Hacker News Reader

escoton Inside the longest Atlassian outage

When doing bulk deletes like this what safe guards do you put in place, other than testing the script up/down in another environment, turning off app servers etc (which Im guessing they did not do)?

escoton Atlassian: We estimate the rebuilding effort to last for up to 2 more weeks

Its like a reverse event sourced system

escoton Ask HN: Share your personal site

https://www.antipa.io

Its an html file I manually edit, deployed with netlify.

escoton Heroku was Down

Mines back up, at least 20min down time

escoton Ask HN: How do you manage your companies knowledge base?

Docs become stale and untrusted. Theres a tech solution waiting to be made that orients docs around time instead of hierarchy or tags. Kind of like how a commit tells you something was true at a certain time and in a certain context.

But I also agree with other commenters that culture is a huge part of this.

escoton Ask HN: Why is everything changing too fast?

There is a theory I believe that its most productive to have tools that do evolve significantly over time, but not continuously. You need months/years of stability in a tool to a) learn its ins and outs and b) get value by using those learnings for a significant period of time. If the tool its constantly changing, even if becoming better, you never have time to leverage your new skills in the tool.

escoton Why is Excalidraw so good?

The line between aesthetics and substance can be…blurry, even hand drawn you could say.

escoton Why is Excalidraw so good?

Im making that at least for graph editing:

https://www.knotend.com

Its a general purpose DAG/flowchart editor completely optimized for keyboard shortcuts. No need to touch the mouse almost ever. Like excalidraw you can use a basic version immediately, no account. I recommend watching the 1min video and checking out the keyboard shortcuts menu because its a bit different from other flowchart editors.

1min tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPR0samb194

escoton Are daily standups hurting your team?

Standups feel good because the uniform process gives a sense of control. But software requires constant decision making based on the specific problem of the moment, and you can't globally define a process that works across all these problems.

escoton Version Control for Structure Editing

> Perhaps version control is actually the weak point of the textual edifice, where we might be able to win a battle.

It would be interesting because as the paper says textual editing has great deployment and collaboration tooling. So if non textual could get a foothold in that exact area — git — it could draw a ton of people who just want to get things shipped.

escoton Esbuild – An extremely fast JavaScript bundler

So is esbuild vs parcel a bit of an accidental proxy battle between go and rust?

escoton Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

Im avoiding travel until the airlines shake off the cobwebs from being mostly shut down during covid.

escoton The latest campus cancellation is different

The universities won't change. Uncensored talks are done off campus or online.

escoton Simula One: an office-focused, standalone VR headset built on top of Linux

The main benefit of vr seems to have many "screens" for free, but the more years I've worked the more I've reduced the number/size of screens I use. I find it more ergonomic to not be looking around so much.

escoton US Cybercom says mass exploitation of Atlassian Confluence vulnerability ongoing

Seems odd that the Priority is "Low" on the ticket

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFSERVER-67940

escoton Ask HN: Feedback on my keyboard-based flowchart editor?

> write in a white cell should automaticly create new node.

And I also agree here to an extent, I just haven't found the right UX. Since the user can't control the layout (its done automatically) it can be confusing to write a new node in an empty cell but then have the layout algo immediately move that cell (based on its connections).

escoton Ask HN: Feedback on my keyboard-based flowchart editor?

Thank you for the feedback. I'll take you up on emailing you for new versions.

> show them the help popup

My goal is to make it usable without forcing the user to look at a tutorial. Otherwise it is too difficult. I agree its not there yet though. How did you figure it out? Did you use the Help icon or just click around to learn it?

> vim like keybindings

This would be cool, I just have to find the right user experience.

> sibling shortcut

Great idea, I hadn't thought of that.

> My use case is to think creatively

Could you give me an example? I use it for the same purpose, but typically I'm plotting events over time. For example right now I'm using it to manage the steps in a database migration at work. This may be quite different from your use case which sounds more like a hierarchical/mindmap kind of an exploration. How do you jump between nodes in Roam?

escoton Ask HN: Feedback on my keyboard-based flowchart editor?

Clickable link:

https://www.knotend.com

escoton Ask HN: Feedback on my no-mouse flowchart editor

Clickable link: https://www.knotend.com

escoton Lawrence Livermore claims a milestone in laser fusion

> The shot...demolished the facility’s previous record yield

Thought 'demolish' was going in another direction there

escoton Ask HN: Feedback on My Flowchart Editor?

Clickable link:

https://www.knotend.com

escoton Ask HN: Who wants project feedback? (August 2021)

Really makes me happy seeing skeuomorphic design

escoton Ask HN: Who wants project feedback? (August 2021)

I like this general idea since a lot of times a product can succeed with just any name that is short, easy to remember, etc. I spent probably a full week coming up with and buying knotend.com (I have a top level comment if you have time to leave feedback) which I would have been happy to just pay a few hundred bucks for.

Im not sure how valuable the logo addition is. Logos seem more personal. I think I would have paid < 100 for a very simple/generic logo and icon pack for knotend that just stood as a placeholder for later when I needed a real logo.

escoton Ask HN: Who wants project feedback? (August 2021)

Just anyone making flowcharts. Large cos often have to coordinate lots of people, so flowcharts can help. My main use case is for project mgmt and roadmapping.

escoton Ask HN: Who wants project feedback? (August 2021)

No but I guess I could. What would you use the pdf for, as opposed to say taking a screenshot to get a png? Would you want the canvas layout rendered on a pdf (the one you get when doing View -> Canvas) or something else?

escoton Ask HN: Who wants project feedback? (August 2021)

Cool name. I don't do blockchain dev but I guess I can see why people would need some kind of integration between onchain stuff and analytics/logging platforms.

The website is really light on informatin. I would expect an api/integration provider to have things like code samples or UI examples, not to have to schedule a demo. Even having a little info graphic showing the steps needed to setup the integration (before needing to make an account) would go a long way.

My project is https://www.knotend.com if you have a sec, I have a top level comment here.

escoton Ask HN: Who wants project feedback? (August 2021)

Your website makes it clear what the product does. I'm not a huge fan of the name, I don't see a reason to shoehorn "AI" into the name at the cost of it being hard to pronounce and remember.

Looks like you need a login to try it, and I don't really have a need for image editing.

I'm not sure if users care or not that the system is built on machine learning models. Maybe a quick note if it here and there is good because it helps them understand that there's something 'smart' about it, but I wouldn't put sentences like this:

> built upon self-aware machine learning models

That just feels over the top and probably confusing to users.

Please see my top level comment for knotend.com and leave feedback.

escoton Ask HN: Who wants project feedback? (August 2021)

My project is a fast flowchart editor with a UX optimized for keyboard shortcuts. Its free too.

https://www.knotend.com

escoton Ask HN: Who wants project feedback? (July 2021)

Thanks. Did you in the end figure out how to add nodes and dependencies. Alt-arrow will add a new node as dependency of the currently selected one(s). I agree its confusing that you cant edit an empty cell, the reason is that it wouldnt mean much. You cant chose where nodes go - they get laid out automatically based on their dependencies.

I dont use discord. Do you mean you want a flowchart editor thats collaborative within your chat? Does discord have plugin ecosystem like that?

escoton The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

Somewhat related, this is a fantastic talk about the design of the first electronic spreadsheet VisiCalc by Dan Bricklin:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDvbDiJZpy0