josephwegner

I had an interesting discussion with my 8yo recently about the highest mountain. It had never occurred to me, but "highest" does not have an agreed upon definition. There are actually a few competing definitions[1]:

There's Muana Kea, which is the _tallest_, meaning the furthest distance from the mountain's base to its peak.

There's Mount Everest (which I had assumed was the agreed upon "highest"), which has its peak at the highest altitude.

Chimborazo has the most unexpected definition of "highest", which is a peak that is furthest from the center of the Earth! We don't live on a perfect sphere, so some mountains can be "shorter" but still further from the core!

Would be interesting to see if the "highest websites" differ for each of these definitions!

[1]: https://geology.com/records/highest-mountain-in-the-world.sh...

I don't think you get to decide for someone else that they should be proud to be in prison.

I would probably advise against doing this. There have been rumors of Russian police looking through citizen's phones for indications that they are engaging with western viewpoints on the "special operation". And the penalty for such activities is quite high right now.

A random phone call from a U.S. citizen might look suspicious, and I don't imagine Russian police are giving much benefit of the doubt right now.

Sidebar: am I seeing this wrong, or is PG's website really showing a bad SSL cert? Looks like it is serving some cert for Yahoo domains?

It also isn't auto-upgrading to HTTPS, which is a smaller issue, but just kind of surprising for someone with PG's tech stature.

I'll add in a vote for IMAP support. I am anti-Google in almost all regards. Currently I use FastMail as my email provider, and Mail.app as my client. I pay for FastMail, and similarly I would very gladly pay for a good cross-platform mail client. I'd sign up for a yearly subscription, even!

I do recognize that IMAP is not as rich a data source as GMails API, but I'd encourage you to not feel limited by that. I don't mind using hosted email, as long as the revenue source is coming from my wallet, rather than ads.

I even had spec'd out building an OSS self-hosted server that ingested email via IMAP and then stored metadata in its own database - this had the benefit of being as rich as GMail APIs, but me as a user still getting to own my data.

For a short time I had become disenchanted with the corporate world, and decided I would go the entrepreneur/consultant route and try to start my own niche business. I had experience in both Developer Support and Engineering and thought I could serve that niche well.

This led to me starting to build out a suite of HelpScout integrations. They had some momentum at the beginning, but from a combination at me not being good at marketing and HelpScout’s marketplace not being mature, it was hard to keep it moving. I also ended up happy again in the corporate world, so my own motivation dwindled.

That said, the tools continue to run well today, and I just have them up and do the occasional feature addition or bug fix. I have completely removed my ego from that project, but I was very excited to see this month I got my first recurring subscription payment!

https://carrick.joewegner.com

See otrahuevada's top-level comment. The life story included in most recipes is not some blogger's attempt to spam you or sell you something. It's a copyright requirement - the only way they can protect their content.

Men too :)

HPV is most commonly known for being a cause of cervical cancer, but it can lead to other sorts of cancer that men are also prone to. HPV vaccines are good for everyone!

https://www.cdc.gov/std/hpv/stdfact-hpv.htm

This is accurate. Particularly the “alarm fatigue”.

I’ve lived in the Midwest my whole life. I’ve heard many tornado sirens, been through many watches and warnings, and never once actually been close to a tornado that did any damage.

A few months ago I was woken in the middle of the night by my wife who heard sirens. I was groggy, and before I was convinced to get out of bed, the sirens stopped. This has happened dozens of times in my life, and felt entirely routine - there was no panic. A few minutes later my phone gave an emergency alert announcing a Tornado Watch. I decided it was time to move to the basement, so I went downstairs and set up candles and blankets, and then began the process of gently waking my 3 young children in an attempt to move them without terrifying them.

As I moved the last of them, I glanced at a clock and saw it was 11:53. We moved to the basement and all was quiet. It seemed like another false alarm.

The next morning I discovered that the tornado hit two blocks away from me, and leveled entire street’s worth of houses. Radar confirmed the tornado passed through my neighborhood at 11:50. If I had been two blocks south, at least me and my son would be dead. Potentially more of us.

Alarm fatigue is real, but don’t let it happen with tornado sirens. They come quick and hit hard.

Why? I make less money than every single one of my staff. I’m an EM, I manage 9 engineers, and never once has the fact that they make more money seemed relevant.

_Maybe_ I could change careers and be an engineer and make as much of them, but I wouldn’t want to. I’m a manager because I like being a manager. It’d be a QoL decrease for me to be an engineer just for the money.

False! There was actually a really interesting HN post about this recently! 3D Printing Sex Toys https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28819927

Full agree here. Even before VR, Second Life is/was the biggest example of a metaverse. But, that's not a high bar - I don't know a single person that is active in Second Life. The small group of people I know that have even heard of Second Life at best gave it a try for a couple weeks. Second Life just never got momentum.

The thing Facebook brings, regardless of what you think of their technical prowess, is a network. I don't know yet how they'll get devices on people's faces, but if Facebook has anything it's access to a massive userbase. That's arguably more important than any tech.

It was my real name, real email. But I never even got to the point of uploading a picture. I did use a real picture for the appeal!

Funny story about my Metaverse experience...

I assume this will be an unusual opinion, but I'm actually very excited about Metaverse. I probably would not have chosen Facebook as the stewards of the first big VR-world, but I've been waiting a long time for some big co to make an investment in this direction. I think a (little m) metaverse is the obvious evolution for VR and could become ubiquitous.

I left Facebook about 3 years ago, around Cambridge Analytica time. It's bee annoying - very hard to plan events, chat with family, etc. - but I've felt strongly enough that the privacy cost wasn't worth the value.

When I heard about Facebook leaning hard into Metaverse, I immediately ordered an Oculus and signed up for a Facebook account (which is required to use Oculus). The value of being early in potentially the first big metaverse is well worth the privacy cost.

Surprisingly, as soon as I created my account, the account was locked for "not following community standards". I hadn't even seen the feed yet, and I was banned! I appealed the ban, and no dice - now it's permanent.

So now I am permanently locked out of Metaverse, presumably for the crime of not being a long-standing Facebook fan. When I imagine a world where a metaverse is a core piece of society, this sort of corporate gatekeeping is _exactly_ the thing I'd worry about.

This seems like it is against the spirit of the patent system, and supporting it would be just as broken. I can get behind the thought of someone coming up with an innovative idea, patenting it, and then selling that idea for a royalty... but someone coming up with an innovative idea and just sitting on it, while stifling other people's similar intuition?

That's certainly not doing anything good for the world. It's just lining the pocket books of the idle thinker.

I am not familiar with the Quran, but for the Bible, different translations have different copyright policies. For instance, the ESV text is free for non-commercial use, but if you want to use it for commercial purposes you must pay a licensing fee.

ESV has a pretty decent API, actually! https://api.esv.org/ I used it way back when when Google TV was a thing, to make a verse-display used during bible studies.

I agree wholeheartedly with the author.

I also find this to be true of email clients. GMail reigns supreme, but there is pretty much no email client out there that is:

- A good UI/UX

- Doesn't store your data in their cloud

- Is cross-platform (even just iOS/OSX, but certainly not iOS/OSX/Windows/Android).

Thunderbird is one of the only contenders here, and I find the UX of Thunderbird to be abysmal. I've started to kickoff a project to fill this space, but admittedly it's a big project and doomed for the shelf :/

Heh - feels like the real business model here should be charging SaaS services for a guarantee _not_ to exfiltrate their data. How much would Wix have to pay for a guarantee that you'll never migrate customers off of their platform?

This could only happen if Reddit actually took some responsibility for the safety of their moderators. Death threats are commonplace for mods of political subs. They're mostly empty threats, but it'd be a much more significant risk if names/employers were public.

Just as an anecdote, I used to moderate one of the more popular political subreddits. It was a difficult task and burnout on the team was common. I can say that the mod team was not just shills for a particular party (unless they were undercover even to me). The entire mod team, even to this day, is there for altruistic reasons - we felt we were doing a service to our fellow Americans by fostering healthy political discussion.

I moderated that sub through election season and then stepped down in January. At the end of the day the death threats and constant insults aren't what drove me away, but the organizational chaos. No one could figure out how to lead that team, and leaning on practiced organizational structures was apparently too hard for a group of redditors.

> They will be strictly worse than a single engineer on 100% salary

Citation needed.

I don't think this is an obvious conclusion. There is certainly some threshold where it becomes less efficient (40 engineers, 1hr/week each??), but I'm not sure 20hr/week is a clear threshold.

_Looks awkwardly at the HN "flag" button_

I think the expectation is that spez (and, ideally every other Reddit employee) would not have credentials to the prod database. Definitely not _write_ credentials.

In a system as large as Reddit, there's rarely a good reason for a human to be running hand-written SQL commands in prod.

It's not intrinsically a bad thing (some may hold that opinion, though). However, if you are investing in Bitcoin because it is similar to gold in that scarcity is a primary attribute, then the ability to mint new bitcoins is dangerous.

I'd also posit that "because America does it" is a fairly weak argument for many of the claimed benefits of Bitcoin. Much of Bitcoin's charter is that it helps move away from government-controlled currency. If you think America's monetary system is the best option available, then Bitcoin likely is not your thing.

This is a must read if you're working with hex grids: https://www.redblobgames.com/grids/hexagons/

Been working on this app for sharing Switch screenshots: https://switch2cloud.herokuapp.com

Hah. The $9 license fee is something I worry about _personally_.

If I can put this on my AMEX (which is where the red tape comes in), it's a no-brainer. It's an even bigger no-brainer if my team finds it interesting and I can do `$9 * TEAM_SIZE`.

Yeah, the team sharing stuff (kinda like 1Password vaults) would make this an absolute buy for my team. I manage a technical support team, and we have a _ton_ of CLI commands that we toss around. Part of onboarding is giving people a giant `.bash_aliases` file and a knowledge base article they can read to understand them all. Having that native and searchable would be amazing.

Either way, I've submitted this for a security review (I work at a BigCo, so red tape...). We'll see!

This site would be way easier to consume if it had some category/description listed for each item. The names are often not descriptive enough to understand, and I can't possibly click into each app.

But this isn't an iOS app...