Hacker News Reader

leemacon Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)

This is wonderful. I've often wondered about small, human-only groups forming in tighter social circles, which can be hard to find.

leemacon Tell HN: macOS 26.4.1 bricked my MBP

Same issue here. I updated and left my machine for a few days. Came back and was unresponsive. I had to use the 26.3.1 firmware and DFU restore. I have a 16" M2 Macbook.

leemacon Ask HN: Share your personal website

https://leemckinnon.com/

I haven't had anything interesting to post over time, but glad I bought my domain years ago for various reasons (yikes, 2007 it looks like, 20 years?!). Will try to throw a PR up, young kids keep me busy.

leemacon How Postgres Triggers Can Simplify Your Back End Development

I spent the better half of a decade trying to rid us of the business logic in the database. At some point, the hole was too deep as we had stored procedures calling each other, such a mess. I could go on and on but also found hiring difficult, we were a small team so a database-only developer was a hard pill to swallow.

I eventually left. We pivoted to a new product and leadership agreed the old system was legacy to remain untouched. Eventually this thinking changed and the old product was to be integrated with the new. Sprocs were back baby! My battle was lost, I was done.

leemacon GitHub was down

Sent in a commit to fix a few PR suggestions. It went through, but nowhere to be found on the PR. Guess I'll have to wait.

leemacon Show HN: I built an After Effects for dummies

Ahh! This is so cool!! Really neat idea, very slick.

Played around with the demo, very well done! I love the walk-through.

Small issue: I noticed you can click on multiple music/sounds and they start to stack with each playing over the other (using Windows/FireFox). That was the only issue I encountered during a quick play-through.

Good luck!

leemacon How to make pizza like a Neapolitan master

A few years back I gave the Roccbox a shot (https://us.gozney.com/products/roccbox). It takes a special flour (Tipo 00 is what I use) so it doesn't char at 850F. The oven is certainly not cheap and there are cheaper alternatives, but I wanted something portable and more rugged-makes camping fun and we cook more than pizza. It get's me that nice charred bottom, but I typically tend to overcook the cheese.

I still continue to use my oven at times, especially when the weather isn't helping. The broiler is helpful there with a pizza stone.

No matter what I use, it's a fine dance to get things right. Sometimes it comes out great, especially when I give things a few days to cold-rise in the fridge. Usually something goes wrong, either too burnt, not fully cooked, or simply not enough pizza :)

leemacon Ask HN: What projects are you working on now?

I'm working on a self-hosted app to track family history and stories. I've got photos going back to the 20s and my dad seems to have so many stories I want to capture around them. I also had an uncle pass recently and finding photos of him for the services was so manual. I'd love to have some photo-tagging of sorts. Perhaps allow family to upload their stash of photos.

It's also giving me a fun chance to dive deeper into ASP.NET Core/React/TypeScript, something I work with professionally, but just haven't had the time to fiddle.

leemacon Ask HN: How Do You Read?

Very cool, thanks for the link to your notes repo. I share your pain with a horrible memory. I may very well start taking notes and storing it similarly to how you've done it.

leemacon Swedish Couple Builds Greenhouse Around Home

Ah, I had a feeling I'd seen this before. Fascinating project, thanks for the link to previous video I had seen a while back!

leemacon Starsky Robotics Becomes First Uncrewed Truck to Hit 55 MPH

Interesting stuff. I'll certainly tell him about this. He's been talking about retirement for some time (early-to-mid 60's) but he's a workaholic like my own father. He's always had a challenging time finding trucking jobs that are local in the Vermont area, but should an opportunity arise where he can drive anywhere closer to home, I think his ears will perk up.

leemacon Starsky Robotics Becomes First Uncrewed Truck to Hit 55 MPH

This is exciting technology! My father in-law is a trucker, although nearly retired. He's fascinated by the developments made by you guys.

I'm not entirely familiar with the industry and day-to-day of a trucker, but I'd imagine you'd need some "on the ground" personnel, at least initially, to perform tasks such as fueling on long hauls.

Aside from this, it'd be interesting to see how quickly you can go coast-to-coast without a human needing a break/sleep.

leemacon Norway aviation firm orders 60 all-electric airplanes, drops operation costs 80%

I wonder this as well.

I've only flown 12 hours in a traditional aircraft (piper warrior iii), but there's certainly a few things I'd imagine a pilot would want to know before taking off in something traditional (oil pressure, manifold, switching fuel takes, checking fuel quality, etc.). Maybe just enough training in a traditional aircraft for a few extra hours to be rated properly.

I'm certainly excited for the possibility for electric aircraft, hopefully in my lifetime. Less maintenance, less things to go wrong, cheaper, (quieter/less vibration?) etc.

leemacon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2018)

Ledgex (https://ledgex.com) | Waltham, MA | Full-Time, Onsite OR Remote if in USA | Full Stack Senior .NET Engineer

We're a small group of engineers and investment professionals looking to expand our company. Ledgex is a FinTech company focused on developing software to help multi-asset investors (endowments, foundations, family offices, outsourced chief investment officers, and pensions) better manage their assets and their time.

We're hiring a few people to help start a new product with myself and a few others from the company. This is a greenfield project using our existing product as a guide.

- Full Stack Senior .NET Engineer - https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/207372/full-stack-senior-net-...

Find out more about our company here: https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/companies/ledgex

Tech Stack: ASP.NET Core (MVC on certain products), ReactJS/TypeScript (Backbone on certain products), Azure

leemacon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2018)

Ledgex (https://ledgex.com) | Waltham, MA | Full-Time, Onsite | Full Stack Senior .NET Engineer | UX/UI Designer

We're hiring a few people to help start a new product with myself and a few others from the company. This is a greenfield project using our existing product as a guide.

- UI/UX Designer - https://angel.co/ledgex-systems/jobs/435409-lead-ux-ui-desig...

- Full Stack Senior .NET Engineer - https://angel.co/ledgex-systems/jobs/435407-full-stack-senio...

Tech Stack: ASP.NET Core, ReactJS/TypeScript, Azure

leemacon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2018)

Ledgex | SQL Developer | Full-time | Boston area | Remote

We're looking for a SQL (MS-SQL) developer to assist with our backend. We started in 2010 and have a small close-knit team. Company is 100% remote in the Boston area and we'd prefer someone in the region (within 1-3 hours drive) to meetup bi-weekly in the city. We get together from time to time after hours. We may be getting a physical office at some point for meetups and for those who want to get out of the house.

Our system is ASP.NET based and hosted on Azure with the option for on-premise setups. We have one other SQL developer that you'd be working with along with the application/QA/and product team.

Interested? Job details can be found here: https://recruiting.ultipro.com/EZE1000EZECI/JobBoard/2a337c1...

Read more about our company here: http://ledgex.com/

leemacon Drip Irrigation Design Guidelines

I have a small irrigation setup that works somewhat well for my needs. I have a small pond/waterfall pump inside a rain barrel that pushes a decent flow to my emitters that water my lettuce and cucumber plants. The pump inside the barrel is connected to an outdoor Z-Wave switch that is ultimately controlled by my SmartThings hub.

The main downside is it's currently manual and water is limited in the barrel. The rain barrel can only hold so much water and at times, I find my ZWave switch will turn off, then back on, which eventually drains the barrel if I'm away. I usually turn it on/off on hot nights when I'm home so I can monitor it.

Next summer I'll take a different approach with some of the ideas from this article. Perhaps use the rain barrel only if it's full (using sonar sensors that ping off the water level), but use the main house line as the primary.

That hacker/tinkerer in me wants to ultimately build a system that waters based on weather patterns/demands. I'll save that for next year.

leemacon Elon Musk's Promises and Goals for Tesla, SpaceX, and More

I was surprised as well. This is also on the front page which is interesting given the target audience. In a strange way I find it fun, though a bit unusable.

leemacon Elon Musk's Promises and Goals for Tesla, SpaceX, and More

The UI here is fascinating. I'm so lost, yet I'm so intrigued to keep clicking around.

leemacon I Stopped Attending Programming Meet-ups

I'm in the same boat. There are a ton of Boston meetups, but I live in the suburbs for many lifestyle reasons. The commute doesn't justify sticking around after hours when I have an hour and a half walk/train/drive home.

leemacon Show HN: Publish a Markdown website in 5 minutes

same here. perhaps it's a domain use previously for a bad purpose? "Site is blocked for a Security Threat"

leemacon My Experience Running Development at a Startup

"For smaller projects like microservices, isolated applications, even parts of the UI that most users don’t see, experiment."

I agree with this part 100%. We're still rocking BackboneJS that we chose in 2011 or so. Sure it's behind the times as they say, but it's rock solid for our uses. We're in too deep to convert now and the cost doesn't outweigh the benefits. Clients are happy and we're happy.

In other newer areas, we're experimenting, mostly with RabbitMQ for small things on the backend and React Native on Mobile. With UI on new projects not in the core web app, we experiment. Works rather well and keeps us sane with the pace of JS frameworks.

leemacon Designing a SaaS Database for Scale with Postgres

I second this strategy. It does cause a few more headaches, but overall clients prefer it to a single DB. We're in enterprise finance, so this comes up a lot and the answer is typically well received.

Almost all the points above are the precise reason we went database-per-tenant. We also chose this method because our system was self-hosted originally (Single DB, non-multi-tenant) for 4 years or so. Adding columns to each table to separate was not ideal and we didn't want to run the risk of 'forgetting a where clause' at any point.

For those wondering, all of our databases have the same schema. We use Visual Studio Database Projects to handle updates to keep it all in sync.

leemacon Setup Keybase.io, GPG and Git to sign commits on GitHub

and they're gone!

leemacon Setup Keybase.io, GPG and Git to sign commits on GitHub

Here are a couple I received, a few co-workers took the rest :^)

https://keybase.io/inv/172ce0cd26

https://keybase.io/inv/84129b0e36

leemacon Setup Keybase.io, GPG and Git to sign commits on GitHub

Thanks for the invite! I'll reply here with a bunch when mine are available.

leemacon Show HN: GitHub project structure visualizer

I tried dotnet/corefx but quickly realized my mistake. Very cool once you get a repo that is a bit smaller.

leemacon Code management that doesn't suck

Some of the English is sounds a bit quirky to me ... "Pull Requests like never seen before"?

Interesting nonetheless as we've been looking for software similar to Gerrit.

leemacon The Darker Side of Aaron Swartz (2013)

That was surprising to me as well. Having had it since I was 4-5 years old (28 now), it did alter my schooling/friendships. I suppose depression did set in for a while. Some of the medicine's would cause my face to swell up which made me a target for name calling (Prednisone).

College was different though with most people being much more mature. My diet has changed and I'm on a light dose of medication that's kept it at bay for almost 10 years. My last flare-up in 2008 was a killer because I also had the flu at the time, double whammy!

leemacon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2015)

sorry, remote isn't an option. Wish it was!