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barrystaeson Ask HN: Why does this image look 3D?

I dont think the blue wavelength is it, but a cool fact: humans can only see blue in true focus when under water! This is why you dont want blue text for signage. Backgrounds on traffic signs are ok if the text on it has high contrast and its a reflective material.

Refraction for blue from lens to air is not aligned like red and green are.

barrystaeson What were interviews for programming positions like in the 70s and 80s?

I guess in that time it was not a position, and secretaries where expected to do the “compute” jobs. So mostly ladies learned programming, on the side as it where. They learned it on the job.

Programmer was not a career/job yet. There where no schools or papers yet.

So an interview would be about secretary tasks like calculus and bookkeeping, perhaps ask if you know how to type already. (Big deal back then) Source: my mom.

barrystaeson Unity Game: Farmers stealing tanks

Cant play on phone because of lack of input keys. Image and sound seems great.

Is there a youtube video to enjoy?

barrystaeson Nearly a third of TV ads play to empty rooms

Shit, they found out?

barrystaeson Ask HN: Is mental illness an ad-targeting category?

Since using adblockers i see less ads, nearly none. And on unprotected devices and networks i see strange ads, unsurprisingly. I can tell you all are shockingly irrelevant and repulsive like the examples OP gives.

So full circle: if you avoid them you get less but also worse ads.

barrystaeson Poll HN: What operating system do you primarily develop on?

The OS you primarily develop on. Where does your IDE and devex tooling run.

barrystaeson Poll HN: What operating system do you primarily develop on?

Whatever the tooling works best on. So Ubuntu for me, mostly as specialised/dispensable VMs.

barrystaeson Why modern cars feel so lifeless to drive

Try a Mazda. Hands down goes for the driver experience. Dont expect a quick bouncing sportscar, expect a car that lets you sense the road and enjoy driving. Can be quick tho.

barrystaeson Badger leads archaeologists to hoard of Roman coins in Spain

Now think the same of the badger. They dismantled the home he built. Just perspective.

barrystaeson Ask HN: Good open source alternatives to Google Analytics?

> Google may sometimes disable AdWords campaigns on sites that use Matomo.

I first used Matomo to monitor users webapp experience, it was amazingly simple to set up, good privacy protection/anonymisation, and perfect for insights on workflow patterns.

barrystaeson How to make quitting your addiction easier

There is only 3 ways that i can think of. Either forget/lose the routine without thought, or observe/choose to quit, or being deprived by others.

Only the realisation and choice is definitive. Thats the quit. There is no try. I decided to quit once.

If your quit failed, you just didnt fully realise yet.

barrystaeson Ask HN: Best alternatives to Google Analytics in 2021?

I used a self hosted Matomo (free and open source) for websites and apps, and it was simpler and (because of that) more flexible than Google Analytics.

Less UI clutter is nice also for colleagues.

barrystaeson Show HN: Firefox addon that hides news articles about Covid-19

So you are saying, it would be possible to block news on the latest trump thing that happened?

Its great to have a laugh but it gets old fast.

Would never block Covid-19 myself, but then again i think the media in the Netherlands are quite informative and value quality content above quantity.

barrystaeson Ask HN: Non-cloud voice recognition for home use?

Could Home Assistant use such commands by running a docker?

Also the video demo is rather impressive, in how accurate (and predictable) it recognises.

barrystaeson Show HN: ESQLate – Build minimum viable admin panels with just SQL

I think this is the long way around to simply making a DB procedure? Those have parameters, can easily be run by external tools like phpMyAdmin or an IDE, and if the database constraints are sane will help avoid invalid input.

barrystaeson Ask HN: Can we create a new internet where search engines are irrelevant?

I turn to search engines mostly when entering a new knowledge domain! E.g. learn about a specific product. Sometimes when im just lazy.

For routine stuff i tend to have established resource starting points, like documentation, official/community sites, blogs/news feeds, and yes: link directories (like awesome lists).

barrystaeson A Debugger for Bash in Six Lines of Bash

A "hot breakpoint" seems like a nice moniker for this functionality. Because it feels like hot-dev workflow combined with classic breakpoints.

barrystaeson Zdog – Pseudo-3D JavaScript engine for Canvas and SVG

When the objects are tightly coupled, it makes sense to keep this logic internal.

This way its short and self documenting, easyer to improve without breaking existing stuff, and likely has some implicit stability and performance gains because developers can make less mistakes.

barrystaeson Translatotron: An End-to-End Speech-to-Speech Translation Model

Not just you, same problem here. (Firefox on Windows)

Workaround: If you look at the WAV file the player loads (right click > Inspect Element), that URL is playable in a new tab/browser window.

barrystaeson Awesome Pascal – A curated list of Delphi, FreePascal, and Pascal shiny things

The libraries with source like other languages also do today, but also that the language is verbose like Visual Basic did.

barrystaeson Proteins central to the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease act as prions – study

> Y'all

Instant throwback to 1997's Redneck Rampage game about US hillbillys..

barrystaeson Ask HN: Personal photo library recommendations? Open source, browser-based

I like this architecture and wil spin up a Photonix docker on my Unraid server in a few weeks or so. I wonder why you used graphql for the api?

barrystaeson Its butterfly keyboard design has failed, but Apple has yet to admit its mistake

> When my iPhone rings, it pauses video playing on my Apple TV until I ignore the call. To send a link from my iPad to a friend on WhatsApp, I can copy the link on my iPad and paste it into WhatsApp on my iPhone - automatically.

I get what you appreciate, but its not for everyone. I like my tools smart but still 100% predictive by me. Like one device erasing the clipboard of another device.

barrystaeson New year, same old plans

Back when i learned about Lighttable years ago i found the instant preview and live editing of running code very cool!

I just realized thats basically what we already do today: i use WebStorm and my webapp hot-reloads any code i type. If i wanted i could even rewind the app state. And when i enable JS debug in IDE its like inception and matrix-view combined, but surprisingly userfriendly still.

To easily try this with just about any IDE check out https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app

barrystaeson YOLO: Real-Time Object Detection

https://pjreddie.com/media/files/papers/YOLOv3.pdf

Sounds to good to be true. Also reads like that. :) A gem from this paper:

But maybe a better question is: “What are we going todo with these detectors now that we have them?” A lot ofthe people doing this research are at Google and Facebook.I guess at least we know the technology is in good handsand definitely won’t be used to harvest your personal infor-mation and sell it to.... wait, you’re saying that’s exactlywhat it will be used for?? Oh.Well the other people heavily funding vision research arethe military and they’ve never done anything horrible likekilling lots of people with new technology oh wait..... 1

1 The author is funded by the Office of Naval Research and Google.

barrystaeson Storing UTC is not a silver bullet

Your examples indeed show common problems with several approaches when place is coupled to a time and then proceed to ignore the place (of meeting or user) when converting times.

I should add that where we store UTC that concerns a place, we also know/store that place in lat,long (or anything that resolves to this) and use that to show it in any timezone, to any user in any timezone, ..even in any era (yes places can change timezone).

barrystaeson Storing UTC is not a silver bullet

PSA: this article is confusing UTC with GMT.

barrystaeson Storing UTC is not a silver bullet

Dont confuse UTC with GMT.

Store absolutely everything in UTC, do all calculations on UTC, and show in whatever timeunit the user wants. The one edge-case where user inputs a local time thats is not unique (repeated hour due to daylight savings time) can easily be solved consistently, and often is not even a problem at all.

barrystaeson Rebuilding My Personal Infrastructure With Alpine Linux and Docker

I wondered if this is what Unraid already does: yes its mentioned at https://wiki.unraid.net/UnRAID_6/Overview#Containers

> The cornerstone of Docker is in its ability to use Linux control groups, namespace isolation, and images to create isolated execution environments in the form of Docker containers.

If you want to run dockers at home, i suggest you give it a try. All you need is an old computer and a USB (it runs in RAM). Unraid basically is Linux with a (happy little) webinterface for NAS shares + apps.