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scary-sizeon Making GRID's spreadsheet engine 10% faster

Really good write up! Concise and very clear. The optimisation isn’t overly complex, but you still brought the pitfalls to the reader’s attention. There’s a lot of those low hanging fruits around if only somebody cared to look.

scary-sizeon How I limit social media

Same here. When the Apollo app was discontinued a few months ago, I completely quit Reddit. Put the Kindle app in the spot on my Homescreen. Muscle memory got me a reading streak that still lasts.

scary-sizeon Reading Rules Changed My Life

> If a book sucks, stop reading it. The best readers actually quit a lot of books. Life is too short to read books you don’t enjoy reading.

This great advice, works for blog posts too.

scary-sizeon Why your blog still needs RSS

I’m not going to regularly read your blog if it doesn’t have RSS. Discovery happens here or on Reddit, after that it’s RSS or bust. On the plus side, I can’t remember the last blog that didn’t have a feed.

For my main blog [1], I manually update the feed.xml, on my „micro“ blog [2] I have a cron job doing it.

[1] https://franz.hamburg

[2] https://atoms.franz.hamburg

scary-sizeon Brexit Could Be Reversed - Here's How

I found Conrad Bastable‘s essay [1] on the subject fascinating.

[1] https://www.conradbastable.com/essays/the-germany-shock-the-...

scary-sizeon There is no data engineering roadmap

This hits home. I communicate a lot more with up and downstream stakeholders as a data engineer. Be it for designing future changes and how those affect others. Or, as you said, triaging outages/delays, figuring out where the missing dependency is. Less problem solving by coding.

The SQL thing the article mentions is also true. Even if you work with higher level tech like Spark. SQL gives you a good feel for joins. I also like the fast feedback cycles you get from SQL compared to something Scala/Python based.

scary-sizeon Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?

It helped me to make it really easy to get stuff out their: I just type a paragraph into Notion and it’s published automatically. Also, don’t think you need to publish long, polished pieces. Short texts to help build a habit. That one also helped me:

https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/06/05/some-blogging-myths/

scary-sizeon Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?

Love the minimal design

scary-sizeon Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?

https://franz.hamburg

Micro blog: https://atoms.franz.hamburg

scary-sizeon Cooklang – Recipe Markup Language

Nice! I dabbled with deep learning and CRF for the sequence tagging. I ran in the same issues you mentioned. Current approach is hand rolled. The „holy grail“ would be linking ingredients mentioned in the directions. So, I could just tap on „…vinegar…“ in an instruction and see that I need 2 tbsp.

scary-sizeon Junk websites filled w AI-generated text pulling in money from programmatic ads

I can attest to that. I’m using Google for work and Kagi for private stuff. There’s quite an overlap in search categories (e.g. tech stuff). With Google, I learnt to scroll past the first three-ish links. On Kagi I had to relearn that the first link is actually the most relevant.

scary-sizeon Cooklang – Recipe Markup Language

Interesting, does the server fetch the html itself? Or does the client POST it? The letter would be useful for paywalled sites like Cook‘s Illustrated. I spent quite some time on ingredient labelling (what’s a unit, quantity etc.). Feel free to ping at hn[at]franz.hamburg

scary-sizeon Cooklang – Recipe Markup Language

Looks promising! I’ll give it a thorough test. Been working on my own recipe clean up tool [1]. Does your app all the scraping and parsing on the client side?

[1] https://pretty-recip.es/

scary-sizeon The Deep Sea (2019)

Awesome feature! Really like the simplicity of it. No super fancy animation, just enough data to keep you scrolling until the end. Your next coffee is on me ;)

scary-sizeon Ask HN: How much of unlimited PTO do you use?

Though taking care of a sick kid is an unpaid leave. But your health insurance compensates that to a certain degree. Usually up to €110 per day.

scary-sizeon Why do recipe writers lie about how long it takes to caramelize onions? (2012)

I feel the same. That‘s a subscription that really pays off. Also one of the few newslettery messages I let in my inbox.

scary-sizeon Reddit comments and submissions collected by Pushshift

Oh, I missed that. Made the read definitely more exciting.

scary-sizeon Reddit comments and submissions collected by Pushshift

What a ride! Great read, entertaining whether it’s true or not.

scary-sizeon Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

- Desktop app for creating a static blogs. Electron and React: https://www.project-daily.com

- Instagram-like, private photo feed, where my partner and me can share pictures of our kids with relatives and friends. Posting works via e-mail, cron job generates the feed html. Imagemagick output multiple image formats, supports iOS live photos too. The feed isn't paginated, but with lazy loading the images it's still very performant.

- Most recently and still ongoing: A recipe clean-up tool. Removes all the gunk and fluff from online recipes. Shows just the ingredients and instructions. Also understands units and quantities, so unit conversion is up next. Here it is: https://pretty-recip.es/recipe?recipe-url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww....

scary-sizeon Lightweight SQLite Editor for Windows

That's true. Most of our production data is in the "petabyte" category. But often we start out with a small amount of data, for example for a new feature or product. That's when a lot of the exploration and query building happens. Once that's done, we leverage BigQuery to scale this up, serving a few hundred million users. There's a platform/standardisation component to this as well. We want our devs to use a single tool for all of their OLAP uses cases.

scary-sizeon Lightweight SQLite Editor for Windows

It's a blessing. I loath the slow feedback cycles your get in the BigQuery Web UI. Even for "small" tables, that would fit on your machine. When I expect a longer data exploration or debugging phase, I dump the BQ tables to SQLite. Opening that with SQLite browser lets me iterate very fast.

scary-sizeon Ask HN: Side projects making less than $2k MRR, what's your project?

I settled on a regex based approach with lots of data clean-up and normalisation up front. Example of my site [4]

Some other approaches I spent a lot of time on:

* Extracting Structured Data From Recipes Using Conditional Random Fields [1]

* Chef Watson [2]

* Ingredient Parser - Model Guide [3]

[1] https://archive.nytimes.com/open.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/0...

[2] https://blog.kitchenpc.com/2011/07/06/chef-watson/

[3] https://ingredient-parser.readthedocs.io/en/latest/guide/ind...

[4] https://pretty-recip.es/recipe?recipe-url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww....

scary-sizeon Ask HN: Side projects making less than $2k MRR, what's your project?

Have fun going down the rabbit whole of parsing structured data from ingredient phrases. Had a fun few weeks with that!

scary-sizeon Maximizing the Potential of LLMs: A Guide to Prompt Engineering

> LLMs can generate code, making it easier for developers to create complex software programs.

Sweet sweet complex software programs.

scary-sizeon Autodoc: Toolkit for auto-generating codebase documentation using LLMs

Wrong documentation is even worse than no documentation. Without it your at least force to look at the code and validate your assumptions. Get a feel for the code base. Wrong docs pointing you to tech that’s not even used is going to be a mess.

scary-sizeon Ask HN: Should I sign a pay cut agreement?

> They chose to cut salaries rather than cut the office rent and catered lunch/snack expenses

Real-estate is surprisingly hard to get rid of. Depending on the size they might be stuck with a multi-year lease. Cutting snacks and lunch doesn't substantially change the equation.

That said, I'd start looking for another job. Layoffs AND a paycut for those that remain doesn't fit well. Might as well layoff more people and keep the others "happy".

scary-sizeon Load 'em up and throw 'em under the bus

Thanks for the additional context. In your initial post it came across like you sat and watched the project burn.

scary-sizeon Load 'em up and throw 'em under the bus

What prevented you from helping him?

edit: This comes off as a rhetorical question. I'm really just interested what happened here. The project was assigned to both of you. I imagine that implies some responsibility for the whole of the project. You spent your "free" time learning React. Was there an organisational blocker that prevented you from helping him out, in any capacity?

scary-sizeon I don't like making the best things

I went for that solution. Got a main blog were I post more polished stuff and a microblog. On the latter I can just post spur-of-the-moment content. Also significantly lowered the barrier of posting to the microblog by just typing in a Notion page that's rendered to html and rss every few minutes.

scary-sizeon Electric Clojure – A signals DSL for full-stack web UI

You're right, I was a bit harsh by disregarding the current use of frameworks. There're huge upsides to them. They still hide stuff, some do it well, some not so. Electric gives me the (unproven) vibe of hiding the lower layers a bit too well.

Regarding the causes of many bugs, your guess is as good as mine. You'll continue to have bugs and you'll have to continue looking under the covers to understand them.