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bthallplz

445 karma · joined June 30, 2012

Christian. Skateboarder. Philosopher. Economics grad who's trying to stay scholarly. Works as a research data analyst.

Long-term jollies, short-term follies.

* Weblog: <https://weblog.tacticaltypos.net>

* Website: <https://tacticaltypos.net>

* Say hi on Mastodon/Pleroma: @bthall@tilde.zone or <https://tilde.zone/@bthall>

* Email: <brandon@tacticaltypos.net>

https://bthallplz.at.hn

meet.hn/city/38.5810606,-121.4938950/Sacramento

Interests: AR/VR, Data Science, Education, Philosophy, Programming, Remote Work, Writing

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bthallplz··on Ask HN: Anyone still coding like 2021? Where do you work?
I don't code much in my position (State of California), but I'm pretty sure the public sector/government is a solid bet. Government has a major reluctance to use (and depend) on techniques and tools that haven't been proven out for like 5+ years. I suspect that most government coders' practices aren't at a 2021 best practices level yet.
bthallplz··on Coyote v. Acme (1990)
Watching it in the theater was a fun experience. It seemed like most of the audience were containing their laughter, but me and one other guy were just belting out laughing. It'd be fun to go see again simply to get a sense for how many people will be less reserved with their laughter.
bthallplz··on Show HN: Brolly, a plain-text weather forecast site
No, none that I'm recalling. I think there was one that had a table of the prior few days' key metrics, but it was way down the page and just in a table format, way less intuitive than how your tool shows this info.

Relatedly, I would love it if a site offered some info about how irregular a place's recent weather has been lately. This would be really nice for a place you're vacationing in or visiting with an interest in moving there.

bthallplz··on Show HN: Brolly, a plain-text weather forecast site
I love the graphs, it's a very neat approach!

I also greatly appreciate getting to see the past few days' history for my location - too many weather sites are only really forward-looking, and I sometimes want to compare to a prior day when the current day feels different somehow.

bthallplz··on How My Images Are Dithered
Have you posted anywhere online about your experiences with color e-ink displays? I think they're super neat, and I love the idea of using dithering for them. :D
bthallplz··on How My Images Are Dithered
Neat! I really liked the look of the Floyd-Steinberg algorithm in the article, so when I googled for a web tool that'll do it for me, I found the tool mentioned here: https://www.ascii-magic.com/styles/dither

It has some fun animation options and settings to play with, and there's other dithering algorithms to play with.

bthallplz··on Synthesis is harder than analysis
I haven't read Kant, but I like this description so much that I how it's indeed a good summary of some of his works. o7 Is this the main idea of Critique of Pure Reason?
bthallplz··on Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
Yay for dictation! It's so nice to just think aloud and then have an easily editable record of your thoughts, even when you aren't feeding the outputs to LLMs.
bthallplz··on We're temporarily restricting Show HNs because of an influx
Post the link as a non-Show HN post?
bthallplz··on More than 6 out of 10 people turn to AI for psychological support
Heh. Sometimes when I'm stuck at work and feeling unmotivated/catch myself procrastinating, I'll write out my thoughts in my OneNote notebook that I take all work notes in. I do kinda cringe about the idea of IT reading those notes sometimes, but oh well, and it's helped a lot.

This is connecting to another commenter's idea that AI can be sort of a stand-in for journaling.

bthallplz··on Snowboard Kids 2 is 100% Decompiled
Any idea if there's a place where we can request games for decompilation?

I see that one for Burnout Paradise is in the works, but I would love one for Burnout Revenge.

bthallplz··on Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS
> I almost feel like she writes to share things with people she loves, even though she doesn't know them directly.

Thank you for articulating this!

I'm not Julia, but I'd just like to put down here that this is pretty much my philosophy for public speaking/giving presentations, and I have been trying to instill it in some coworkers who struggle with presentations. It's a great privilege to be able to convey to one's peers and loved ones things that you're (likely) a bit more familiar with than they are and which may help them with some matter.

bthallplz··on An AI coding agent, used to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs
Is this the talk? https://youtu.be/YBZ6JFrfuiM?si=6ZdZph8GxOy-OLHZ I'm curious to see it!
bthallplz··on YouTube, your RSS feeds are broken
Any idea if there's a way to get the Shorts-only feed?
bthallplz··on Show HN: MDV – a Markdown superset for docs, dashboards, and slides with data
I was curious to see them, too, so I uploaded the HTML examples here: https://tacticaltypos-tools.pgs.sh/mdv/examples/out/
bthallplz··on Cuts in publishing and book reviewing imperil the future of narrative nonfiction
From what I've heard through self-publishing media, nowadays, traditional publishing isn't even particularly disposed towards pushing back on things like these. They might even be all for publishing works based on outright lies if there's an existing customer base with open wallets.

Supposedly traditional publishing has become more and more conservative (not necessarily politically) with the risks they take on things they publish, so they'd be less likely to push back against widely-held ideas that are outright wrong. They'll really only publish authors with an established following or works that have a large base of interested consumers.

Edit: I just wanted to add that since I've heard these things so much, going to a bookstore like Barnes & Noble feels super weird. The books look nice, but they're all expensive and I have no sense that the selection has been curated for genuine quality or informational content. It's just what happens to being published now.

I greatly prefer the experience of going to thrift stores like Goodwill where the selection is chaotic, there's no real expectation of curation aside from maybe broad categories, and the books are gloriously cheap. You can find great stuff there!

bthallplz··on [dead]
Yeah, Iran (at least) is having its own 9/11 moment, and it's all thanks to Trump.
bthallplz··on Kangina
> The containers are, however, heavy, unwieldy, and prone to absorbing moisture.

Sounds like they'd only really make sense for surviving in dry environments. But still quite neat!

bthallplz··on Judge orders government to begin refunding more than $130B in tariffs
> I've been living in Finland for 10+ years, and this whole story was super surprising for me to learn because the prevailing notion among people here is that Finland is the land of law, and everything is done correctly and legally, always, and we can and should trust the authorities.

I'd pretty much grown up believing that that's how the US worked post-slavery (aside from occasional deviances from the rule). Since the start of the pandemic, I've had quite the awakening.

bthallplz··on Surely the crash of the US economy has to be soon
I wasn't aware that there are people who want it to crash. I've just been getting the feeling that no one understands why it isn't crashing or hasn't crashed yet amidst a bunch of really destabilizing policies.
bthallplz··on Ask HN: Share your personal website
This tool called Quartz, it's pretty neat: https://quartz.jzhao.xyz

I like that it allows us to set different depth levels for the full graph view and the individual note's view.

bthallplz··on Ask HN: Share your personal website
https://tacticaltypos.net - My digital garden/website/blog
bthallplz··on Show HN: Ferrite – Markdown editor in Rust with native Mermaid diagram rendering
Yes! I was looking at it and hoping they had that feature already. I so want an Obsidian alternative to exist just in case.

Thanks for posting the GitHub issue!

bthallplz··on Show HN: Frockly – A visual editor for understanding complex Excel formulas
I haven't been able to try out the OP's link yet (I'm also on mobile right now), but for your current usage of splitting formulas across lines, I've used this tool a bunch to do that for me: https://www.excelformulabeautifier.com
bthallplz··on Calendar
Neat! I think I've done a similar thing in Jujutsu VCS, which enables you to start a new commit and add a message (description) to it well before you make any actual changes. As you described, it's a really useful way of keeping on track.
bthallplz··on Programming languages used for music
It isn't mentioned there, but you all might be interested in the python music libraries called SCAMP: https://scamp.marcevanstein.com

I learned about it after stumbling across the creator's short, fun videos showing it being used: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_yUKG0GRuliL65l_qEG1uwCC... ("Python Music Shorts")

bthallplz··on Ask HN: Failed launching my SaaS as a Student. Should I open source "bad" code?
Oh, sure. You might be getting ahead of yourself with worrying about that at this stage, but maybe eventually.
bthallplz··on Ask HN: Failed launching my SaaS as a Student. Should I open source "bad" code?
Just focus this on your personal brand.

You can still relate it to concerns/business requirements or processes that agencies might have, which you considered and factored in when you made design decisions about the code, architecture, or processes. But since this is more of a project that you built on your own and one that you own, it makes more sense to me that you'd present this as "I changed X on Y because 123" and so on.

bthallplz··on Ask HN: Failed launching my SaaS as a Student. Should I open source "bad" code?
You could open source it and continue to work on it as a side project and main thing in your portfolio to demonstrate your skills.

And over time you could even offer a hosted/paid SaaS option, if there seems be interest in that and you have more time and resources available to sustain that.

From the perspective that you'd refine this project over time (as you already have), I don't think you should worry too much about how the code and architecture look and are right now or people's reactions to their current state. It'll grow, change, and improve as you do. And others' reactions can help you grow.

> I spent the last 6 months rewriting the architecture for multi-tenancy, overhauling the UI/UX, and adding productivity and compliance algorithms.

Separately, I think it could be really good for you and your career to document somewhere online (even just a blog) some of your thinking/decisions regarding these spaces. And it doesn't need to be too formal, just lay out your thinking.

Your post here is pretty great as an example of your communication skills - which I've heard are highly appreciated/valued in CS -, so you've got the skills, and it'd be great for you to have more public proof of that.

bthallplz··on How to Synthesize a House Loop
I've suspected that, too, while looking at DAWs and how people make music with them. It seems a bit boring to me.

To kinda get away from that or even just experiment, I was interested in the possibility of writing music with code and either inject randomness in places or at least vary the intervals between beats/etc using some other functions (which would again just be layering in patterns, but in a more subtle way).

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