Hacker News Reader

news_to_meon Ask HN: What are your non-tech hobbies?

I love seeing everyone else’s hobbies. It’s important to be well-rounded.

Somewhat tech-related, I like building and repairing electronics and vintage mechanical things (Singer sewing machine, old door latches, old Macintosh; you get the idea).

Bike maintenance is deeply satisfying. Especially when you go camping on a bike you’ve completely overhauled.

Listening to and playing music are important to me in ways that are difficult to describe.

And not really a hobby, but just meeting new people and neighbors and listening to them (especially people not in tech) is very rewarding.

news_to_meon Working in One Bit

Brandon James Greer[0] has some really good vids on pixel art, including 1-bit. I recommend trying it out for yourself in Aseprite, or if you have an iPad/Apple Pencil, Pixaki is actually really nice.

[0]: https://youtu.be/0BZwEoj50uw

news_to_meon Dasher: Information-efficient text entry (2007) [video]

Incredible! I feel like there’s so much room for improvement for mainstream input methods. Amazing this existed in 2007 — too bad I can’t use it on my iPhone.

news_to_meon A Unix-style personal search engine and web crawler for your digital footprint

If it's a WebExtension, it's usually not too hard to port to Firefox (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...)

news_to_meon The Thermocline of Truth (2008)

> (NOTE: my use of male pronouns is deliberate; it is almost always male IT engineers who have this unreasonable optimism. Female IT engineers in my experience are generally far more conservative and realistic, almost to a fault, which is why I prefer them. I just wish they weren’t so hard to find.)

I don’t know why, but something about this aside really rubbed me the wrong way.

news_to_meon An Elixir adoption success story

I've been working on Elixir projects freelance for over a year now, and it's become my preference for new projects. Elixir is one of my favorite languages because I feel like it really increases the leverage each developer has in a project.

news_to_meon Disproportionate amount of bad online behaviour stems from psychological issues

I totally agree. In my friendships, I highly value people that will tell me when they disagree, and I try to avoid people who are hard to disagree with. Some of my favorite people are stereotypical “New York” types.

news_to_meon RetroBridgeBBS: An internet bridge BBS to transfer files to your retro computers

This looks great! Would have been helpful when I was bootstrapping my Mac for internet access.

Speaking of which, does anyone know of a Raspberry Pi setup that will emulate a modem and bridge an internet connection? I've been using SLiRP/PPP, but it's been a little flakey.

news_to_meon RetroBridgeBBS: An internet bridge BBS to transfer files to your retro computers

Whoa, super cool work! I can see Coprocessorjs being really useful.

I love seeing modern dev for 68k Macs. The toolbox can be a pain at first, but it's not so bad once you internalize all the different managers you have to remember. MacApp supposedly helps do a lot of the work for you, but I haven't gotten around to doing much with it yet—it's more fun implementing my own abstractions like an async task manager.

news_to_meon Final Project: Vector Laser Projector (2019)

This is awesome! I knew something like galvo motors must exist but I never looked deeply into it. I'm going to have to use something like this to build a better automatic cat laser.

news_to_meon Yahoo Answers to shut down May 4, 2021

Why sarcasm? Yahoo Answers represents an important slice of online culture from the early 2000s. Are our kids supposed to just believe us when we tell them how babby is formed[1]?

[1] https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080211063124A...

news_to_meon Elixir and Phoenix after two years

I agree, and to be clear I've never really been in a position to worry about hiring anyway. But I would imagine building a medium/large team with varying experience levels (including juniors) would be easier with a more established framework like Rails.

news_to_meon Elixir and Phoenix after two years

+1 for Ecto, really a game-changing library.

news_to_meon Elixir and Phoenix after two years

In terms of language, Phoenix is a complete replacement for Rails for me. I feel more comfortable growing a functional codebase, and the BEAM means I don't have to worry about scaling as soon as I would with Rails. I think it's a good fit for when you want to do more with a small, experienced team.

I would reach for Rails when I'm concerned about finding developers (Elixir devs are fewer and more expensive, generally), or if there are Ruby libraries I want that aren't available in Elixir.

news_to_meon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2021)

This is a great idea! Maybe we can encourage it by upvoting posts that include salary info.

news_to_meon Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (April 2021)

SEEKING WORK | Seattle | Remote Preferred

I'm Zack, a full stack Web developer specializing in web applications and productivity tools. I have experience with Express (Node.js), Ruby on Rails, Phoenix (Elixir), and Wordpress. On the front-end I have experience with React/Redux and custom frameworks. I also build hardware projects and write programs for my Macintosh Plus in my spare time.

https://zjm.me | z@zjm.me

news_to_meon Live feed from Iceland erupting volcano [video]

> The crater is loud and deeply rumbly and makes you feel the raw power of the Earth.

I'm using this in my next Zork clone ;)

news_to_meon Is Being Salaried a Scam?

This is also why I started freelancing and limit myself to ~20hr weeks. I actually feel just as productive as I did working 8hr days salaried, since I have much better mental health with the extra free time.

The only real downside is finding clients to agree to that limit, but so far it hasn't been too much of a problem.

news_to_meon Shrink, Reduce, and Implode: The Legacy Zip Compression Methods

What a coincidence! I was just in the middle of implementing LZW compression this weekend[0]. Compression algorithms are very interesting, and underrated.

[0]: https://sr.ht/~zjm/lzw/

news_to_meon Modern Alternatives to PGP

https://xkcd.com/1172/

news_to_meon The Lasting Lessons of John Conway’s Game of Life (2020)

Satisfying to see Kjetil Golid’s work mentioned — one of my favorite artists!

https://www.katevassgalerie.com/kjetil-golid

news_to_meon Front-of-the-Front-End and Back-of-the-Front-End Web Development

But... why? Doesn’t all this seem needlessly complex? How are users better served by adding complexity to the front end?

Certainly there are complex UIs that require sophisticated front ends, but you probably aren’t building one, even though you’ve convinced yourself it’s necessary.

news_to_meon GTA III and Vice City fully reverse engineered: re3

Have you ever heard of free software? ;)

news_to_meon Ditherpunk 2 – beyond 1-bit

Dithering is so cool! I love the different looks you can get with different algorithms. I added dithered output to a little 3D renderer I’m building and I think it looks super cool [0].

Also, it’s mentioned in the monochrome article, but Lucas Pope’s post on dithering in Obra Dinn is one of my favorite tech explorations [1].

[0] https://twitter.com/zackmichener/status/1359989840360525827?...

[1] https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?PHPSESSID=dreqnu2pikn...

news_to_meon Creators of ORCA and their works embracing tech minimalism and software freedom

These guys are a huge inspiration for me and my personal work. I really love their approach to technology, and I wish there were more people exploring alternatives to the tech co/startup/capitalist grind. (Maybe there are? Recs welcome)

news_to_meon Computer Graphics from Scratch

Yeah I find this method way easier to understand than scan conversion. Fabian Giesen has a great series of articles from 2011 that explains it well[0].

Also the original 1988 paper by Pineda is a surprisingly easy read, and it's only 4 pages![1]

[0]: https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2011/07/06/a-trip-through-the-...

[1]: https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.15...

news_to_meon Solar-Powered, Off-Grid Bike Can Bust Poachers Anywhere

I’m one of those Karens — fuck your bike’s noise, it should be illegal, at least in the city. Electric can’t get here soon enough so we can have fun and get some sleep too.

news_to_meon Why Working from Home Will Stick [pdf]

I think you're right, but I get the feeling that companies will still come out ahead in the end — and employees will be stuck with some amount of loss.

news_to_meon Why Working from Home Will Stick [pdf]

Totally agree — I was trying to frame my comment in the terms of the GP. For better or worse, managers are often forced to think in terms of time rather than output, and I wanted to respond on that level.

For jobs where time spent correlates with output, time is a good way to think about it (and should be paid hourly), but obviously this isn't 99% of white collar jobs.

news_to_meon Why Working from Home Will Stick [pdf]

Hopefully we can get some legislation to correct for this. It seems like the sort of thing the labor market should balance out eventually, but... the labor market is pretty irrational all over the place, so I wouldn't trust it.