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nicwest

517 karma · joined October 21, 2011

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nicwest··on Itch.io Taken Down by Funko
https://bsky.app/profile/karmn.bsky.social/post/3lcuc4dqudc2...

It's hard for me to read this any other way.

nicwest··on UK Threatens End-to-End Encryption
then when they back down we could have "UK threats to end end-to-end encryption end"
nicwest··on Launch HN: Hypercontext (YC S21) – Meeting notes, actions, and OKRs in one app
your website appears to have a bunch of meta data on it from something called soapbox. If I link to your website in slack it comes up with a "That looks like a Soapbox link. Would you like to install the Soapbox app" message. I assume a recent-ish rebrand?

What was the thought process there?

nicwest··on New Model M Is an American-Made Keyboard That Puts a Spring Back in Your Typing
There was an awesome project a while back to recreate a new buckling spring keyboard:

https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=79141.0

https://www.modelfkeyboards.com/

nicwest··on Bluetooth Trackball Mark II
Have you tried the trackballs formerly known as "Clearly Superior" now "Xtrac" apparently[1]. I like the physical scroll wheel and dedicated middle mouse button, the internals are mechanical not optical (I have had problems with kensingtons in this regard), and there are some fairly alluring foot peddle expansion ports on the back that I've not played with yet.

if you do go down this route, I would suggest avoiding a model with an LED in it. while it looks cool for sure the LED is positioned so that shines right in your eyes if you put the device front and center (like in between a split keyboard).

[1]: https://xkeys.com/xkeys/trackballs.html

nicwest··on Ask HN: Suggestions for books about API design?
Consumer centric API design

https://github.com/tlhunter/consumer-centric-api-design

nicwest··on Most-favorited Hacker News posts
I think it's interesting that out of all the news articles about famous people that have died, Ursla le Guin is the one that turns up in this list.
nicwest··on Ask HN: Self-taught webdev with lots of free time. What should I learn?
Go helped me learn about designing good interfaces, and how to write tests using dependency injection rather than just patching stuff out.
nicwest··on Ask HN: Self-taught webdev with lots of free time. What should I learn?
I found that learning and writing some Clojure and Go made me think better about the code I was writing in my main language (python).

I enjoyed working through Clojure for the brave and true: https://www.braveclojure.com/clojure-for-the-brave-and-true/

and the go tour is probably the best introduction I've ever had to a language: https://tour.golang.org/welcome/1

nicwest··on Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?
I'm investigating the way that encounter difficulty is estimated in Dungeons and Dragons. I've felt for a long time that the influence the number of opposing monsters have is somewhat exaggerated.
nicwest··on Show HN: A set of standard document templates
- Post-mortem

- Incident report

- Scheduled down time

nicwest··on Algorithm Removes Water from Underwater Images
Also I imagine that depth would be a significant factor
nicwest··on How to Exit Vim
Mileage may vary depending on language support, but vim does have a go to definition feature[1][2]. I believe there is also out box error checking for some languages, and if that is not enough for you (and at the risk of offending a large number of vim purists), there is a fantastic plugin called ALE[3] that will likely provide you with what you want.

1: https://vimhelp.org/pattern.txt.html#gd

2: https://vimhelp.org/pattern.txt.html#gD

3: https://github.com/dense-analysis/ale

nicwest··on Unmortgage, the ‘part own, part rental’ housing startup, with partners AllianzGI
> Are taxes and maintenance costs shared proportionally?

Day-to-day maintenance (replacing lightbulbs, shelf falling down etc) is your responsibility. Plus you get to decorate however you want (at your cost). All other taxes and maintenance costs are shared proportionally.

> Who gets to decide when to call the plumber?

You do. There's a home emergency cover plan in place (costs shared proportionally) so you can get someone round 24/7, 365 days / year.

> If you fail to pay your rent, can they evict you?

Yes, but if you just need a couple of months to get back on your feet, we won't.

> What happens to your share then?

You still own it, but any rent arrears would be netted off.

> Can you sublet?

Not at the moment.

> Can you sell your share on the open market, or only back to the company, at whatever price they decide is fair market value?

The latter, but there is an option to go to the open market together. Price is determined by a regulated independent surveyor, not by Unmortgage.

https://www.unmortgage.com/faqs

https://www.unmortgage.com/how-it-works

source: I am an unmortgage employee.

nicwest··on OpenSCAD: Software for creating solid 3D CAD objects
I recently bought a 3D printer and have enjoyed programing objects in cljoure with scad-clj.

https://github.com/farrellm/scad-clj

This is biggest project I know of that uses it:

https://github.com/adereth/dactyl-keyboard

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk3A41U0iO4

nicwest··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2018)
Unmortgage | London, United Kingdom | Frontend, Backend & Data Engineers | Full-time | Onsite | https://unmortgage.com

Millions of people are stuck in the rent trap, with no way to own a home. At Unmortgage we are reinventing homeownership to bridge the widening gap between renting and buying with a mortgage.

We are funded for the next 3 years after the largest seed raise in Europe and are looking for people to join us at this early stage.

We work in a Agile (XP+TDD) team in a stunning office above Bank station, London. The Stack is React, Python running on Kubernetes in Google Cloud. Everyone gets their hands dirty and there are no silos allowed.

Here are all our exciting jobs: https://jobs.lever.co/unmortgage/

If you have any questions about the backend jobs you can drop me a line at nic.west@unmortgage.com, or chee.diep@unmortgage.com for the frontend jobs, or alternatively our CEO ray@unmortgage.com for all of the above and any additional information about the company.

nicwest··on Ask HN: Did any Show HN posts turn into successful startups?
I think this was the company that became pebble (correct me if I'm wrong).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2221579

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3290884

nicwest··on Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub
> Git doesn't include better built-in support for issues, wikis, PRs / code reviews, and releases

I feel like a lot of these features could be handled with git-notes[1]. For example git-appraise[2] uses the git-notes feature for a code review system:

[1] https://git-scm.com/docs/git-notes

[2]https://github.com/google/git-appraise

nicwest··on Matias Click Switches: Tactile mechanical keyswitches
so while it's not exactly the all in one service you describe, you can do something similar already:

http://www.keyboard-layout-editor.com/

to design your layout, then

http://builder.swillkb.com/

to design a layer case, files go to a laser cutting service,

then you would need a controller of some sort (commonly something like a https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/), switches, diodes, usb ports, etc.

then hand wire everything together.

tmk/qmk is more or less a defacto standard in custom keyboard firmware:

https://github.com/qmk/qmk_firmware

here are some examples of people generating firmware with webtools, I don't know what they use on the backend.

https://www.massdrop.com/configurator/ergodox

http://qmk.thevankeyboards.com/

nicwest··on Ask HN: Which functional language has the best ecosystem for a web backend?
Clojure! the thing I like most about a lot of the libraries is how they seem to blend so seamlessly. I don't know if it's an artefact of just being a lisp or just a lot of the developers sharing a mindset, but the whole experience feels less janky.
nicwest··on Ravens OL John Urschel, 26, retires abruptly, two days after CTE study
There is a decent interview with Jamie Cudmore on the rugby dungeon where he talks pretty candidly about concussion issues:

https://www.acast.com/therugbydungeon/ep-22jamiecudmore

nicwest··on The Amazing Shortcut Keypad
a lot of custom keyboards use a amtel avr controller which is easily flashable with custom firmware. I think I can see a teensy like board in the picture. here is an (the) example in c: https://github.com/qmk/qmk_firmware
nicwest··on Problems I Have with Python
could someone explain to me why

    >>> ranges = [range(i) for i in range(5)]
    >>> [*item for item in ranges]
    [0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 2, 0, 1, 2, 3]
would be better than:

    >>> ranges = [range(i) for i in range(5)]
    >>> [item for subrange in ranges for item in subrange]
    [0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 2, 0, 1, 2, 3]
nicwest··on Fitbit is reportedly buying Pebble for around $40M
I bought one of the blackberry only models from their show HN post way back when [1]. Glad to see they made it this far.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2221579

nicwest··on Benefits of using tmux – streamlining your development environment
How did it go?
nicwest··on Benefits of using tmux – streamlining your development environment
I was a long time tmux user while on mac. Since I've swapped to arch and i3 I don't use tmux at all, and just use the WM. I basically live in terminals nowadays and I've not really missed tmux. The thing I really do miss is vim-tmux-navigator.

https://github.com/christoomey/vim-tmux-navigator.

nicwest··on Splix.io
game doesn't seem to require flash, but the ads(?) do, and if you don't have flash, it blocks on the ad page seemingly indefinitely. FF 49.0.1 arch linux
nicwest··on Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?
The Clean Code Talks - "Global State and Singletons": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FRm3VPhseI
nicwest··on How Did GM Create Tesla’s Dream Car First?
Is there any reason GM can't just make the bolt compatible with Tesla's super chargers? Seems like a win for both parties.
nicwest··on Mutt 1.6
if you haven't already, have a look at w3m [1] or similar. I use mail cap to route emails though w3m and it's pretty rare that I notice anything amiss.

`text/html; w3m -I %{charset} -T text/html; copiousoutput;`

[1] http://w3m.sourceforge.net/

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