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jalada

1,118 karma · joined November 17, 2008

Head of Engineering; https://pixielabs.io

Podcast co-host; https://octal.fm

Also made: https://twitterfall.com, https://www.rivered.io, https://www.traintrack.io.

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/jalada; my proof: https://keybase.io/jalada/sigs/1NgGnifAWiFvtmWKkvcr37qSJQZaVXvd_B5pPuc0Y-4 ]

submissionscomments
jalada··on London Gatwick has launched a robotic airport parking service
Simultaneously - https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/jul/26/water-supply...
jalada··on Spotify adds 'Verified' badges to distinguish human artists from AI
Spotify pretending like they don’t want AI artists. Once you’re locked in, you won’t look, and they can make maximum ad $$$ and pay no one.
jalada··on Is beef tallow making a comeback?
Depends on the room.
jalada··on How random is xkcd? (2015)
Reminds me of Spotify's post about shuffling songs: https://engineering.atspotify.com/2014/02/how-to-shuffle-son...
jalada··on Reclaiming the web with a personal reader
It's looking dated now but I built https://www.rivered.io 10 years ago, based on the same theory, inspired by Dave Winer's discussion on the topic: http://scripting.com/2014/06/02/whatIsARiverOfNewsAggregator....
jalada··on Apple previews Live Speech, Personal Voice, and more new accessibility features
I know there's a lot of concerns about generative voices, but it's a shame the only solution is 'insist on a live recording of random phrases'. For those whose voices have already degenerated, but who have hours of recordings available from historical sources (e.g. speech therapy sessions), it's too late to ask them to record something fresh.

Don't get me wrong, it's fantastic to see the tech being used this way. My Dad has lost most of his speech due to some kind of aphasia-causing condition and if this had been available just a year or two ago it could've been a big help for him; it's reassuring that others earlier in the journey will benefit from this.

jalada··on Paris votes to ban rental e-scooters
When I was in Paris in 2019 I tried to use their e-scooters and it was nearly impossible because angry locals had sharpie-d over every barcode so you couldn’t scan them. I’m surprised the companies haven’t left already.
jalada··on How to Befriend Crows
Cute. My parents' house has, for a few years now, been plagued by crows attacking the windows in the early hours of the morning, dive-bombing them, standing outside them screaming, pecking them, etc. If they're not attacking the house they're on the roof or in nearby trees screaming.

The closest to a solution has been to cover every window with outside blinds to at least stop them smashing into them.

I stayed with them for a few months and was woken up by this every morning without fail. Honestly, it was pretty distressing.

I love birds and feed them in our garden (so do my parents!), but I wouldn't want to encourage crows to follow me around after that. I'm always in two minds about this tendency for humans to...humanise...animal behaviour.

jalada··on Framework Ethernet Expansion Card is now available
Orinoco cards were also great for wardriving, I paid a premium to get one over here in the UK (where they were way less common) with an external antenna connector on it.
jalada··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2022)
Pixie Labs | Full Stack Developer (Senior Engineer) | Remote (UK-based) | Full-time | See job spec for compensation details | https://pixielabs.io

Pixie Labs is a digital product agency. We partner with organisations to design, build and launch software that brings their most valuable technology-driven experiences to life. As a senior engineer, you’ll help head up our clients’ development projects and write high-quality, reusable code whilst also sharing your knowledge and expertise with the rest of the team to help them do the same.

You may think an agency isn't for you - often it means hitting unrealistic deadlines imposed by clients, or writing terrible throwaway code just so the company gets paid. We're not like that; we focus on delivering at a sustainable pace and working closely with our clients to manage expectations. You can see for yourself how we manage and deliver projects in our handbook: https://handbook.pixielabs.io.

We're fairly polyglot, but specialise in and make heavy use of Ruby on Rails, Turbo (Hotwire and Stimulus), React and of course Next.js.

Full job spec: https://apply.workable.com/pixie-labs/j/18B26E12B9/

jalada··on This Year in Matrix
Heads up for anyone thinking about trying out a homeserver or two. To my knowledge there is no way of moving from one piece of homeserver software to another. So for example if you start with conduit you're stuck with it. I think there are a bunch of plans all over the place to mitigate this, but I don't think they're there yet.
jalada··on Show HN: SlikSafe – A decentralized, end-to-end encrypted alternative to Dropbox
Very good.
jalada··on Gdrive-search: A TUI to quickly find files in your Google Drive
Thanks for sharing, OP! I had a lot of fun learning Rust whilst building this, which means some of my code is probably questionable. Any hints about what I've done wildly wrong are much appreciated :)
jalada··on Computer-1 mini-ITX Chassis
Those handles make it a good LAN party case!
jalada··on The Framework is the most exciting laptop I've used
For anyone who tl;dr:

> Only 61 percent the battery life of a similarly configured XPS 13

jalada··on Ask HN: What under-the-radar technology are you excited about?
Here in the UK it's incredible how little immunotherapy is prescribed despite the fact that it's been available for ages and known to work. Anecdotally I have heard one problem is that allergy medicine is just not something that GPs are kept well informed about. My GP told me that it was 'unwise to mess with the immune system like this'. Uhh...vaccines?

(source: I have had immunotherapy)

jalada··on BBC Sound Effects made available to download for use under RemArc Licence (2018)
I made a Twitter bot when this first came out that tweets random sounds from this every few hours: https://twitter.com/oh_sfx. A lot of different engine noises...
jalada··on Subspace – A simple WireGuard VPN server GUI
It's still a thing, it was re-released on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/352700/Subspace_Continuum...
jalada··on Details of the Cloudflare outage on July 2, 2019
Yes. I think HN stole your asterisks. You meant:

  /.*=.*/ becomes /[^=]*=.*/
That is, zero or more 'not-equals-sign-characters', followed by an equals sign.

Where the first regex is 57 steps for x=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, the second is just 7.

Avoid using greedy .* for backtracking regex engines! Give your greedy regex engine the hints it needs to do what it does best.

jalada··on Jack Dorsey says it’s time to rethink the fundamental dynamics of Twitter
Always nice to hear from people who still use Twitterfall!
jalada··on Ask HN: Going from Developer to Manager. What should I know or learn?
Welcome to managing a team of eight people.
jalada··on Show HN: Dependabot – Automated Dependency Update PRs for Ruby, JS, Python and PHP
We (Pixie Labs) have been using Dependabot for a month or two now. Here four reasons why, as a small team with a bunch of codebases to look after, we <3 them:

1. Their pre-sales support was great and they went out of their way to accommodate our requirements. 2. You can get ongoing support from them by @ing the bot in a PR (and they reply inline!). 3. It drip-feeds you updates (5 a day), so a really old project is still manageable. 4. The PR message contains links to release notes, changelog, and actual commits, for the library in question. This is such a time save (and reveals how many OSS projects don't have decent changelogs).

jalada··on Surviving the New MacBook Pro
Not an option for anyone developing MacOS, iOS, or WatchOS apps.
jalada··on Show HN: Cavy – an integration testing framework for React Native
We were building a client app in React Native that had quite a long and complicated data entry journey that we got really bored testing over and over ourselves on our devices or in simulators.

We built Cavy to automate that process. It's in early stages, it's not perfect, and it makes nasty use of component refs to achieve its aims. But it solved our problem, so it might solve yours too!

jalada··on Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company
Whilst everyone is plugging their own stuff, we’ve been working on a little thing called Stormchaser for aggregating Tweetstorms in your timeline and lists: https://www.stormchaser.io
jalada··on SSL Is Now Included on All Paid Dynos
Woohoo!

I'm sure eventually they'll add automatic LetsEncrypt certificates too. But in the meantime if you're using Ruby on Rails on Heroku, this gem (that I made) will probably help: https://github.com/pixielabs/letsencrypt-rails-heroku

jalada··on Chrome is warning users about insecure pages
The article mentions free DV certs from Heroku alongside offerings from Let’s Encrypt and CloudFlare. But Heroku don’t offer certificates for your domain like LE / CloudFlare, only ones for *.herokuapp.com. You have to obtain a certificate yourself.
jalada··on FreeNAS: Open Source Storage Operating System
Correct me if I'm wrong (please!) but FreeNAS still can't (easily?) do what Synology's 'Hybrid RAID' (basically sharded RAID across drives) facilitates; growing your (redundant, e.g. 1 or more parity drives) volume by adding more drives, and also growing your volume by replacing drives with larger ones.

I've always thought that was essential, it bemuses me that there aren't many solutions out there that help you do this. I guess everyone must buy have loads of disposable income to buy 8 drives at once.

jalada··on “It's The Future”
Heroku has free dynos for side projects, and hobby dynos ($7/dyno/month) for slightly-less-side projects. So that original $75/m quote isn't quite right for that situation.
jalada··on Nissan Motor Company has announced a new type of gasoline engine
> The turbo-charged, 2-liter, four-cylinder [VC-T] engine averages 27 percent better fuel economy than the 3.5-liter V6 engine it replaces.

You don't say.

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