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jsvaughan

524 karma · joined February 20, 2007

@jsvaughan Software developer / contractor / the person behind http://www.bionicbooks.com / the person behind amazing freecycle site http://freelywheely.com / London
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jsvaughan··on I hate soldering
might be worth trying a cheap solder sucker pen if you havent (the mechanical recoil type), significantly better than nothing
jsvaughan··on Restoring a ZX Spectrum+ Toastrack
We've got 3x spectrums, two 48k rubber key ones and a plus2. we've even got such random things as a Trickstick :)(https://worldofspectrum.org/hardware/feat4.html). I got them out of the loft the other day but the biggest problem i found is that few of the original game tapes still work. did manage to play Jetpac though :)
jsvaughan··on 3D Army Land Navigation Courses
Can highly recommend orienteering racing if this seems like your kind of thing
jsvaughan··on Das Blinkenlights
You could perhaps make it play a subtle background sound like the noise WOPR makes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4vWTzs_bp4
jsvaughan··on Spudguns: Potato Cannon Guide
Good book on this and similar subjects - Backyard Ballistics: Build Potato Cannons, Paper Match Rockets, Cincinnati Fire Kites, Tennis Ball Mortars, and More Dynamite Devices

https://www.amazon.com/Backyard-Ballistics-Cannons-Cincinnat...

jsvaughan··on My trip to the Communication and Laptop Museum in Estonia
Another private collection, more mainframes and supercomputers, in the UK that I found out about recently https://www.computermuseum.org.uk/
jsvaughan··on The myth of the myth of the 10x programmer (2020)
This is not a question of someone being 10x what you are.

In our industry there are plenty of very weak developers, I bet you have worked with someone who is 0.1x of someone reasonably good, even someone who makes a net negative contribution.

jsvaughan··on The Unexpected Heaviosity of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (2006)
Great post, I hadn't seen this before
jsvaughan··on How to store your app's entire state in the url
This is the critical point to make. Paste a few long texts into the boxes and the url goes into the hundreds of thousands of characters long, whereas this says that anything more than about 2000 chars puts you into uncertain territory:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/417142/what-is-the-maxim...

jsvaughan··on ZX Spectrum BASIC programming (1983)
I owe my career to this book. I learnt binary from page 93 when I was about 8 years old so I could draw custom graphics on the screen (an airplane that i could fly around)
jsvaughan··on The Ethereum merge is done
Does anyone know whether we will see an immediate jump in transactions per second due to this?
jsvaughan··on How I clean my glasses
this is it. also needs emphasis on getting a clean tea towel or equivalent out of the drawer, do not be tempted to use anything else.
jsvaughan··on NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites
Have a look at the sales (lower down the page) of say these:

https://www.larvalabs.com/cryptopunks lowest price available $386k(!)

or more detail on artblocks: https://www.nft-stats.com/collection/art-blocks average price $39k

or these: https://www.nft-stats.com/collection/boredapeyachtclub 90th percentile = $168k

jsvaughan··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2019)
Mocha | London + NYC | REMOTE

We are a small company expanding our team that are developing a privacy centric commerce and ad platform, all remote working.

Various roles to fill, but aiming to keep the team small and find people with a good skills match across the various parts of the system.

Skills we are looking for: node/expressjs/lambda/dynamodb/serverless - exp of serverside js/api dev in particular, python/elasticsearch/athena/mysql, android/kotlin, UX particularly mobile UX, AWS Quicksight.

The roles are 100% remote so need to be happy with that, and with working somewhere with a reasonable timezone overlap with the UK.

To apply please email me - jon.vaughan at mocha.global, please send a resume and a quick few lines about the kind of thing you are looking for. Please also put Hacker News in the subject line.

Thanks

Jon

jsvaughan··on Thinking Machines: Art and Design in the Computer Age, 1959–1989
Some info about the CM-1 and 2 here:

http://www.tamikothiel.com/cm/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine

jsvaughan··on A Vast, 430-Year-Old World Map
the wikipedia page for early world maps is worth a look, it shows how they improved over the years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_world_maps

I was struck by how much more accurate the linked one is than the c1300 mappa mundi, which lives in my home town.

jsvaughan··on The 1980 Citroën Karin
You could try the Aston Martin Bulldog, http://astonmartins.com/car/bulldog/
jsvaughan··on Ask HN: Those with small side projects, where did you find part-time talent?
I've bought logos and some other design stuff on Fiverr - have had mixed results, occasional good stuff.

I've also hired a couple of people to do work through Upwork (when it was oDesk) - I did have some good work done but I was not convinced that the same person was always doing the work, it seemed to me that it was being farmed out from one account that had good ratings.

The best result I have had (but the most pricey thing I have paid for) was design work done by a local agency (https://weare2ndfloor.com/). I spent a lot of time googling, looking at portfolios etc before getting in touch with them, but in the end it was worth it, I am very pleased with what they produced.

jsvaughan··on Searx – A privacy-respecting, hackable metasearch engine
Ah, brings back memories of Metacrawler (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaCrawler), which was once, pre-Google, my first choice of search engine.
jsvaughan··on An empirical study of working speed differences between software engineers [pdf]
It also say this:

"Thus, if we ignore the most extreme cases, the differences between the slowest and the fastest individuals are by far not as dramatic as the 28:1 figure suggests"

Why would you ignore the most extreme cases?

jsvaughan··on The Spanish cooking oil scandal (2001)
tldr: it wasn't the oil: "without any doubt, the contaminated foodstuff was tomatoes, and it was the pesticides on them that were responsible for the epidemic"

(This relates to the separate NYP post about phony food, which says "Fake olive oil...has killed people...more than 20,000 people were poisoned in Spain...")

jsvaughan··on Ubuntu 16.04 proves even an LTS release can live at Linux’s bleeding edge
I had a few weird small things - I was using Gnome on the desktop and after the update I couldn't mouse click on anything (MS wireless mouse), but all works in Unity. One of my ssh keys stopped working, the font (possibly consolas) i was using in the terminal stopped rendering nicely and for a while Terminator thought a pipe symbol was a < (despite it being ok elsewhere). I am using an nvidia card and have had no issues with that.
jsvaughan··on Ask HN: A spammer is spoofing my email address; what do I do?
+1 for DMARC - you can set your policy to ask the recipient to reject (or mark as spam) anything that fails the DMARC check. But yes, it is tricky to get right, so go for no action initially and monitor the reports.
jsvaughan··on Brave: Brendan Eich's clean-ads browser startup
ad links could be via redirects from the hosting site, intercepted by the web server plugin.

personalisation would be a problem, because you won't have a cookie, but there is always device fingerprint etc

I agree it isn't quite as good but it is possible to make ads indistinguishable from legitimate site content.

jsvaughan··on Brave: Brendan Eich's clean-ads browser startup
Surely we are soon going to see server side ad-injection and the end of ad blocking
jsvaughan··on Why is it so hard to find a file in Ubuntu? (2011)
I suspect that the question is just poorly worded - I think he meant to ask "why are programs in linux so hard to find" (if you look at his other questions they are not mega technical but they are also not questions that a novice would be posting)
jsvaughan··on Google recommends inlining small CSS
if you use the google pagespeed apache/nginx module it has an inline_css filter which does this for you, no need to cause yourself a maintenance problem.
jsvaughan··on More parents, students saying 'no' to homework
the learning benefit could be because of the change of scenery, not because one side is better
jsvaughan··on Chrome Devtools Tips and Tricks
Something that saved me a lot of time recently is that from the network request list, you can right click the request and "Copy as cURL" to get a full cURL equivalent command of the request.
jsvaughan··on Apple: Magic Accessories
- the new 'force touch' trackpads do not move, clicks are the same all over

- you can do click and drag with 2 fingers, don't have to slide the clicking finger

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