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acj

65 karma · joined December 22, 2008

A geek with a camera and a bicycle.
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acj··on Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1
I hear this in the upper midwest occasionally, too
acj··on Jemalloc Repositories Are Archived
More: https://github.com/facebook/jemalloc/discussions/7
acj··on Jemalloc Repositories Are Archived
They un-archived it today long enough to revert a change to the purging algorithm that was merged in March [0]. The first archive date I saw this morning was from the last week of May. I won't speculate about the reason, but it's a small relief that the archiving seems deliberate and that the maintainers are still active.

[0] https://github.com/jemalloc/jemalloc/commit/27d7960cf9b48a9a...

acj··on The unbearable sorrow of Apple Weather
> failing to load the one part of the map that I want to see.

Yep. My partner and I have this problem every time we use the app in our home city. It usually works better when we’re traveling. I’ve left them feedback and will keep hoping for better. Meantime, I’ve switched to a less frustrating app.

acj··on ICQ will stop working from June 26
Same. The guy didn’t change any of my profile or recovery info, luckily, so I was able to get it back. And then he sent me a message from another account asking why I had taken his UIN. We ended up chatting for a while. It’s a fond memory.

I actually tried to delete that UIN a few years ago, but the support folks wanted me to provide a few UINs from my contact list to verify ownership. No chance I’m going to remember those.

acj··on Flameshow: A terminal flamegraph viewer
rbspy supports pprof output. I haven't tried using it with this tool yet, but it should work.
acj··on Show HN: Install and use multiple versions of FFmpeg with asdf
My main use case is upgrading codebases that depend on ffmpeg. I work for a shop that does a lot of media encoding and analysis across several independent systems, and we can’t upgrade all of them at once when a new ffmpeg is released, which means that for a while we’re actively supporting versions N and N+1. With this plugin, each codebase can declare which version of ffmpeg it wants in .tool-versions, and I don’t have to remember to do the uninstall/reinstall dance.

Most people won’t need this, but a few might find it very helpful.

acj··on Shouting in the Datacenter (2008) [video]
28:45 in the video. https://youtu.be/_IYzD_NR0W4?t=1725
acj··on Flu vaccination linked to 40% reduced risk of Alzheimer’s disease
> where I read it (probably xkcd)

Yep, it's in the alt text for https://xkcd.com/552/

"Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'."

acj··on Crafting Interpreters is available in print
Congrats, Bob, and thanks for all of your time and effort. I enjoyed the illustration videos that you included in the earlier blog post [1] (under "Illustrating by Hand"). That post landed at a time when many of us were badly stressed, and I remember it being very soothing.

[1] https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2020/04/05/crafting-craft...

acj··on AWS's Egregious Egress
One advantage of CloudFront is support for uploading large files (5GB+) to the origin server. CDNs tend to enforce a low size limit for uploads. It’s probably an uncommon use case, but the reduced client-side latency is nice for customers who are far away from the origin.
acj··on Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?
A tool for visualizing log file volume over time in your terminal [1]. Useful for quickly getting a handle on traffic patterns during a production incident. This began as a scratch-the-itch project and was also the first useful thing I made in Rust. Two itches scratched :)

A tool for visualizing ping latency as a heatmap [2]. My Macbook's wifi had developed a severe latency stutter every ~500ms that was driving me nuts when using interactive tools like SSH. It was very satisfying to visualize it and see the pattern, and it helped to narrow the list of possible causes.

[1] https://github.com/acj/krapslog-rs

[2] https://github.com/acj/pingrok

acj··on Ask HN: What are some tools / libraries you built yourself?
Last year I built a tool for visualizing log file volume (based on time) in your terminal [1]. Similar tools exist, but none were fast enough or easy to set up in a hurry, e.g. when you're investigating a production outage.

The year before that, a tool for visualizing ping latency as a heatmap [2]. My laptop's wifi had developed a severe latency stutter every ~500ms that was driving me nuts when using SSH and other interactive tools, not to mention killing my throughput. Once I could visualize it and saw the pattern, it was very clear that there was a system-level issue. Eventually traced it to a virtualization product's network driver.

It's definitely a pattern for me -- feel frustrated with diagnostic and data viz tools that are either too slow to handle or too complex to configure when I need them, and try to build simple tools that solve exactly the problems I keep bumping into. These smaller projects also provide good opportunities to practice with new languages or frameworks.

[1] https://github.com/acj/krapslog-rs (also krapslog-go)

[2] https://github.com/acj/pingrok

acj··on Ask HN: Show me your half baked project
A command line tool for visualizing high-resolution ping latency to hosts on your network: https://github.com/acj/ping-heatmap

It began as a crude answer to "why is this so slow" and slowly turned into a fun data viz project. Needs a better name :)

acj··on Digital Ocean Networking Issues Due to Internet Backbone Provider Outage
Not an official statement, but CenturyLink/Level3 is reporting service disruptions due to a fiber cut.

https://twitter.com/CenturyLinkHelp/status/12526545920699514...

acj··on Awk for multimedia
Natron is worth a look as well: https://natron.fr

Mac/Linux, Python API, mostly usable docs, and the source is available.

acj··on Ask HN: How are credentials managed at your company?
Shared spreadsheet in Google Docs. [sigh]
acj··on Ask HN: Books you read in 2015?
"Chasing the Scream" - a timely and interesting summary of the war on drugs and its (in)effectiveness.

"Mr. Bloomfield's Orchard" - a fun book about fungi from a mycologist with a solid sense of humor.

"On the Move" - Oliver Sacks's biography. Insightful and uplifting, especially if you enjoy writing.

"Ready Player One" - a dystopian cyber thriller. Reminded me of Snow Crash. Good stuff.

"The Last Place on Earth" - a good (if labored) summary of the races to the north and south poles and their geopolitical impacts.

"Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" - been on my list for years. Long but good.

"Steve Jobs" - needs no introduction. Got me interested in Isaacson's other books.

"Hallucinations" (Oliver Sacks) - insightful analysis of the prevalence and for-reaching effects of hallucination. It's a lot more common (and puzzling) than most of us realize.

acj··on Show HN: MarketBot – See real-time app reviews in your team's chatroom
Thanks for the suggestion. I added Flowdock support this week and will add the others as soon as I get some time.
acj··on Ask HN: What projects are you working on?
Indeed I am. Thanks for your efforts!
acj··on Ask HN: What projects are you working on?
An app for playing media on a Chromecast using AirPlay on an iOS device or Mac.

It's currently an Android app, which presents an odd set of hardware requirements; hoping Google releases a Cast SDK for Mac sometime soon.

First iteration is done and will be shipping soon.

acj··on Clojure on the Mac App Store
I'm not a game dev, but that makes me extra glad that I bought a copy. There's a lot to like: slogging through a set of thorny problems, documenting them clearly to help others find their way, and taking donations through a system that many of us are already hooked into (despite its issues and extra hurdles, as demonstrated here). Thanks.
acj··on Siri’s first real competition hits Android phones today [video]
That matches my experience with Cluzee so far. Asking, say, "What does Person XYZ do?" usually gets an answer, but asking "Where does Person XYZ work?" is an unrecognized command. Allowing more flexibility in phrasing the questions would be a big win. The app has potential, IMO.
acj··on Linus Torvalds on Android, the Linux fork
My best guess: "This doesn't mean that Android isn't [Linux], ..." and "That doesn't [mean], however, ...".
acj··on Ask HN: Parents' Sayings
"It's only worth what the next guy will pay for it."

"Win fights with your brain, not your fists."

"I'm still 18 inside."

acj··on Ask HN: Jumping into Android Development
What books do you recommend?

I've depended entirely on the web for learning Android development, but I've heard good things about the Android books from http://commonsware.com/. He has some helpful (free) tutorials available as well.

What is the best part about working with Android?

For me: flexibility and transparency. I like to get my hands dirty and gain a deeper understanding of the system, and it's quite helpful having (1) access to the source code for almost the entire system and (2) root access on the device. Those things likely won't matter when you're writing your first Android app, but it will matter when you're doing something uncommon or complex.

Are there are any CoreData like persistence frameworks?

I haven't needed any for my own apps, but the framework has integrated data storage engines. I imagine that someone has built a CoreData-like layer that uses them. This link might be helpful: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/371538/any-good-orm-tools...

Is three weeks, give or take a few days, too aggressive a deadline for doing a port from iPhone to Android?

Can you give us any more details? Your time commitment will vary significantly depending on the complexity of the app. If it's a 3D game, then three weeks might not cut it. If it's a reasonably straight-forward app that doesn't have a ton of features, then three weeks will be ample time given your prior experience.

A few other thoughts: don't be afraid of Android UI building. It isn't as scary as it sounds. heliodorj's comments about reading the Activity/Intent/Multitasking documentation are spot on -- making sure that you grok those concepts will save you time and frustration. Be sure to test on a real phone, preferably one that isn't super speedy so that you don't frustrate users with older hardware (e.g., the G1, aka HTC Dream).

acj··on Android Tries Harder
You can grab the general-purpose development tools (jdk, Eclipse, etc.) with apt-get. After that, you'll need to download the Android SDK and follow the installation steps. Eclipse will pull the remaining libraries for you. (If you encounter any strange errors while installing the SDK through Eclipse, try downloading the full Eclipse from eclipse.org and using that instead.) It's very easy to set up a virtual phone in the emulator and test your apps on various versions of Android.

Overall, my experience with the Android toolchain on Ubuntu (as well as OS X) has been a positive one.

acj··on LHC Shut Down Again
From the article:

UPDATE (March 10, 12:45am PST): With thanks to Prof. Jon Butterworth, member of the ATLAS collaboration at the LHC, I've been informed that the plan to shut down the LHC for an extended period of time was actually announced in early February by Dr. Steve Myers after the LHC Performance Workshop, in Chamonix, France. So rather than this being a sudden development, it is part of a planned shutdown.

acj··on Valve bringing Steam to Mac
Yes and no. Valve is porting some of its existing PC/Xbox game titles to run natively on the Mac platform, and most (or all?) of their new titles will be released simultaneously on PC, Mac, and XBox 360.
acj··on Ask HN: review my startup, a planning/analysis app for cyclists
Using Chromium nightly (build 35301) I can't update my profile settings. Clicking on "Save changes" gives no feedback and does not appear to save the changes. Other buttons in the app appear to work.

Nice work!

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