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slow_donkey

394 karma · joined January 26, 2018

hn at raindeer dot io
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slow_donkey··on Show HN: Munchy, a search engine to discover recipes
I tried solving this with a search engine that accounted for reviews with some manual curation, but I realized there's actually an extremely limited set of 'good' recipe sites and kept returning the same 10 sites with a long tail of average sites.

You could improve upon this by establishing site authority for a topic (cuisine), but it still seemed pointless to me.

slow_donkey··on Jeff Varasano's NY Pizza Recipe (2008)
Also check out https://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php which is a treasure trove of pizza experiments. Varasano himself was active on the forum back in the day (~2005) and a few members actually started their own pizzerias.
slow_donkey··on Jeff Varasano's NY Pizza Recipe (2008)
To be fair this is a very very old list dating back to 2006/2008 and these were the pizza names that came up constantly at that time - it's also only rating the shops that he personally traveled to which were predominantly NY/Neapolitan because that's likely what he was benchmarking his own restaurant against.
slow_donkey··on Terraform 1.0
You can use it standalone and manage the state yourself.

Looks like they actually might have added locking recently with https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi/pull/2697 but I haven't looked deeply

slow_donkey··on Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project
I agree with you but nothing about the comment was discussing whether or not people will pay for repl.it

The context of this HN post is about originality itself.

slow_donkey··on Show HN: Redact – Automated deletion for your content on social networks
Hm any competent ops team would have backups if they really cared to find your original data
slow_donkey··on Transition to React Native
IMO before react native came on the scene there were no well performing hybrid app frameworks except possibly xamarin. So it likely wasn't your fault
slow_donkey··on Lambda School is a predatory bootcamp that lies about students outcomes
I highly recommend reading Vincent Woo's piece about Lambda to understand the criticism better with actual evidence. https://vincentwoo.com/2020/05/19/on-lambda-school/

It's also arguably not an equivalent comparison. Many people attending these bootcamps have already graduated college and tend to forgo work to attend - there is a huge opportunity cost even if they don't directly lose money. I have no reason to believe the model wouldn't work, but there's ample evidence that the implementation of the model via Lambda is flawed.

slow_donkey··on Lambda School is a predatory bootcamp that lies about students outcomes
I haven't reviewed their numbers recently but the historical criticism is that you end up paying more money for Lambda yet their placement rate was lower compared to similar bootcamps.
slow_donkey··on Opensource.cooking: A simple, bloat-free cooking site
I'm building a search engine for this exact issue - there's 10000 recipes for every dish but they have to be contextualized: Do I want mac and cheese in the next 30 minutes or am I serving this for Thanksgiving? Those are 2 different experiences and recipes.

Even the base issue of at least ranking recipe blogs by quality isn't solved by other aggregators such as Google / Yummly which are more of a recipe dump.

If you or anyone else is interested I'm planning to release a version in the coming weeks - email is in profile.

slow_donkey··on 34% of remote workers would quit rather than return to full-time office work
So I have the same issue. On Slack, I can't tell if someone is busy - almost no one sets their status as away unless they're actually offline. Whereas in the office it was easier to assess via headphones or if they've just gotten up from their desk etc.
slow_donkey··on Syntax Highlighting in a Webpage Without JavaScript
How dare you question the snark
slow_donkey··on REST vs GraphQL vs gRPC
I don't disagree with you, but graphql just lends itself well to bad decisions and many times when I've poked at graphql endpoints they share these issues (missing auth after first later, exposing schema by accident, no depth/cost limit). I think a combination of new technology w/o standardized best practices and startups being resource constrained proliferates poor security with graphql.

Of course, the same could happen for standard REST as well, but I think the foot guns are more limited.

slow_donkey··on Ask HN: Where to look for jobs at small companies?
If you're in a major metro local meetup/slacks are a great tool. They'll provide the intro without you needing to 'know' the person. I've done that successfully with engineering positions and you could likely go through engineers if the (JS) community is larger.
slow_donkey··on Snyk: Find and fix vulnerabilities in open-source dependencies
It costs a lot. Especially any add-ons they upsell you on
slow_donkey··on LinkedIn’s Alternate Universe
Wish he didn't make fun of bad English from non-native speaking posts - of course they'll seem cringey to us. There's plenty of legitimate examples he could have used instead.
slow_donkey··on Ask HN: Best Gmail alternative that handles multiple emails in one inbox?
I didn't find it obvious that Fastmail allows multiple wildcard domains but it is a supported feature and extremely useful for throwaways and custom projects.
slow_donkey··on Fueling Reddit’s Future
I find it funny that software with relatively no r+d or initial costs have become burdened with VC.
slow_donkey··on SpaCy 3.0
This sounds super cool, is there a public link to your work? I'd love to check it out
slow_donkey··on Element (Matrix chat app) suspended from the Google Play Store
If anyone needs a download, you can easily install/sideload via f-droid or the app can be trivially built with './gradlew assembleDebug' (provide your own keys to build a release version)
slow_donkey··on Baking with machine learning (2020)
Ah yeah I saw this initially but haven't given CRFs a try yet. I was hoping ml had advanced enough that I could throw newer solutions at the problem. Thanks for linking this though, I just realized there's a lot of labelled training data the NYT provided which I will definitely use.
slow_donkey··on Baking with machine learning (2020)
There's a more practical but relevant cooking problem that I haven't seen discussed - when extracting recipes from websites it's tricky to parse the actual ingredients and quantities.

For example, "1/2 cup of diced tomatoes or a can of tomatoes (preferably san marzano)". This sort of freeform text doesn't suit regex very well but also lacks substantial context clues. You'd most likely use named entity recognition which could recognize that "1/2" is a quantity, "cup" is the unit, etc. but I haven't gotten very good results yet.

Maybe I'll write up a post when I land on a solution.

slow_donkey··on Baking with machine learning (2020)
I wrote an Android app for managing recipes with bakers percents so I definitely agree - being able to scan over the ratios of water, salt, and sugar tells you a lot about the recipe and what the dough will feel like.

I do wish normal cooking recipes had a similar convention - it's rare that I've ever used exact amounts since the ratio and technique are always more important.

slow_donkey··on Build a salary with GitHub Sponsors
It's hard for me to see the value in monetizing posts from OSS projects. If I wanted to pay for someone's thoughts I'd be using substack or paying for pictures from OF - in both cases the value I receive is directly tied to the subscription.

Possibly a more interesting approach could be gated support similar to an exclusive discord for patreon subs to ask questions.

slow_donkey··on Ask HN: What are you working on?
What's the purpose? Do finely tuned job descriptions attract more candidates? I'm guessing the point isn't to actually describe the job if the copy can be automatically generated.
slow_donkey··on Ask HN: What are you working on?
I've been building an app for bread baking with bakers percentages. It's been hard to find a solid recipe app that's not hell-bent on monetizing via a shipping list or even supports easy recipe creation.
slow_donkey··on Show HN: StaticBackend – A web and mobile back end without lock-in
Conversely, renewed competition may also be a good sign that there's a market for such products. You do need a place to differentiate, fortunately the surface area of the problem is fairly broad.

As an example, look at low-code for inspiration to determine what features people need which aren't being filled by existing solutions. Hopefully that reduces the need to compete via feature checklist.

slow_donkey··on Haskell is our first choice for building production software systems
I had the same feelings as the parent - this article did not make good arguments for using Haskell specifically in building production systems, it instead argues that Haskell is a good programming language yet many of the benefits listed can be found in other languages.

Even if Haskell was objectively the 'best' language, it'd likely be a poor choice for most teams simply due to familiarity and developer speed.

I'd be extremely hesitant to hire the services of this company entirely because they use Haskell and it'd be a nightmare to maintain after their contract.

slow_donkey··on An Uncommon Cold
Are there other reasons you'd continue to take it?
slow_donkey··on SaaS We Happily Pay For
Yeah g-suite is a dam bargain especially since it also gets you conferencing, SSO and is one of the few SaaS you'd truly want to buy and retain.
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