HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

s-video

200 karma · joined February 10, 2021

what's up?

http://s-video.net/

submissionscomments
s-video··on Nobody cares
I feel like this reveals some sampling error in the OP rant. When you see something negative get made that makes you think "nobody cares", you're not seeing the people who did care and left.
s-video··on The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive
NEL was a brief deviation from the usual CDL one-borrower-at-a-time system. Parent asked how CDL, not NEL, hurt authors.
s-video··on One Laptop per Child
I had one of these as a kid, got it as a christmas present because my dad did the give one get one thing. It was a lot of fun and I remember messing around with Python on there because it came with an interpreter, I think.
s-video··on Any sufficiently advanced uninstaller is indistinguishable from malware
Hah, I had the same experience. Saw microsoft.com and thought "it's gonna be a Raymond, I can feel it"
s-video··on Kenneth Anger has died
I watched Lucifer Rising when I was a teenager because some of my Tumblr friends recommended it to me. While I can't say I took much away from it other than it looked cool, I'll always have some fond memories of that time associated with it.
s-video··on Effective Spaced Repetition
1. Have you read Andy Matuschak's guide to prompt writing? Your post reminded me of it. https://andymatuschak.org/prompts/

2. Do you have any sort of guide or principles for note-taking? I'm always debating whether or not it's worth taking notes, and when I do take notes I'm debating what the best way to do it is. (Hierarchal/bulleted information like in your post, or summarizing things in paragraphs, or what) A lot of times it's unclear to me what information is worth writing and it frustrates me.

s-video··on Git Internals – Git Objects
Even though I might use these commands only rarely, this made me feel more confident with Git.
s-video··on Why are online recipes so long-winded?
I'd like to shout out Adam Ragusea for having a >2M subscriber cooking channel while not doing any of this.
s-video··on “They wanted my Instagram handle, and somehow they've now got it.”
Is this how new brands get usernames that would otherwise seem to be claimed long ago?
s-video··on Noma, Rated the World’s Best Restaurant, Is Closing Its Doors
https://archive.ph/PNyh1
s-video··on My bad habit of hoarding information
I think you if you have a particular goal with using the computer it gets easier to avoid hoarding. I'm trying to get better at writing code that's easy to read and change, which is admittedly too vague but it can still help me be real with myself and close tabs that don't have anything to do with it.

For example, here's two tabs I opened recently:

A Neat XOR Trick: https://www.mattkeeter.com/blog/2022-12-10-xor/

Code Only Says What it Does: https://brooker.co.za/blog/2020/06/23/code

So that first one is about solving an advent of code problem cleverly. That second one makes some nice points about how code doesn't necessarily capture your intent or the reasons you wrote what you did. So if I had both of those open in my browser or in some queue for unread links, and I wanted to cut down, I'd delete the first one.

I also find it helpful to ask if a link has any information that isn't already covered by some other resource in more depth. So if my goal was to learn more about compilers I might be tempted to save the blog post OP links to about writing a brainfuck compiler in Go with LLVM but there's already resources like Crafting Interpreters out there, so I'd probably only give that blog post a skim and not bother saving the link. (But if it was my goal to specifically write a brainfuck compiler, or write a compiler in Go, or write a compiler that uses LLVM, or some combination, I'd be more likely to save that particular post.)

s-video··on Best ecommerce UX practices from mcmaster.com
This is what crosses my mind and bugs me whenever I see an article like this. As much as I hate the Amazon-style pages, I understand they're like that because that's what their business is, and that saying everyone should do it like McMaster is pretty futile.
s-video··on Launch HN: Shimmer (YC S21) – ADHD coaching for adults
>With your permission, I'd love to share these tools and tips with our coaches,

Well, sure, it's not like I own them!

I guess the first line of my post came off a bit jaded. After having people paid to deal with my ADHD not come up with anything truly effective in my whole education since high school, it was both relieving and disappointing to end up figuring out something myself. If your app helps people figure out what works for them, then best of luck to you.

s-video··on Launch HN: Shimmer (YC S21) – ADHD coaching for adults
I'm an adult with ADHD but this doesn't appeal to me because I've already found behavioral techniques that work really well for ~free.

I'll try and describe one briefly: I use a free app called Virtual Motivaider[1] to make my phone vibrate every 2 to 6 minutes. I'll print a sheet[2] that has a table with two columns. Every row is the same: the first column has the text "Am I on Task?" and the second column has two check boxes, "[ ] Yes [ ] No". When I start a task that I typically struggle to hold my attention to, I start the app, and when I feel the vibration, I check off if I was on task or not. I picked the 2 to 6 minutes interval arbitrarily; there could be many other intervals that work just as well. There's also probably other apps out there that just vibrate at a user-set interval.

This has worked extremely well for me. It seems that just recording a behavior can increase it or decrease it in the direction that you want.

I learned about this from a textbook called "Applied Behavior Analysis" by Cooper et al, in a chapter titled "Self-Management". If my technique (technically known as "self-monitoring of attention" or "self-monitoring of on task behavior") sounds interesting, I would recommend finding a pdf of that book and reading that chapter. It has some vocabulary that's defined earlier in the book, so you can just look them up in the index or glossary as you read. The book and the field it hails from can be annoyingly dogmatic, though.

I'll stop talking about it for now, but I do like to share this whenever adult ADHD comes up because its helped me dramatically, and much more so than any professionally-run special education program I was in or popular psychology book about habits or getting things done. OP, I haven't looked at your app or page too deeply so maybe you're already doing something like this or other behavioral techniques, but if you're not, it might be worth checking out.

[1] The company that made Virtual Motivaider also sells (well, they stopped producing them because of COVID difficulties, but they're currently trying to get them back) a physical product called Motivaider. It looks like a digital kitchen timer but it just does the same thing as the app. I bought one after using the app for some time, and while the app worked very well, the physical product has some nice benefits, like a very distinct and quiet vibration, and a lot less friction to start a new session.

[2] Printing out new sheets for each task, or printing out a lot and then having to get one for each task, turned out to be pretty inconvenient, so I've since compressed the table into a 2 row by 15 column one, where in the first column the first row has a "Y" and the second one has an "N". The rest of the columns are for putting an x in the Y or N row. I fit 6 of these in a 6 x 9 inch document, made a pdf of 100 of these pages, then used a print on demand service to print a spiral bound book of it, which I carry with me between work and home. This has eliminated a ton of friction and I've ended up using this technique much more often.

s-video··on How to Generate Random Numbers That Average to a Specific Value
Thought this was a neat trick. Doesn't require any complicated math functions.
s-video··on Meet the Lobbyist Next Door
When I search for a current political topic on twitter, I find a lot of posts from popular and usually verified accounts from both sides of the spectrum, using this rhetoric which shares this identical... cadence? Style? I'm not sure the word for it. But some recent trends with these accounts are starting tweets with "to be clear...", making liberal (lol) use of line breaks, and ending on some short "mic drop" sentence. Like this:

"To be clear, if you're opposed to student debt forgiveness, you're not advocating for 'fiscal responsibility'.

You're just an asshole."

I'm assuming that this trend is just influencers noticing what gets a lot of engagement lately, but they're all copying it so well that it almost feels like they're being coordinated. It's uncanny.

s-video··on “UBO Minus (MV3)” – An Experimental uBlock Origin Build for Manifest V3
No cosmetic filtering might still tip me over into switching to Firefox.
s-video··on Oberon (2009)
I installed the Oberon OS (A2) emulator and showed it to my friend. We burst out laughing at that program that makes a skeleton run across the screen. If you keep executing it, it just spawns more skeletons and we had a skeleton parade.
s-video··on A model for journalistic copypasta
>I think most people don’t realize how much of what they read is regurgitated press kits.

Are there any websites that just cut the middleman and link or reproduce the press kits themselves?

s-video··on Advanced Metaprogramming in C: A select statement
libmill and libdill are similar but different projects by the same author. I think he just let the libmill domain expire. What's funny is the site is a GitHub Pages site, so it's still there on the libmill repository, and could be accessed at https://sustrik.github.io/libmill but it's configured to redirect to that expired libmill domain so it's inaccessible.
s-video··on How to Design Programs
I started reading this and taking the edx course that’s based on it (How to Code) the other week. I feel pretty comfortable reading code and modifying things, and finding documentation, but tend to get stuck deciding how my data structures or types should be laid out. This week I’ve hit the “How to Design Data” part of the course and it’s been giving me a lot of clarity.
s-video··on Book of Proof [pdf]
I finished working through the first chapter of this book last week. It's a lovely book, but I'm not sure if I'll keep going because I don't know what use I have for proofs right now.
s-video··on Show HN: I made a deceptively simple but hard sliding puzzle
I felt so cool for beating it and then I saw "Current level: Easy"
s-video··on My real life use-case for generics in Go: API for client-side pagination
I majored in computer engineering and only touched embedded C and assembly (and MATLAB). I later picked up Go when I wanted to write code to run on regular computers. I never actually touched generics until they were being introduced to Go and I genuinely didn't realize what they could be used for.
s-video··on Why Google is so unbearable, and how to fix it
This is nitpicky but the tire changing page doesn't actually fit your rational for choosing .edu pages

>Professors are paid generous salaries to share knowledge with the paying customers of the University (students). So, let’s find some paid unpaid University knowledge on how to change a tire by using our new trick!

But the bottom of the page says

>Prepared by: [students] For Dr. Bruce Magee's English 303 (Technical Writing) Class, Winter 1997-1998.

The professor is actually an English professor and the page was written by students as an assignment. I looked into this because I was wondering, "what would a professor be teaching that he's writing notes on tire changing?". There's probably some professor out there that does that in an academic context, but there's probably a lot of things that no professor actually gets paid to write about. Maybe they would write about something miscellaneous like that anyway and put it online, but they would be doing so out of the culture of web savvy professors having personal pages where they upload stuff they think is helpful.

s-video··on How Go mitigates supply chain attacks
I love Go as well, but I don't think being the first to kick up a flame war will do anything for us.
s-video··on libmill - Go-style concurrency in C
>Someone on the 9fans mailing list ported it to a micro-controller

Do you have a link to this?

s-video··on Go 1.18
The thing that worries me is people trying to reconstruct features from other languages with generics. One of the things I like about Go is that no matter whose code you're looking at, it's almost certain that you're already familiar with any feature you'll see, because the set of features is relatively small.
s-video··on Godocs.io One Year Later
I appreciate the work the Go team put into pkg.go.dev, and I like the new features they've put in (e.g. flagging deprecated things, the search is great) and hope those get into godocs.io as well. But I really just don't care for how its designed compared to the old godoc.org. (and go.dev compared to the old golang.org) It just doesn't gel with me. I wish I had the design vocabulary to explain why. It just feels big, and loud, and cramped. And I really don't care for the animations and drop shadows. The old docs site and old home page just felt quieter, less commercial, yet still fresh and modern and professional. My ideal Go docs site would have the appearance of the old golang.org/pkg pages, with a fixed width.

I don't even agree with a lot of the criticism thrown at pkg.go.dev. In older threads Russ Cox gave perfectly acceptable reasons to not accept every license. (legal stuff, better safe than sorry) There's the fact that the source wasn't available for like a month at first, but that changed once it was brought up, and I don't think the Go team was trying hide anything or something. It's mostly just the design that gets me.

That, and, I'm little puzzled as to how they rolled out pkg.go.dev, and go.dev, and replaced golang.org with go.dev. Like, at first they rolled out pkg.go.dev, saying "godoc.org is really old, so we're replacing it". Sure. But pkg.go.dev obviously came with go.dev, which they just called a "discovery site" (or something to that effect, I don't remember). ...okay? Then they stripped off golang.org/pkg (the old standard library documentation) and the reason they gave was to reduce the number of doc servers they had to run. And finally, they just scrapped golang.org and replaced it with go.dev.

What's really odd to me is that, in retrospect, it seems like they had a long term plan to replace golang.org altogether, at least since they rolled out pkg.go.dev, but just... didn't mention it? It seems highly unlikely that they just rolled out a new package doc site, along with a free bonus "discovery site" -- they never billed it as a new home page until it became the actual home page -- and then noticed the discovery site could conveniently be the new home page.

Furthermore, on Twitter, someone criticized the way go.dev has corporate logos, and one of the Go project managers (or some such role, I don't know) replied that it was for funding the project. (I'll dig up that thread if someone REALLY wants me to) So, I'm really convinced that it was always the plan to replace golang.org, but its just bizarre to me that it wasn't communicated like that since the start. It sort of came off as a series of happy accidents. Why not just announce the plan to replace golang.org at the start? Why wait to announce your intentions until you actually do it? I'm not trying to be accusatory and suspicious, I don't think anyone should be, but it's something that I just can't get off of my mind.

...ok, all that said, I'm really grateful for the work and progress done with godocs.io. Keep it up! :)

s-video··on Google Search Is Dying
Word of warning regarding the "site:reddit.com" trick: even reddit can get astroturfed.

I share OP's pain though. I wish there was a search engine that actively filtered affiliate link laden/spammy/SEO'd/etc content.

Page 1 of 2Next →