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deadghost

343 karma · joined September 9, 2013

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deadghost··on Modern CSS Code Snippets: Stop writing CSS like it's 2015
So where are we at with utility libs (tailwind/tachyon) vs inline css in js vs preprocessors (sass/scss) vs vanilla modern css?
deadghost··on Google Cloud Run cost me $4,676 in 6 weeks with zero traff
As a solo dev, I use $5 VPS on OVH or Hetzner for peace of mind. I remember trying out GCP for some simple html or django thing a decade ago and it cost me $30/mo or something and I said nah. I've also seen an ex-coworker rack up $50k with no recourse. I've already read enough horror stories like this.

Also don't outsource your thinking to LLMs, it's a useful tool, but once you do, it's brainrot for programmers.

deadghost··on Many hard LeetCode problems are easy constraint problems
>how fast they can run 100m after practice, while the real job is a slow arduous never ending jog with multiple detours and stops along the way

I've always explained it as demonstrating your ping pong skills to get on the basketball team.

deadghost··on The big Intel investment comes from already awarded grants
In a way, the government already has a 10-40% stake in everything through taxation.
deadghost··on The case for having roommates even when you can afford to live alone
I generally like having roommates, but when they're bad, they're BAD. I've also never done the communal cooking thing. Either they don't cook, are bad at cooking, or have dubious food hygiene. I haven't met any potential partners through them either. I might take a walk or swim with them but I sure as hell didn't get OP's experience.
deadghost··on Living with Nausea: My Story in Six Charts
tl;dr: I felt like death for 2 years probably because of long covid POTS. Feeling somewhat ok now.

I had ridiculous nausea and other weird body issues appear out of the blue around 2022. While I never puked, I got nauseated from even brushing my teeth. I'd have to pause a few times to complete brushing. I suddenly got heartburn, I could only hobble around like an old man. I couldn't tolerate a single car ride, even just getting into a car was too much. After a year, I could at least get in a car and my limbs would all go numb. I could only eat small amounts. Zero tolerance for caffeine. Chocolate sprung up heart burn. Tested for H Pylori, negative.

It was over two years before I could take car rides without absolutely dying. While much better now, I still get abnormally car sick, bouts of relatively mild nausea, and haven't managed a significant meal outside of home.

While I suspect time is the largest factor, I did take a cocktail of supplements. Ginger rooibos tea with every meal, collagen, l-glutamine, creatine, unflavored whey isolate protein, and psyllium husk. Before bed I'd take 3+ mg melatonin, famotidine, ginger pill, artichoke extract pill.

I suspect I had/have long covid induced POTS or similar dyautonomia. Apparently it's quite common: https://archive.is/20240503031045/https://www.washingtonpost.... In any case, I've been recovering and seem to still be recovering.

deadghost··on Almost half of Dell's full-time US workforce has rejected the company's RTO push
I have a friend in his 40s and I asked him about his opinion on WFH. He doesn't like it. He prefers to go to an office and be around people. He also doesn't have much in the way of interests or hobbies. I suspect a lot of RTO decision makers fit a similar profile.
deadghost··on Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now
I don't know much about Greece and don't follow Greece at all. Every time I hear something about Greece, it sounds like a hot mess.
deadghost··on Graza Olive Oil co-founder Andrew Benin built the business
I was going to say it's expensive, but it's actually not outrageously more expensive than the current going rate for olive oil. It's $11/liter at Costco. Their refill can comes out to be around $20/liter. It's supposed to be a premium product so it's not out of my expectations.

Olive oil in general is just much more expensive after the recent droughts. I vaguely remember 6 liters of olive oil coming out to around $30 at Costco pre-drought, so prices have roughly doubled. But hey, I see nearly 2000 reviews on their Sizzle Oil, so I guess they must offer a good enough product for people to stomach the 2x drought price on top of the 2x premium product price.

deadghost··on I got tired of hearing that YC fired Sam, so here's what actually happened
>The number one thing not to do is other things.

https://www.paulgraham.com/die.html

deadghost··on UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time (2019)
Reddit comes to mind. Who knows how much money they spent on their redesign with users hating it and actively choosing to use their old site design YEARS after they rolled out their new design.

I also run a site and when I ask people what I should improve next, nearly no one says design, even when the design is clearly not very good.

An example of a site that never changes is Craigslist. I can't even recall the last time it looked different. It's probably overdue for a redesign even.

deadghost··on Clojure's machine learning ecosystem
I've been using clojure as my main language for a decade. Few things can stay hyped that long.

My last few jobs were in clojure so jobs do exist, moreso than in Common Lisp and Haskell at least (probably). There aren't very many companies that use it relative to the programming world at large, so I'd say you're right on that front.

I'm happy using it and will continue using it. Sometimes I encounter interesting ideas and libraries that I end up using.

At the end of the day, it's a programming language. You can write interesting things on uninteresting or even subjectively awful languages and boring things on interesting languages.

Here's something I've been working on for the last two weeks: https://keyboards.justbuythisthing.com/. If I didn't tell you I wrote it in clojure, no one would know. It could very well be PHP.

deadghost··on New York medical school eliminates tuition after $1B gift
I've currently reading Warren Buffett's biography, The Snowball by Alice Shroeder and "Sandy" Gottesman frequently appears. When I saw 2, I thought that sounds awfully like someone I read about in Buffett's Graham group. After 3, it was definitely someone in the Graham group I've read about.

The Graham gatherings that included Buffett and Gottesman had fine gentlemen, at least one of which has championed a similar cause in the past, whether that was Gottesman or another one of his peers, my memory fails me. While it's sad to see someone I am still reading about pass away, it's heartening to know that he ended on a high note and that he continues to leave a positive impact from beyond the grave.

deadghost··on How to copy a file between devices? (2022)
I setup Samba share on my LAN. It works well enough for my purposes. It's not super smooth as not every app let's me open a file directly from the network and I need to make a copy first.
deadghost··on 83% of Warren Buffett's $365B Portfolio Is Invested in Just 7 Stocks
The really good investors are dumping their time into reading books and annual reports. I haven't found high quality investing discussion on the internet _anywhere_ yet. The closest is valueinvestorsclub but before anyone gets the bright idea to blindly buy what's there, there are _a lot_ of misses posted.
deadghost··on 83% of Warren Buffett's $365B Portfolio Is Invested in Just 7 Stocks
For coke?

~20% of their revenue converts to net income. That's the amount after cost of goods sold and fixed costs.

deadghost··on 83% of Warren Buffett's $365B Portfolio Is Invested in Just 7 Stocks
>I'm surprised they have this much in 'assets' tied to 'not sexy + boring' things like "not the best foods/drinks for you"

Buffett drinks five cokes a day and has said 25% of his body is coke. I haven't read his biography yet but I've heard that his family has never seen him drink water.

Boring has low capital expenditures. You don't need to keep pouring money in to maintain the product. They're also sticky, stable goods that people will keep buying no matter what. They're also able to grow stably year over year.

deadghost··on China Added More Solar Panels in 2023 Than US Did in Its Entire History
Reducing dependency on petroleum is a good idea yes. If not for the environment, then for national and economic interests.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_crisis

List also leaves off things like: WW2 Japan being totally immobilized from lack of oil, Allies not pushing a faster end to Nazi Germany due to fuel limitations, US eastern fleet being threatened by the '73 embargo.

The prosperity and security of the nations of the world should not be beholden to a handful of often unstable oil states.

deadghost··on IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023
My previous company was doing this. I basically quit out of frustration. They weren't much better than picking random people off the street and pointing them at code. It bled into my work life when they took over a project I was on and was pinging me constantly with "hello" and "good morning" expecting to jump on calls with their teams to explain exactly how to do their jobs.

An example to illustrate what I was working with:

Problem: input validation is too restrictive

Their solution: remove all input validation

For my mental well-being, I couldn't stay on.

deadghost··on Choosing what to read
I've been reading two hours a day consistently for the past half year. I generally read with purpose and settled into a daily routine of reading a book on business, a book on programming, and a book for fun. It works for me.

I also found that non-fiction is more interesting than fiction. Fiction needs to be believable, non-fiction doesn't. Non-fiction captures a complex, layered reality with characters that are often at odds with others and even themselves. Sometimes they randomly died off, sometimes they show up again in unexpected places. A fiction author would have to be an absolute master to create such a complex world.

deadghost··on 10-year Treasury yield rises to 5%, highest level for the key rate in 16 years
tl;dr: stocks go down, investors less aggressive, tech job market stays dipped

US Treasury Bonds are considered the risk-free rate.

If you have $TICKER that you expect to yield 5%, you wouldn't buy it because you undertake risk to invest in a company to get 5%. You'd buy a Treasury bond instead to get 5% risk-free. As a consequence, stock prices should drop until yields + premium to take on risk exceeds the risk-free rate.

deadghost··on From Vimperator to Tridactyl (2018)
I'm a cranky old man. I'm still on FF52 and pentadactyl. Tridactyl is still missing a modeline and has janky smooth scroll.
deadghost··on It’s time to ditch SMS-based 2 Factor Auth
As someone that is expat / travels a lot, can you please make this stuff optional or give me options other than SMS? I keep getting locked out of everything. I despise SMS 2FA.
deadghost··on Borneo Lost More Than 100k Orangutans from 1999 to 2015
Just eat your nutella. Just Indonesia is 260M people, approaching the population of the US. Palm oil is the cheapest and most widely used oil in all of South East Asia. From what I'm told, Palm is very efficient and produces a lot of oil and isn't necessarily bad. The issue is corrupt governments failing to preserve their people's natural heritage as plantations encroach on nature. I doubt a few Europeans cutting down on nutella will make much of a difference when the people in SEA consume huge quantities of it themselves.

I checked out the orangutans in Sumatra and you can see the palm plantations encroaching into the jungle. Locals told me they consume a lot of the river water and makes the entire area warmer. Although the area had the fortune of being a natural reserve, I still saw trucks grabbing aggregate from parts of the river that were not included. Oh and if you were in SEA around 2 years ago, the ridiculous haze was from people burning wetlands to plant more palm. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southeast_Asian_haze

deadghost··on The outdoor community made water filtration a must for a reason
I caught giardia and who knows what else while I was in India for a year. I had diarrhea 10+ times a day for over a month, vomited a few times, bloated and lactose intolerant for over a year, and two years on I'm still not feeling 100% even after taking over 100 pills to nuke everything.

You might be lucky and not be too affected by this stuff but it's not something to mess around with.

deadghost··on Show HN: Can Picker – Curated Value Headphones
Yeah that'd be good if I can figure out how to cram that in nicely.
deadghost··on Show HN: Can Picker – Curated Value Headphones
Wrote this as a hobby over the course of a few months. The original version took a weekend. Figure now is as good of a time as any to post it. It's written in clojure and clojurescript(react based) not that it's a big deal.
deadghost··on A Surprise from the Supervolcano Under Yellowstone
Just construct a giant bowl on top of the volcano to collect the ash and lava.
deadghost··on Show HN: Discover the tech stack for any website
Ran it on https://canpicker.com/. It's kind of cool and accurate but I was expecting it to pick up stuff like react and maybe finer grain details like individual libraries.
deadghost··on Ask HN: What weekend projects have you created?
Yeah I've been meaning to add the K240 as they're quite good and popular. I'm not immediately familiar with the HD 598 but Sennheiser generally makes good stuff at each price point. They have a habit of changing model numbers periodically though for seemingly no reason.
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