Ah, thanks for explaining that. Really appreciate it. Makes a lot more sense now.
760 karma · joined November 24, 2020
Created Verba, Exhibitor, SockState, GoodFlow, ts-pg-orm, and such. Most of these are only fun side-projects.
Links to me online: linktr.ee/samhuk
This kind of tool is exactly what I would have needed, instead of the approach I've taken which is a bit kludgy and grass-roots.
By far the most difficult part of it for me was ensuring that the web socket network can heal from outages of any of the clients or the server. E.g. If a client loses connection, how does it regain knowledge of state? If the server dies, what do clients do with state changes they want to upload? Etc. It was really difficult!
Good work :)
Telcos are (in theory, at least) private utility companies, so why does it make sense for them to create the application/use case? Do you mean that Telcos like Verizon are reeling from not creating their own platforms (say, apps or app stores) that charge for use of LTE etc.?
Basically, why and how do you think that Telcos are reeling from not capturing LTE value? Didn't they already by charging for use of their network?
Side-note: If I'm not wrong in my assumption of what you meant, then you conjecture a rather depressing idea that companies feel the need to capture value from an increasing number of market segments and crave hegemonic monopolistic control, for example Microsoft since forever.
Think Storybook but simpler, faster, better Typescript support, and uses esbuild by default.
...Is the aim. I'm the sole lead dev working on it at the moment up against the ~10-20 strong team who built most of Storybook, so it's a long road ahead, but it's growing into something I'm quite proud of and happy about.
Node.js, express.js, Typescript for the "central command" server that acts as any client's first port-of-call.
Central command fans out to whatever tech is required for the job. Very typical for me is fanning out to various python Flask servers to do ML/image proc/etc. work or connect to GBQ.
PostgreSQL for persistence because it's pretty much the undisputed pereto-optimal solution: solves 80% of problems with 20% of the effort. Does almost everything you need until you get to the big scales, which by then you can afford to just pay the wizards to do the Cassandra, Dynamo, Redis, haskell, etc. magic
It's concerning that you have such a low bar for using such extreme language, which seems a bit tone-deaf given the point you are trying to make. Couldn't you have phrased that in a less flamebait way?
To elaborate and address your valid point, however: OP implies a confusion between the subjective and objective. The site makes statements in an objective way as if they are facts about what is "news", "interesting", and what is bad content. Being a publicly available tool reinforces that implication further.
My final takeaway point, as explained by all the previous points before it, was that this is incorrect because the OP's objectively described views are in fact very subjective. This is one in a long line (dozens?) of "HN but more X less X"es, and most make this mistake, which is why they never gain any ground.
I could have been less discouraging, however, so I'll try and take that onboard.
* I don't really see the value-add of a curated list of what is already a curated list. Down the rabbit hole...
* The site's definition of what is included and what is excluded is extremely vague. "general news", "unique views", "interesting stuff". I mean come'on...
* At least HN has a relatively excellent definition of what counts as acceptable content (relative to other social media platform's definitions, which are deliberately vague to allow complete hegemonic content control).
* If I had a buck every time someone said "Hacker News needs to be more hacker and less news", only to realize that their definition of "hacker" and "news" was very unique to them and so supposing that there should be some filter to "objectively make HN better" was actually very subjective and of little use as a publicly available tool.
IMHO, this should have been a private tool of theirs. They could have probably achieved their subjective goal of "more hacker less news" with a little script to filter out HN posts for specific domains and keywords.
It hosts:
* My personal site (http://samhuk.com). I use this mostly for just myself as a way to remember tasty recipes and such. It also has a tonne of functionality behind a login that I use.
* Samba server for a little NAS setup. I have to daily drive Win, Linux, and MacOS, so Samba was my go-to.
* CI/CD for some of my projects.
* A minecraft server that me and my friends sometimes play around on when we have a few drinks.
It has an old 8th gen intel i3 that I got for peanuts, 8TB WD datacenter HDD, etc., way more than enough for what I use it for. Could have done with a rpi honestly, but...rpi 4...
On a similar theme, calling those who support humans going to mars as being part of some Elon Musk-led culty "mars religion" is totally preposterous. There's a reek of "Everyone who disagrees with me doesn't have the truth'n'facts and have actually just tricked themselves into believing a religion".
Musk Derangement Syndrome is strong.
I actually support a lot of their statements though, e.g. about the rather silly lunar gateway that seems to have very little actual financial logic to it. It's just a shame.
Latest update over on my blog: https://samhuk.substack.com/p/exhibitor-update-3-v200
IP address: House
Port: What kind of thing from inside the house you want
Gateway: House #1, start of street.
DNS: Tells you which house number corresponds to a family name. "Oh why yes, 'samhuk' lives at house # xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
The analogy goes on and on. It's how I have always thought about networks since.
Then it all just clicked. I still remember that day all these years later.
Other notable mentions, in no particular order:
* Perfect is the enemy of good enough. Did n't really appreciate this idea until around 2 years into my career.
* How to be professionally displeased at something. Early on my career I would get way too angry at incompetent colleagues peeing in the pool, e.g. bad code, design, management, etc. I would complain quite a bit! It only clicked ~2-3 years later into my career when I figured that one's displeasure at a situation should be a function of both how bad the situation is and how able you are to improve it. When you offer constructive solutions to incompetence (suggest alternative algo, management style, library, tool, etc) whilst not actually mentioning what is wrong, instead of just fruitlessly reminding people of what they did wrong, people become far more cooperative and receptive, etc.
My tin-foil-hat pet-theory is that the relatively recent tyranny of low expectations and "participation award" society has on average made younger people much more sensitive to negative comments about their work. The extension of that is that people end up robbed of more detailed reasoning about what they did that was wrong.
People are interesting!
So, due to the lack of front-end exp (a while before I joined), they chose to buy the license for a moderately well-known UI component library to heavy-lift a big front-end rewrite. Well, due to same inexperience, there was no due diligence done and it turned out said component library had tonnes of bugs, wasn't easily extendable, had no real Typescript support, and on and on. The product suffered immensely for years, but dev leadership I think took on a sucken cost/hopeless mentality.
Years later, just before I joined, they chose to try and do something about it and pivot (I suppose as some political recoil), deciding to have a go at creating their own UI components and gradually strangler-pattern the existing external UI library. However, leadership thought themselves and the other CS grad dotnetter/java types could "learn on the job", so they didn't hire ANY devs with real experience, i.e. JS, TS, React/Angular/whatever, build tools, general front-end best practices, anything!
Fast-forward half a year and there is already even more bugs, a growing mountain of tech debt, etc. This is when i roughly joined, as their first developer with (back then) a couple years of f/e experience. Took me around a year to start turning around the general careless culture the business took towards it's f/e dev work, and argued for more learning, adoption of industry norms, craftsmanship, and all that jazz.
It's all in my rear view mirror now, but wow was that an interesting time.
It deeply confuses me how some people, some who are obviously very smart, value censorship and government-enforced-truth over freedom of speech and expression.
Where did it go wrong? How did we get here? IMHO this isn't about "culture war" or "left v right" anymore, but instead about how did a large number of people so casually abandon fundamental human rights.
Could you elaborate into what is noble about censoring the discussion about the safety of covid-related mitigations by official, recognised scientists?
Google automated ranking, using totally random pagerank algos, which was their downfall. Reddit and youtube, in general, rely on crowdsourced ranking, which is harder to game (not impossible).
FYI, this can be quite difficult for certain countries. Source: I have had friends who live in China and the Middle East, and VPN IP addresses are very quickly found and blacklisted. It's not a one-size-fits-all solution.
What is the "something else" to React that you allude to? Vue? NextJS? Preact? Angular? Heh, PHP?
I've tried almost every big-name web app framework under the sun, React for 7 years, Angular an age ago for a year or two. Vue for a few months. Etc. In my experience, everythig either trends away from React (Vue, Angular, ...) and fails ("fail" -> never gains widespread adoption, zero job market, or just less popular than React, etc.), or sticks close to React (Preact, ...) and still fails because they have no real unique offering/large benefit over React, particularly in "enterprise" setting (which is what predominantly matters).
> and because "everyone else" is doing it
That's tautological. {thing} isn't popular for no reason. There is always some unique value-add that {thing} offers over {competing things}.
One of the life lessons I always remember for myself, particularly in software development: There better be a very good reason why you're betting against the mass. They are many and a good proportion of them smarter than you.
2. Ukraine fights on but cannot last forever against a country with a much larger population and, arguably, industry (capable of war). Tensions rise, but many governments drag feet out of fear of killing their already covid-striken economies.
3. Austerity in UK becomes the only solution as budgets with 30 billion pound black holes kind of can't exist. NHS collapse, that has been occuring for ~10-20 years, accellarates much faster. Productivity declines due to sicker population. Vicious cycle becomes apparent over next ~5 years as sicker workers -> lower productivity -> lower GDP -> worse healthcare -> sicker workers -> ... Will be blamed on brexit and/or "lazy people", as was the case ~10 years ago when "benefit fraudsters" became the new group that the UK government told everyone to hate'n'blame.
4. EV uptake misses the current jubilant expectations as the first-world eventually catches on to the absolutely dispicable atrocities occuring to mine {metal} (e.g. Cobalt, Tantalum, etc.) for {battery dependent thing}. EV companies employ FUD to divert blame. Perhaps ask government to help silence discussion, Twitter Files like?
5. Scalping (i.e. PC parts, etc.) will still be a problem (although not as bad) since there is literally every incentive for companies to not do anything about it. Many scalping services, scripts, github repos, etc., spawned from covid times, lowering the bar so Joe Bloggs can do it, spawning what will be an endless cat-and-mouse rat-race to the bottom until {something} happens.
6. Small-time logo designers and all related industry deflates as stable diffusion et al automates a good chunk of it, lowering the bar.
To end on lighter notes:
7. {new product} on Show HNs will still be dismissed by some as "simply achievable with rsync".
8. Work on nuclear fusion increases as it becomes less of a toy/pipe-dream and machine learning enables rapid progress and iteration.
Early internet: As long as there was copper, you generally could exchange {protocol} (i.e. HTTP, FTP, POP3, ...) to {person} in {country}, quite freely.
Current internet: Many egress and ingress connections are banned by {government agency} of {country}.
Future internet: What parent comment was predicting: An increasing number of governments increasingly aggressively ban an increasing number of internet services (i.e. connections).
It's really not that hard to imagine, look at China or Russia or many other countries (e.g. Middle-East). Very aggresive white/blacklists of internet services.
This is the "fracturing" the parent comment is alluding to.
YMMV. I wish you luck!
IMHO, I think that he doesn't have enough incriminating information about political figures to be "hit-able". He must have some information about the Democrats' shady financials, likely going way up, but let's face it, we all know that already. This contrasts H Epstein, who likely knew which political figures were pedophiles, sexual predators, and all that horrific business, which is far worse and likely led to the "anomalous events" that occurred during H Epstien's arrest.
You only have to see recent occurences with well-known online personas that saying the wrong thing can get your bank account frozen, internet access restricted, and use of a multitude of services denied.
When institutions and companies get so centralized, large, and act homogenously, a "pseudo-government" capable of restricting your freedom emerges.
This idea of "First Amendment doesn't apply because not government" is IMHO an incredibly poisonous one. An idea that, by way of disclosures like the Twitter Files, we have found out the US government has exploited by using a complex web of companies and agencies to police speech on platforms like Twitter.
Institutions like Stanford policing language is effectively indistinguishable from the government doing it in a multitude of ways. Yes you don't get charged with a crime, but you will end up unable to get higher education there. What if Harvard does the same?
If you allow this seed to take, then you quickly slip down the "First They Came..." slope. First they came for schools. Then for tech platforms. Where do you think it ends? Just there?
This is essentially a long definition of the (quite polarizing and controversial) term "woke mind virus", since it spreads from company to company and institution to institution until there is nobody left, and through no "technical" violation of the First Amendment, you have effectly not got it any more.
I'm not American and even I am scared of how un-American such flagrant policing of language is. Some of the examples are shockingly benign, with invisible lines drawn and imaginary people invented to manufacture offense.
With the Twitter Files showing how the US government has colluded with a web of companies to violate the 1st Amendment, I wonder if any lines will end up being drawn between anomalous actions like Stanford's and the US government. Even as a non-American, I'm confused how this doesn't violate the very thing that being American is -> freedom.
This all reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...
Personally, and it's a rather flimsily held opinion of mine so I'm open to challenges, but I feel like it's quite the opposite. Isn't it the non-humanitarian things that have brought together unlikely sides? At the height of the cold war, Americans and Russians still visited each other's countries for Chess championships, but not much else, right? My history knowledge isn't that great :P
And yes, I am a bit surprised by some of the photos, particularly towards the end. I've never been involved in the science publishing scene, so to me it just looks...strange.
* I really like all of the. As just "photographs", they seem all very pretty, detailed, some even awe-inspiring, to me.
* Is it just me (I'm not in any way a photography guy), or are so many of these photos extremely over-edited with extra color to make them more appealing? EDIT: The visible-light photos
* Veritasium did an amazing video on how the black hole image was made. It honestly made radio astronomy "click" for me, finally after many years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1bSDnuIPbo
* Scrolling through that gave off a strong ex-Apple web developer smell. Why add such complex scrolling behavior where it isn't necessary?
* I appreciate the message and everything, and it's a fantastic and indeed hypnotic image, but what does the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine have anything, in particular, to do with science? Yes some Ukrainian scientists have been displaced. Some scientific institutions and faculties too, but the image isn't even about that. Feels a bit like they could have done their "send our best regards" bit in a better way, IMHO. Am I being a bit overly pedantic/negative here? I don't know...
So, as a figure who has A) been critical of the recent political left and B) has been "sympathetic" to the recent political right, of course will get booed.
That's where my "badge of honor" statement comes from.
Honestly, I think two things: A) This is a total nothingburger, because it was obviously going to happen, and B) This is way more of a poor impression of SF residents by being crybabies at what is meant to be entertainment, than Elon, who didn't get much of a word other than "Hi Dave" before a fight broke out.
I don't know. It's all pretty sad TBH.