Hacker News Reader

willemlabuon I don't need your query language

Why the divorce? DataGrip has been the best database-gui that I've ever used.

willemlabuon Sam Zeloof and Jim Keller start a new semiconductor fab

Asking for a friend: is there anything similar to this in the UK?

willemlabuon Clicking Bad

The recent Universal Paperclips submission reminded me of this excellent game.

willemlabuon Universal Paperclips

This reminds me of another excellent time sink game: http://clickingbad.nullism.com/

willemlabuon First Light (Oxford University spinout) achieves nuclear fusion

Here is a video I found that explains the concept in a visual way that finally made sense to me after reading the release.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JN7lyxC11n0

willemlabuon Ask HN: Is Reddit working for you? (or is it down)

There's an active incident:

    We're experiencing an elevated level of API errors and are currently looking into the issue.
    Jun 24, 2021 - 14:04 PDT

https://www.redditstatus.com/incidents/3710db57k6n8

willemlabuon If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel (2014)

Yeah, wow! 27 submissions altogether. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=joshworth.com%2Fdev%2Fpixelspa...

willemlabuon Reddit.com Service Unavailable

I think this is a problem with fastly.com

edit: Their status page now shows degraded performance: https://status.fastly.com

willemlabuon Robot Sticks to Ceilings by Vibrating a Flexible Disc

Thank you for this link. That was incredibly interesting. I won't spoil the twist at the end, suffice to say that I now am hoping for something like that in a scifi movie.

willemlabuon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2021)

NoblePro | Senior mobile developer | Full-time | Remote, UK | https://www.noble-pro.com

I'm the CTO at NoblePro. We're building a tech team, and looking for folks who want to help us hack on treadmills, bluetooth, and the software that connects it all.

This stack is probably not something that most people have given much thought, but fitness-tech has exploded, and we're doing some super interesting things.

NoblePro has been around for 3 years, we're self funded, and profitable. With this round of hiring, we're hoping to build the tech team to launch our apps and platform globally over the next 2 years.

If that sounds interesting, I'd really like to chat to you about it.

Please visit: https://apply.workable.com/noblepro-ltd/j/1F7B8897B9/ or get in touch with me directly: willem at [domain]

willemlabuon Ben Barbersmith: Cryptocurrency is bad. For the planet, for consumers

And to the post on HN about the article yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26943408

willemlabuon Next.js 10.2

I feel like the biggest piece of this announcement was buried at the bottom of the article:

> We're excited to announce Tobias Koppers, the author of webpack, has joined the Next.js team at Vercel.

willemlabuon Ask HN: What novel tools are you using to write web sites/apps?

https://expo.io does things in a similar vein.

willemlabuon Input: Customisable Fonts for Code

Came here to say this. JetBrains Mono is my favourite code-font. The ligatures are excellent too.

willemlabuon Font loading on the web

Just a note that the solution proposed here will not work with JavaScript disabled.

willemlabuon The Focus to Say No (2011)

What this entire thought is missing is that you need to have a idea you're saying yes to.

This is about prioritisation more than it's about focus.

willemlabuon A history of amulets in ten objects (2019)

TIL: o'clock means "of the clock".

willemlabuon Personium – personal data store server

Frankly, I wouldn't collate any of my data on this service.

willemlabuon Personium – personal data store server

I'm not advocating for anything specific here. :) And frankly, I take your point and actually agree wholeheartedly. The status quo of data mining and tracking is terrible, and leads to exactly what you're talking about: people changing their behaviour (not just online) because they feel like they're being watched[1].

I realise I'm not providing a solution. I wouldn't even feel confident at pointing a general direction. I'm merely pointing out that I don't believe the right way to solve this problem of personal data aggregation is consolidating all this personal meta-data into a single spot.

[1] https://www.socialcooling.com/

willemlabuon Personium – personal data store server

You make a good point. PDS solutions aim to get rid of "big data", and centralised data lakes that can be queried. It's not inherently a bad idea, but:

> a nicely structured datadump is not particularly valuable if it's just one person

This very much depends on the person.

willemlabuon Personium – personal data store server

Of course. :) I don't mean to patronise, and I hope you're not trolling, but I feel like you're missing the point a little. Using a "cloud" to store potentially sensitive documents or information is not comparable to collating your digital movements, usage history, habits, purchase information, etc.

It's not just about controlling the information, it's about collection in the first place. I want to store photos, and I need to store documents that are sensitive in a place that I can access them easily, and securely. These things are important to me. To me – individually – because they relate to me.

Collecting information about my online activity is not important to me. It is, however, important to advertisers, data brokers, and other players on some arbitrary scale of nefariousness.

willemlabuon Personium – personal data store server

I understand this, and there's an argument to be made about ethics here.. but, these companies do have a non-trivial amount of work to do to collate the data into profiles. There are also ways of making the attribution of this data to an individual more difficult for these companies.

willemlabuon Personium – personal data store server

This goes against my internal logic about personal privacy. The solution to online privacy and data mining is not collecting it all in a central repository, it is not collecting it at all.

Further, and I realise this will come off as alarmist, but, what then if the software suffers a 0-day? All that data will then be nicely aggregated for a bad actor. Somehow, knowing that there is perhaps a non trivial amount of work to be done to collect data and compile a profile from many different sources feels safer than putting it all in one place.

willemlabuon Game Design Perspective: Stardew Valley (2020)

Adding an 'f' in front of the word 'mining', just to make all the words in the list alliterate. :) It's pretty funny to me, and shows the author is just ever so slightly making fun of the compulsiveness and repetitiveness in the game.

willemlabuon Game Design Perspective: Stardew Valley (2020)

> farming, fishing, foraging, fighting, and _fmining_

This little easter egg really got me. Well done.

I've never played, but having seen some of the community interaction [1] that goes on with the developer (@ConcernedApe)[2], it occupies a strange little heartwarming place in my head.

[1] https://twitter.com/ConcernedApe/status/1341187588082683905 [2] https://twitter.com/ConcernedApe

willemlabuon WhatsApp delays privacy changes amid a backlash and user exodus

This feels like a scramble to recoup some lost trust, and I imagine that they're hoping the media storm passes and the exodus stops. I really just hope Signal can get up and running again soon.

willemlabuon Ask HN: About Financial Inequity

So, gambling?

willemlabuon The Death of the Newsfeed (2018)

Previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16741237

willemlabuon A Pretty Good Mathematical Model of Perfectionism

The ~ made me smile.

willemlabuon BBC Online Moves to AWS, Serverless

From the article:

> About 2,000 lambdas run every second to create the BBC website; a number that we expect to grow.