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kevinmershon

129 karma · joined October 2, 2019

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kevinmershon··on Chinese astronauts make rocket fuel and oxygen in space
> This is a similar reaction to photosynthesis in plants, which produces glucose instead of rocket fuel.

This is silly, but also begs the sillier question why we aren't bioengineering plants to produce rocket fuel

kevinmershon··on Show HN: "Is This Tech Dead?" A snarky autopsy engine for your dead frameworks
no hits for clojure. I'm incredulous
kevinmershon··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (March 2025)
I've been working since November on an integration between a Quest VR app called Fluid, and MacOS and Windows hosts. The app itself is called Fluid Link, launched just after new years, and has been rolled into official Fluid offerings. It supports full desktop and individual window streaming into the Quest app, shared keyboard and mouse control, and unlike competitor apps also supports multiple hosts and cross platform clipboard sync.

Fluid's website is https://fluid.so and Fluid Link is available for download at https://fluid.so/fluid-link

Fluid is currently free (until tomorrow?) and Fluid Link is free to try up to 15 minutes at a time, with no restrictions on functionality. There's a discord server and in-app support chat for support questions, and videos demonstrating Installation and usage on YouTube.

kevinmershon··on Ask HN: How Do I Escape Homelessness After Rebuilding My Mental Health?
While all those skills are great to have, you're now competing with every unemployed junior, fresh grad, and old coder on the market. You need to update your skill set, and ideally focus on skills that are in higher demand and with higher barrier to entry or with a captive audience/market.

Vue/React/Python are all still huge but they're commodity skills today. Differentiating will help with the jobseeking.

kevinmershon··on Ask HN: How Do I Escape Homelessness After Rebuilding My Mental Health?
Chamber of Commerce is swimming with other hungry sharks. You'd be better off finding a coworking space (NOT a chain one like WeWork). Talk to the owner and explain your situation, ask for a month or two discount while you get your bearings and attend every meetup they have. Meet everyone, tell your story, share your skills. A small community will help take care of you in ways a CoC will not.
kevinmershon··on Ask HN: How Do I Escape Homelessness After Rebuilding My Mental Health?
1. Ignore the haters.

2. Sell or trade in the desktop for a laptop. Portability and space is your friend. Join a local Facebook "buy nothing" group, and ask for a trade or someone's spare old laptop. Any mobility improvement is a win.

3. Immediately make a free account for Salesforce's Trailhead program https://trailhead.salesforce.com/ and start learning everything you can. Badges can be added to your linkedin, and you should go heavy down the path of force.com development if you can.

4. Once you have a few badges, polish up your linkedin (and resume) and start spamming recruiters for salesforce positions.

The ERP/CRM world pays very well but almost all platforms have a stupidly high barrier to entry, EXCEPT Salesforce. You could have a $100k/yr job in a few months if you follow this path, and then branch out to Oracle or NetSuite or SAP from here.

edits (consolidating advice here for posterity):

I should add that ERP/CRM consulting is largely remote friendly and your prospective employers/consulting firms will probably not give a rip where you live. They never did for me.

Find a coworking space (NOT a chain one like WeWork) in your town. Talk to the owner and explain your situation, ask for a month or two discount while you get your bearings and attend every meetup they have or know about. Meet everyone, tell your story, share your skills. A small community will help take care of you in ways a Chamber of Commerce chapter will not.

If you are not religious, look for an Oddfellows chapter. They may be a resource to you in a similar way as a church congregation.

And if you have skills but they are outdated, you're now competing with every unemployed junior, fresh grad, and old coder on the market. Update your skill set, and ideally focus on skills that are in higher demand and with higher barrier to entry or with a captive audience/market. Differentiating will help with jobseeking.

For extra side income, attend garage/yard/rummage sales and focus on books. Books are great to flip, because you can immediately appraise the quality, scan the ISBN number to find the going rate, and only buy it to flip if it's worth enough.

kevinmershon··on HTTP/3 is everywhere but nowhere
It's pretty true from recent experience. I've recently started rewriting a C# based desktop/window stream tool because of how weak the support is across the board for C#. Microsoft abandoned WinRTC, Sipsorcery is one guy and is missing VP9 HEVC and AV1 support. And for fancier stuff like using computer shaders for color space conversion, SharpDX is constantly referenced by chatgpt and MS docs, yet it's archived and unmaintained as well. I ended up using media streams VideoFrame class but it and two other classes required to interact with it have unpreventable thread and memory leaks built into the WinRT implementations themselves 4+ years ago. Good times.

All of the above was easy to implement in Rust

kevinmershon··on Parinfer: Simpler Lisp Editing
Your comment about how it makes editing flow like python is spot on, and I've been saying this for years. I'm a long time parinfer-rust user in spacemacs, and it makes me very happy.

However it also made me very strict and opinionated about formatting. One of the main downsides of parinfer comes when you have to interact with someone else's poorly indented or opinionated (wrongly) formatting that goes against the clojure style guide. Parinfer can then ruin otherwise working code because things are out of alignment. To fix this, I set up a function to force format files on open, which mostly works but then for the longest time made me the source of a lot of white space commits. It also struggles with egregiously long files.

Thankfully I eventually got my team on board with force formatting all files and treating non standard formatting as linting errors. We also cut down the largest files one of the other devs made, and that helped a lot.

kevinmershon··on Why we built Vade Studio in Clojure
For the most part, yes.

CIDER and nREPL is better tech than IEX though. I live in both and Clojure is much more enjoyable.

kevinmershon··on Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work
phone self-service systems, tutoring services, contract review, recruiting. Just to name a few
kevinmershon··on Could you pass this 8th grade test from 1912?
Exactly. It seems like so many people fall into the logical trap that school is about getting you to permanently memorize facts that, in a typical adult life, end up being largely trivia.

School is about teaching your brain how to retain information in general, so you can retain what you need to use.

kevinmershon··on ZombAIs: From Prompt Injection to C2 with Claude Computer Use
Agreed, and not just that you can. You absolutely should.
kevinmershon··on UnitedHealth says data of 100M stolen in Change Healthcare hack
So would this count as 1 instance or 100M instances of HIPAA violations? Last I checked the penalty is $50k per violation...
kevinmershon··on Priced out of home ownership
Yep. Homes can either be for shelter or for investment, but not both. We are experiencing this as a global culture.

I dream of a 100% tax rate on second homes, foreign ownership, and corporations owning single family homes and condos. Or even better, make it illegal. But any politician who pushes such a bill would immediately get removed from office and the law repealed.

kevinmershon··on Coding in Vision Pro
I have worked for hours in Immersed in both the quest 2 and 3. The 3 is considerably more comfortable on the head and eyes. I constantly had to take the quest 2 off for a breather
kevinmershon··on Mixed Reality gone in Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26052
virtual box can do a seamless windows mode. It in't as slick as parallels but it is passable.
kevinmershon··on PostgreSQL is enough
I actually did, repeatedly. I threw away 3 or 4 chat sessions with it about this very subject. It kept hallucinating features into libraries and naming products that don't actually support this translation direction.

And with Google searches the vast majority of results are going the opposite way: creating a GraphQL API from a real SQL schema.

kevinmershon··on PostgreSQL is enough
Thank you for this post. I've been looking high and low for weeks trying to find a way to connect Looker to a GraphQL API unsuccessfully and apparently "PostgreSQL emulators" are called FDWs as I learned from this link. I had searched every term I could think of for how to simulate or proxy a SQL database into an API but calling it a foreign data wrapper would have never occurred to me.
kevinmershon··on Wanna team-up with an SRE to build a product and/or company?
This is effectively what Bumble Bizz is trying to be.

It's terrible

kevinmershon··on Ask HN: Why do some YC companies keep posting the same job bi-weekly?
I'm not saying this is the case here, but there can be both tax and labor outsourcing incentives for posting a job ad that you "just can't seem to fill".
kevinmershon··on Why do programmers need private offices with doors?
Rakuten was the first and only bigger corp I've worked at (my life has been startups and boutique shops) and so I have had a hard time understanding why people don't like open office floorplans. Thank you for making me realize why I enjoyed it and might not, at another org.
kevinmershon··on A connection between after-hours work and decreased productivity
With all that salary, keep the job and hire a team of outsourced workers to build the business of your dreams on the side.
kevinmershon··on EmacsConf Live Now
All but one of our engineers at my company use Emacs. We work in Elixir, Clojure, and Typescript. Varying configurations for sure, but mostly Doom Emacs and Spacemacs.
kevinmershon··on Show HN: Dobb·E – towards home robots with an open-source platform
to be fair, that's what robot means etymologically
kevinmershon··on Colm on Constant Work (2019)
> When I say a simple design, I mean a design that is easy to understand, use, and operate. If a design makes sense to a team that had nothing to do with its inception, that’s a good sign.

This closing line really spoke to me. Doubly so if one interprets "operate" as "maintain". Many of us have had a boss or engineering lead/manager who imagines themself like Rich Hickey, parroting with terms like simple and easy hoping for great praise and consensus.

In my career experience, nearly every time someone describes their ideas as simple they often aren't, and are using that term to try and force team acceptance of their design. Simplicity is something demonstrated or asked for, not declared.

kevinmershon··on Cursorless is alien magic from the future
Thank you for writing it. This whole post has made me really curious and I've taken the dive into Talon, already having written an app layer for Warp terminal and exposing my (normally not detected) terminal emacs to Talon.

I'm not too interested in Cursorless I don't use VSCode and vim/evil mode text objects are equally powerful (and less visually noisy). Very excited by this whole concept.

kevinmershon··on Launch HN: Grai (YC S22) – Open-Source Data Observability Platform
I believe you w.r.t. tech-first companies. I work in a tiny software dept in a small service company and we have no infrastructure like this at all. It would be nice to know how I can go from zero-to-Grai.
kevinmershon··on Launch HN: Grai (YC S22) – Open-Source Data Observability Platform
Your intro video started with the assumption, I think, that a team already has some infra relating to this called DBT. It would be nice to have a video for onboarding from scratch assuming there's no data prior effort toward data observability.
kevinmershon··on Ask HN: What would an IDE built for the Apple Vision Pro look like?
Agreed. So, in a word, Emacs. It's just Emacs buffers everywhere
kevinmershon··on XTDB 2.x Early Access
That is incredibly exciting! Glad to hear it.
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