AlexMuir

Oh no! I come to procrastinate on HN and find my own site at #2. After many years, it's still not ready to share!! I've got so much more I want to do with it.

Even though I'm sure it looks abandoned, I have been working hard on getting back into this. The last couple of months I've been developing a 3D viewer for mechanical components that lets you disassemble/rebuild/step through processes. I wish I could share it but I'm not there yet. Babylon JS is amazing though.

EDIT:

I'll throw down some random notes because I've never really talked about this:

- I've learned a LOT over the three years since I made these videos - about cars, life, boats, love, fabrication, quaternions and myself.

- I made these videos in a backstreet garage in Budapest. A personal situation arose and I left Hungary and tried to get going again back in the UK.

- I built a new garage/studio in the UK and kitted it all out in preparation.

- Then lockdown struck and I had to get involved in a real-world business that I co-owned. The people who did my video production couldn't travel, and when they could, the UK had become so difficult that they had no desire to stay. So I had to find a new team which wasn't easy.

- I also had to rebuild my own life and that took a lot of time and effort. I didn't have the energy to go back into videos - it's something that I did at a certain time of my life, and I knew that I needed to be stronger to revisit it or I would risk my own happiness.

- I feel a combination of emotions - I am immensely proud of what we achieved with this, and I'm embarrassed by my failure to finish it. That said, I don't think I've ever been more excited by this project.

Edit 2: Go and watch Tim Hunkin's Secret Life of... series @ https://www.youtube.com/@timhunkin1 You'll be glad you did!

Went looking for an SSD earlier - the "SD-card in a box" scam is going great guns on there. Must be selling hundreds a week. Not just the ludicrous 10TB, but also 2TB.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/LuBanSir-External-Design-Portable-C...

Note the reviews refer to all different stuff - phone chargers, arm slings, extension cord organisers. What a total shitshow.

Friend of mine works for a huge global consumer brand. They decided to launch an online ordering platform for their trade customers, with the aim of eliminating a lot of call centres etc.

Developers were going to need paying more than even a 10-year served exec in the UK with 200 staff under them. They couldn’t run it within their existing organisation - the salary disparity would have been unpalatable. So they were advised to set up a subsidiary, rent a whole floor of Wework in London and run it out of there.

Burned through £20m in a year - a decent chunk on contractors from the sort of IT brand you know. Nothing shipped. Wrote it off after a year. Fired everyone and surrendered lease.

That was Wework’s target market - not freelancers or startups. Big companies with deep pockets who could have leased the whole building but never created the buzz. Work from home killed that market and it won’t return.

This seems very close to the motion of rapid skipping. Once one can skip without jumping like a kangaroo it becomes almost effortless but also gets a good sweat on.

I lived in Szeged for two years. Beautiful city and I have fond memories but it was a lonely existence there for me as an outsider - even speaking reasonable Hungarian after three years in Budapest. I do miss the Hungarian climate, the food and some of the people. If you go to Hungary, explore outside Budapest!

Took me right back one of many detentions I served at school, when Mr B Swales set us the challenge of finding a grammatically correct English sentence with five ands in a row.

The answer was as follows:

The landlord of the "Dog and Partridge" pub commissioned a signwriter to letter a new board outside. On looking at the work, the landlord declared that he liked the colour but would prefer more spacing between Dog and and, and and and Partridge.

Hi, interesting post. I don't think ageism is an issue - if you can get work done (and show it), you'll be hired. I'd suggest diving into a problem that interests you. I'm playing around with Companies House and Land Registry data at the moment. That's going to be an area you are well familiar with. Perhaps get in touch with some of the people working on OpenData stuff - Anna Powell-Smith might know someone who needs a data wrangler - https://twitter.com/darkgreener

I have a friend in a somewhat similar position - a highly educated, disbarred UK lawyer who did few years in prison. Drop me an email if you want me to put you in touch - me@alexmuir.com

Tim is so pleased with the reception these videos have had! He is exactly as knowledgeable and gentlemanly as he comes across. I’ve learned a lot from him!

If you get the chance to visit his arcades in London or Suffolk I highly recommend it. The combination of humour, physical activity and engineering is wonderful.

SEEKING FREELANCER: Manchester, UK | Remote

I am looking for someone to write me an open-source, block-based WYSIWYG editor based on React components which outputs JSX. Think Colonel Kurtz, Sir Trevor JS etc, Editor JS doesn't support nesting.

Ideally the editor will be a React app. Output will be:

  <Text>
    <p>This is text, with 
      <Highlight color="red">inline components</Highlight>.
    </p>
  </Text>
  <Aside>
    <Text><p>Nesting is possible.</p></Text>
    <Image id="12" layout="right" />
  </Aside>

You get the idea. All editors represent this structure in some weird hybrid of JSON and HTML at the moment.

For editing, Custom elements are simple React Components that provide the UI.

For output, the content is just parsed as XML and rendered. I can provide a more detailed spec.

I've reviewed the majority of WYSYWYG editors out there and made starts on coding this but I just don't have the JS chops to pull it off.

alex@howacarworks.com

Good summary.

One of the issues I find with Rails is that the 'old-way' of views, partials and a sprinkling of React is INSANELY productive. I've been trying hard to justify getting into Stimulus properly.

DHH is on a four-month sabbatical at the moment and my hope is that he's working on open-sourcing the framework behind hey.com, which Basecamp are calling 'new magic'[0]

There's something coming around object-oriented view components and client-size JS. I'm just not quite sure the perfect recipe has been found yet.

https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1275901955995385856?lang=en

I run a company that collects and delivers used furniture for charities in the UK (https://boxmove.com)

It’s a social enterprise in the sense that we save charities a fortune on the way they currently operate, and we employ our staff on better salaries than they receive working in-house. The flip side is we expect a decent day’s work from our teams. We are profitable, sustainable and no reliant on grants, funding, or anything else. That’s good for everybody.

Those that join us from charities typically did 6-8 jobs a day. Our teams average 20. There is so much bullshit and incompetence in the charity sector that I would love to call out, but sadly that would damage our business. It is a frustrating sector to operate in - not least because we compete against ‘serial social entrepreneurs’ who receive a grant, take a nice salary for two years nibbling away at our client base, then shut down and move onto the next self-enriching project.

Not really sure why I answered this question but there you go!

If anyone wants to write detailed, high-quality articles about automotive engineering on a similar basis, drop me an email. Explaining concepts from the basic to the advanced in an easy-to-understand way.

alex@howacarworks.com

We’re talking about the tech stack here. It’s already a success because there’s a working product. No-one is arguing that the use of this stack guarantees business longevity.

If I recall the terms specifically prohibit different pricing. (You deserved a reply not a downvote!)

Peter parfitt is good too.

Great to see Articles of Interest here! As someone with minimal interest in fashion, I binged the whole thing while slabbing a garden. Fascinating!

Also... Over The Road. Another great podcast.

This is awesome. I ignored all the questions. Just make it a clean chatroulette to have a coffee with random developers. Secure it with a programming question.

> I think the bigger question is, let's say it did arrive much earlier that we think, does that mean the virus grows at a much smaller rate than current models?

This absolutely makes sense to me and would explain a lot of weirdness in the statistics. Less infectious, with a longer incubation period and circulating among the population for longer.

Your answer is coherent and rational and doesn’t deserve to be downvoted. I also agree with you. This situation is taking weeks from absolutely everybody’s lives.

I wish I could put my finger on it, but there is a huge disconnect between economic reality and the current financial situation across most of the world. It seems to me, perhaps simplistically, that every central bank is simply issuing money to generate growth and this can't be sustainable. Our biggest industry would appear to be buying, renting and selling assets to each other.

My apartment overlooks a city of 1 million people in the UK - I estimate generously that 50,000 of them are economically productive in the sense of producing something of value that can be 'exported' from this city. The other 950,000 must live off that value - it doesn't make sense. All factories are flattened to make way for apartments. Any industrial development is of distribution centres for breaking down pallets of imported tat.

I don't know what this will lead to - perhaps it's the collapse of the Euro, the rise of some stable currency that isn't playing this game, or an opportunity for a new currency (crypto or something that we don't have yet).

Just as the LIBOR scandal revealed that commercial banks were just making up numbers, so I believe that central banks are doing the same with each other and trust will need to be removed from the system.

This is absolutely true. Popular European opinion is that the UK is insane to leave the EU. But a huge part of the EU is just swimming in bullshit. I knew many middle class Hungarians whose family friends scored them a nice EU grant to start some sort of business. Obviously 99% of those businesses went nowhere. Rinse and repeat. The irony is that is actually deters real investment because why risk €100k of your own money when the business next door will rip-off your idea with €200k of free EU money.

And that’s not to count the absolutely incredible mid and high level corruption that this article discusses.

Source: lived in Hungary for 5 years

The entirety of human history is one of conflict. Do you believe this is now at an end? Do you believe there are any prospective military threats to the US in the next 30 years? And if so, from where?

If I remember right, they recommend using a sub domain and being an Mx.

On iOS. Signup Email input should be of type email. Password length feedback should be inline - not after typing pw twice and submitting.

Gave up at the ‘place two bots’ stage. Couldn’t work out how to place a bot. Love the idea. Needs UX love!

You’ve written the same comment twice. Can you give an example of Iran’s violent lashing out?

This is going to be an absolutely massive business. I wouldn’t be surprised if in five years it’s bigger than payment processing.

I'm often searching information on auto parts and Google's results are quite literally 100% webspam. Here's an example - The entire first page is the same provider squatting domains:

https://www.google.com/search?q=scrambler+50cc+parts+format%...

Wiring diagrams in Google images - literally every result is webspam in the same format split across squatted domains.

https://www.google.com/search?q=mazda+miata+wiring+diagram+s...

These aren't even particularly niche searches, nor is it hard to detect that all these sites are the same.

I think you’ve been downvoted here because there isn’t really a clear point to your comment. Perfectly written but having read I don’t know what you are actually saying.

To save anyone else this pointless click: that video is total nonsense and the ramblings of a moon landing conspiracy theoryist.

Exact same situation here.