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imjared

645 karma · joined October 16, 2011

full stack web dev in central VA
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imjared··on PgAdmin 4 9.13 with AI Assistant Panel
The docs suggest that you can set the default provider to "None" to disable AI features: https://www.pgadmin.org/docs/pgadmin4/9.13/preferences.html#...
imjared··on 3D Map of Shinjuku Station in Three.js
Immediately dove in to the Foc and Foneria stations in Barcelona. I thought we had some long escalators here in Washington DC but after exiting there and taking escalator after escalator after escalator (repeating) to exit the station, my mind was sufficiently blown. http://estacions.albertguillaumes.cat/img/barcelona/foneria....
imjared··on MRI brain images become 64M times sharper
That private MRI cost is what I paid after insurance for my recent knee MRI here in the USA.
imjared··on Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've built?
I did agency work for a while. One of our clients around 2010 was the US Holocaust museum here in DC. They had stumbled on a trove of pictures of orphaned children and needed help identifying them. We built a site to display them and integrated a handful of carefully selected social networks including Polish network Nasza Klasa. The idea was that people could share these photos and through the network effect, the museum would be able to find, tell, and archive the stories of these children. I was skeptical that anything would come of it but almost immediately, the site started getting results like "that's my father" or even "that's me". It still amazes me.

Looks like the site is miraculously still up though the Cufon is looking a little rough these days: https://rememberme.ushmm.org/

imjared··on Ask HN: Anyone working 4 day week here, as an employee?
My gig has been doing 4-day x 8hour work weeks since long before I started. We have Wednesdays off which is a bit unusual but means I never work more than two days in a row (unless I want to swap a Wednesday for a Friday). It's pretty great.
imjared··on Sleeping longer than 6.5 hours/day can help you lose weight: study
I got a white noise machine recently and it has been an absolute game-changer. I live in a pretty dense city and with warmer weather, neighbors have been spending more time hanging out outside. Their noise into the wee hours was keeping me up and preventing me from sleeping or enjoying open windows. I put the white noise machine next to my bed, set the thing on full blast, and have been sleeping through the night peacefully. Probably one of the better $50 spends I've made recently.

I'm not sure if your problem is noise or what but I'd wager that a machine like this could be helpful in a plethora of situations. It's just pretty calming.

https://yogasleep.com/products/dohmclassic

imjared··on We're moving to a four-day work week at Beacon
We've been doing this (4day x 8hr) at Monograph (monograph.com) for much longer than I've been at the company. I like to think we're a bit of an outlier since we take Wednesdays off. While this seems strange, it means that I never work more than two days at a time, I have time in the middle of the week to recharge, and I don't totally lose context on problems I'm working on. We could argue that this means it's not a true "off" day which may be true but I'm completely happy with this setup.

Tuesdays are the new Fridays, y'all.

imjared··on Spotify podcasters are making $18k a month with nothing but white noise
I just bought one a week ago to deal with noisy neighbors. Can’t believe I waited so long. It’s also nice to have on a lower setting during the day to drown out general city annoyances
imjared··on A tour to my Zettelkasten note clusters
This is cool. I'm looking to level up my Obsidian usage and I really like the author's thoughtfulness and optimism in their daily notes.

My favorite thing so far has been using Daily Notes to track a morning score and an evening score in the markdown's frontmatter. The score is just a "how I'm feeling" and can encompass really any aspect of my wellbeing. I'm working on a project to parse the data out of my daily notes so I can try to visualize trends. Eventually I want to mash in more data (listening history, Strava activity level, steps from Garmin, etc.) to see what kinds of things have, or seem to have, effects on my well-being.

screenshot of last april: https://share.getcloudapp.com/8Lupb7LX

imjared··on Switching to a four-day workweek (2021)
My new gig does a 4days x 8hr work week. It was a major reason for joining the company and has proven to really help reshape how I work and how I think about work. Interestingly, we take Wednesdays off with the ability to trade that day on an as-needed basis. This gives us 2x 2-day work sprints per week. I find that I roll into Thursdays having had a day to reset a little bit, tackle personal projects, cook a huge meal, or go for a long bike ride. Friday comes and I haven't once felt the "Thank god it's Friday" feeling, but rather "Oh, it's Friday already?" in the same way that I used to feel it after a 3-day weekend.

Here's a bit more on our operating philosophy from our CEO: https://www.fastcompany.com/90501241/my-companys-always-had-...

imjared··on Show HN: CookLang – Recipe Markup Language
There was a project a while ago that did this for tacos but it seems to have fallen by the wayside. (Or the catalog is complete)

https://github.com/sinker/tacofancy

imjared··on Esbuild – An extremely fast JavaScript bundler
I've been trying to figure out how to build JS projects with the evolving tools (grunt => gulp => webpack => parcel => back to webpack) for years. I stumbled on esbuild and thought why not. Within about 15 minutes, I had solved pretty much all our build issues. Admittedly, our use case was simple-- we needed to transpile React-flavored TS to a npm package. In about 6 lines of code, I had a working bundle. There were no .esbuildrc or esbuild.config.js files, no babel dependencies, and no order of build operations to consider. The tool just worked and it was screaming fast. My first impression was that it _didn't_ work because the process closed in my terminal so quickly.

After my first experiment with it, I rewrote our hundreds of lines Cloud Functions deploy script in about 15 lines (most of which is configuration options on the `build()` method).

I'm curious to explore the tool more. Kudos and thanks to the author for an unbelievably useful contribution.

imjared··on 38% of remote workers work from bed
I think there's something to be said for the general lack of movement that comes with WFH. It could be pure coincidence but the years I was in best shape running were the years when I had a 30 minute walk to/from work.

I now work from home and try to get out some mornings for a walk around the neighborhood but more often than not, I go straight from bed to a chair. My body gradually loosens up during the day but mostly in a seated position.

imjared··on Baltimore Museum of Art will host an exhibition curated by the museum's guards
After 10+ years in the area, I just discovered a few weeks ago that this place exists while looking at a map to plan a bike ride. I couldn't believe that some of what's there is from the same world class artists that I saw at the Guggenheim in Spain (Jeff Koons, Richard Serra). I thought for sure Google Maps was playing a trick on me since no friends have ever mentioned it and I certainly haven't been. It's now on my shortlist of places to check out when the weather cools off a bit.
imjared··on The Mother of All ‘Abandoned’ Airports (2015)
When visiting Berlin a few summers ago, I happened to be staying in Neukölln and decided it'd be fun to do one of my daily runs around the airfield. There's a funny thing about airports that I quickly realized: they have no trees and thusly no shade. They're also really big.

I won't say I particularly enjoyed the run but it was cool to be able to do it and experience a very unique and historic outdoor space in a big city.

imjared··on Ask HN: Favorite purchases of last two years?
Thanks for this. I'd agree that foam rolling has never been a huge win for me. It's a nice thing to add to my routine and it's super easy to do while watching TV, messing around on my phone, or having a work conference call with video off.
imjared··on Ask HN: Favorite purchases of last two years?
To be honest, I'm not working with my favorite PT. The benefits, in my mind, come from: 1. something is better than nothing 2. the sense of mindfulness. it seems that a lot of PT is getting the right exercises to do for whatever ails you. as a runner, I generally know what I need to work on but my PT has helped refine my list of things. By getting a shorter, focused list, I can think of my PT almost like a coach rather than trying to come up with my own workout plans.

In terms of insurance, I have a pretty standard high-deductible health plan and an HSA. I pay out of my HSA (and more recently out of pocket, since depleting the HSA) up to my deductible.

I want to run my marathon in the fall and I think of it so far like paying $X to be able to make it to that start line. I've told myself that I'm willing to do what it takes in terms of finances, training, and general suffering to make sure I can toe the start line.

imjared··on Ask HN: Favorite purchases of last two years?
- a mid-level road bike, Trek Emonda SL6. I'm lucky to live in a city that's really fun to bike in (Washington DC) and has a great community of athletes. I get out for multiple rides per week and am finding myself obsessed with cycling

- regular physical therapy. I've started marathon training again and while that in itself beats my body up, I feel like years of sitting at the computer building sites and playing games has really put my legs at a disadvantage. My PT provides manual adjustments, needling, and gives me expert feedback on my regular exercises. Going on a regular basis also helps me be mindful of how I'm treating my body and helps keep foam rolling, stretching, and yoga at the forefront of my mind since I'm regularly paying money for a specialist.

imjared··on Starting a TypeScript Project in 2021
I just launched a React Component library from start => finish last week using TSDX and typescript 4.2.3. I was similarly concerned about the update cycle but have been trying to get over the mental hurdle that few updates = bad project. Few updates could simply mean that the baseline functionality is good enough and that was exactly the case for me and my team last week.

Obviously, YMMV but just wanted to give a +1 to a tool that made my life a little bit easier recently!

imjared··on TurboTax Tricked You into Paying to File Your Taxes (2019)
Are there other services that allow for such easy import of other account data? I have a handful of investment accounts scattered like Wealthfront and Robinhood and the one-click imports from each service feel really seamless.

I don't like coughing up the few hundred dollars every year but I'm also lucky enough to not have to think about it much other than on whatever weekend afternoon I choose to slog through the endless prompts.

imjared··on Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers
Not sure if it's helpful for you but you can customize the behavior by going to your System Prefs > keyboard settings and toggling "Touch bar shows:".

I did this on like day 2 of having my MBP for what sounds like the same reason you want to. The setting I have turned on is "Expanded control strip" and I never see any application-specific controls, only volume, brightness, etc.

imjared··on The engines of SARS-CoV-2 spread
I was hesitant to fly early this summer. As months ticked on, I didn't see any news about full flights getting infected in the way I would expect. I've seen countless stories of "x people went to event and 90% got Covid a week later" but as far as I could discern, almost nothing like that had come from flying. I chose to fly with a carrier (Delta) that I felt was handling the situation more responsibly by blocking middle seats. I'll say that the whole experience felt pretty fine. Airlines and airports have taken reasonable precautions at every step of the experience and I'll say I felt substantially more comfortable flying (except for wearing a mask for ~10 hours) than I've felt doing other risky activities like dining outside or going for a run/bike ride on a crowded trail in the park.
imjared··on I used the internet to painlessly relearn a foreign language
In the few years I've been studying Spanish, I've found that the (take your pick of) wine/mezcal/sidra always helps a lot with my ability to speak.

This comment is certainly a bit tongue-in-cheek but being able to relax the nerves a bit and just give it a good effort sometimes goes a long way. Sounds like landing with a wine consultant who doesn't speak your native tongue is about as good a scenario as possible!

imjared··on Japan's Brand New Bullet Train Is Earthquake-Proof
and, speaking from experience, the "slow" tourist one that's included with the JR pass. On the way to Osaka from Iwakuni, we found ourselves with a few other tourists getting to ride the Shin sitting on our luggage at the back of one of the cars. Not a horrible experience, obviously, and gave us the opportunity to have a nice 45 minute chat about "WE ARE IN JAPAN AND IT IS THE BEST" with people we wouldn't have otherwise met.

I got such a kick out of the "slow" shin still being worlds better than anything here in the USA.

imjared··on Show HN: Neural text to speech with dozens of celebrity voices
I've tried Gilbert Gottfried and NDT. I do get a console error about CORS: > Access to fetch at 'https://mumble.stream/speak_spectrogram' from origin 'https://vo.codes' has been blocked by CORS policy: No 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header is present on the requested resource. If an opaque response serves your needs, set the request's mode to 'no-cors' to fetch the resource with CORS disabled.

Using Chrome stable

imjared··on Why Figma Wins
At a high level, how are you spec'ing in Figma?
imjared··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2020)
Patronage | Product intern or Development Intern | https://www.patronage.org | Remote | INTERNS

Patronage is an all-remote startup founded in 2013 on the belief that technology can be a force for good. We partner with local and national organizations taking on big challenges. From advocating for major reforms and accountability in government to making information and services more accessible to advancing high-profile presidential, congressional, and gubernatorial campaigns, we've seen a lot.

As a developer on our team, you'll quickly get up to speed and join us in our work as we build out the next phase of web and tech infrastructure in a critical election year. Working knowledge of HTML and CSS is a must. Other helpful areas of awareness and skill include, but are not limited to: WordPress, JavaScript and jQuery, PHP, Twig, Liquid, Nunjucks, React, Angular, Python, and more.

As a product manager on our team, you'll assist with research, development, and marketing as we build out the next phase of web and tech infrastructure in a critical election year. You must have excellent written and verbal communication skills and be a strong cross-functional team collaborator. You must be very organized and have the ability to remain flexible but focused in an agile environment. Have interest (or experience) in market and user research, product design and/or engineering

Salary: $4,000 to $6,000 per month for full time interns, depending on qualifications

https://www.patronage.org/internships/

imjared··on Software Folklore – A collection of weird bug stories
There's a popular progressive API I've been forced to work with that uses "true" and "false" instead of their respective booleans. The most egregious that I've ever seen in this class of errors was an API (from Google!) that returned " false".
imjared··on MainStreet – $10k to Leave Bay Area
USA small towns != European small towns. Many small cities in the US have no walking infrastructure, horrible (unreliable, slow, etc.) public transportation, and are victims of sprawl.

Having just come off a trip to a handful of smaller European cities, if I lived there I would most likely just walk, bike, or maybe scooter everywhere.

imjared··on Show HN: Koonchi – Convert Photo to Hand-Painted Painting by Artists from India
Absolutely. I remember going down this internet rabbit hole one day a few years ago. I remember feeling like it helped me better understand just how many people there are in China that a single city/area could be known for putting out artwork that we see in our chain retailers here in the USA.

https://www.instapainting.com/blog/company/2015/10/28/how-to...

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