HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

avanai

261 karma · joined May 1, 2014

submissionscomments
avanai··on Exapunks (2018)
Make sure you get those JIRAs filed and pointed. Standup is at 10:30.
avanai··on Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place
I think you just described cash.
avanai··on Apple Watch for Your Kids
I got one for my grade schooler and it's mostly great. She can text or call me or her mom or her grandparents (but no one else), we can know where she is, and there not too much she can play on it. It gives her a bit more freedom because she can get in touch with us to make plans or wander off out of sight but still be in touch.

I'm kind of annoyed with "schooltime" on the phone, it has a fixed (boring) watch face, it doesn't actually stop a kid from exiting schooltime, they just have to press a button and we can see if she did it in the app. It's also either on on a weekly schedule or totally off, so she has to whine at me to turn off schooltime on holidays and then it's easy to forget to turn it back on. There's also no provision for multiple family members to manage kid watches. I set up her watch so my wife can't also manage it. Also, there's no way for me to install apps. I'd really like to install Home Assistant on her watch so she can unlock doors, but...I can't. Can't be done.

Overall I'd say they built out a nice system for a while and then...stopped. I bet there's a PM at Apple that had the rest of the features all ready to go and then got moved off onto the Vision Pro or something. Every now and then they're talking to their old teammate and they sigh about what it could have been. I'll buy them a beer sometime.

avanai··on Just Use Go

    var _ MyInterface = &MyStruct{}

Now your compiler will tell you you stopped implementing the interface. Pretty? No. But it works. And gopls will even offer to implement stubs for missing methods.
avanai··on My smart sleep mask broadcasts users' brainwaves to an open MQTT broker
“Ask an LLM to hack your app” should be a production-readiness step from now on.
avanai··on Ian's Shoelace Site
Same. I also use Ian's Secure Knot in places where you'd use a double-knot https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/secureknot.htm
avanai··on Pebble Time 2 Design Reveal [video]
Man I loved my Pebble but I’d say the three things I use my Apple Watch for most are: telling time (++), reading notifications (~), and getting Siri to set timers or control my Home Assistant* (—-).

Since Apple simply won’t allow 3rd party apps the full api access they need to do everything, I’m stuck with my Apple Watch if I want all the Apple stuff, and I’m too lazy/annoyed to try to switch ecosystems.

*via Apple Home via Homebridge

avanai··on I drank every cocktail
The other magic ingredient is salt. A tiny pinch of salt can balance out sour and bitter flavors in surprising ways, and be otherwise undetectable. I’ve “fixed” a lot of cocktails that way.
avanai··on My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
A "eulogy" is a speech you make at a funeral in honor of the dead person. I think you meant "apology".
avanai··on Anyone can push updates to the doge.gov website
Too late. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/12/science/measles-vaccinati...
avanai··on A bunch of programming advice I'd give to myself 15 years ago
> Try to solve bugs one layer deeper

This is one of the main things I try to impart to junior folks when I’m mentoring them or reviewing code.

It’s also one of the biggest red flags to me of someone who’s working above their level when I have to repeatedly press a more senior person to dig deeper and fix things at a deeper level.

You need to take the time to understand why the bug happened, or you’re just going to be patching wallpaper instead of fixing the plumbing leak.

avanai··on In 2024, please switch to Firefox
I’ve been using Firefox almost exclusively for years with two exceptions. The web dev tools in Chrome are really just better. And recently my work made the decision to only allow Chrome for security reasons. I’m annoyed about that but I understand why, it’s not necessarily that Chrome is more secure but the central management tools are stronger and if they were only going to support one, they picked the one more people use.
avanai··on The worst programmer I know
The most impressive thing about this story is that they figured out the answer. They did the research, and nailed down that it was Nyquist who was was the productivity booster. It’s the exact opposite of the OP’s story, where management tried to fire the Nyquist-equivalent.
avanai··on Celsius Was Lying
Clicked to find out about how we're all measuring temperature wrong.
avanai··on Names should be cute, not descriptive
I'm not a huge fan of cutesey names but a lot of those names are variations on or homages to Kubernetes (Greek for "Helmsman"): e.g Skipper, Harbor, and Helm from your list.
avanai··on Gut epithelial barrier damage caused by dishwasher detergents and rinse aids
OK I read this as carbon-scrubbers which grow marijuana. I dunno, maybe it helps oxygenate the air. Or maybe I haven’t had coffee yet.
avanai··on Typing “old” (space) into iOS Safari crashes the app
“Best “ does it for me. 16.1.1

Turning off “Safari Suggestions” in settings fixes it.

avanai··on A sand battery could transform clean energy
They compare its cost effectiveness to lithium electrochemical storage batteries, but it seems much more apt to compare it to large-scale flow batteries, which also use relatively cheap, easily available materials. How does it compare to those?
avanai··on Clojure needs a Rails
I think this article vastly undersells the value of Java(script) interop. The ability to call out to a well-maintained library in two of the most widely-used languages in the industry is one of the major selling points of Clojure as a pragmatic LISP, versus e.g. Racket or CL. The reason why there are so many half-baked wrappers around popular Java libraries is that it’s reasonably trivial to write one yourself on demand, so that’s what people do.
avanai··on Amazon to Acquire One Medical
From a medical provider friend who works at One Medical:

“I won't wear a tracking device and see 40 patients while wearing a catheter”

avanai··on What are your most used self-hosted applications?
For my bedtime routine I have it fire when I start charging my phone. There’s an iOS shortcut that fires an HA event when I plug or unplug my phone, and if we’re all home and it’s after bedtime it turns everything off and sets the alarm
avanai··on Reactive Clojure: A web language
When the framework does so much for you, I always worry about what it looks like at scale when you need to start optimizing. Can you instrument all the plumbing, if something breaks can you get at it to fix it? How will you add caches at various different layers? On the browser, http cache, db cache, CDN, etc.? If the generated JavaScript that’s ultimately running on the browser has a bug, how many layers of library do I have to sift through to fix it? When I want to simulate the network for testing or deal with intermittent connection failures on the frontend how hard it is to plug in? What do schema migrations look like? What do deployments across a fleet of servers look like (there’s some point in time when some servers are old and some servers are new…)?

These are problems with any framework, but the more all-in-one a framework attempts to be the harder it is to get in between the joints with your glue gun to fix things up.

That said, this is Clojure and usually you have pretty easy access to all the intermediate bits and bobs and macros so maybe it’ll be great.

avanai··on Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021
The umlauts for quotes thing is really interesting. I don’t know why the author went for “these kids haven’t seen enough ‘proper’ text” rather than, say “these kids weren’t taught typing and discovered a creative solution that communicates their intent well.”
avanai··on Why are so many coders still using Vim and Emacs?
I’ve spent 20 years in vim, Emacs, and various IDEs and I’ve come to the conclusion that nothing is more powerful for editing text than Vim’s interaction language, no system for text editing is more powerful and easier to customize than Emacs, and some languages really benefit from an IDE.

So: I use Emacs with EVIL (vim emulation), and for Java I switch to JetBrains IntelliJ, also with Vim emulation turned on.

Like a woodworker who builds their own tool bench exactly how they like it, a programmer needs a toolset that suits them and that they understand intimately. Yes, you can get a bench from Lowes and maybe save some time, but in the long run you’ll be better served by the one you built.

Where the analogy breaks down is that a woodworker can customize an off-the-shelf bench pretty easily, but a programmer has a much higher barrier to customize/build plugins for an IDE. On the other hand customizing Emacs (or Vim, but I think Emacs is much easier to dig into) is trivial, and with a bit more effort writing really advanced customization that script your editor for whatever you need is pretty easy. If something breaks, in your code, an installed package, or the core editor, you can just debug it with a first-class built-in debugger.

I often have project-specific code to e.g. spin up my current job’s integration test environment and run the test I’m looking at. Could I do that in Goland? Probably, with enough effort. But I can keep using the same tools I’ve used for 20 years to do it.

If you’re interested in getting started I would recommend Doom Emacs to a new user these days.

avanai··on Reverse Engineering the Japanese Sentence
opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun

https://qz.com/773738/how-non-english-speakers-are-taught-th...

avanai··on How to properly manage SSH keys for server access
Something like https://www.okta.com/products/advanced-server-access/ ?
avanai··on Scunthorpe Sans – a self-censoring font
How do you express yourself when you drop something heavy on your toe?