HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

anw

1,310 karma · joined October 31, 2012

Be a Kusama, not a Warhol.

Create slowly, with passion and meaning. Being prolific means nothing if there is no substance.

ὁ δὲ ἀνεξέταστος βίος οὐ βιωτὸς ἀνθρώπῳ

Examine your life, be the person you should. •̀ o •́

submissionscomments
anw··on Librem 5: First Impressions
I ordered my phone October 10, 2017.

As of March 21, 2022, I have not received my order yet. When given the option, I selected to receive the completed phone, rather than a beta build. Thus, the delay.

Mainly, I did not order this to just have a phone (as I have several older Androids). I wanted to help fund an alternative to the Android / Apple ecosystems.

Hopefully soon.

anw··on How to fold an origami cat: Lexus takumi challenge (2020)
Ha! Have to laugh at one sentence in particular

> candidates are assessed in a number of ways, but one is via a decidedly non-digital method – the Japanese art of paper folding, origami.

As fingers are anatomical digits, folding using a non-digital method made me imagine people trying to fold paper using their elbows — and non-dominant elbow at that.

anw··on Avoid Surprise Bills from AWS
So if that wasn't the best offer for the day, what makes that offer stand out to be mentioned vs the highest offer you had received that day?
anw··on Ask HN: Do you also alternate between super productive and slow days?
Yes, I also alternate. But my ebb and flows are around motivation, not exertion.

If I am working for someone else, and I put in a lot of effort, then I feel completely drained after N amount of days (or after project completion) – which requires me to mentally "unlink" my brain from anything related to that project.

If I am working for myself, whether that be on my company, or for personal growth, then I can hit a wall day after day and still find motivation to continue forward, projecting even one little victory as something that can give me energy to keep going.

The key for me is motivation. If I feel invested (and rewarded) in my own growth, then I am much more productive than just adding more to the bottom line of some faceless organisation.

Good luck to you! I hope you find something worth while that both gives you energy and makes you feel like you're growing.

anw··on Duolingo S-1 IPO
I really like Duolingo. It's not my favorite way of learning a language§, but they do a good job of pounding vocabulary into your head over and over. I will never forget that jeruk is "orange" in Indonesian.

However, taken from "Risk Factors" on this S-1:

> •users feel that their experience is diminished as a result of the decisions we make with respect to the frequency, prominence, format, size and quality of ads that we display;

Duolingo has a big problem with both their ads and how they promote their Plus plan. (I hope to never see an owl flying through space again)

Primarily, the quality of the ads I see are those stupid fish games or the "pull this pin to drop lava on the knight" that you see advertised on Facebook. I'm sure they're making money off of views, especially since you can't proceed in your lesson until you watch the video, but it cheapens the brand name of Duolingo (at least for me).

If they had ads for anything language, travel, or even food related, it would feel more on par with their branding. But so many other dollar grab apps do the same thing [regarding those kinds of video ads] that it feels like I'm just looking at another cheap app.

Secondly, how they promote their Plus plan. You are limited in how long you can access their platform by how many hearts you have. Miss enough questions, your hearts run out. Run out of hearts, you're restricted from proceeding further in your studies. You must buy hearts to stay on their platform. This feels counter intuitive, as you are now kicking users off of your platform and lose the ability to sway them towards other things you have to offer.

I have found that between carrot and stick approaches, it is usually better to use a carrot where you can.

§ - For my style of learning, I've found Pimsleur to be one of the better approaches. Breaking sentences into phrases, phrases into words, and down words into syllables really helps me grasp the langauge more, especially with the context that goes around in the "story".

anw··on Widescreen Gaming in the 90s
This is an important point, and an oft-quoted mantra I've seen from older devs.

Your computer will change, and has little to know difference on your health.

Your monitor, keyboard, mouse (and chair/desk can also be included) are your long term tools that you use to interact with your computer. They can be a benefit or detriment to your health (eye strain, RSI, back pain). If you have to work with your computer for your job, and do so for many years, it's worth it to purchase tools that have long term benefits.

anw··on Widescreen Gaming in the 90s
John Carmack coding Quake on a 100 pound 1080p CRT in 1995[0] is a great image that this article reminded me of.

I seem to remember monitors being 800x600 around that time, and a few years later did we even see 1024x768 become the norm.

It's mind blowing to imagine what 1080 would be like back in the day.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20110927044427/https://geek.com/...

anw··on Don't Feed the Thought Leaders
It's cathartic to read other people who have to go through this.

I'm fighting red tape for my team as we build out a dashboard.

Outlook is packed with 1–2 hour meetings for the next 3 months where so far I'm:

* being asked to load test our system to make sure it can handle the load (of 3 people?)

* being asked to integrate with various analytics platforms so we can alert some poor schmuck at 3 AM in case the API goes down then (it's not a vital part of any platform)

* told to have this run in k8s since everything runs in k8s

* other pedantic tasks by Sys Ops who think everything is a nail and love to argue their points ad exhaustium (or worse, argue why their fav stack is the golden child)

I understand the need for standards and making sure they're followed, but there really needs to be a human element of, "is this truly needed for what I'm trying to do?". So many engineering departments are all about automation, but don't truly think through how much automation is needed, rather than a 1 size fits all approach.

I appreciate that this article comes to the conclusion that the more correct an answer will be, the more complicated it tends to be. I wish more people in decision making positions would understand this.

anw··on Launch HN: NextUX (YC S19) – Web UX editor and feedback tool for product teams
I really appreciate your blog, and especially find articles like "Design Better Forms"[0] very interesting, if even to provide a nice check-list of do's and don'ts to keep in mind. Thank you for the articles you write.

For NextUX, while I may not have a need myself, I've forwarded the link to my fiance who is doing internships via MBA program – having a need for tools like this – and heard back, "this looks very useful".

Good job covering a lot of aspects of UX/UI, and I wish you the best of luck!

[0] https://medium.com/nextux/design-better-forms-96fadca0f49c

anw··on How M1 Macs feel faster than Intel models: it’s about QoS
> macbook … and lasts 22 hours on a single charge

I keep hearing this but have not experienced this in person. I usually get about 5 hours of life out of it. My usual open programs are CLion, WebStorm, Firefox (and Little Snitch running in the background).

However, even with not having IDEs open all the time, and switching over from Firefox to Safari, I’m only seeing about 8 hours of battery life (which is still nice compared with my 2013 MBP that has about 30 minutes of battery life).

anw··on Deno 1.10 Release Notes
Cargo is one of the nicest build systems I've used. Coming from maven, I have nothing but love for what cargo brings and how easy it makes it.

The key thing for me with Cargo (and Rust) is the documentation. I'm able to quickly glean what I need to do from the docs, and often with useful examples that are close to my use case.

I do wish the package ecosystem was set up with namespaces. Abandoned crates, name squatting, etc. should really be a thing of the past. But I guess this fosters creativity in names.

anw··on Ask HN: How to get back hacker's mentality and joy of coding
Hi epimetheus2! There are probably going to be a few people here who say, "code in the morning, spend your time and mental energy on yourself before you spend it on your company". I agree with this, but I also want to point out a few things I've found for myself, since I'm coming from a similar background as you.

First, part of the thrill of coding when I was a kid was the discovering and learning new things. Even making my name flash on a screen was a really cool thing. At the time, coding felt like a mystic art that you had to master through hours of trial and error, and each thing you learned was another building block on your way to understanding.

Now that you're doing this for a job, you know how the sausage is made. You no longer are coding either elementary things (to learn whichever language), or even building things you find an interest in. You're using your skills for the purpose of making a company money (which hopefully pays you well enough to make up for the fact it's draining your own enthusiasm for this craft).

And that's probably one of the biggest things. You're taking this previously magical thing that you used to discover new and exciting ways to build [what you wanted] and using it for very mundane things, or for uses that you just have no passion about. Also, there are a million articles or Stack Overflow questions that tell you step by step what to do. You no longer have one old book from the library and 3 outdated Web sites that kind of talk about what you want to know. The excitement of discovery is lost since all of the answers are flashing on a bill board for you and everyone else.

I was feeling the same way as you from about 1 year ago until just 1 month ago. I also work as doing code (JVM stack and backend, as well). I also have about 3 projects of my own that I alternate between (1 backend, 1 frontend, and 1 that is both). About a year ago (Pandemic time) we laid off quite a few people, which meant all of my energy had to go into picking up a larger workload–effectively killing my motivation and passion for my projects.

Taking a year long break from my passion and projects was a very good thing. You shouldn't have to feel that you "need" to code for joy. That'd just kill the joy. Instead, find something that brings back that feeling of newness and magical curiosity that coding did when you were a child. Something that nobody is telling you what to do, or how to use your abilities.

Take up painting, photography, bike riding, wood crafting, a Raspberry Pi or other hardware (although, let's be honest, there are probably a lot of us who just buy them and leave them in a drawer :)). Even learning how to tend a flower garden would be something that you can pour energy into and feel invigorated when you get the results.

In time, your thirst for creating your own thing with code will come back (it did for me, anyway). And in the mean time, you can feel reinvigorated seeing the benefits of your work come to fruition, and have new knowledge that you can share with other people, or just enjoy thinking about as you go about your day problem solving how to solve your next curiosity.

Good luck! Life should be fun. You don't need to be the "coding as a hobby" person all the time! Feel free to jump around and only enjoy the things that bring you joy when they do that for you :)

anw··on Apple TV 4K Gets A12 Bionic
I frequently travel, and bring my AppleTV with me to hook up to hotel TVs.

It would be great if they made a way to support Web logins for WiFi.

At the moment, I do t see a big change between this version and the one I own. If they added that feature, I’d buy it in a heartbeat so I could stop spoofing my AppleTV’s MAC on my laptop just to login to the hotel web portals.

anw··on Show HN: hackernews.roundtable.audio turns HN posts into live audio discussions
I'm reminded of Diggnation from around 2005.

Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht would put out weekly videos/podcasts where they'd talk about the top news articles appearing on Digg (which Kevin helped start).

Because Kevin was in the tech, media, and startup scenes, there was a lot of interesting information mixed in along with the humor and drinking.

Is there a modern day equivalent to Diggnation?

anw··on PHP in 2021
It's nice to see PHP adding useful things like enums and async (green threads). My foray into Web development started with Perl, but quickly segued into PHP with how much simpler it felt. The ability to hop into vim on your server (or use CPanel back in the day) and edit your site live was exciting back then – but now that very thought makes me shudder with what could go wrong, haha.

While I've moved onto JVM languages and Rust professionally, I do hope PHP will continue getting future generations excited about Web development and building out their ideas quickly.

FYI: Not sure if the author will see this but some spelling mistakes in the article. [0] E.g. s/reslease/release/

0. https://stitcher.io/blog/php-in-2021#the-community

anw··on I want a computer that I own
And the cool thing – it looks like there has been some interest[0] in supporting Power for WINE.

[0] https://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2019-February/14...

anw··on The unusual ways Western parents raise children
The adjective form of orthodoxy is orthodox. Think of something like the "Orthodox" church. And it's antonym is "unorthodox", for example: "the unorthodox church" ;)
anw··on The unusual ways Western parents raise children
I'm not the OP, but my attempt through breaking down word etymologies would be something like:

ortho: rigid, straight, correct

doct: teachings, learnings

ic: of, or pertaining to

So orthodoctic seems to have the meaning of "pertaining to rigid or correct teachings".

anw··on The unusual ways Western parents raise children
If you don't mind, which motion-detecting sleep mat did you wind up going with?
anw··on AWS Babelfish: The Elephant in the PostgreSQL Room?
If you are using an Jetbrains IDE (Intellij, CLion, etc) then there is a built-in Database tool that lets you do the same things that Sequel Ace does.
anw··on Ask HN: Why aren't you coding?
Because Coding is not Working. Coding is not Planning. Coding is not Being Efficient. Coding is not Accomplishing Goals. Coding is not Saving Money. Coding is not Gaining Customers.

I am getting paid to get things done in a good manner. If I wanted to have a house built for me, I would not expect to pay somebody and immediately have them start laying bricks without them looking at the land, taking soil samples, sketching up drafts of what the house should look like within the constraints available, and then plan the foundation of which to start building.

If they came and immediately just started laying bricks, I'd know I have a really shitty house builder.

I mean no offense by this, but "why aren't you X" is a bit naïve and comes off as lacking a good amount of experience in that field. There are many reasons why not doing X is right, including social/mental recovery and prevention of burnout.

anw··on Shuffle — An online editor for busy developers
Wow, I'm blown away by the slickness of the UI and UX. It's very impressive and intuitive.

I'm not the target demographic (yet), but may look into this later when I look at starting up a 1 man company.

Great job putting this beautiful site together. Is there any article or post about how this platform was created (including design aspects)?

anw··on Ask HN: Any less known but cool places you want to visit one day?
Jeju-do (Jeju Island, South Korea) - especially to see Halla mountain.

Xi'an (China), along with the other ancient capitals of China (or what we would call China, today).

Other areas around Asia that were inhabited by the Mongols, Manchu/Jurchen, and other related groups. Separately, I'd also like to see the parts of Viet Nam, Cambodia, and Laos where Hmong people live.

Parts of India, such as Arunachal Pradesh because of the diversity and history of people living there (Tai, Monpa, Naga).

Locations that were formerly part of the Assyrian Kingdom along with areas from the Akkadian Kingdom.

anw··on Load testing is hard and the tools are not great
Load Testing has been both a blessing and bane in my career.

Most managers only want to see how traffic will perform in what-if scenarios (can we handle Black Friday, what will happen if our traffic goes up 10x during a special event, etc). For these, JMeter and whatever service you're using for analytics/metrics work perfectly fine (New Relic, is the current favorite). Then we can compare average latency, Error Rates, etc. with what we get during JMeter.

The issue is that most managers or other PHB want more than just a one off for load testing. And this article greatly covers that.

A lot of time people want a Swiss Army Knife of tools for "automation", where load testing falls under that category for them.

This magical tool should be able to:

* Test your API calls from a functional, integration, and a performance (not load testing; just making sure we're under specific latency)

* Test your Web-sites from the same testing perspectives, as well as being modular (ie: Selenium's POM)

* Integrate with CI so specific tests, test suites/flows can be tested for every new build, and we can run specific workflows by clicking a button

* Be used during load testing so we can measure latency and run tests while recreating customer experience from the Web side of things

For each of these steps, there is at least one good tool or library to handle things. However, I've found it difficult to find something that handles all of these well and where (most importantly) the other devs are willing to pick it up.

Selenium/Web Driver handles the UI tests. Postman and a handful of others can perform the API tests. JMeter is the de facto for load testing at every place I've been to. And you can write any of these into your CI.

Is there something that can do all of this well, and has a low enough overhead where devs on your team are willing enough to actually use it as more than just a toy or experiment?

anw··on iPhone 6s falls out of a plane and survives, with all the action recorded
He's very fortunate that it landed on the beach, rather than in the ocean or on concrete. This is one of the great times that Find My iPhone comes in especially handy!

I know the Nokia has a solid reputation for being durable. I never thought of the iPhone being tested for durability, but it seems this is a pretty well known thing:

[0] https://wccftech.com/iphone-12-pro-durability-test-ceramic-s... [1] https://www.cultofmac.com/297808/5-methods-apple-uses-test-i...

anw··on Show HN: I Wrote a Book on Data Analysis with Rust Notebooks
Thanks for offering the coupon to the HN community :) And of course thank you for putting this together for all of us to read and learn from. I took advantage and ordered this book, along with a few others on the site.

I've wanted to add Data Analysis along with ML to my utility belt. With your books and Andrew Ng's class coming up this Monday, I have a fun Winter of learning ahead of me!

anw··on Show HN: I Wrote a Book on Data Analysis with Rust Notebooks
Thank you for writing this! I've been meaning to get a Jupyter notebook set up with Rust.

By the way, I tried to sign up for the newsletter – since you also offered a 10% discount there, and was going to buy the book using that – but it returns with a 404 when processing via https://newsletter.datacrayon.com/subscription/form.

anw··on Why AWS loves Rust, and how we’d like to help
> I also pointed out that Rust has to win the mindshare of C++ programmers first, before even reaching other ecosystems

C++ is just a tool, as is Rust. Rust does not need to win the mindshare of C++ programmers first to become successful. It only needs to itself as a viable alternative in whatever fields people find it useful. I believe it has.

Between WASM, embedded, and even Web development, I see a lot of "mindshare" being attracted to Rust.

anw··on Ask HN: What's something not possible in HTML/Web-Dev that you'd like to see?
What do you mean by intersecting markup?
anw··on Is your programming language unreasonable? (2015)
> Do most (or any) languages in which people take this approach actually enforce handling of all cases?

I'm not familiar with most languages, but I can state that Rust requires matching sum types to cover all possible variants. For example:

    enum Animal {
        Dog,
        Cat,
        Pigeon
    }
    let pet = Animal::Dog;
    let sound = match pet {
        Animal::Dog => String::from("ouaf"),
        Animal::Cat => String::from("miaou")
    };
This would not compile, because you've forgotten to cover the pigeon. You would need to either add one of the two lines below:

    Animal::Pigeon => String::from("rou rou")
or

    _ => String::from("eeeeeeeeeeeei")
The last line is a catch all, which would cover anything not checked for explicitly.
Page 1 of 5Next →