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fumplethumb

79 karma · joined July 8, 2016

brian [at] vskr.net
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fumplethumb··on Conductor is joining Meta
https://ampcode.com/ is amazing! Surprised the community here does not discuss it more.
fumplethumb··on Spymarks, not Watermarks
I appreciate the link.
fumplethumb··on Ask HN: What is your go-to solution for a personal wiki in 2026?
https://www.getoutline.com is pretty good!
fumplethumb··on Show HN: Clearcam – Add AI object detection to your IP CCTV cameras
Just added my email to my profile. Feel free to shoot me an email!
fumplethumb··on Show HN: Clearcam – Add AI object detection to your IP CCTV cameras
DISCLAIMER: I work on the SIG Connect app.

SIG Connect does exactly that: https://www.sigsauer.com/sigconnect

I suspect, since this is HN, you're looking for something more open and hackable. But you might want to check out SIG Connect if you just want something that works out of the box.

Sorry I can't get into "how it works". Feel free to DM me for any questions.

fumplethumb··on Merry Christmas Everyone
Most other places are closed. Chinese restaurants are typically open on Christmas!
fumplethumb··on Ask HN: Emergency "Management" Software?
How about humanitarian toolbox? https://www.htbox.org/
fumplethumb··on Infinite Git repos on Cloudflare workers
What about… GitHub, Gitlab, Gitkraken, GirButler (featured on HN recently)? The list goes on forever!
fumplethumb··on Show HN: Is_ready – Wait for many services to become available – 0 Dependencies
With Docker compose, there is a more idiomatic way to achieve this with zero dependencies using healthchecks[0]. Works well!

I used wait_for_it.sh for the purpose described in the OP until I found healtchecks could be used instead.

[0] https://github.com/peter-evans/docker-compose-healthcheck

fumplethumb··on PID Without a PhD (2016) [pdf]
One thing I see missing from some other replies to your comment is a discussion of determinism. That is given the same input, always produce the same output.

Determinism is often valued in safety critical systems. The system can't work _sometimes_. The system can't even work correctly _eventually_. It must produce the desired result in the time allotted. Actuating the thing 20ms too late could be as bad doing it incorrectly depending on the application.

I'm no ML expert, but that seems to be a problem for those types of solutions in some spaces.

fumplethumb··on Ask HN: How can I keep my Engineers properly fed with quality work?
We’ve had some success with similar methods. In addition to the simplicity(it just “plugs into” the existing board), it’s nice to get metrics on the bottlenecks happening on the product side of things. If we can show that it historically takes 2 weeks to refine requirements, we can tighten up our estimates and shine a light on potential problems occurring there. If you only have metrics on the dev work, the more business-minded folks tend to focus improvements only on what they can measure.

I’ve also found that folding product workflows into the Kanban board gives the team more visibility and ownership over that end of the pipeline. We can observe how those items age before it ever gets to the dev team and swarm to fix things as a team earlier in the process.

fumplethumb··on Ask HN: Helpdesk/ticketing software for small SaaS company
I likeJitBit! Used it for a few years at my last role. https://www.jitbit.com/
fumplethumb··on Show HN: Customizable, embeddable Chat GPT based on your own documents
This is amazing!

I would love to have an AWS expert handy at all times, so I tried to upload all AWS documentation using this: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sitemap_index.xml. I can no longer use the site, so I suspect that busted something.

In hindsight, that was not cool and I'm sorry about it.

fumplethumb··on Show HN: DoomCheck: A tool for probabilistically estimating project size
I really like this tool (text-based, yes!), thank you for creating this! I'm working on creating estimates at work and it is a real struggle. Creating estimates with a range and probability is awesome because it reflects the uncertainty inherent in any estimate.

It would be nice if the system showed its work somehow. In addition to giving me comfort as the estimator, it's nice to show the person on the receiving side the my inputs and help them understand process being applied. I looked for some docs on this, but I couldn't find anything. At the very least, it would make a great blog post!

Another bit of feedback while I'm here. I tried using {1-2d} for days and {budget 10d} for budget. It seemed to work for estimates, but not for the budget. Looked for docs on the syntax, but I couldn't find it and it all the examples in the quickstart use hours.

P.S. I'd love to talk to you about how I'd like to use this if you're looking for more feedback / collaboration. This has legs!

fumplethumb··on Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (August 2022)
I’d be interested in discussing this more. I’ll shoot you an email.

After a quick search, I found pdfgrep[0] which sounds like one simple way to solve this problem. But I think it only runs on Linux.

[0] https://pdfgrep.org/

fumplethumb··on How to keep your Terraform code DRY by using Terramate
You can conditionally deploy resources by setting the count on most resources. So you can have an environment variable with something like has_cache. Then in your terraform use a ternary or something to set the count to 1 if has_cache is true and 0 if it’s false. I have done this without much fuss.
fumplethumb··on Ask HN: What news subscription is worth it?
I’ve been reading the Economist digitally using their app for years. They had a few issues over the years - I think they prevented copy/paste for a minute. I was pissed about that.

But now I love the app. The typography is decent, they support light/dark themes, you can play human-read audio of every piece individually, etc.

I’m curious, what are your problems with the app?

fumplethumb··on Ask HN: What's your favorite flat file blog?
The custom domain option is there, but is not simple. I have a bear blog on a custom domain :)

More info here: https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearblog/wiki/Custom-domai.... Btw I believe the dev is working on improving this right now.

fumplethumb··on Ask HN: What's your favorite flat file blog?
I know you might be looking for something more DIY, but this simple service has been really refreshing to me: https://bearblog.dev/

It’s so simple and easy. If you want to focus on content instead of tinkering with your blog endlessly (like I have done several times), this is a great option.

fumplethumb··on Ask HN: How to make an extra $50k+ per year without changing jobs?
Amazing! Just placed an order. Im expecting my first child in May, so I couldn’t resist.
fumplethumb··on My First Impressions of Web3
> Instead of storing the data on-chain, NFTs instead contain a URL that points to the data. What surprised me about the standards was that there’s no hash commitment for the data located at the URL.

I've been recently exploring the Solana[0] NFT ecosystem. The situation is similar there and I admit it took me by surprise at first. However upon further inspection, there's more to the story.

As others here have mentioned, most serious ETH collections address this problem using IPFS. But on Solana, Arweave[1] is a popular solution. I had never heard of Arweave before and it's a seriously cool concept. In a nutshell, it's a system that allows you to pay for 200+ (potentially much more) years of storage _up front_. I won't pretend to understand it all, but it effectively pays the network of miners to host your assets indefinitely. The up front payment - which is steep when compared to traditional hosting - provides a "sustainable endowment" for these mining rewards. This allows you to guarantee that the asset will be available without counting on some random hosted storage system.

It seems that NFTs are the main use case for such a system at the moment. However I can imagine other use cases could emerge for an answer to this question I never really thought to ask: "How can I ensure that an asset is hosted "forever?" Interesting problem and an interesting solution that a network like this - with its marriage of decentralized technology and economic incentives - is uniquely poised to address.

[0] https://solana.com/

[1] https://www.arweave.org/

fumplethumb··on Web3 is not Decentralisation – it’s a Ploy to put Crypto Bros in Charge
I often find it useful to relate the Web3 movement to the introduction of the internet. What problem was did that attempt to solve? The internet solved problems that were only apparent in hindsight. The same could be true of Web3. It could also be nonsense, but I don’t think so. The absence of a particular problem to solve doesn’t necessarily render it useless.
fumplethumb··on Web3 is not Decentralisation – it’s a Ploy to put Crypto Bros in Charge
This is an interesting comment because I disagree completely. Web3’s binding of economics and technology is _exactly_ what makes it compelling.

Free versions of things are often impractical. Good things take time and effort. How many users host their own email servers or have their own mastodon instance for example? Most people prefer to pay (in fees or in ad attention) for premium versions of these services that are built/maintained by private companies in a closed/centralized manner.

At its best, Web3’s marriage of economics and technology allows for a hybrid model where people pay for premium versions of these products built by people/companies in an open manner. The closed vs. open is key here. Without Web3 you can build something open/decentralized for free or something closed/centralized for profit. Web3 allows building services that are open/for profit.

Imagine the power of capitalism harnessed by open projects. Maybe I’m crazy, but that’s what excites me about Web3.

fumplethumb··on Orbit – open-source design system
I was also confused about this. It appears this library includes components specifically geared for travel-oriented applications. Still seems like most of the components are pretty generic, but here are some examples that stood out to me:

- Seat: https://beta.orbit.kiwi/components/visuals/seat/

- Stopover arrow: https://beta.orbit.kiwi/components/visuals/stopoverarrow/

fumplethumb··on Adobe Dropping Support for PhoneGap
My company has been using PhoneGap to deliver enterprise mobile apps for years. Though we have long realized that PhoneGap will not be be around much longer, the migration has been quite a pain for us.

We have been able to move to Ionic without many code changes, so that's our de facto solution. I'm curious to hear about others' experiences with PhoneGap, Cordova, and Ionic in the real world. Ionic seems to be the best path forward as the "spiritual successor" to PhoneGap, but I have also been looking into React Native (possible with Expo).

fumplethumb··on The Battle of Helm’s Deep, Part V: Ladders Are Chaos
All I can think about when reading this stuff is playing LOTR: Battle for Middle Earth 2 on Xbox back in the day[0]! Still my favorite RTS game, though I haven’t played in years.

Sure enough, Helms Deep was one of my favorite battlefields. It was fun to give myself the defensive advantage, but also fun to give it to my (computer) opponent for a healthy challenge. I’ll never forget the value of Elvish archers on the walls.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings:_The_Bat...

fumplethumb··on Yap: An ephemeral, Real-Time chat room with up to six participants
Cool app, but I really love the style.

Is there a name for this kind of style? There’s a common theme here with sites like https://glitch.com. I love it, so it would be nice to put a name to it.

Also reminds me of https://sourcehut.org, but to a lesser degree. Big fan of that design too!

fumplethumb··on Doing a database join with CSV files
I haven't used xsv, but one of the nice feature appears to be that it will work on arbitrarily large datasets. From the README[0]:

> These commands are instantaneous because they run in time and memory proportional to the size of the slice (which means they will scale to arbitrarily large CSV data).

The example given with LINQ reads the whole files into memory:

  string[] names = System.IO.File.ReadAllLines(@"../../../names.csv");  
  string[] scores = System.IO.File.ReadAllLines(@"../../../scores.csv");
As a fellow LINQ (probably with LINQPad in this case for a quick and dirty script) user, I'd love to know LINQ can be used to read the files in "slices" like xsv. I'm sure this could be accomblished with enough code, but is there quick / easy way to do it?

[0]: https://github.com/BurntSushi/xsv#a-whirlwind-tour

fumplethumb··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (November 2019)
> I am rocket fuel to your business tech. I make difficult things easy and easy things automated. I have the 30k foot view and am on the ground with a microscope.

Wow nice pitch! Don’t know if you’re as good as you say, but damn that’s a good pitch!

fumplethumb··on We can teach women to code, but that just creates another problem
I agree that the author seems to be conflating front-end development with web design, two different fields requiring two different skillsets.
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