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hobbescotch

193 karma · joined April 26, 2016

Full stack Python dev
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hobbescotch··on Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year
Have you been to Finland? It is a very safety conscious culture. This isn’t just some fluke.
hobbescotch··on Cloudflare Connectivity Issues in Eastern US and Central Europe
Having lots of random issues with gcp today as well
hobbescotch··on Apple apologizes for iPad 'Crush' ad that 'missed the mark'
Their Apple vision ad was very dystopian feeling and to me looks like the same team did this one. They seem really out of touch. Very negative vibes in these recent ads.
hobbescotch··on Daniel Dennett has died
Very sad news. Had the pleasure of having him be the keynote speaker at an aesthetics conference some friends and I organized during uni. Brilliant mind. RIP
hobbescotch··on Google Workers Protest Cloud Contract with Israel's Government
Wonder why the second discussion was flagged
hobbescotch··on Analysing the Twitter User Exodus to Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads
I would say that they all have stable user bases which is nice to see. Though some are weighted towards different niches. I recommend checking them all out.
hobbescotch··on Argentina's Milei Devalues Peso by 54%
Although his style would seem off putting, I would not discount him so readily. He is an economist with many published papers under his belt and has worked for the WEF. Whatever happens, hope the outcome is positive for Argentinians.

Edit: bio from WEF website

Licentiate in Economics, Universidad de Belgrano, Argentina; two Master's in Economics, Universidad Torcuato Di Tella and CEDES/IDES. Former: Head Economist, Estudio Broda and Máxima AFJP; Senior Economist, HSBC, Argentina; Adviser of the Argentine Government, ICSID. Currently, Head Economist, Corporación América. B-20/G-20 Adviser and Member, Group of Economic Policy, ICC/G-20. Since 2012, leads the division of Economic Studies, Fundación Acordar, a think tank of national scope. For more than 20 years, University Professor of Macroeconomics, Economics of Growth, Microeconomics and Mathematics for Economists. Has written over 50 academic papers.

hobbescotch··on Ask HN: What are you passionate about at the moment?
Modelling natural gas consumption. I don’t think it’ll be actually useful and certainly not as nuanced as professional models for trading, but adding the necessary data to my data warehouse and then working on it has been a fun experience.
hobbescotch··on Low serotonin levels might explain some Long Covid symptoms, study proposes
I had a globus / lump in throat sensation that was my first symptom of COVID and persisted months after. It went away somehow after I started going to the gym. Obviously can’t say if it’s connected or not, but wouldn’t be surprised if it was.
hobbescotch··on Python: Just Write SQL
I’ve been a data engineer for many years and have lots of practice optimizing SQL touching many parts of the language and I still enjoy using SQLAlchemy for its tight, elegant integration with flask/django. Of course some queries make sense to optimize with raw sql but I think here, like with many other things, there’s no black/white conclusion to draw from these situations.
hobbescotch··on Threads and the social/communications map
Twitter doesn’t default to the “For you” tab. It remembers which one you spend most time on (I think Elon tweeted this at one point). I use chrono exclusively and it doesn’t default to the algo feed when I open the app.
hobbescotch··on Huge phosphate rock deposit discovered in Norway
I haven’t looked at the data, but junior mining and exploration is a bit of the wild west in terms of honesty and would not in the least be surprised if some trickery is at play to produce that result. Also a reason why it’s not advisable for new investors to get into this sector.
hobbescotch··on Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering
You would think that but the Nintendo Switch controller still has analog stick drift many years after being discovered.
hobbescotch··on Thousands of subreddits pledge to go dark after the Reddit CEO’s recent remarks
3rd party app developers are the freeloaders I would argue. They contribute no revenue to reddit, are exempt from displaying ads but incur OpEx costs. Some are as big as 1B reqs a month but act as though they are the victim. Not only that, instead of being a professional business partner, they go on their respective subreddit to complain about reddit management… on reddit. Kind of hilarious actually.
hobbescotch··on Thousands of subreddits pledge to go dark after the Reddit CEO’s recent remarks
I am going to take a different stance here but these platforms do provide HUGE value. Hosting is a massive cost and so is moderating the volunteer moderators. These 3rd party apps were free loading, some getting billions of requests in a single month and acting like victims, while reddit bears the burden of OpEx costs. On a CPM basis reddit API fees are actually quite cheap and fair for 3rd party devs. 3rd party apps can turn a profit with app redesign, but, from their comments seems like something they were not willing to do.

Reddit has just laid off employees and is probably paying 4-5x it was before for financing due to interest rates and has to find new sources of revenue, and quickly, IPO or not. Users are great for building communities but they can just as easily turn into a non-rational mob like is being done here.

hobbescotch··on US solar market is projected to triple in size by 2028
Yes 100%
hobbescotch··on US solar market is projected to triple in size by 2028
I would check out some videos of the Kivu cobalt mines where children work to mine for our cobalt. There are north american mines that are shut in because we chose to instead use child labor in incredibly dangerous mines that frequently have landslides because it’s cheaper. It seems that many only care enough about climate change to greenwash and not think about anything else. There are hopefully new battery compounds on the way but it should be allowed to criticize elements on the energy transition if there are problems. How else do we get nice things without encouraging open discussion? Perhaps it’s an american thing to associate these views with certain labels but I don’t see how it’s related to any political affiliation or gender to have these concerns.
hobbescotch··on My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated
I learned Java Applets in school in 2009 and it was clear to me then that they were sort of… awkward. Java itself is fine and I still do a little Java work from time time and it’s a breath of fresh air from the daily python work.
hobbescotch··on Unlighthouse: Like Lighthouse, but it scans every single page
Reminds me, I had to once set up lighthouse scans for thousands of sites and the only way to do this fast enough was to run the tests concurrently on a single machine. But the test results also depended on cpu load of thr machine running the tests, so we had to sample cpu load live and adjust a multiplier in the lighthouse tests to handle this so that lighthouse would not think it is the site that is being slow. I understand it’s a complex tool, but I wish lighthouse results with the cli were more reproducible!
hobbescotch··on User interface design timeframes: from 0.1 seconds to 10 years (2009)
Not a front end dev but this is why I love using vanilla js and pre rendered html in side projects. Easier to maintain long term as I don’t have to deal with ridiculous framework updates and feels snappier.
hobbescotch··on Night Train Map with all regularly served night train destinations in Europe
Stockholm to Narvik without changes and with private room was amazing. Very cozy experience, would do it again.
hobbescotch··on Ask HN: What should I use instead of Heroku?
Speaking for myself, the issue is that I don’t know enough about devops/security to go barebones (esp if for a side project accepting payments w/ sensitive data). It’s of course dead simple to set up a server barebones, but to do it in a way for a service open to the internet with uptime requirements requires more specialization of knowledge these days.
hobbescotch··on Light exposure during sleep impairs cardiometabolic function
In the summer if I don’t sleep with my mask off I start to feel myself slowly unhinging. Sun being out at 2am while you’re trying to sleep can definitely make you feel out of it! Hard to find blackout curtains that work perfectly too.
hobbescotch··on New Brunswick’s Mystery Disease
It’s hard to not have a skeptical view towards government intervention in this case when the whole province is run, media included, by a handful of families. Hope it turns out for the better for everyone living there, and very sorry for your loss.
hobbescotch··on Google Lighthouse V8 – Improved CLS metrics
Fixes this issue basically: https://github.com/GoogleChrome/lighthouse/issues/6512#:~:te....

Tried all of the proposed solutions and this error still pops up on certain sites and certain configuration settings. Felt totally random when it started happening.

hobbescotch··on Google Lighthouse V8 – Improved CLS metrics
Not sure if it's just me, but the Lighthouse CLI is so buggy that I've resorted to setting to up to run in a docker container so that it doesn't crash when trying to load certain sites/configurations. Hope that they work on improving stability at some point. That being said, kudos to the team on the release, I'm sure this is a challenging project to work on!
hobbescotch··on Bitcoin is 'a giant pyramid scheme,' says Pinboard founder [video]
Not exactly true. Fiat currency, in part, gets its value by the fact the governments can throw you in jail for not paying taxes with it. Sure, not going to jail could be a subjective preference, but pragmatically speaking, that's a big, objective value proposition for most people.
hobbescotch··on Multitasking hurts performance and may even damage the brain (2018)
I struggle with how to handle this at work. I am a data engineer and while writing new scripts to pull data, the testing process sometimes involves waiting 15 mins to an hour (or more) for all the data to pull. Some times I'll start a new task in the middle of the pull or, if I expect it'll only be a few minutes, I'll flip out my phone. But once the data is finished pulling, I'll then need to jump back it and validate it one last time.

I'm curious what others do during this sort of downtime?

hobbescotch··on Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada
The province of New Brunswick has set up a website tracking this here: https://www2.gnb.ca/content/gnb/en/departments/ocmoh/cdc/neu...
hobbescotch··on ShipMap
Does anyone know where they get the data for these shipping map sites?
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