable showdead and look around it's a veritable zombietown in here.

ZinniaZirconiumon A new funding model for open source software

OK my project is open source. I have zero stars, zero downloads, and zero users.

How much do I get paid?

Zero? But I wrote open source code that solves a real problem. It's open source. I should deserve to get paid. Because open source software.

I don't think your funding model works.

ZinniaZirconiumon Universal Basic Income is Capitalism 2.0

Not if you genuinely don't care about impressing anyone. A real programming job involves convincing someone your work is valuable enough to pay for. A welfare scam involves convincing someone you deserve free money. Both are too much social involvement if you prefer a hikikomori lifestyle of writing code nobody will ever use.

Zero users and loving it! is not necessarily hyperbole.

ZinniaZirconiumon Universal Basic Income is Capitalism 2.0

I can get paid to write code nobody uses?! Sign me up!

Zero users and loving it!

ZinniaZirconiumon The Stutterer's Song: Remembering Bill Withers

I remember Bill Withers.

https://jango-index.ml/?artist=Bill+Withers

ZinniaZirconiumon Alphabet’s Loon balloons now providing commercial internet service in Kenya

However, the Times reports that the company has been criticized for launching its balloons in parts of the country that already have developed internet infrastructure and that some people in poorer areas of Kenya can’t afford the phones needed to connect to its 4G service.

Yup. Exactly as expected.

ZinniaZirconiumon Some SQL Tricks of an Application DBA

Haha! No I don't work at Jango. Earlier this year I got tired of songs disappearing from Jango song search so I made my own search tool as a quarantine project. Like you say Jango is almost a secret these days and I've been looking for an appropriate forum to discuss it but there pretty much isn't any. I tried Show HN and nothing happened.

So are you actually a paying customer with a Radio Airplay account or are you a free Jango listener? I never had and never needed an account.

I don't know what kind of database Jango uses or what kind of work Jango people do but I sure hope they keep doing it.

ZinniaZirconiumon Some SQL Tricks of an Application DBA

SQLite doesn't have GIN indexes.

ZinniaZirconiumon Some SQL Tricks of an Application DBA

I wish there were different recommended configurations for SQLite when used as the backend of a web site versus the storage format for an embedded system. The defaults are really not suitable for concurrency or for tables with millions of rows. Also I wish I didn't have to recompile to enable sqlite_stat4 histograms.

SQLite doesn't have materialized views.