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nic-waller

54 karma · joined May 16, 2020

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nic-waller··on Show HN: Terminal Based Wikipedia
It appears to be scraping HTML pages.

https://github.com/yashsinghcodes/wik/blob/main/wik/info.py#...

nic-waller··on Getting Wealthy vs. Staying Wealthy
Mea culpa. Thanks for pointing out my error.
nic-waller··on Getting Wealthy vs. Staying Wealthy
This "blog post" is nothing but an entire chapter copied verbatim from "Psychology of Money". That seems to go well beyond fair use doctrine.
nic-waller··on Google Safe Browsing is blocking small Mastodon servers
I saw a similar aggressively red warning on Mobile Safari. Apparently it uses the same database of "deceptive" pages.

I turned off "Fraudulent Website Warning" in Settings and then I was able to access your site.

nic-waller··on I don't care about cookies
Some sites use localstorage instead of cookies for session tracking.
nic-waller··on Cockpit – Integrated, glanceable, web-based interface for servers
I started using Cloudron recently and I really like it! I came to this thread to mention it, but I see you're already here.
nic-waller··on Show HN: Endgame – An AWS Pentesting tool to backdoor or expose AWS resources
Impressive tool, but the supporting documentation is what I appreciate most.

I think the prevention guide could be improved by providing an example service control policy that blocks known dangerous IAM actions like ecr:SetRepositoryPolicy for all but a specific security principal.

nic-waller··on Sales of electric cars up by 43% in 2020
It's easier to set up back yard solar panels than a back yard fuel refinery.
nic-waller··on Show HN: Routine Ops – Schedule recurring tasks by role
I really think there is an under-addressed niche here. I haven't tried your product yet, but I was pretty hopeful when I saw this posted here. That being said, I have some feedback already:

- $29/user/month just feels too high. My per-service spend on any other SaaS ranges from $3/user/month to $18/user/month. What makes this service so valuable that I would spend more on it than any other SaaS that supports my business?

- There's obviously some overlap here with Jira. It would really be nice to see a page on your website showing what RoutineOps can do that Jira can't already do.

- Some people really, really like learning about products by video instead of text or screenshots. Videos aren't as information dense, I know. But in the past I've found them useful in my goal to influence budget holders.

- Your screenshots don't illustrate how the recurrence flow actually works. If I schedule a new task every day and then do nothing for seven days, do I have one task or seven?

- There is no obvious way to contact you. The page footer isn't just spartan, it's barren. It's missing some really essential stuff. Privacy policy is another important one.

- My primary use case for scheduling and tracking recurring work is based on audit compliance. Are you intending to address that market segment? If yes, then tell us.

- When I'm buying software to help with audit compliance, it's especially helpful to know whether the SaaS organization I'm purchasing from also has passed some audits (like SOC 2 or ISO 27001) I guess it's too early stage for you at this point, but something to think about.

nic-waller··on Introducing Money in Excel, an easier way to manage your finances
Me too. But I doubt it will ever happen without regulation.

The only development in this space that I'm aware of is from a South African company called root. You can run custom code before/after transactions through their credit card. https://root.co.za/card

nic-waller··on Show HN: Python Package for Predicting Gender from First Names
Ah, I didn't see the N records originally. That makes sense!

Because I'm enthusiastic about data structures, and now that I've finished my work day, I thought I'd come back with a few numbers to support my earlier comment. The package size can be reduced by 90% by saving the names as compressed plaintext.

  5192 KB gender.json
  1484 KB gender.txt     (71% savings)
   488 KB gender.txt.gz  (90% savings)
On my reasonably modern laptop, it takes over 700 ms to unmarshal 5MB worth of JSON. But it takes less than 100 ms (85% time savings) to read the whole file and compare strings.

  $ time jq -r . >/dev/null gender.json
  real 0m0.764s
  
  $ time grep -E '^(NIC|PAUL)' gender.txt
  real 0m0.091s
When working with large datasets of items that are mostly the same size, sometimes it's useful to use fixed-width records to enable random indexing into the file. Of course, this is a small data set so it's not really worthwhile to pursue such optimizations. So just for fun, here's an analysis of how long the names are. 99% of names in this set are 13 characters or less. Representing short names as fixed-width records and long names as an appendix would use about 2.5 MB (50% savings compared to JSON).

  2 222
  3 1785
  4 8913
  5 27862
  6 45986
  7 44311
  8 28291
  9 14355
  10 7167
  11 4072
  12 2611
  13 1512
PS. Here's how I prepared the text file:

  <gender.json jq -r '. | keys[]' > gender.txt
nic-waller··on Show HN: Python Package for Predicting Gender from First Names
Storing the lookup map on disk as a JSON-encoded dictionary seems less than optimal for package size and module load time. Two plaintext files (M.txt and F.txt) would be simple and more efficient on disk. The text is also highly compressible -- that could further reduce package size. These things might matter if the package is used in a Serverless environment.

Also, do you think there could be value in identifying classically androgynous names?

nic-waller··on Ask HN: Is there a search engine which excludes the world's biggest websites?
My hobby project is https://random.surf (works better on desktop than mobile).

I share that same desire to visit the web less travelled. I want to discover interesting sites that deserve to be bookmarked because they will never show up in a search engine.