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zkirill

746 karma · joined February 12, 2010

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zkirill··on Music for Programming
I always thought that Solar Fields was the name of the soundtrack! Looking forward to checking out more of their stuff.

I would also recommend works by 0edit (Ed Harrison) who did the NeoTokyo soundtrack. Listen to the FLAC version for the full experience. [1]

I like to balance electronic with instrumental. Journey OST works really well.

You may also like The Silk Road Ensemble & Yo-Yo Ma. [2]

And, of course, Miles Davis.

[1] https://www.0edit.com/

[2] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=29dfRYifyOU

zkirill··on Ask HN: What are the best alternatives to GitHub?
What’s wrong with self-hosted GitLab? I haven’t heard of any controversy except for them reaffirming their commitment to Ruby.
zkirill··on Airline cancellations are spiking as July Fourth looms
> As the shortage intensifies, some industry analysts have proposed easing the requirements for pilot certification — including the rule requiring 1,500 hours of flight time before piloting a commercial aircraft.

Commercial pilots were very overworked even before the pandemic. What could possibly go wrong?

The list of airlines one deems safe enough to fly is going to shrink even more.

zkirill··on Ask HN: What do you use to build auth?
I sleep better at night thanks to Spring Security and KISS. [1]

Reading the docs from top to bottom, and diving into the source code makes me believe that "you should never roll your own auth" should be an addendum to "you should never roll your own crypto". The number of edge cases and gotchas is simply mind-boggling. It's not about being a good enough programmer to cover yourself, but about years of collective experience dealing with all sorts of exploits and browser shenanigans.

[1] https://docs.spring.io/spring-security/reference/servlet/aut...

zkirill··on Terminated
Is NGINX-RTMP [1] the easiest to setup alternative to YouTube? Does anyone have any experience with it? I'm not sure if you need the paid NGINX Plus [2] to deliver a decent user experience on all devices.

[1] https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-...

[2] https://www.nginx.com/products/nginx/streaming-media/

zkirill··on Request HN: Build me an app to show where the air I'm breathing came from
Sure, but you didn't say how much you would pay for this app, and how would you market it beyond just yourself.

We have a project going that's doing something similar but with food. You'd think that if someone were interested in where their air comes from, they would be even more interested in where the things they choose to put inside their body come from. However, we're finding that the market is either underdeveloped (low awareness) or very small (wealthy people who can eat anything they want). I'd be curious to hear your perspective.

zkirill··on Ask HN: What are some mentally healthy apps to have?
iPad: Alo Moves, Books, The Economist, Notes

Apple Watch: Fitness

A few years ago I made it my personal goal to pick up my phone only when absolutely necessary and that has done wonders for my mental health. For photos, I have a Canon G7 X and appreciate that it only has one job and it does it very well.

zkirill··on Ask HN: How to maintain a killer product documentation page
We generate a static website using Hugo and a documentation theme. [1] Non-technical members of our team can use Markdown easily and publish changes on their own schedule thanks to a very simple but sturdy CI/CD setup (GitHub Actions and NGINX).

Stripe's documentation is way over-engineered and wasteful IMO, and probably requires a massive team to maintain.

[1] https://github.com/alex-shpak/hugo-book

zkirill··on Panic in Startupland
> Good business will have the time of their life. Fast-growing, profitable startups will have the opportunity to buy out struggling competitors, invest in an environment where CAC will decrease, and hire people with fair compensation packages.

What will qualify as "fast-growing" in this climate?

zkirill··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On?
A search engine that queries all nutrition databases simultaneously. Many countries publish their own databases in incompatible formats. Why work on it? Our customers want to search and reference this data, and our current solution needs an upgrade (SQLite). Why is it cool? Tricky problem to solve because of different language nuances, spelling mistakes, sample errors. And nobody (AFAIK) has ever done this before.
zkirill··on Ask HN: Who Wants to Be Fired? (June 2022)
Sounds like humans trying to shift the blame to data (which cannot be fired). You have my sympathies.
zkirill··on Ask HN: Who Wants to Be Fired? (June 2022)
I am a technical co-founder and I can't wait to fire and replace myself with someone who is better than me so that I can go and do [another thing over there that's on fire].
zkirill··on Ask HN: What is your favourite allrounder language in 2021?
Kotlin as a gateway drug to Java. Once you're in the Java ecosystem it's hard to go back because you realize that 99.99% of problems have already been solved and you have no excuse not to focus on your business.
zkirill··on Ask HN: Recommend employers with positive social impact
I feel like Quartzy doesn't get nearly enough recognition for the amazing work that they do.
zkirill··on Ask HN: Recommend employers with positive social impact
The Economist recently reported on "The coming food catastrophe". The subheading read "War is tipping a fragile world towards mass hunger. Fixing that is everyone’s business".

Our product is used in commercial and industrial food kitchens to make them run more efficiently. We help everyone from mom-and-pop shops to factories. Our customers use our apps to calculate production costs, reduce waste, calculate nutrition, find suppliers, and order ingredients. The last few months have been particularly busy for us because of inflation and rising food prices. We hope to help as many food SMB's make it through the recession.

Our plan is to be in every business kitchen in the world so our core features are available for free and the subscription price is affordable to all. I18n is one of our biggest considerations because our users are all over the world and majority speaks languages other than English.

We bootstrapped ourselves to 100,000+ kitchens so our customers aren't worried about us folding because we can't raise the next round of funding.

Link in bio.

zkirill··on Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B
We are a tiny bootstrapped startup. Spring is critical for us and we rely on RabbitMQ. This news is concerning to say the least.
zkirill··on Ask HN: Is any company still hiring entry level engineers?
I have a few tangential questions. What sort of salary are they expecting? Secondly, how long do they plan to stay at the company that invests in training them once recruiters start sending them better offers?

A company can be good at: training employees, paying reasonable salaries, retaining employees. Pick two if you don’t have the funds to play in the “hot job market” (which, I assume, is the situation that the majority of tech companies around the world are in at this moment). And there’s your answer.

zkirill··on The balance has shifted away from SPAs
You invented a problem. SPA team and Spring team have separate responsibilities. Our customers don’t care how it looks beyond ergonomics and functionality. It took us a long time to shift away from “SPA all the things” mentality.
zkirill··on The balance has shifted away from SPAs
Maybe, shoot me an email if you want to chat about it kirill at getfillet.com
zkirill··on The balance has shifted away from SPAs
Our web product went from AngularJS to React to Angular to Angular + Spring. The addition of Spring helped us introduce a useful constraint: if you can build it as an old-school page with Spring, don't put it into the SPA. Angular is reserved for deep core business logic and UI which would be impractical to build anywhere else. One of the biggest benefits is reducing our Angular project complexity, making it easier to keep current with Angular updates. I am happy to hear that SPAs are no longer sexy because this sounds like the landscape has matured. For example, Angular started doing LTS releases.
zkirill··on Ask HN: Are Chatbots Dead?
Primarily non-tech people talk to it. It’s a bridge between our engineering team and everyone else. You can message it asking to look up some data or perform an action. Basically, things that everyone would have to wait for an engineer to do. It also sends us notifications and reports about topics that different teams are interested in. It’s been referred to as another team member who is super smart and its avatar is a cat.
zkirill··on Ask HN: Are Chatbots Dead?
Our internal chatbot is beloved by the whole company and has made a noticeable difference in team productivity. We are constantly looking for ways to make her smarter.
zkirill··on Decoupling as a moral decision
I got the Levesque question wrong. :(
zkirill··on Ask HN: How do I choose a programming language?
Don’t be quick to dismiss “dead” or esoteric languages. They usually come with frameworks that solved virtually every problem imaginable over the years. Building a thing may involve programming but any veteran programmer would tell you that if they could solve a problem without writing a single line of code, they would gladly do so. However, if your goal was to find a programming language to fall in love with then my answer wouldn’t apply and I would suggest that you try all of them!
zkirill··on I think I know why you can't hire engineers right now
SpaceX for cosmonauts.
zkirill··on I think I know why you can't hire engineers right now
Is there a linear slope between awesomeness of work and salary?

In that case, wouldn’t it theoretically be possible to convince an engineer to work for free given enough awesomeness? Or, conversely, convince them to work on something profoundly uninspiring given infinite salary?

zkirill··on Ask HN: How to incentivize customers to complete training sessions?
Would you have behaved differently if the dollar amount was lower? Or if the coupon was a % discount applied evenly to all products?
zkirill··on Ask HN: How to incentivize customers to complete training sessions?
Yes, consistently.

I know it will be used but want to ensure max ROI before we sink resources into building and maintaining it.

zkirill··on Ask HN: How to incentivize customers to complete training sessions?
I meant literal money as a mental exercise. In my mind, if you literally couldn’t pay your customer to complete your training program, then you have bigger problems.

Badges of honour is a good point, especially if there is a community portal.

zkirill··on Toshiba T1100 – the laptop that was named a milestone of electronic engineering
I thought that nothing could made me feel more nostalgic than seeing Norton Commander but then I saw Battle Chess.

Earlier today I was reading about the history of ThinkPad and found this gem on Wikipedia:

"ThinkPads have a distinct black, boxy design language, inspired by a Japanese bento lunchbox, which originated in 1990 and is still used in some models."[1]

I miss those days.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinkPad

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