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sirtimbly

60 karma · joined January 26, 2015

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sirtimbly··on Flock cameras keep telling police a man who doesn't have a warrant has a warrant
Impersonal, tech-mediated surveillance was clearly the next logical step for law enforcement after the events of 2020.
sirtimbly··on NASA Force
ohhh... right, clearly, they only expected Mac users to open the web page or to apply.
sirtimbly··on Why I love NixOS
All the fun of Terraform with none of the profitability.
sirtimbly··on Monosketch
finally!
sirtimbly··on Ink: React for interactive CLI apps
JS will eat the software world. So having better tools on par with charm in the go world would be great.
sirtimbly··on Launch HN: Patchwork (YC W24) – Team communication based on feeds, not chat
Your design is very friendly and approachable. I appreciate the attempt to take another swing at this problem. I've been using Teams for a year now, and they are trying to do some of this same stuff, but what they missed was the key of the composing experience, being too high-stakes. Like you point out:

> they’ve often overlooked the fact that writing a post has more friction than writing a chat message, which is why people often revert back to doing everything over chat

Anyway, you have a really good idea with the LLM generated title and TLDR. I worry about not having trust in an algorithmically ranked timeline, so you might want to make that feature optional, or do a top-level tab like they did on twitter. Or give users ability to influence the rankings.

sirtimbly··on Show HN: Godspeed is a fast, 100% keyboard oriented todo app for Mac
This app makes me happy. As happy as when I first used "The Hit List" back in 2007. Custom themes would be nice.
sirtimbly··on Large scale precursor correlations between cosmic rays and earthquakes (2022)
Fascinating. At first I just thought this title was ridiculous, but basically the authors are saying that the magnetic properties of the core affect cosmic radiation detection, so therefore any massive anomaly deep in the earth's core would

1. have an effect on cosmic radiation detection, and 2. is also likely to precede widespread global seismic activity.

They adjusted the radiation detection data for global sunspot numbers and saw a correlation of the specific event of the 2010 Chile earthquake.

If this holds true for more events, a sort of "geophysical weather forecast" could be possible!

sirtimbly··on Launch HN: Electric Air (YC W23) – Heat pump sold directly to homeowners
Yes yes! One million times yes! Shut up and take my money.

$4K lower than a quote from a local contractor for a less capable system.

sirtimbly··on Snow Crash Related Items Auction
The sort of collectible one of his characters would purchase after a successful exit from a crypto startup. But it is beautiful. Also what is this new snowcrash story he was working on!?!
sirtimbly··on Launch HN: Moonrepo (YC W23) – Open-source build system
try googling for it... spell check autocorrect is killing it.
sirtimbly··on Moonwalkers: Shoes that make you walk faster (pre-order)
"Urban mobility" is such a rich vein for startups, it makes me think living in a city is pretty awful.
sirtimbly··on Museums on prescription: Brussels tests cultural visits to treat anxiety
Taking my children to museums does not reduce my anxiety.
sirtimbly··on Show HN: I made CSS Scan 3.0, a fast way to check and copy CSS
This tool addresses one aspect of my job really well, looking at how a dev implemented my figma design, and showing them exactly which little tweaks need to be made to fix it up. Of course inspector works too, but it's just like buying [Cleanshot](https://cleanshot.com/) instead of using the built in macOS screenshot tools. Providing a more refined experience for something I need as part of my regular job.

It's expensive for what it is, yes. But as a self-employed consultant, these (non-subscription) business expenses for software are my favorite.

sirtimbly··on Sick and struggling to pay, 100M people in the U.S. live with medical debt
Yes. Debt is the entire story of the American economy, from top to bottom, it's not inherently evil. It's useful for creating new wealth. But of course it gets misused also.
sirtimbly··on Sick and struggling to pay, 100M people in the U.S. live with medical debt
That sounds like a solid improvement. It really is a different class of market interaction.
sirtimbly··on Sick and struggling to pay, 100M people in the U.S. live with medical debt
I hate the way the health-care system works and how it's affected me and those close to me. I spent much of my adult life paying off medical debt exactly like they describe. Defrayed by parents somewhat, but still a significant burden for many years. On one hand, we have debt and bankruptcy as a tool to help individuals deal with costs that would be impossible to save up for. On the other hand, this quote from the article rings true:

> “We have a health care system almost perfectly designed to create debt.”

This was true before the ACA – and is still true.

sirtimbly··on Ask HN: What to do about ‘Good at programming Bad at Leetcode’
Ahhh! Now I know what this style of interview is called! Thanks for explaining what the heck was going on in some of the interviews I went through in the last few years. Since 2005 spent a long time at 2 companies and then went self-employed 6 years ago. When getting back into full-time employment around 2019, I had a couple really weird interviews where they gave me some intense timed puzzle solving "games", and then brushed me off. I was so confused because it had no relevance to any of the web development work I had done, ever, in my years of career experience, and it was super stressful.

I thought these hiring managers were insane. I get it now. I think code tests are fine, but timed puzzles just don't tell anyone much about any dev's ability to assemble features out of higher-level tools.

sirtimbly··on TRPC: End-to-end typesafe APIs made easy
Conceptually, yes. But type definitions are exported by declarative lines in the same code that runs. Basically the schema is imperative code that runs actual validations, the tRPC methodology simply looks at the inferred types from that code to enforce consistency between client and server rather than parsing an actual static schema artifact (e.g. a .gql file).
sirtimbly··on TRPC: End-to-end typesafe APIs made easy
Correct! Instead of codegen, it relies on the TS language server to enforce schema compliance.
sirtimbly··on Actual is going open-source
I've used both. firefly-iii is a fairly good, easy to maintain and host, web app. It's not as good design or UX as Actual - especially since firefly-iii has no mobile experience to speak of. Acutal had great mobile apps. firefly's budgeting interface is a bit of a UX mess.
sirtimbly··on Actual is going open-source
It's in an established and competitive market. There's money flowing into companies doing this same thing. An investor throwing (some) capital at marketing and growth for this totally functional (and beautiful) product could have made sense.
sirtimbly··on Actual is going open-source
Sad that this app didn't achieve the scale of subscriptions it deserved. A good reminder that awesome tech isn't usually enough. Do you regret not taking capital to fund marketing and support full time? Or put another way, any other ideas of where you could have spent someone else's money to give you a boost into higher subscription numbers?
sirtimbly··on New lightweight material is stronger than steel
Pressure vessels. Big ones.
sirtimbly··on The perfect configuration format? Try TypeScript
The line between configuration and code is always a little blurry. There are some projects where using a .js file for the "configuration" of another operation is incredibly useful. TS makes even more sense in many of those situations. Lots of configuration files require pre-processing already, like merging shell env vars in with textutil or something like that. So, I wouldn't dismiss this opinion outright.
sirtimbly··on California tried to save the nation from tax filing, then Intuit stepped in
How unsurprising that a government wanted to further obfuscate how much money they want to take from their citizens.
sirtimbly··on Launch HN: Buoyant (YC S21) – Blimp drones for air freight
I can't stop thinking about this. Logistic systems that utilize heli-stats and other drones for various flexible and inconvenient legs of the route seem incredibly powerful to replace trucks and small planes. Automation will change everything.
sirtimbly··on A simple way to build collaborative web apps
A 225K gzipped .wasm file download for a client-side state management and persisistence layer is not great. It is competitive with some similar solutions, but still a lot for any web app's performance budget
sirtimbly··on Small cities in America’s Mountain West are booming
Optimizing for distance from a national forest seemed like a good idea when purchasing a home 5 years ago. Still seems like a solid plan. Home price rises are great, but sorta irrelevant when you're happy with where you live already, and it's likely that you can keep working remotely as long as you like.
sirtimbly··on Machhapuchhare - The Himalayan Peak Off Limits to Climbers
I saw it from Pokhara on a trek, and it's a lovely bit of romanticism to think that there is a summit left on earth that is unconquered by choice, at least for a while. It humanizes the mountains, and it's a fun story to hear from the guides.
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