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johtso

900 karma · joined June 6, 2011

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/johtso; my proof: https://keybase.io/johtso/sigs/YxYSihnl8rZY30JJDe9RtNmh8OE7Kkem6MSXJtz_IPo ]
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johtso··on The belay test and the modern American climbing gym
Being pulled up onto the air is not abnormal when belaying, and is a sign that they are giving a soft catch. Granted with a belayer who is much lighter than the climber this can end up being "too soft", risking a ground fall lower on the route. Something you'll also often see is unclipping the first quickdraw to give the belayer more space to "fly".
johtso··on Our phones are killing our ability to feel sexy (2024)
"Babylon rectangles"
johtso··on What are these bumps on the top of a pull-tab can?
It's the pig's eyes of course!
johtso··on What we learned copying all the best code assistants
Also interested!
johtso··on Popeye and Tintin enter the public domain in 2025 along with Faulkner, Hemingway
Internet archive has it too https://archive.org/details/The.adventures.of.Tintin.animate...
johtso··on IMG_0001
We should be collaborating, open sourcing the scraping code, and sharing the scraped datasets IMO.

I was working on a similar idea a couple of years ago but got hung up on the scraping step after realising google api restrictions were too onerous.

I was trying to come up with a way that would have the videos scraped by the user and then randomised, entirely client side.

johtso··on Show HN: Outerbase Studio – Open-Source Database GUI
Don't think DBeaver supports libsql databases? I think the goal here is to be able to working with Turso / Cloudflare D1 databases etc.
johtso··on Show HN: Outerbase Studio – Open-Source Database GUI
Outerbase Studio is great! Been happily using it to experiment with queries over my Turso database, and see how many rows are being read when optimising.

Excited to hear that some AI stuff is going to be brought over, currently do a lot of switching back and forth with ChatGPT, and having your database schema automatically be part of the prompt would be great.

I'm guessing visualisation stuff is going to stay part of the paid offering?

johtso··on Model Context Protocol
Could this be used to voice control an android phone using Tasker functions? Just expose all the functions as actions and then let it rip?
johtso··on Show HN: A Marble Madness-inspired WebGL game we built for Netlify
Nope, arrow keys also misbehaving. Very vanilla keyboard layout. Let me know if I can provide something to help debug, maybe the key events
johtso··on Show HN: A Marble Madness-inspired WebGL game we built for Netlify
The controls don't seem to work for me. AWSD, only up and down work, unless I try to go diagonally, then it just gets "stuck" moving forever. Arrow keys no directions work unless I hold multiple keys down at once, then it also gets stuck moving.

M1 macbook pro, Arc browser

johtso··on Show HN: Jelly – A simpler shared inbox for small teams
The IMAP feature sounds interesting, but as someone who would be interested in exploring the service, but wouldn't be happy going "all in" with no way of switching back without losing data, it's a shame it's only planned as a feature in the higher tier.

Being able to try a service "risk free" seems really important. To start replying to emails in a new service and then lose them if it doesn't work out doesn't sound like a reasonable option.

johtso··on Show HN: Jelly – A simpler shared inbox for small teams
If you're a team that currently uses google teams and gmail, is there a way you could start using it in parallel? I'm guessing any replies sent through Jelly would be invisible to someone looking at gmail.
johtso··on Pi Chess Board
Yeah, the transparent board with fiduciary marks and a camera was the road I was going down at one point.

There's also a really neat solution that involves a matrix of wires, one for each row and column, and then running a current through the wires. The pieces then each interact with the current in a unique way producing a signal. You then do some clever stuff to figure out all the pieces that are on a given wire. Cheaper than RFID, and you don't need a sensor for each square and can do some multiplexing. I think it possibly uses magnets in the pieces? You can tell electronics is my strong point!

johtso··on IMG_0416
Youtube certainly isn't developer friendly.. their APIs have very strict limits that often force people to go down the scraping route
johtso··on Pi Chess Board
Not sure if I missed it, but I didn't see any mention of how player moves are detected. Is there a camera and CV? It's always seemed like a fiddly problem to solve with electronics as you end up needing a matrix of sensors so there's a lot of wiring.
johtso··on Show HN: Asterogue, my sci-fi roguelike, is now playable on the web
Loving it so far!

My only comment is that it feels like there are too many items for the amount of inventory space.

There will be rooms completely littered with boots that you just walk past. Every time you see something interesting like a potion you have to first chuck away a pair of boots before you can pick it up and drink it.

johtso··on Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
Cute! I wonder how hard it would be, rather than having the houses "bounce" up, to make some kind of CSS animation that would look a bit like they were being sketched, some kind of gradual reveal..
johtso··on Dance training superior to physical exercise in inducing brain plasticity (2018)
I also wonder if even just the close physical contact itself has a positive impact on brain chemistry.
johtso··on WALDO: Whereabouts Ascertainment for Low-Lying Detectable Objects
It's a joke.
johtso··on Plunk: The open source email platform
API tokens are server specific aren't they?
johtso··on Plunk: The open source email platform
This is exactly what I've been wrestling with recently.. it's so disappointingly absent in all the offerings out there.

The solution I ended up with was to build my own pseudo-idempotency around Postmark. It helps that Postmark at least has proper persistence so you can query their API to check if you've already sent a certain email. I had to move away from Mailchimp because, if an email gets queued for some reason, it isn't reflected as sent in the API so there's no way of knowing whether an email is hiding in "queued limbo". Postmark doesn't have this problem.

The only caveat is that there is a delay between sending an email and it being reflected in the API (seems pretty standard across the different services). This means I had to implement a simple database backed lock to make sure I never try to send the same email more than once in quick succession.

It's kind of ridiculous, but.. I couldn't find any alternative.

Edit:

Wonder if it would be worth wrapping something like this up into some kind of a self-hostable proxy service. You'd provide the idempotency key in a header and it would do the rest

johtso··on Show HN: Mutable.ai Codebase chat that uses a Wiki for RAG
Oh I see it's already done! Is it possible to update it to the latest and greatest version? I have to say, the chat responses are quite impressive so far. The linking to relevant sections of code or documentation not so much. I guess that's a pretty hard problem.
johtso··on Show HN: Mutable.ai Codebase chat that uses a Wiki for RAG
Any chance you could run this on the Effect codebase? Definitely an example of a project that can be hard to navigate due to its scope and gaps in documentation

https://github.com/Effect-TS/effect

johtso··on Use a work journal
Love the sound of this tool! Seems a bit of a shame to permanently delete anything that's been completed, sometimes it's really useful to have a record of what you've been working on.
johtso··on JSBen.ch – Performance benchmarking playground for JavaScript
Maybe those links could be updated in some automated way?
johtso··on AWS Lambda Web Adapter
That's one thing that's really nice about Cloudflare workers, you're billed on CPU time, not duration, so you can happily make slow requests to other services.
johtso··on Metaflora
It asks me to enter a species and I can't enter Latin plant names?
johtso··on Show HN: Restate – Low-latency durable workflows for JavaScript/Java, in Rust
The label "Sign in with your corporate ID" for GitHub sign in seems a little odd..
johtso··on Show HN: Restate – Low-latency durable workflows for JavaScript/Java, in Rust
Doesn't anything involving requests to other services inherently have to be idempotent because there's still a chance of a communication error resulting in an unknown outcome of the action? You don't know if the "widget order" was successfully placed or not, and therefore there's no way to know if that action can safely be tried again.
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