HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

heleninboodler

1,847 karma · joined April 5, 2019

submissionscomments
heleninboodler··on Language and shell in Go with 92% test coverage and instant CI/CD [video]
There were a lot of aspects of this talk that I thought were really great. The willingness to try something unscripted, diving into the code repo live (e.g. to show where fuzzing is used), and the discussions of the reasoning behind the design choices. Great job @xiaq. This really makes me want to try elvish out, and I usually am quite skeptical of new shells.
heleninboodler··on A Collectively Owned Bandcamp Successor
The copy on the homepage is very dramatic and reads as if Bandcamp has already turned against all its artists. It's been over a year since the second sale if I am calculating the dates correctly. Has Bandcamp changed at all?
heleninboodler··on Supreme Court rules ex-presidents have immunity for official acts
Not endorsing the view, but that's how some people think. It would actually be incredibly interesting if he decided to commit political suicide by having Trump killed and spurring congress into amending the constitution to explicitly revoke the immunity. If presidents start murdering presidential candidates, we might be able to get together and pass a constitutional amendment. :)
heleninboodler··on Supreme Court rules ex-presidents have immunity for official acts
Can't help but wondering if Joe is contemplating Seal Team Six's summer plans right about now.
heleninboodler··on Silicon Valley's best kept secret: Founder liquidity
The median employee also isn't the guy who's going to make a killing by being an instrumental early employee at startup. It's apples and oranges. I'd argue that the person who is versatile and productive enough to help build a startup from zero is also in the upper tier of those FAANG employees, and commanding 400k+ per year isn't out of reach.

I personally have taken both paths, and made what I considered a ridiculous amount of money at a startup (after I'd been gone for a while, having bought my stock). When I got my cash out, I didn't quit my not-technically-FAANG-but-pretty-close job and that comp continues to grow. I never expected this, but my comp has grown to the point where the cumulative amount I've made here has actually surpassed the startup money. 7 years at each place, and the steady paycheck eventually outpaced the big windfall. The difference is I can keep the steady paycheck indefinitely, so it's definitely the win if I stick it out. Of course, now I'm itching to do a startup again. :)

heleninboodler··on Apple unveils 'Passwords' manager app at WWDC 2024
> I don't get the hand-wringing when it comes to reasonably priced services.

For me, it has nothing to do with the price and everything to do with the fact that I don't want a service dependency for my most critical passwords. I want them to be available no matter what. The product should be standalone. And this isn't a hypothetical concern, either: my employer is contractually mandated to disallow cloud-based password managers, so I must use standalone ones (yes, this is a stupid policy, but one that I'm bound by).

And on top of that, 1Password 5 was an excellent product and it is just steadily getting worse, in my opinion.

heleninboodler··on Tom 7: Badness 0 (Three ways)
You're getting a lot of glib answers, but in all seriousness, this is one of the amazing things about tom7 videos. It sometimes starts by appearing to be about nonsense or triviality, but as he weaves all these weird stories, they start to come together into observations that are absolutely brilliant and funny and he writes code to demonstrate what he's saying. I highly recommend "Harder Drive: Hard drives we didn't want or need" as an intro to his style, his humor, and the absurd lengths he will go to in order to prove a point. It's in three chapters and the middle chapter still blows my mind.
heleninboodler··on Don't DRY Your Code Prematurely
Call me crazy, but it's almost as if these should be guidelines considered by a thinking person, with experience to help inform them, rather than hard-and-fast rules that must be applied to everything.
heleninboodler··on Horizontal running inside circular walls of Moon settlements
> Why wall of death?

I think that's just what the cylindrical room is often called when it's used for motorcycles. The paper repeatedly references it, abbreviated "WoD." I don't think there's any death involved. :)

heleninboodler··on The semiconductor industry hinges on a quartz factory in North Carolina
Yes, exactly.
heleninboodler··on The semiconductor industry hinges on a quartz factory in North Carolina
Fun fact, the quartz is used to make the big crucibles where the silicon wafers crystallize by starting from a seed in the center which is slowly drawn upward. My grandmother was a quartz salesperson for GE for decades (they sourced their quartz from this same company) and they make the crucibles. My grandma lived in a place with a small yard and her garden was planted in these very modern-looking quartz crucibles that were destined for chipmakers but had some tiny flaw on the inner surface so they couldn't be sold.
heleninboodler··on JSON Canvas – An open file format for infinite canvas data
> not only infinite ones

I don't think this really has much to do with the "infinite" nature of the canvas. Individual instances of infinite canvases have a finite size. :)

heleninboodler··on JSON Canvas – An open file format for infinite canvas data
My very first thought about this format was that someone is definitely going to pervert it to be used as a graphics format, and for that it's woefully inadequate. I decided to hold my tongue since it's not the creators' fault that someone will misuse it, but I can totally see people adding optional ad hoc fields to nodes to allow for example all sorts of fancy line styles.
heleninboodler··on JSON Canvas – An open file format for infinite canvas data
Suggestion: add some metadata at the top level, including a bounding box that includes all nodes so that you can encapsulate a canvas and include it within another context before having created all the elements within it. It's redundant information and it needs to be kept in sync with the nodes and edges, but it's very useful for applications working with your data.

Also, this is not very json-ish, but optimizing your serializer so your metadata is always written first is pretty handy for embedding, since it allows you to use a pull parser and do useful things before the entire doc is parsed. (e.g. picture a huge doc being embedded and starting out as just a box and having its elements filled in async. You can't do that well if you don't know the bounding box ahead of time)

heleninboodler··on Miles Davis and the recording of Kind of Blue
You mean just for fun? I'm having a hard time imagining real value in doing something like karma-farming on HN. Not to mention, that would be more like anti-karma-farming.
heleninboodler··on Linux Touchpad Like MacBook Update: 2023 Progress on Smooth Scrolling
Nope, it "just worked." I ended up vastly preferring a mouse, though, so I didn't stick with it long term.
heleninboodler··on Linux Touchpad Like MacBook Update: 2023 Progress on Smooth Scrolling
> There is no way I'm going to suffer the ergonomic hell that is a laptop for a second longer than I absolutely have to

I agree with this, but intentionally choosing a trackpad to put on your desk is just accepting a portion of this hell, in my opinion. The trackpad is an RSI torture device to me, because of the way you have to hold the muscles in the back of your hand tense so all but one finger is a little higher than the others.

heleninboodler··on Linux Touchpad Like MacBook Update: 2023 Progress on Smooth Scrolling
I've connected an Apple Magic Trackpad (external bluetooth trackpad that sits on your desk) to an ubuntu machine and it's wonderful. There are still some software things to solve to get the acceleration perfect and things like scrolling working, but having trackpad hardware that isn't trash goes a really long way.
heleninboodler··on Miles Davis and the recording of Kind of Blue
This is a fascinating comment to me. I understand not really feeling jazz, but it doesn't even sound like a song to you? My only suggestion is to jump into the middle of a few songs and try to hear the rhythm and song structure. They can often be difficult to pick up when they start slow. All Blues might be the easiest. I sincerely wish you luck, because it's really incredible music.
heleninboodler··on Miles Davis and the recording of Kind of Blue
I think there are several other tracks on the album tied for this same distinction. :)
heleninboodler··on What Is WebTV?
> they had to make sure their site layout worked on WebTV

They weren't big enough to benefit from the fact that one of the components of WebTV's architecture was an entire "page patching" database and proxy that would fix HTML from popular sites that didn't work correctly on their browser.

heleninboodler··on What Is WebTV?
Andy Rubin was also a very early WebTVer; probably one of the first two or three employees, and was there through the Microsoft acquisition.
heleninboodler··on I accidentally made my link shortener into a malware honeypot
The other two I checked were *.wordpress.com and *.bandcamp.com, both well known TLDs with user-generated subdomains. Neither is there.
heleninboodler··on I accidentally made my link shortener into a malware honeypot
How current is this? It doesn't actually have *.blogger.com in it, nor the other two examples I checked.
heleninboodler··on Things You Should Never Do, Part I (2000)
It's usually a little of both. Sometimes it's a little messy but before you get full understanding, it appears a lot messier. But having the experience of coming across code that I think sucks until I fully understand it and recognize it as something I wrote two years ago (but maybe someone moved to a new location, so I didn't remember it) makes me a little more humble when it comes to judging code.
heleninboodler··on Things You Should Never Do, Part I (2000)
There's mess and there's "override $PATH in 50 files" mess. "The old code is a mess" is a really easy conclusion to come to when trying to grok a complicated codebase, and it's not always correct.
heleninboodler··on Marilyn vos Savant and the Monty Hall Problem (2015)
> The initial door reveal is misdirection by an informed host, such that it has no effect on the odds, which are always, players choice of door is 1/3

Yes, exactly. Which means when you switch, the host is effectively allowing you to choose both the other doors, which gives you 2/3 odds.

heleninboodler··on Dad died in 2022. Since 2023, things he selfhosted have slowly begun breaking
Note also that a dedicated email service like Fastmail has a lot fewer ways you can accidentally violate TOS than, say, GMail. Your google account can get TOS'd for activity on YouTube, Drive, Chat, Photos, Docs, Blogger, etc. When was the last time you heard about someone getting TOS'd for the contents of an email being misunderstood?
heleninboodler··on Marilyn vos Savant and the Monty Hall Problem (2015)
It's a lot easier to see the 2/3 nature if you imagine that instead of revealing the goat and then asking if you want to switch, Monty said "you've chosen this door that has a 1/3 chance. I'm offering you to switch to choosing both of these two remaining doors, at least one of which definitely has a goat by definition." This is functionally the same offer. It's 2/3 to switch because you're effectively choosing two doors and having Monty automatically grant you the car if it's behind one of them.
heleninboodler··on Insecure vehicles should be banned, not security tools like the Flipper Zero
> had a car stolen and they (insurance) treat you like absolute trash when it happens.

You've said this twice, but what does it mean? I have had my car stolen twice and the insurance company didn't give me any trouble at all and just paid out.

Page 1 of 20Next →