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brettnak

443 karma · joined November 4, 2009

brettnak [AT] gmail [DOT] com
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brettnak··on Supabase raises $200M Series D at $2B valuation
We're currently using supabase in production. I was already planning to leave them. I feel like it's close to good, but still really does have a _lot_ of bugs. It really doesn't feel like it's been tested thoroughly, and the documentation, while present, leaves a lot to be desired.

My experience of supabase really demonstrates to me that the ideals of all of the postgres layer technologies - postrest, realtime via wal, jwt auth in the db -, just don't make for an easy experience. It all works (mostly) but I find it more annoying than useful and have to work around it more often than I'd like. I suppose I'm old school, but just building the things that one needs is often more robust and less work than trying to plug into what they've provided.

I really don't know what they're going to do with a series D. It seems they now _have_ to go for a high-value exit, but I really don't see which company would provide that exit.

brettnak··on United finds loose bolts on plug doors during 737 Max 9 inspections
The desire of fastener tension is clamping force or fastener stretch in some cases, not fastener torque. I think what the parent is saying is that a perfectly torqued fastener is only about 30% accurate in terms of clamping force.
brettnak··on How one of America’s last piano manufacturers stays alive
I would highly recommend that you check out the documentary ”Pianomania” if you haven’t seen it already. It follows a Steinway piano tuner as he tunes instruments for a few famous pianists doing exactly the kind of thing you mentioned.
brettnak··on Mystery GPS Tracker on a Supporter’s Car
Where did you find the tracker in the car?
brettnak··on A Picture of Java in 2020
The author clearly should have gone into the specific use-cases he was talking about. An IDE _is_ nothing more than a text editor with advanced features. There's a huge continuum from a basic text-editor like notepad to a full fledged IDE.

I'd particularly like to see a use-case laid out where something like VSCode + Extensions wasn't actually enough. I've been using IntelliJ nearly every day for the past 4 years and I still don't understand how it is any different from a text editor + extensions. IntelliJ is even architected similarly with so many different "plugins" adding full fledged language support for other langages. Goland, Pycharm, etc, are basically extensions for the intellij text editor.

brettnak··on Go is boring, and that’s fantastic
I think this also ignores that video games are _vastly_ more complicated than the space shuttle - from a "computers" perspective. The did some very impressive things with some novel and primitive computers, but the amount of "state" that is being kept track of and data flowing through those computers is tiny.
brettnak··on Thieves Are Using Bluetooth to Target Vehicle Break-Ins
My headphones are only paired with my macbook and my android phone. I always am walking with the headphones paired with my phone, so that's one of the two devices. The only other device is my macbook pro, that is often sitting on the kitchen table with it's lid closed, and unused for several days, and yet this happens every day. I obviously don't know what exactly is going on, but if they can "connect" then presumably something about the bluetooth is still functioning.
brettnak··on Thieves Are Using Bluetooth to Target Vehicle Break-Ins
My bluetooth headphones connect to my macbook pro when come home from work and my laptop is sitting on the kitchen table. My headphones tell me "two devices connected" when I walk in the door.

Although it seems like bluetooth _should_ be shut off by devices when not in use, I doubt most devices actually do that.

brettnak··on Sacha Baron Cohen Uses ADL Speech to Tear Apart Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook
Because they are made of human beings and live on planet Earth. A better question is why do we think companies shouldn't care about that? Why isn't it their responsibility?
brettnak··on We ‘may’ have discovered a potential remedy for tinnitus
The movie theater one is actually kind of interesting. There is a certain maximum audio power that a room can sustain before loosing fidelity. I think _all_ sound engineers know about this, but a projectionist with a volume knob probably does not.

Next time you're in a place where the audio is too loud for you to hear, try to listen carefully for a few seconds. You might discover that despite being too loud, it actually sounds bad, and reducing the volume would actually _improve_ the audio fidelity.

brettnak··on Brave launches 1.0
The final point you made, where you stated:

> Note that I am using browser extensions, like uBlock Origin or Privacy Badger, but I'm only doing so for privacy reasons.

is, I think, very relevant to the entire discussion. With the way browsers work, and the way the web works, blocking ads is well "within" the allowed scope of the internet. I, you, we never explicitly consented to browser tracking. It was created when there were no rules. After it had been happening for a very long time, it was added to large TOS & Privacy agreements, and by then, was so ubiquitous that we had no where else to go.

Publishers have power over you to put ads in their pages and track you across the internet. I have a problem with both the quality of those ads and the method in which they are delivered. I still have some power over whether or not I see ads, so I chose to exercise it.

brettnak··on Brave launches 1.0
I think this largely ignores "how" ads are distributed. The website you are looking at did not select _any_ of the ads you see. They chose a network who is delegating that placement to someone else. Depending on which ad network, this could delegated by several different ad networks until an advertiser is finally selected by the final intermediary.

In principle this may not be a very important distinction. However, I often think that I would stop blocking ads _IF_ the website I was looking at had actually vetted the ad I was seeing. I do not want to see so much garbage just for visiting a website. For example: I block all ads from theverge.com, not because their content is bad, but because I find the outbrain ads at the bottom of the page so asinine and tasteless that I'd rather not see any ads.

To continue on with theverge example, If they actually had selected the individual ads they were placing, I'd be totally fine with that. But I am not fine with them delegating that responsibility to another company that clearly is not up to handling the task.

brettnak··on What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL (2014)
I think a lot of this is just some weird expectations. You cannot _use_ a database without knowing sql. ORMs work great, but you have to know sql to use them properly. What if you want to load a relationship with a join? What if you want only to load certain columns?

I would consider part of the profession to be knowing sql. This whole "orms are bad / long live the orm" split attitude is ridiculous. ORMs are fine. Some orms are bad, just like some code is bad, and some frameworks are poorly thought out. I have worked with developers in the past, who I _desparately_ wish were forced to use a good ORM like ActiveRecord, so that they could understand just how far you can get with a solid and good pattern. I've also worked with developers in the past who used an ORM like a 15kg sledgehammer, and had absolutely no idea what was going on.

brettnak··on Service Quotas: View and manage your quotas for AWS services from one location
Came here thinking that this was _finally_ a way to cap your costs and set your own quota and price caps for various aws services in hopes of avoiding that random 1k bill for a personal account etc. I'm surprised that it's account level limits and not a set-your-own-limit service.
brettnak··on Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles
I probably own the final Mazda that has a "touch screen"... If you could ever really call Mazda's touch screen a touch screen.

A lot of the things that drive a poor experience with a touch screen are, imho, directly because they have such a poor implementation of a touch screen. Mainly, it's _slow_, _very slow_. A touch screen has to be very fast to seem like it's working, and in a car (in particular), it _must_ feel instant or it will feel like it's broken and cause distraction. I would be very interested to see some sort of apples-to-apples comparision (a good touch experience, vs a good tactile experience), but Mazda's is just not good. It's not even close to the realm of "good enough" to be used as a comparison.

I would say it's more like they never tried to do a touch screen, and then called it bad so they wouldn't have to keep trying.

And... The android auto experience is 10x better than the mazda infotainment system because of access to spotify, podcasets, and _actual_ navigation. I love the loftiness of how mazda talks about what they want to do, but they're so far off of delivering what they say they want to that I don't really know what to think. It's just bad and slow.

I really good tactile experience is probably better than a really good touch experience. But Android Auto is getting close to being a really good touch experience. The Mazda infotainment is not at all close to being a good tactile experience if you want to use say, spotify, or google maps, or use it to actually get to where you want to go.

brettnak··on Apple removes game after Chinese company cloned, trademarked, requested takedown
It seems to me like this is going to come up in the future "everyone who bought an iDevice" vs Apple antitrust lawsuit.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/13/us/politics/supreme-court...

brettnak··on Apple leaves Facebook offices in disarray after revoking app permissions
It seems like there's something getting lost here. A lot of comments and even articles make it sound like Apple is retaliating against fb at random, which is not true. FB had an internal app agreement with apple to distribute apps to it's employees. Probably this one: https://developer.apple.com/programs/enterprise/

They violated the terms of the agreement, and therefore the have lost access. They also probably violated the terms of the app store as a whole, but who knows.

Whether or not one should have to be part of that program to install Enterprise apps is a different issue.

brettnak··on The Buzzfeed Lesson
It's interesting to see so many new businesses forget the lessons that previous businesses learned. Brand identity and trust used to be the foundation of businesses, and at some level (I'm not sure what level) it still is. Even as someone educated on the differences between BF & BFN, I still never knew how to take BFN seriously with all the regular crap on BF. I don't really feel like it's my job to figure out how they fit together, and it would have been pretty simple just to completely split the brands if they actually wanted to have the two faces of the company. To the average internet reader, there was no difference between BF and BFN. People have either always known, or are learning (however slowly) that they can't vet every story themselves and they have to trust. BF corrupted that with their two faces.
brettnak··on Explanation of the Asiana SF crash by a former UAL captain
Since a lot of this has been coming up I thought many people might like to know the basics of how the auto-thrust system is used. Some of this information could be slightly inaccurate so if a real pilot wants to correct anything here, that would be great. The auto-pilot setting for autothrust (A/T) has a lot of modes. You don’t specifically set the mode so much as a combination of settings can affect the mode that it’s in. The modes are the following (this is fairly generic and probably not exactly how the 777 system works):

A/T by itself will simply hold a specified airspeed by adjusting the Thrust Levers.

A/T + FL/CH + V/S + Alititude Hold: (Auto-Thrust + Flight Level Change + Vertical Speed + Altitude Hold) climb or descend to the set altitude by the set vertical speed at the specified airspeed. The thrust levers are maniplated by the system. Generally once the altitude is attained, V/S and FL/CH will turn off.

A/T + “V/S”: The same as the above but with no set altitude.

A/T + Thrust Hold: I looked at the 777 main control panel and I couldn’t find the setting for Thrust Hold, however it seems to be referred to in various things on the internet and I just don’t know what to look for. This setting is normally used for takeoff (maybe landing?) where the pilot sets an airspeed and a thrust (via the thrust levers) and the airspeed is regulated by pitching the aircraft up or down.

A/T + Thrust Hold + FL/CH + Altitude Hold: This setting is similar to the one above, but without setting a vertical speed. The indicated airspeed is controlled via pitching the aircraft up or down until the specified altitude is reached. I believe once the altitude is reached FL/CH mode is switched off as well as Thrust Hold.

This is my best guess as to what the 5 modes the NTSB says the 777 has. If any pilots could correct anything I’m missing or that is simply wrong, that would be great.

Switching between modes is really not intuitive because you’re fiddling with settings and it’s hard to know what button press is actually going to tell the system to do something. If you’re interested in how confusing it can actually be, I’d recommend installing the x-plane trial and trying to mess with these settings.

If you want to give it a go, the beginner’s tutorial for x-plane & the 777 has you do a visual landing on 28L @ KSFO

http://wiki.x-plane.com/777_beginners_tutorial#Landing_the_7...

brettnak··on Explanation of the Asiana SF crash by a former UAL captain
This should help a little:

-400: Likely the 747-400. One of the variants of the 747

UAL: United Airlines

Asiana: This is the airline of the plane that crashed at SFO.

Right Seat: First Officer / Co-pilot's seat.

Left Seat: Captain / Pilot's seat.

Standards Captain: Probably means he was one of the people who would have final say in whether or not a pilot was certified to fly a specific aircraft. I believe there are two different standards, one for pilot and one for copilot, but I'm not sure.

Upgraded by Phenomenal Growth: The airline grew so fast they didn't have enough pilots so they had to promote copilots to pilots faster than they were probably qualified.

*edited to correct information based on the comment below.

brettnak··on Hijacking airplanes with an Android phone
I believe the weather information comes from both an on board doppler radar and ACARS. ACARS is basically text messaging for airplanes over VHF.
brettnak··on Xkcd "Click and Drag" in a "map" interface
Thanks for bothering to make it work with pinch to zoom on my tablet! Impressive!
brettnak··on Nexus Q from Google I/O stolen by airport security
This sounds like something that I would take to small claims court. For something like this, it's probably unlikely that they'll even show up and you would win by default.
brettnak··on Nvidia PR Responds To Torvalds' Harsh Words
Supporting Linux is important to NVIDIA, and we understand that there are people who are as passionate about Linux as an open source platform as we are passionate about delivering an awesome GPU experience.

Recently, there have been some questions raised about our lack of support for our Optimus notebook technology. When we launched our Optimus notebook technology, it was with support for Windows 7 only. The open source community rallied to work around this with support from the Bumblebee Open Source Project http://bumblebee-project.org/. And as a result, we've recently made Installer and readme changes in our R295 drivers that were designed to make interaction with Bumblebee easier.

While we understand that some people would prefer us to provide detailed documentation on all of our GPU internals, or be more active in Linux kernel community development discussions, we have made a decision to support Linux on our GPUs by leveraging NVIDIA common code, rather than the Linux common infrastructure. While this may not please everyone, it does allow us to provide the most consistent GPU experience to our customers, regardless of platform or operating system.

As a result:

1) Linux end users benefit from same-day support for new GPUs , OpenGL version and extension parity between NVIDIA Windows and NVIDIA Linux support, and OpenGL performance parity between NVIDIA Windows and NVIDIA Linux.

2) We support a wide variety of GPUs on Linux, including our latest GeForce, Quadro, and Tesla-class GPUs, for both desktop and notebook platforms. Our drivers for these platforms are updated regularly, with seven updates released so far this year for Linux alone. The latest Linux drivers can be downloaded from www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html.

3) We are a very active participant in the ARM Linux kernel. For the latest 3.4 ARM kernel – the next-gen kernel to be used on future Linux, Android, and Chrome distributions – NVIDIA ranks second in terms of total lines changed and fourth in terms of number of changesets for all employers or organizations.

At the end of the day, providing a consistent GPU experience across multiple platforms for all of our customers continues to be one of our key goals.

brettnak··on A Cheap 12-Core, 30-Watt Ubuntu Cluster
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qF1lx1w...

That might get you around the blocking.

brettnak··on SLR Camera Simulator
I think this applies to a lot more than photography. Directly, I have knowledge of how it applies to both dancing and music as well, especially jazz. You definitely have to get out there and do it, but you have to spend time deliberately refining your ear, and deliberately refining your technique.

For dancing, it's much the same, you need to get out there and do it. But there is also a lot of time spent deliberately refining your ear for the music, your feeling for the beat what position your body should be in and how a lead should feel. Each play into the other but if one is neglected, it's hard to progress.

brettnak··on AT&T CEO voices regret over iPhone unlimited data model
Another real question is this: Do people think the first of the major telcos to buckle down and actually do this will pull quite far ahead of the others?
brettnak··on AT&T CEO voices regret over iPhone unlimited data model
I was going to say something similar. While I realize that we are mostly entrepreneurs here, aren't there some of us who believe in working hard and providing a reasonable service or product at a reasonable price? In all seriousness, people often consider giving to charities and whatnot as a contribution to society. Wouldn't it be even greater to simply run a service - especially in this case - for an "honest" amount of money; ie, enough to make some profit, save some, and cover costs? Is this line of thinking completely absent from society?
brettnak··on Modern Web Development
I'm probably not the only one, but I have no idea where the separation between Chromium and Chrome actually is. Can anyone enlighten me as to where the separation really is? Is Chrome a fork of Chromium, is Chromium an upstream? I know they actively work together in a lot of ways but how exactly?
brettnak··on Headphones for Hackers
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned Etymotic. They're earbuds, but they sound pretty great. However, I have heard that to sound their best they need an amp.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003YTTN9I/ref=oh_o06_s00_i...

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