Hacker News Reader

markthethomason SpaceX Strikes Deal With Cursor for $60 Billion

yup - updated

markthethomason PaybackTime.app: survived the Eaton fire in LA, so I made an app

Dealing with insurance reimbursements is a huge pain, so threw this together over a few weeks. Not bulletproof, but hoping it can help the thousands of other people in my situation a little bit

markthethomason Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?

https://ifelse.io

Been a minute since I’ve posted but writing for it has made major positive impacts in my career and life

markthethomason Show HN: I built a price-tracking tool

hey thanks so much for trying things out! I really, really appreciate it. Totally hear you on the search experience. I currently use Meilisearch (https://www.meilisearch.com/) for the search backend. I love how crazy fast it is and generally have had a nice experience running the system myself. But I totally hear you on the semantic search side of things.

I am definitely hoping / planning to offer that unified "view this product across stores" feature — that would be killer. Just have to work on the ML stuff to get that sufficiently good and get the data in a good spot. The CozoDB thing looks very promising, will check it out! Thanks again

markthethomason Show HN: I built a price-tracking tool

I'm working on Costbot, a price tracking tool designed to help online shoppers save time and money by monitoring price histories and alerting them when their favorite products hit their target prices. The side-project recently become done "enough" to be shared in small fashion, and wanted to ask for feedback/thoughts etc. on here.

I'm a staff software engineer by trade, but love working on side projects in my (relatively rare) spare moments. This has been a fun project, involving some new things I hadn't worked on before (extended parsing / crawling, scraping, headless browsers etc.). Hoping to put together a write-up on the tech soon.

markthethomason KV.js

This looks super cool! I have a use case where I store some stateful stuff in Redis that a worker constantly interacts w/ and updates. Redis is great, but the project is a very side thing and would love not to have to pay for bandwidth / just embed it inside of it. Going to take a look at this and see if I can make it work! Didn't see any serialization formats, so might just do that myself. Ty for building this!

markthethomason Transactions Aren't Everything

Not sure if I missed done nuanced point here or it was just a non-sequitur of an article

markthethomason Fly.io Status – Consul cluster outage

That's a good point / thing that I've not thought about as much here. I would be much more frustrated if my primary datastores were hosted there. As things stand, their semi-hosted offering never really made sense to me (esp. now lol), but I do think if you get into the game of DB hosting there's almost another level of expectation even beyond basic compute (oddly enough)

markthethomason Fly.io Status – Consul cluster outage

Yeah, I saw; I've kept up w/ everything pretty closely. Still decently frustrating as a paying customer, but I hope they can figure it out. If they can and can show some real reliability, I'll be an even bigger fan.

markthethomason Fly.io Status – Consul cluster outage

(unpkg seems to be up now)

markthethomason Fly.io Status – Consul cluster outage

Been a fan of fly and have had most, if not all, of my side and semi-side projects on there for some time now. But...the ratio of good/fun/snarky blog posts to reliable service has gotten a bit too large for me, starting to look for other providers at this point just in case they can't turn this trend around. Honestly been a good object lesson for me in the importance of backing up marketing/hype/"mind-share" stuff w/ absolute rock-solid performance/reliability or just forgoing the former for the latter.

As an aside, it's also taking down some decently-load-bearing web infra like unpkg => https://www.unpkg.com/

markthethomason Show HN: Chess2 – Play live online chess against a friend, or a chess engine

Ah gotcha very cool! Incredible it can run in the browser

markthethomason Show HN: Chess2 – Play live online chess against a friend, or a chess engine

Very cool! What’d you use for the engine?

markthethomason Moonwalkers: Shoes that make you walk faster (pre-order)

“My shoes!!! They’ve been hacked!!!”

markthethomason Twitter suspends pg's account [fixed]

Wow. Wrote this in jest but seems like it won’t be long before it’s practically, if not actually, true https://unicorn.computer/twitter-suspends-all-users-who-have...

markthethomason Show HN: MongoDB Katas / Practice Problems

planning to add more katas and support databases in the future; built for fun and to help teach Mongo at work :)

markthethomason Show HN: Griddler, a Wordle clone built for free and fun

built for fun while waiting for some appointments the other week. Hoping to add some multiplayer support soon.

markthethomason Ask HN: Host of [redacted] is not well. Can anyone in SF help?

This is brutal to see. Hoping he can get some help ASAP.

markthethomason [dead]

THIS IS SATIRE

markthethomason [dead]

This is satire!

markthethomason Oracle Migration to Austin to Take Place over Next 100 Years

(This is satire!)

markthethomason Airbnb IPO Shares to Include 'Cleaning Fee'

(This is very much satire!)

markthethomason [dead]

(Satire!)

markthethomason Future of DeepSpeech / STT after recent changes at Mozilla

DS is by far the easiest to use/most promising ASR library/kit/thing I’ve used; really hoping it keeps going

markthethomason Show HN: Free personal status page for remote work

Hey all!

I put this together in some spare time over the past few weeks. I'm a senior software engineer who's recently switched to permanently-remote work due to Covid-19. It's been a bit of an adjustment for me and my family, too, so I wanted to make some tools to make it a little easier for everyone. I often find it hard for my family to know if I am busy, "busy", or "please please don't interrupt" busy. isBusy solves that by unifying all your work and personal calendars and presenting an easy to understand status page.

I hope this makes working from home a little easier for everyone! Let me know what you think or if there are things I can improve!

markthethomason [dead]

ack I hope not. The line between The Onion and reality has definitely become too blurry

markthethomason [dead]

this is (obviously) satire :)

markthethomason [dead]

bingo

markthethomason [dead]

as always: this is satire :)

markthethomason Eloquent JavaScript 3rd Edition (2018)

this. is. awesome. SO glad this book is being kept up to date