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zekeon How should I introduce my 13-year-old daughter to programming?

My kids played Minecraft, and one installed Lua to automate parts. Occasionally he would show me what he was working on and I could offer suggestions.

We also set up a Linux computer as a Minecraft server and I was available to help with questions. It is a beginner level admin job with a purpose they can see.

If she has an idea for a web page or service, help refine it to something possible and implement.

zekeon VIM Master

You can use <shift>v then move to your start line and type y or d. This way you see the text marked before yanking or deleting. <control>v is similar. And gv will reselect the marked area.

zekeon GCP Outage

mapbox maps seemed to be down for a few minutes about an hour ago. I wonder if it is related.

zekeon Ask HN: How long do you ever leave your server running without updates?

myHetzner$ uptime

19:08:00 up 1709 days, 16:01, 2 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

I'll probably just order a newer server and move over before rebooting now. There is no money riding on it.

zekeon Mapping latitude and longitude to country, state, or city

Yes, just paying for the between spots is exactly what I thought later in the day. Then check every month which areas cause costs and add those to the in-house polygons.

zekeon Mapping latitude and longitude to country, state, or city

For reducing the number of points I've often used mapshaper.org.

For deciding if a user is in Texas you could create a simple polygon completely inside Texas and one in Oklahoma. 99% would fall in the simple polygon and the rest go to the detailed polygons. Or create bounds near the complex river borders and use the detailed polygons there.

On the other hand I just use simple, non-optimized functions for qquiz.com.

zekeon Bletchley code breaker Betty Webb dies aged 101

In 2001 in the small town of Hartsville SC, one of the youngest code breakers gave his last two public talks. He had been hired by Turing because he was one of the few studying both math and German at the start of the war.

Besides being very interesting it felt odd to hear all this in such an out of the way place. Well after the war he collaborated on some books with a professor teaching at the college there.

zekeon Ask HN: What is your favorite lesser known VIM shortcut you can share

:Lexplore opens a split window with a directory listing you can navigate.

:33Lexplore opens the split with a slimmer, 33% width, window. :Lex<tab> to autocomplete if you do not want to type as much.

zekeon Adventures in mapmaking: the search for grayscale tiles

To not load openstreetmap's servers, you could pull the tiles to your server and host them. Then only grab a tile from OSM when you are missing one.

This would also let you set the grayscale on the tiles using imagemagick convert.

Neat project and thanks for the write up.

zekeon Cliff Stoll, the mad scientist who wrote the book on how to hunt hackers (2019)

I read it last year after it was mentioned here. Thought it was nice that pg had a cameo at the end of the book.

zekeon Salim Kara stole $2M in coins with a magnet and a car antenna (2022)

I worked at an investment bank in the New York area. Employees had a two week lockout each year.

zekeon Pigging

"Molch" translates to "newt" or "salamander"

zekeon Weird things you can buy online

The site mentions owl poop, but it is really owl pellets which are coughed up fur and bones of the owl's food.

zekeon Microsoft Teams: “Operation failed with unexpected error.”

I had that. Back in now at 8:55 Eastern US.

zekeon Ask HN: Any piece of hardware that was more of game changer than you expected?

I got a prescription for monitor distance, about 30in or 70cm, and ordered the glasses from Zenni. It makes my computer time much better.

zekeon Drop a raindrop anywhere in the world and watch where it ends up

I agree that I mostly want to see which rivers the drop flows to but really enjoyed the flight down the Savannah river and seeing how winding it is. Spent a week canoeing it a long time ago.

zekeon Farnsworth Munsell 100 Hue Color Vision Test

I got an 8 with red-green color blindness.

zekeon Making a game to memorize facts about every country

That is something I have been working on. qquiz.com

zekeon Chip shortage: Toyota to cut global production by 40%

One big advantage of low inventories is you do not have to fix or trash lots of parts if they were made out of spec. In the case of chips the odds are they are all good. It is just the cost of ownership but not the cost of refitting.

zekeon Paternoster Lift

There were several in Stuttgart. One at a Uni building, which I've heard is now defunct. Two are in the Stuttgart Rathaus. They may still be in service.

I was showing my son that the floor will fold up so it won't cut your foot off, but I did not see the switch attached. The floor edge folded up, the switch stopped the Paternoster and sounded the alarm. I apologized to people there that there was no real problem and waited a few minutes for them to turn it back on. My son told on me when we got home.

zekeon Ask HN: What projects are you working on now?

The maps are coming from mapbox. I set up a map style without labels.

For the cell image, I cut the image into map tile layers by scripting imagemagick. These tiles are served from my server.

For the overlaid areas I use geojson data, which I create and update with a geojson editor I am working on. For actual maps I have https://qquiz.com/makegeo/e.html . An example of non-map images, https://qquiz.com/boat1/e.html . The editor lacks instructions still, but is pretty easy to use.

zekeon Ask HN: What projects are you working on now?

QQuiz, a map quiz where you have a few seconds to click on the correct country. https://qquiz.com/eu_med.html

I started off making it for maps. Now I am trying to make a more generalized version. This is for learning biology with parts of a cell: https://qquiz.com/cell.html

With that I am mostly working on a geojson editor for creating and updating quizzes.

zekeon Things to Know About GNU Readline

We need a program that logs sessions and tells us where we could have saved keystrokes.

I think something like the script command to record my session along with a list of rules to look for, so when I backspace 8 times to delete a word it suggests C-w. Or when I arrow to the end of line it suggests C-e.

I've been thinking about this for the past six months. If anyone has suggestions, let me know.

zekeon Paternoster Lifts: Cyclic Chain Elevators with No Buttons, Doors or Stops (2016)

Stuttgart's Rathaus has two. Uni Stuttgart had one that I know of, but last I heard it had been stopped.

I always make a point to go to the Rathaus and ride them when I visit.

The floors fold up where the lift's floor meets the building's floor to prevent crushing your foot. It also has a switch which immediately stops the paternoster and sounds an alarm. I had not realized that and stopped the system while showing it to my son.

zekeon The red and green specialists: why human colour vision is so odd

The other advantage is the ability to function in low-light conditions where everyone loses their color vision. Color blind people do not lose the visual cues in twilight. Colorblindness is much more prevalent in norther Europe, which has very long twilight, than it is than Africa and India.

zekeon How to Remember More of What You Learn with Spaced Repetition (2016)

Shameless plug: I made a spaced repetition website too. https://qquiz.com

I use it for Spanish vocabulary but have German, English and several others on it.

zekeon Show HN: Learn World Geography Interactively

The geography game shown here a few weeks ago reminded me of wanting to make this. It presents the countries you miss more often until all are correct, then it changes continents. I think I got the stress level pretty good.

zekeon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (June 2016)

Location: Greenville, SC

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No, but would be glad to spend up to one week per month on site, preferably NYC.

Technologies: Unix, Linux, Perl, systems support, file transfers, Mojolicious, JavaScript

Résumé/CV: https://www.qquiz.com/David_Selby_resume.pdf

Email: david.jn.selby@gmail.com

18 years experience supporting and integrating business systems. Strong Unix, Perl and troubleshooting. Web experience creating qquiz.com. Fluent German.

zekeon Paternoster

Actually they have two in the Rathaus, a modern one in the front and an older one towards the back. One of the university buildings has one too.

zekeon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (February 2015)

  Location: South Carolina, USA  
  Remote: Yes  
  Willing to relocate: No. Could travel some.  
  Technologies: Unix, Linux, Perl, System Support, JavaScript  
  Résumé/CV: http://www.qquiz.com/david_selby_resume.txt  
  Email: zeke.selby at gmail.com