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Mashinky is (way) more casual than OpenTTD but it's a really nice game made by a solo dev.

The vibe is similar though and you can even take a break and ride your trains. I strongly recommend giving it a try.

lapnitnelavon What the Heck Is Pyproject.toml?

When the overwhelming majority of computer users will probably struggle with something a bit more complex than a Hello World type project, nice scripting and introduction to programming is light-years ahead of every body else.

This is no small feat.

Also the ecosystem of libraries is the same.

You can't see that from your ivory tower but those things matter a lot to people on the ground.

Don't let you prejudice get in the way, it never helps :)

lapnitnelavon What is the engineering hiring bar?

Those companies probably also value attention to detail and would realise that our hero is called Recursive Cactus, not Calculus ;)

lapnitnelavon Amazon fires worker who led strike over virus

Maybe it's the perfect time to highlight how critical the job those people are doing is?

Amazon isn't exactly a champion of taking care of your employees, so yeah, you go guys.

lapnitnelavon Google recommends all North America employees work from home

The crazy bit is that there's a life outside of work, at least in most of the developed world, and yet the comment you replied to highlights a different reality.

A symbiosis, if only temporary between the corporation and the employee.

Cue David Attenborough's voiceover.

lapnitnelavon Australia sues Facebook over Cambridge Analytica

If enough countries start doing that, maybe the balance of power might be different. Especially in the West.

lapnitnelavon Quarantine will normalize WFH and recession will denormalize full-time jobs

I'd argue a voice chat solution might be a bit less intrusive while keeping the warmth of human interactions.

Mumble, for example, is both excellent in sound quality and FOSS.

lapnitnelavon “I did spend 9 years as a manager at a pizza place”

I think America is anything but a society, more a bunch of folks that happen to be sharing the same tract of land, compared to other cultures.

Hyper-individualism has its shortcomings and as you framed it, the piper has come to collect the money and there's been a lot interest owed.

Hope we are wrong but wouldn't hold my breath.

Disclaimer, haven't set foot in the US yet so I'm only extrapolating from what I have been able to observe from far away.

lapnitnelavon Boeing 737 Max Aircraft: Preliminary Investigative Findings [pdf]

You're locked in a big tin can flying hundreds of miles per hour, high in the sky and if things go wrong, you better be emotionally ready to meet your maker. And that's just the flying bit.

Not to detract from your points, but if you have any inclination to anxiety, yeah flying is stress-inducing.

lapnitnelavon Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

That's the exact thought that has crossed my mind a few weeks ago. I was more focused on the specific of advertising / marketing given the amount of open source solutions available nowadays.

The second benefit being that they'd own the underlying data rather than yet another tech giant. So hopefully better for privacy.

lapnitnelavon Launch HN: Freshpaint (YC S19) – an automated, retroactive Segment alternative

Hey sounds brilliant, congrats on the launch.

As soon as I heard of Segment, I knew they were onto something valuable and can only welcome more competition.

Now that I've been nice, allow me to get the plastic pitchfork.

I see no mention of GDPR, I assume you are going to restrict your market to NA for now? What about CCPA?

In the same vein I don't think you have any integration with open-sources alternatives to commercial software that one could host on premise.

That's an odd choice given the shape of things to come wrt privacy.

lapnitnelavon Google resists demands from states in digital-ad probe

Besides the usual pathos of all the folks losing their jobs, there's a whole subsection of the internet that would disappear / severely shrink.

You might argue that it probably wouldn't be a huge loss but that would be your perspective there.

Nevermind the fact that the ad serving market, once you remove FB/Google/AMZN, is actually quite broad and diverse, especially in the display/programmatic world.

This being said, Chrome recent announcement wrt privacy & 3rd party cookies might be the final blow for a lot of indies. Not that I disagree with you and I believe a culling and a new approach is required, one that purposely avoid the SV giants and centralisation of data.

lapnitnelavon Google resists demands from states in digital-ad probe

Google has way too much power in the Online Ads biz. Period. This can't go on like that.

lapnitnelavon Launch HN: PostHog (YC W20) – open-source product analytics

Completely agree with you there, I think it's especially true for an often overlooked yet massive subset of the businesses : the smaller players.

They tend to have neither the resources nor knowledge that there's a world out there beyond the regular free to use but you pay with everybody's data and consolidate their power big corp (FB, Google, ...)

I think the way forward would be something akin to CloudFormation with presets on your own server (DO / Scaleway / AWS / ...), something managed over which you still have ownership and can plug off. My axis is particularly around marketing but I suppose you could expand.

PS : I would add Redash to the list of BI tools.

lapnitnelavon Launch HN: PostHog (YC W20) – open-source product analytics

Given what you do, do you think open-source projects ran "on premise" (i.e. with your cloud provider of choice) paying a licence to use has a future beyond the enterprise scale?

lapnitnelavon Justice Department meeting state AG offices Tuesday to discuss Google: sources

The best move would be to revert the Doubleclick acquisition and spin out the AdTech part as its own separate entity.

But also make Google Search an open auction system (like it sort of is on Display) where other players can integrate with and Google (search) takes a fixed % for each click. Pipe dream I suppose but best way to avoid Google from being able to be truly dominant.

lapnitnelavon Justice Department meeting state AG offices Tuesday to discuss Google: sources

I don't hate Google (I don't love them either) but they clearly have too much power in Online Advertising.

If you are a publisher and a big one, you have to use Google Ads Manager (formerly known as DFP) because it's the only way to have full access to Google AdExchange which allows you to have access to demand coming from Google Ads (ex Adwords).

And because they had dominant market share in all these markets, they could get to be the first in line whenever there's was a request for ad on the exchanges. This has changed recently but put simply, you can't escape the Borg if you are in this industry.

See https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-google-edged-out-rivals-and...

lapnitnelavon Digital publishing is beginning to make money

One of the real value of Netflix (/ Spotify) is that while you are committed to spending X amount of $/£/... per month, you get to potentially share that account with other people.

I think having the ability to subscribe to multiple publishers with a flat fee that you can spread across multiple people would go a long way.

Either with your family / friends or with some random on the internet, deciding on a bundle and pooling that money so that publishers get their $$ and you get multiple sources of content.

lapnitnelavon Exploit custom codecs to write inline C in Python

Thanks a mil for the tips.

lapnitnelavon Exploit custom codecs to write inline C in Python

I've been toying with the idea of implementing some sort of DSL on top of python but wouldn't really know where to start.

Would you have any pointers (heh) given the discovery you made?

lapnitnelavon Verlan: French slang that inverses words

I can't edit my original comment anymore but if you do have an interest in French, I strongly recommend studying the first 2 examples because they are pretty much full of those carefully crafted punchlines.

A bit older but very much a classic too, https://genius.com/Mc-solaar-caroline-lyrics

lapnitnelavon Verlan: French slang that inverses words

Oh I am sure there are word plays in American / English speaking HipHop, I just haven't found the same propensity than in the French scene.

If you have notable examples in mind, please do share with me because I have been trying to find that for a while to prove my own point wrong.

lapnitnelavon Verlan: French slang that inverses words

A bit tangential but closely related, I believe French HipHop / Rap makes such a good use of our language and all the slangs which I find lacking a bit in English HipHop.

I don't know if it's cultural or if I am really unaware of the equivalent in English, but it is such a delight to see the creativity of those folks.

A few recent examples :

https://genius.com/15760906 < Cadillac | Game over : A song about death.

"J'écoute des CDs, des sons de l'au-delà" > I listen to records (CD), sounds from the other side. Des CDs also sound like being dead (décédé).

https://genius.com/Odezenne-tu-pu-du-cu-lyrics < Odezenne | Tu pu du cu

"T’es stupéfiant \ Je te roule, je te fume \ T’es stupéfait" > Word play on stupéfiant which is both a word for drugs and being surprising / stunning.

https://genius.com/Nekfeu-egerie-lyrics < Nekfeu | Egérie

"Toujours en déplacement le soir \ Mais, c'qui compte, c'est le dépassement de soi" > The play on déplacemment (being out of town) / dépassement (overcoming) ... le soir / de soi. Brilliant

lapnitnelavon Pandas 1.0

Congratulations to the Pandas team. You lot have saved my bacon so many times over the last few years, I owe you many breakfasts.

Long live the King.

lapnitnelavon “This is why I use ad blockers and a pi-hole server”

https://github.com/w3c/web-advertising

The draft of the proposed new standard for ads on the web

lapnitnelavon “This is why I use ad blockers and a pi-hole server”

It is but mostly because it decreases the trust in the ecosystem.

This being said, the current W3C Advertising API draft proposal on serving ads is possibly inspired by it.

lapnitnelavon SaaS marketing tactics and case studies

Define the goals of your strategy, map that out to KPI / Metrics.

Trying to get sign ups? Track landing page conversions, forms filled, optimise, rinse and repeat.

lapnitnelavon Some aspects of memory get better as we age

Only bilingual but have a similar problem living in an English speaking country but practicing my native language regularly enough.

I end up forgetting some pretty basic words in both languages quite regularly

lapnitnelavon Doing a database join with CSV files

Seconding for log parser.

There's even a UI there : https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/exchange-team-blog/in...

lapnitnelavon I killed my teenager’s fancy college dreams

Wouldn't building a society where people don't have to make such critical choices out of desperation be the best way to tackle this problem?