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farski

82 karma · joined September 6, 2011

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farski··on Show HN: Manim (3Blue1Brown's animation engine) in the browser via WebGPU
That was also unclear to me, so +1 for more code examples. Also, it seems like maybe this doesn't work in Safari but there's not error message or anything. I was looking for a Run or Render button or something to get things to happen, until I gave up and tried Firefox.
farski··on Why the end of support for Windows 10 is uniquely troubling
This was my plan for my dad's PC, but, while he uses an iPad he uses for the vast majority of his browsing/email/etc, he uses his PC to do his taxes and the taxes of quite a few other people. TurboTax is dropping support for Windows 10 for next year's edition. Based on everything I've seen, it simply won't run (or that's how they are communicating it). So now I need to replace my dad's 3 or 4 year old computer only because of TPM. TT is saying they're doing this because Windows 10 support is ending, which obviously it isn't. Bad decision making on both ends, but the outcome is the same: I have to basically get rid of a very nice computer.

I'm holding out as long as possible, hoping that reason re-enters the game, but I'm not holding my breath.

farski··on Ask HN: Is there a [blazing fast] alternative to homebrew for macOS yet?
Sorry if this is obvious, but when I do `brew install sassafras`, the bulk of the time between hitting enter and being able to run sassafras is downloading and installing. The overhead of Homebrew seems very minimal. Is the slowness coming from a side of Homebrew that maybe I don't see very often?
farski··on Ask HN: What macOS apps/programs do you use daily and recommend?
Alfred, Choosy, DBngin, Flux, IINA, iStat Menus, Ice, Karabiner Elements, keepingyouawake, Little Snitch, übersicht
farski··on Help I have a JavaScript Lib that blows away competition but nobody knows of it
I agree with other commenters. The pitch didn't do a great job of explaining what problem this solves, so I went to the demo video to find the answer. There's no logging problem big enough in my life to require a tool that takes 48 minutes to explain, so that's when you lost me completely. Even the console demo did more harm than good. It provided no real-world examples of logging (complex objects, multi-stage processes, etc), and some of the fancy bits were worse than vanilla console.log (e.g., the "debug" badge that is dark gray text on a dark gray background).
farski··on Ask HN: What are household items that can be repaired but people often replace?
As others have said, doing maintenance before things get to the point of needing repair is also worthwhile. When I buy something that I want to last a while, I make sure to read the manual and also do some additional research to identify any scheduled maintenance that should be done, and I create a reminder in my Todo app to stay on top of it. That includes big things like car maintenance, and small things, like laundering a shower curtain before it get so stained and gross it can't be cleaned.
farski··on Ask HN: What is the best podcast you listened to in 2022?
I was so bummed when they ended the Heavyweight podcast and made it a Spotify exclusive. It was one of the very few shows I would have conversations with people about the day after it dropped.
farski··on Ask HN: What is example of good documentation in your opinion?
I find the Slack API and app platforms docs to very pleasant to use.
farski··on Google’s Feedburner just voided RSS URLs for CNN, Marketwatch, etc.
We work with lots of podcasts that were created in a time when Feedburner was standard operating procedure. We were already seeing reliability issues with Feedburner on those feeds this week (intermittent 500s), but if they really broke or removed custom domains, it's going to be a long weekend for our teams.
farski··on Ask HN: What tools are you a 10/10 on?
Could you say more about Raycast vs Alfred? I've got lots of customizations built into Alfred, so switching always feels like a big lift and I use it so much it would be a major disruption to so many workflows. But Raycast does look very nice, so I often think about making the switch.
farski··on Ask HN: What tools are you a 10/10 on?
I've got a lot of customizations built in Alfred, but Raycast intrigues me. Have you used Alfred to the point where you can compare the two?
farski··on Shimano Forces Hammerhead to Remove All Di2 Related Functionality From Karoo
That's a great clip to link to because 30 seconds later Tristan says "I don't want to be responsible for you guys beaning it off the side of a hill because you were trying to go too quick," which obviously was him walking back Ben's recommendation a bit because even he thinks it's a safety issue to look at a map while descending hairpins as a tourist.
farski··on Shimano Forces Hammerhead to Remove All Di2 Related Functionality From Karoo
I tend to update my Karoo pretty quickly, but I have never seen any indication that it would force an update, so I think people could stick with last week's version for as long as they want.

That being said, this week's update that removed Di2 also added some nice location-based auto lap features, which are way more useful than an icon telling me which gear I'm in, which I already know, so I updated.

farski··on Shimano Forces Hammerhead to Remove All Di2 Related Functionality From Karoo
There are a bunch of features on Karoo that will show or indicate turns regardless of which screen you're on. As jfengel said, if you're going 50mph you should know where you're going and not looking at your computer. The other things being removed (battery level, gear indicator, shift mode) represent no realistic safety concerns.

I'm annoyed that I'm losing these features, too, but they are all firmly in the nice-to-have category. Just like bike computers in their entirety.

farski··on Show HN: I am building a free version of Strava
Planning ahead, either for myself or to organize group rides/runs, is #1 on my wishlist for Strava.
farski··on Ask HN: What kind of online tools are you using, missing or can be improved?
I find myself working with timestamps a lot, and there were a couple very specific things I couldn't find with any of the existing converters/tools, so I built https://epoch.place, and it was a very good use of my time. I use it all the time and it does exactly what I need.
farski··on Ask HN: What kind of online tools are you using, missing or can be improved?
I got my https://github.com/notifications dialed in this year and it's be really useful. For watching activity on internal repos I work on, plus a good number of public repos that I keep an eye on to various degrees, I find that it's a very well-designed tool for triage.
farski··on Backblaze restore for Personal Backup is awful
Could you give a ballpark figure for how much that costs you, and how much data you're dealing with?
farski··on Ask HN: What steps do you take to protect yourself and your family online?
There's a fourth credit agency now that it's recommended to put a freeze on, but I don't remember the name off the top of my head.
farski··on Glass – Photo sharing app and community
I found it very hard to figure out how to choose content, since I don't personally know anyone using the app yet. I like the concept, and I don't think I want an algorithm as a lunachpad, but Flickr always had groups/categories/etc that helped with discovery. I was surprised Glass didn't have anything similar to that. It felt like a huge hurdle to get into the app.
farski··on “We're Shutting Down Our 3G Network”
I'm getting bit by this too, so I've been keeping an eye on possible workarounds. People are finding ways doing upgrades that BWM is mostly saying are impossible: https://www.reddit.com/r/BMWi3/comments/of67m0/i_had_a_3g_to...
farski··on Fastmail accounts blocked in Russia, here's what we know
I don't think Fastmail has any plans that are $50/month
farski··on Show HN: CloudSkew – Draw AWS, Azure, GCP, K8s architecture diagrams
The initial experience to get AWS icons loaded was a little strange. I saw all the Azure icons loaded by default, and when I searched for something like "S3" I got a message that said "No records found. Did you try adjusting your icon preferences from the 'user preferences and settings' menu?", but I couldn't find that menu.

I eventually saw the "Add/remove icons" option at the bottom of the screen, and figured out how to turn on the AWS icons, but then I got stuck in that menu. I had to refresh the page to get out of it.

farski··on Show HN: Epoch.place – A modern, sensible Unix timestamp tool
Hm, not seeing any flickering in Chrome on my end. Can you give more details on hardware and OS?
farski··on Show HN: Epoch.place – A modern, sensible Unix timestamp tool
Any time I need to convert a date to or from Unix epoch timestamps, I find something on Google and I’m pretty disappointed with the experience. Every single option on the first page of results uses six or more form fields to enter the date and time, and they use discrete forms to go in each direction. Even the one available on Omni Calculator isn’t so great.

And spending a lot of my day in JavaScript, I always have chop off some digits by hand before any of these tools work, since they don’t detect when values are in milliseconds.

I made epoch.place [1] to try to modernize things a bit. It’s open source [2], and features include:

- Modern natural language date parsing - Automatic detection of Unix timestamps in seconds and milliseconds, with overrides - Multiple output formats always available - Click-to-copy any resulting values - Linkable results - Realtime output of the current time in all formats, and the delta between your input and now

Simple, straightforward, no frills. The page should load in about a tenth of a second, so you can get in and get out.

It uses Chrono [3] for parsing, and runs entirely client side with no cookies, tracking, ads, or dependencies (other than Chrono which is being loaded from jsDelivr).

Mobile support is still a WIP, but I hope this app makes the task of dealing with timestamps a little bit easier.

[1] https://epoch.place/

[2] https://github.com/farski/epoch.place

[3] https://github.com/wanasit/chrono

farski··on Show HN: Botzee is a free Slack app game similar to Yatzy
Hi all! Botzee is an app that lets you play a text-based dice game right in Slack. If you’re familiar with Yahtzee you should pick it up really quick, and even if you aren’t it’s an easy game to learn.

It has single player, multiplayer, and some simple AI bots. I also just recently added an MMO variant, which allows all players to compete in a single, giant world-wide game (in a completely privacy-conscious way).

With more people spending all day isolated, I hope it can be a source of fun and social time for teams, groups of friends, families, etc. I’ve gotten a few really nice notes from folks lately about how it’s been a welcome distraction from the daily grind. The app does include a few donation buttons, but it is truly free to play, and I have no expectations of making money off it. I’m sharing it simply because I think it’s fun and I’m happy with where it’s at. I make and maintain it entirely so I can play with my friends, but I hope others can take advantage of it as well.

For those interested in the architecture, it’s a fairly standard serverless app running on AWS. All requests go through API Gateway and are handled by a single monolithic Lambda function, and it uses DynamoDB for data storage. The total cost for running it last month was 17 cents. As you would expect, it handles the periodic, bursty nature of this kind of app very well. It’s been fun project to pick away at over the last few years. I often use it to test new AWS features before bringing them into projects at work, and I quite like the Slack API and app platform, so coming up with ways to integrate new features from there is always an interesting exercise.

I hope you enjoy it, stay safe out there!

PS. If you’re looking for a way to spice up your Botzee games, consider a battle royale style tournament, where the lowest scoring player is eliminated each game, until a champion is crowned!

farski··on Ask HN: How do you store your tax documents?
I have an encrypted sparse bundle disk image (.dmg) that I use to keep all documents like that: tax, bank and investment statements, insurance policies, etc.

It lives on an external drive that is backed up to Backblaze. Since it changes fairly infrequently, I'll also manually drop copies of it on other clouds occasionally.

farski··on Ask HN: Good email host?
I switched to FastMail several years ago. I had been hosting my email on Dreamhost, which was "just okay" in term of what they offered for email, but it was costing me about as much for shared hosting, XMPP, email, mysql, etc per year as FastMail was going to be just for email. So, like you, to me it felt expensive at the time. It took me a while to pull the trigger.

The things that made eventually got me to make the switch were:

- I realized email is basically a utility for me. So while I'm happy to spend $30/mo on cell phone, $60 on my home ISP, etc, it was kind of crazy to think I wouldn't spend $4/mo on email - FastMail had great reviews. Pretty much every time I did research to answer "is this really the best choice?" the answer was always yes - They seem to really care about IMAP as an idea. If you read through their blog, they do a lot of work to make sure IMAP is a great open standard for communication. That means their support for the protocol is always getting better, and they're improving OSS projects related to IMAP that they use.

Also they keep getting better. Aside from dropping XMPP support (which I can understand, though I have yet to find a suitable replacement for), their service offerings have gotten better since I signed up. Obviously email is email, but there are many little things that have received constant updates since I joined (better admin dashboard, better mail/contact/cal push support for iOS, more sensible billing options)

I could go on, but paying whatever I pay for FastMail service has definitely gone from "ehh do I really want to pay that much for email?" to me really liking supporting them as a company. If they were to increase prices a reasonable amount at some point, I probably wouldn't hesitate paying it.

farski··on The Fight for the Future of NPR
And the next 11 paragraphs? Which part of the article did you actually read?
farski··on The Fight for the Future of NPR
There article says, word for word, "NPR is not involved in the making of This American Life...Nor did NPR create Serial"
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