Hacker News Reader

selfieon Work begins on a $12B high-speed rail line between Las Vegas and Los Angeles

Build it and they'll come? At least one end has to be somewhere people want to be, right? A line from London into the countryside makes sense. You can live in the countryside and work in London. A line from nowhere to nowhere is a chicken/egg problem. Now if one end is an Airport and another is a new community who will have jobs at the airport, that might work.

selfieon The failure of the Domino's 30-minute delivery guarantee

Yeah, you can pick a year of your choice, and find a story like this.

selfieon Tell HN: Ever think of applying to YC? Do it this weekend for S24

Yeah, if PG takes me out for a steak, I will believe it :-). An email that cost $0.000001 on SES, nah!

selfieon Tell HN: Ever think of applying to YC? Do it this weekend for S24

That means nothing though. If you (N=1) apply to Google and get rejected but take a Facebook job, it doesn't mean people shouldn't apply to Google.

selfieon Who's hiring that's impactful, doesn't suck, and isn't morally bankrupt?

Gitlab?

selfieon Build Club AI Accelerator (Sydney, AU, Then SF)

https://www.buildclub.ai/accelerator

Perhaps is the better link. It talks about the perks.

selfieon Show HN: Vapi – Convince our voice AI to give you the secret code

I think so - I started doing a binary search >50000 -> <75000 -> <65000 -> <55000 -> <52500 then wondered if it was 50000, so guessed that. It said I was right, well done, the answer is indeed 02563!

selfieon Show HN: An app that takes your money if you don't reach your goals

Do you take the money, or do your users split it between their friends and you take a cut?

The take the money one has been done (Beeminder, and others probably), but sure different flavours are welcome.

The split with friends I haven't seen. That would be pretty cool, especially if you can do it without needing to pay banks a txn fee, or perhaps a tiny one (maybe you take a 5% of profits fee from participents, or similar). Crypto is the other option (!).

The split with friends is great becuase

* People less likely to lie to friends than a SaaS. Which is good for both parties.

* Social motivation and financial motivation.

* If you lose it's like losing a game of poker with mates, not a big deal (as long as you kept the stakes reasonable).

selfieon Insatiable: A life without eating

Spill the beans. That statement by itself sounds like the byline of a 5G/flat earth crank.

selfieon Covid infections are causing IQ drops and years of brain aging, studies suggest

Except chronic fatigue / long covid could affect IQ as tested. It might be that you have the CPU but the power supply isn't up to voltage, so to speak, so the CPU has to run slow.

selfieon Sleep apnea: Mouthguards less invasive, just as effective as CPAP

I guess it's kinda funny

selfieon Sleep apnea: Mouthguards less invasive, just as effective as CPAP

I assume you are not aware of it, because of being asleep. Maybe it happens in deeper sleep?

selfieon Sleep apnea: Mouthguards less invasive, just as effective as CPAP

Can you refute this?

https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/can-mouth-tap....

selfieon Show HN: I made a tool to clean and convert any webpage to Markdown

Vercel!! Watch out for you bill now this is being hugged. Hopefully you are not using <Image /> like they pester you to do.

selfieon How I prepare a talk for a tech conference (2022)

Yes this sort of thing! There was one posted on HN back where the speaker says, in the middle of other context fairly deep in, recognise this number? 3.14159265358779323846264338327950288419, and then shows that it isn't actually Pi, (one of the digits is swapped, he may have swapped a different digit to me). Nice joke because is reminds us to challenge assumptions too!

selfieon The Battle to Define Mental Illness (2010)

So, this: https://xkcd.com/435/

selfieon How I prepare a talk for a tech conference (2022)

I like a joke that is about the subject matter. A subtle pun that makes a smile but doesn't interrupt the flow at all. Another way to make it entertaining is make it a story. Forget jokes, make it about how you had to mop up the leaks in the server room as an intern before getting to the rack that had the crashed hard disk. Or something.

I remember the first meme like presentations back in 2002 at work and I hated it. It's like stop learning, now you have to find this picture funny (maybe it was some star wars reference, and I haven't watched them), and we will get back to it. It was cringe!

selfieon Htmx and the Rule of Least Power

Render is a different thing in both places. Server Renders is ... formatting a sequence of bytes. Hopefully your templating engine is optimized and it is a low cost operation. Rendering on the client is obviously more involved as it requires actual rendering on the screen using the graphics drivers.

On the other side of the scale, React has overheads like a virtual dom.

It is a complicated question as to what is most performant, who bares that cost, and so on.

selfieon Show HN: My $1k self-install, off-grid solar backup build for renters

How is self install possible if you are not a licensed electrician. Something like this could shock someone if not earthed properly, for example.

selfieon Htmx and the Rule of Least Power

That is right, so from a security perspective, as an end user, you can't "Disable JS, but enable HTMX only".

However a a developer or team, if you say "this page only includes the HTMX library and no other scripts" (something that is easy to verify) then you know a lot about what can and can't happen.

In a sense HTMX is a framework that provides a non-turing complete DSL with limited interactions.

Whereas React alone provides... well nothing, because it isn't a framework. You need JS to initiate it, and do anything with it at all! So a React app by extension must have a lot (or maybe a little, rarely) custom Turing-complete code with access to the entire operating system that is the Web API!

(I appreciate that people's definition of Framework vs. Library will differ, but the main point stands that React requires a decent chunk of turing complete code to do anything useful, whereas HTMX requires no turing complete code on the client but just markup.)

selfieon Htmx and the Rule of Least Power

A HTMX-y app will typically be a fetch-heavy app. Think TODO list, where each time you add a todo, you want that persisted on the server anyway. Yes you are sending more down the wire. I doubt rendering a partial HTML template is that much more work than formatting JSON but there is more crap to send down the line for sure.

Where the application is doing lots of micro-level stuff, like maybe you are drawing on a canvas and occasionally sending a payload of updates to a server, I think then HTMX would be much slower and clunkier, and that is when you dust off your React.

selfieon Htmx and the Rule of Least Power

The rule of least power (a bit like the principle of least privilege) is a great thing for both security and understandability of code.

selfieon Show HN: Mazelit - My wife and I released our first game

The website is something else! https://something.pink/. It is really fun to use. Privacy being the bathroom is funny!

selfieon Show HN: Mazelit - My wife and I released our first game

Err... most things. Furniture for example.

selfieon There’s a 30-year old dead Rabbit in Seven Sisters tube station

There is almost a unicode for it: ʁ

selfieon There’s a 30-year old dead Rabbit in Seven Sisters tube station

A dead rabbit would be plausible though: it could have been trapped in the foundations and found during remedial work, for example.

selfieon Here's a puzzle game. I call it Reverse the List of Integers

Could a constraint solver just rip through this problem?