Hacker News Reader

cpfohlon Flux: Open-source text-to-image model with 12B parameters

Ah. I try the following:

> A Gary Larsen, "Far Side" comic of a racoon disguising itself by wearing a fedora and long trench coat. The raccoon's face is mostly hidden by the fedora. There are extra paws sticking out of the front of the trench coat from between the buttons, suggesting that the racoon is in fact a stack of several raccoons.

Every human I've ever described this to has no problem picturing what I mean. It's a classic comic trope. AIs still struggle.

cpfohlon Why blue animals are so rare

My favorite blue animal:

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=h_&q=Dendrobates+Tinctorius+Azureu...

cpfohlon From Infocom to 80 Days: An oral history of text games and interactive fiction

If you’re looking for some accessible ones to play Inhave very fond memories of the ones at Rinkworks:

http://www.rinkworks.com/adventure/

The site is straight from the late nineties; mobile wasn’t a concern at the time, and it remains not a concern. These are better consumed in a desktop. The whole site is a delightful bastion of “The Old Internet.” The role playing games are also plenty fun!

cpfohlon I jumped from a plane, my parachute failed, I hurtled towards earth feeling calm

And delightful satire at that.

cpfohlon New gel breaks down alcohol in the body

The Athletic seasonals are way better than their "always available." And the Free Wave is better than the Run Wild for the always available beers. They had an Irish Stout (Emerald Coast) that was indistinguishable. I could have blind taste tested them. There's some fantastic single-hop beers too.

I couldn't get into the Untitled Art. Just too sweet.

cpfohlon How a photographer captured his eclipse photo

What a fantastic read. Love the dedication and the insight into what it takes to make art like that.

cpfohlon Cache is King: A guide for Docker layer caching in GitHub Actions

This is wild. I've spent the last three weeks working on this stuff for two separate clients.

Important note if you're taking advice: cache-from and cache-to both accept multiple values. Cache to just ouputs the cache data to all the ones specified. cache-from looks for cache hits in the sources in-order. You can do some clever stuff to maximize cache hits with the least amount of downloading using the right combination.

cpfohlon Ask HN: What was an interesting project you started and finished over a weekend?

I had no idea that was even an option. Thanks for the heads up!

cpfohlon Ask HN: What was an interesting project you started and finished over a weekend?

Threw together a toothbrush timer for my kids. Just used the svelte repl:

https://svelte.dev/repl/5a7f676868044bbba2ff3c7a64062066?ver...

On mobile you’ll need to kit the “output” button

cpfohlon Jupiter's ocean moon Europa, thought to be habitable, may be oxygen-starved

This was the exact premise of Battlefield Earth. The invasion aliens couldn’t believed we needed oxygen

cpfohlon LoRA from scratch: implementation for LLM finetuning

I had the exact same confusion

cpfohlon How does Cave/Glade Generator Work

Fantastic read, I’ve done some work adjacent to this for real life mapping and coming up with clean algorithms for this stuff is so satisfying. This was particularly well explained

cpfohlon NYC's new rat-killing weapon is wildly successful – for now

Sure, although the article talks about monoxide…thus my confusion. It’s also a much less pleasant way to go: this is an “as I understand it” to be clear; carbon monoxide binds to your hemoglobin better than oxygen, but your bloodstream doesn’t build up carbon dioxide (which is what causes that panicky “I need a breath” feeling). Adding CO2 accelerates that feeling…

cpfohlon Ask HN: As a first-time solopreneur how would you go about hiring the first team

I dunno man, the 80/20 rule definitely applies here (and it's cousin Dunning-Kruger does as well, so yes, stay humble). Most software engineers are paid for their expertise in rapidly acquiring and mentally modeling complex domains...

Believing that spending a month of high-effort learning will teach you enough of the basics of just about any field that you can flush out terrible choices isn't _that_ ridiculous...

cpfohlon NYC's new rat-killing weapon is wildly successful – for now

I'm confused what dry ice has to do with carbon monoxide...they lost me there...

cpfohlon It's Cheaper to Live on a Boat Than Rent an Apartment in These U.S. Cities

I'll add to that "Good luck getting a slip or mooring." Not a boater, but I have friends who are; there's a waiting list. The longest have been waiting for 5 years.

cpfohlon Can’t send email more than 500 miles (2002)

I apparently mis-remembered this showing up on HN. It's only ever been posted once. So I re-posted just now.

cpfohlon C More or Less

An old favorite of mine. Apparently hasn't actually popped up here as often as I thought and asserted in an earlier comment. Enjoy!

cpfohlon Can’t send email more than 500 miles (2002)

https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/c+-.en.html

Enjoy!

cpfohlon Can’t send email more than 500 miles (2002)

I love this feature of HN. Between this, the onion salesman, C+- and a few other favorites I’m on a roughly 2 times a year cadence of getting to reread old favorites!

cpfohlon Yash: Yet another short hand

Whose phonology? English is a delightfully diverse language, spoken by delightfully diverse people!

cpfohlon Windows Subsystem for Linux gets new 'mirrored' network mode

How is autoMemoryReclaim not the prime takeaway from this!?

I know we just use headlines here, but that is my single greatest gripe about using WSL day to day

cpfohlon Writing Small CLI Programs in Common Lisp (2021)

  I hate that I’m largely living in a JS world, but I’m fast and effective with it, and the standard library, ecosystem, and tooling has matured enough that I can deal with the quirks.

cpfohlon Writing Small CLI Programs in Common Lisp (2021)

Before typescript and node > about 16 I’d reach for Python or more organized bash for these things. Now it’s Typescript from the client down to my system scripts.

The ability to use the same language all the way up and down my stack, to import code I use in my program from my script, and get Type-checking means more often than not I’ve got a hash bang with npx ts-node.

Especially useful for testing server code while skipping the HTTP nonsense.

cpfohlon AWS Icon Quiz

Great minds! I was thinking a nice orange or blue?

cpfohlon The Elements of Style [pdf]

This book came up recently, and I learned that “White” is E.B. White. Author of Charlotte’s Web and Stuart little. I particularly enjoyed the image of Charlotte teaching grammar…

cpfohlon Add dir=“auto” to your inputs and textareas

It works that way if you correctly use modern features of CSS/HTML. This is just one of those features. It’s very difficult to correctly update the web platform because backward compatibility is so important for the most widely used programming platform in the world.

cpfohlon Show HN: Strich – Barcode scanning for web apps

Wait, didn't iOS recently introduce torch control? I could have sworn that was in the last few months...

cpfohlon Show HN: Strich – Barcode scanning for web apps

BarcodeDetector (currently) has pretty poor performance. I'm sure that will eventually be fixed, though. I've had great success with qr-scanner and a web worker, though....

cpfohlon Most bosses regret how they mandated workers return to the office

Curious where your job was? Assuming Woburn or anywhere in the westernmost stretch of 95/128? My first job out of college was at BBN Technologies in Cambridge, but I was living in Beverly on the north shore. I quit shortly after my first 3h commute (most days were 1.5). The commute situation in the greater Boston metro is pretty awful…