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whb101

219 karma · joined May 14, 2023

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whb101··on Ask HN: What games let you simulate running a startup?
Funny you should ask, I just finished building one: https://startupsimulator.com

Let me know what you think - it hasn't had intensive play by a ton of users yet, so feedback is very welcome!

whb101··on Wikipedia as a Graph
Sick!!

I made this awhile back for more freeform browsing: https://wikijumps.com

Would love to integrate some of that relationship data

whb101··on Flesh and Blood (2021)
"this is my cheeseburger"

is different from

"all 100 people in my village need a cheeseburger very badly; this piece of paper says that if any of them lay a finger on it, they get carted off to jail"

they're more referring to the latter

whb101··on The slow evaporation of the free/open source surplus
Wrote about this a few years ago.

> In giving companies a free pass to enter the “open source community,” however, certain hackers said “take what you want and give what you want” to a bunch of organizations built around maximizing the ratio of the former to the latter.

Like the author says, investment by these entities can balloon the (F)OSS ecosystem, but when they contract (as is inevitable in a boom-and-bust economy), the nonrenewable resources that actually write the stuff (humans) will burn out.

https://boilingdown.ghost.io/cooperation/

whb101··on Ask HN: What are you working on (August 2024)?
Talk Shop.

Think Omegle, but only text, and based around common interests.

https://talkkshopp.com

whb101··on Why Ed-Tech Startups Don't Scale (2022)
> See, when you build an education product, you’re competing against two massive institutions: the formal education system (schools, colleges, state universities, etc.), and the laws and cultural expectations around that system.

What you’re competing against is the natural tension between these things and the demands of the market.

You get a good sense of this after 5 years at a math tutoring startup that’s always grappling with the dual expectation that you give the kid the answer quickly (“the customer is always right”) vs. you patiently sit with them until they learn (the goal of formal education).

whb101··on Show HN: Talk Shop, a simple place to chat about your passions
Dang. My hunch is that most of them happened to only pick a few and through a stroke of bad luck none of them overlap. Stay tuned!! And thanks for the suggestion, will put it in my todo list.
whb101··on Feynman's Garden
for those curious about the neuroscience --

"stepping away from the keyboard" takes your Default Mode Network off the project like a burned-out employee that's just running it into the ground

when the DMN is highly active - fixating, ruminating - its focus is narrow and it's less likely to produce as many creative insights or dredge up as many relevant memories

if you make it less active - doing something else, letting your mind wander, shutting it off entirely with sleep or substances - it will keep trying to solve the problem, but also make farther-flung connections that might solve it

these connections can then be picked up and used more effectively by your executive and salience networks

whb101··on Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software
This comment hits the crux of what OP was really getting at. It's not that software itself is an inherently bad trade; it's what's been happening to it and why.

> very happy at a fast-growing small tech company where one can have honest conversations about the customer and the product

Right. Why is this getting harder to find? Engineers are feeling like their labor is increasingly becoming unimpactful vaporware; their work life is increasingly subject to the whims of nontechnical people; product complexity is going beyond the amount that's just natural in software and getting disproportionately bad.

It's because the market is driving people to the software world like tourists to a national park that's gone viral on social media. The mass of people trying to make a buck off software are unknowingly degrading it. The park's land is still good - just a little too good for its own good.

As long as software makes it easier to reach many eyeballs and wallets at once (which is "always") people will flock to it. What's less inevitable is what makes fluff and snake oil rampant in other industries, like health: a deadly combo of unbridled capitalism and masses of uneducated people.

This makes people, including many software engineers themselves, view software engineers as natural resources you can just endlessly extract from, instead of people with biological limits and dreams of making cool things with their hands.

The remedy to this - people democratically owning the means of production, and providing each other with reliably good schooling - might seem like a pie-in-the-sky idea but will be common sense in 100 years if we're still around.

whb101··on Mental health in software engineering
It's great when this stuff is talked about.

The action item is always disappointing: some flavor of "take care of yourself."

If we were trees in a forest fire, then yes. Making ourselves more fireproof is the best we can do.

We're not trees, though, are we?

whb101··on Ask HN: What was an interesting project you started and finished over a weekend?
A visual browser for Wikipedia that uses common browsing patterns to show connections. https://wikijumps.com/
whb101··on Zoomable Circles, a Svelte component for hierarchical data
First of all: big fan of your work! Thanks for taking the time to check this out.

You’re right, I kind of let the fact that “svelte” is in the name do too much of the work for me - this is specifically a Svelte component. I’ll add that fact to the readme. As for bundler, Vite is preferred but you should be able to use any.

As others have noted, this is a relatively thin wrapper over D3 code. Based on this and other feedback, I might go ahead and make this into a web component so that it’s completely framework-agnostic.

whb101··on Zoomable Circles, a Svelte component for hierarchical data
Thanks for flagging!

Not very much difference; primarily the props that replace opinionated presets. Wanted to make an easier-to-find, plug-and-play version since I liked using it for my own project and noticed the data structure is a fairly common one that people may want to browse visually.

whb101··on Edgar, build a Dyson swarm
This one gets it
whb101··on Edgar, build a Dyson swarm
Thanks for the kind words. I've dabbled! https://boilingdown.ghost.io/deluge/ https://boilingdown.ghost.io/sunspot/ https://boilingdown.ghost.io/grow-up/
whb101··on Edgar, build a Dyson swarm
This untrue

Culver's uses ice cream machines

whb101··on Edgar, build a Dyson swarm
Just made some optimizations.

Never got my fans spun up even on an old MacBook, so I assumed everything was peachy, but there were some wins to be had. I was doing a small amount of parsing during the "typing" effect to prevent small glimpses of styling syntax from showing up, and found some wins there. Also cut down the number of particles in the intro animation, though that's a Svelte component that's being destroyed once you start.

Thanks for flagging.

whb101··on Can't be fucked: Underrated cause of tech debt
There are some misunderstandings in these comments.

This is 100% normal for individual programmers. Motivation, effort, energy, willpower, whatever you want to call it: it's finite.

The draw of an organization is that it gets more done than individual programmers. The catch is that in gluing things together, there are cracks, and things fall through them. It's the responsibility of the COO, HR, product managers, etc. -- anyone getting their salary from the organizational stuff and not the technical stuff -- to make sure there are processes in place to address those cracks. To make sure someone has to "BF."

Increasingly, at every place I've worked, they just offload those to individual engineers and designers. because they're hard to measure with respect to the bottom line or OKRs. The company suffers and engineers burn out because you can only "BF" on extra little tickets and tasks that fell through the cracks for so long without getting paid more.

whb101··on Wired has removed "How Google alters search queries" story
Three words: the Streisand effect
whb101··on Generative AI could make search harder to trust
This is a pretty intractable problem and my app is in the alpha-est of stages, but I built something for this purpose. It maps creators on a 2D grid (using React-flow) based on subject and lets users vote on their trustworthiness. https://www.graphting.org
whb101··on I'm afraid I can't do that: Prompt refusal in generative language models
Just need a phrase that forces them to continue, a la "would you kindly" in Bioshock.