Hacker News Reader

martininmelbon True Crime: Allan Pinkerton's Thirty Years a Detective (1884)

The Valley of Fear by Arthur Conan Doyle featured a fictionalised version of a Pinkerton agent.

martininmelbon Cooklang – Recipe Markup Language

I was just about to write a comment saying that it would be more consistent with the other markup to have: @{ground black pepper}.

martininmelbon Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?

Many years ago I built some software to allow people with cerebral palsy to use a computer. I did not get paid and it was not used by thousands of people (as far as I know) - but what made it impactful for me was that I got to see the delight of the people who hadn't been able to access a computer and who were then able to access one.

martininmelbon Goldilocks Zone Finder – Find your ideal climate

I love the map. I love the responsiveness. I have done things with Leaflet and geoJSON and have always wanted to do hexagons. How did you convert the temperature data to hexagons? Or, more specifically, create the tesselation of hexagons? (I would like to do something similar for Australia where I live)

martininmelbon Weird Languages

As a corollary:

“A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing.” - Alan Perlis

martininmelbon What can be learned from studying long gone development practices?

> Best way to deliver software is to have a handful of capable people and pay them well and get out of their way.

That is the gist of one of the essays in The Mythical Man Month mentioned in the parent.

martininmelbon Plotnine: Grammar of Graphics for Python (2019)

It looks impressive. I am just wondering if it supports NetCDF (or if it is in the roadplan). In particular, things like pcolormesh and displaying grids on a map.

martininmelbon Ask HN: Optimal cloud service to run tiny website with back end Python + SQLite?

I wrote this app last weekend mostly so that I could look at COVID-19 stats, but also as a learning exercise. I download data from John Hopkins, ingest it into a SQLite database and then have a couple of Python scripts to present an API to the front end. It is hosted on a Digitalocean droplet which costs me US$5.00 per month. Setup is easy - takes less than 10 minutes, and if you know Linux everything is pretty straightforward.

I also use Cloudflare as a DNS (free tier).

https://martin.schweitzer.id.au/covid19/

martininmelbon The Pragmatic Programmer, 20th Anniversary Edition

Yes. That book has probably shaped my thinking and coding more than any of the others above (although they are also very good).

martininmelbon Ask HN: What do you do in your 1-on-1s with your direct reports?

This seems to work for me:

1. This is your time to talk about whatever is on your mind. If you want to talk about the footy over the weekend, that's fine. If you want to talk about work or issues at home or career progression, that's fine.

2. Sometimes there is not much to talk about - and that's fine too. If they do not have much to say on a particular day and I don't have much to say, it's a short meeting.

3. As said previously, try never to reschedule and never, never forget.

4. It's a really good time as a manager to practice listening. For that reason, I never have an agenda (i.e. things I want to say) at these meetings. Also, I try to contain the impulse to give advice unless they specifically ask for it.

5. I make it quite clear that as far as legally possible, I will maintain confidentiality. The only time that something may be relayed upward is if there is requirement for me to do so (e.g. an employee reporting harassment).

martininmelbon 100 prisoners problem

What does the prisoner do if she gets to, for example, box 40 and there is a 40 in the box?

[edit] I reread the explanation and get it now. Only 1 prisoner (40) will actually get to open box 40. I was trying to think of this from the point of view of implementing it in code. I guess the cycle stops when a prisoner finds their own number or reaches 50 attempts.

martininmelbon Ask HN: My house might burn down in the next 24 hours. Suggestions?

Photo albums and photographs. If they are all digital, you're lucky, take any backup drives with photos on them (i.e. photos of family and friends)

martininmelbon Geometric Constructions Game with Straightedge and Compass

I have been using this to teach my two daughters (10 and 14) geometry. Would love to find more sites like this that make teaching maths fun. I do, however, give them hints on how to solve the puzzles and explain the theory of how it works.

martininmelbon Solomon Golomb (1932–2016)

Interesting article. I had not associated him with LSFRs, but did know about his eponymous ruler: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golomb_ruler

martininmelbon WebPlotDigitizer – Extract data from plots, images, and maps

Some advantages of web apps is that they are multi-platform out of the box, don't require any setup or admin privileges and don't require installing dependencies (e.g. the link you point to, while looking like a really great product, depends on gtk).

martininmelbon Git from the inside out

So, maybe this is more useful?

Unlike more primitive version control systems, git repositories are not linear, they already support branching, and are thus best visualised as trees in their own right. Branches thus become trees of trees. To visualise this, it’s simplest to think of the state of your repository as a point in a high-dimensional ‘code-space’, in which branches are represented as n-dimensional membranes, mapping the spatial loci of successive commits onto the projected manifold of each cloned repository.

(Quoted from tartley.com)

martininmelbon A significant amount of programming is done by superstition

I think this is what I refer to as SODD - or 'Stack Overflow Driven Development'. Somebody is not sure how to do something, so they look for an example on SO and they copy the code without really understanding what they're doing. (note: this is different to when they get an answer on SO and copy it knowing what they're doing).

martininmelbon What We Do and Don't Know about Software Development Effort Estimation

An even older engineer once told me: Even after you've doubled the estimate, it will still take twice as long as you estimate.

martininmelbon Graphs Show How Reddit Got Huge by Going Mainstream

Or an alternate headline could be "Graphs show how Reddit became more diversified as it became more popular".

martininmelbon Stop Freelancing

For what it's worth, if you do decide on a company, call it something modest - and don't try to pretend that you're something that you're not or pretend that you're bigger than you are. Seeing a business card that reads:

    John Smith
    CEO and President
    John Smith Global Design Enterprises

just does not cut it.

martininmelbon You are not a software engineer (2011)

> In particular, I'd like to see some real consequences for malpractice on the part of practitioners

I agree as long as we also see some of the benefits - required registration with a professional body - along with a requirement that certain projects cannot use uncertified practitioners (in other words, better pay for Software Engineers).

martininmelbon A Big List of D3 Examples

I ran it through an html checker (http://validator.w3.org/check) and got 3 Errors and 4 Warnings.

martininmelbon The most useful thing in bash

    $ Make me a sandwich
    What? Make it yourself
    $ sudo !!
    Okay

martininmelbon Is there an excuse for short variable names?

After reading many of the responses, I am wondering if there is a difference between the 'business programmers' and the 'scientific/mathematical programmers'. Most of the examples below show code that could have come from physics or maths code. I have noticed that my code (scientific) tends to have much shorter variable names than the code of some of my "not so mathematical" counterparts. Also, 'business' languages like Java and COBOL seem to encourage longer names more than C and FORTRAN.

martininmelbon How Doctors Die (2011)

How about if you were in a lot of pain and were told that you can take a pain killer but it would likely shorten your life (not necessarily a hypothetical choice)?

martininmelbon Show HN: API for detecting people, cars, and everyday objects in images

But it did find one potted plant for that image. I could not see it (bottom left hand corner).

martininmelbon Google Effect

And maybe Google 'autocorrect' has ruined our spelling?

martininmelbon The Web Book Boilerplate - Writing books for almost every platform

This looks like a product that I could use. I tried installing it - and found it easy enough to install Kindlegen. When I got to the 'npm install' part, I discovered that I had to install Node.js (at least I assume I did). I then tried running it and found that Grunt was not installed. Maybe update the installation instructions.

martininmelbon The Web Book Boilerplate - Writing books for almost every platform

If you're interested in creating a PDF from Markdown, I would suggest that you look at Pandoc (used by wbb). It generates LaTeX from the Markdown and generates a PDF from the LaTeX. I've yet to play with it to see if LaTeX metacommands can be placed in the Markdown.

martininmelbon Ask HN: How do you escape CRUD jobs?

I've had some CRUD jobs and some non-crud jobs. Interestingly, all the CRUD jobs came through Agencies and all the non-crud jobs were direct. There may be something there...