Hacker News Reader

trvrprkron How to stop feeling lost in tech: the wafflehouse method

Grinding out your goals in a 48-hour vision quest-esque process like this, especially for someone early career or facing larger questions about trajectory, seems odd. Five years is an infinite amount of time for some people and especially so with pace of change and uncertainty these days.

I suppose this might work for some, but it comes off as excessively performative and not actually practical.

trvrprkron NaNoWriMo to close after 20 years

> badly disrupted

Embracing AI writing would absolutely be a disruption of the bad kind.

trvrprkron HE.net problem

Hurricane Electric (HE) provides, among other things, DNS services. When a domain is placed in `clientHold`, as has happened to HE due to a spurious phishing report, it causes the domain to no longer resolve. So the DNS records for HE and all of HE's customers are gradually becoming unresolvable as caches expire.

trvrprkron Many indoor air quality sensor products are a scam

This is pretty wildly inaccurate specifically in Project Farm's case. Most "consumable" parts of tests, like bolts, are swapped out from test to test. From what I've seen he's pretty transparent when that's not the case.

He also explicitly buys all products with his own money (some by way of viewers contributing, of course) and products are sourced from what folks in the comments are asking for.

trvrprkron No hello – please don't just say hello in chat

A huge benefit of many (most?) chat apps is that communication can be async. If it requires a live conversation, then respectfully it probably warrants scheduling time.

The author is arguing that the “udp approach” to these conversations is less intrusive, and also alleviates doubt/anxiety about the nature of the conversation.

trvrprkron 80% of orgs that paid the ransom were hit again

Interesting idea. But what you're describing is absolutely not "ransomware."

trvrprkron Twitter Engineering:We’re starting with a set of words we want to move away from

> The biggest problem was that the company became the arbiter of what was offensive and what was not.

Companies already have to do this and they have done this for a long time. There are undoubtedly offensive words, phrases, and actions which a company actively discourages or will not tolerate.

The problem is that society progresses in disjointed ways, and common vernacular often lags far behind that as well. Instead of waiting for the overwhelming majority of people to understand that some words which once were perceived as neutral actually carry a darker, less-desirable connotation, Twitter (and others) are working to get ahead of that.

Sure, the lines may be blurry now, but that's no reason to claim that companies weren't arbiters of offensive words or actions in the past.

trvrprkron Electronic Circuit Simulator in the Browser

Username: tpdc

Thank you for the offer, even if you don’t get to me.

trvrprkron Chirpss – Hear and see people visiting or leaving your website

Sometimes links will go through a number of other things (url shortener, analytics, so on) before hitting the final URL.

trvrprkron Five Ways to Lie with Charts (2014)

See also: "Is truncating the Y-axis dishonest?" https://twitter.com/rshotton/status/865951825463312385

trvrprkron UEFI boot: how does that actually work, then? (2014)

Please add (2014) to the title.

trvrprkron Ask HN: Weird, curious or bizzarre subreddits that you would like to suggest

https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditSimulator

A bot-only subreddit where the bots post content based on Markov chains. There are bots for many of the more popular subreddits so, essentially, each bot has a "personality" that reflects a specific subreddit.

trvrprkron “... it's my fault that Google shut down Google Reader”

I wonder how many other people in the hierarchy of that product (or really, any other that met a similar fate) would cast the blame on themselves. Especially with the legacy that Google Reader has left.

That said, I wonder the details of why it was discontinued (the gritty details available to the final decision makers) and whether those same people who blame themselves today might still have decided to discontinue it had they had the total picture.

trvrprkron Ask HN: Can we talk about FreeBSD vs. Linux?

Unfortunately kfreebsd will not be an official Debian 8 release architecture: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2014/11/msg00...

trvrprkron Personal Security Tools

Author here. I was definitely going for a neutral tone with phrases like those to make it less mundane/more human.

This feedback is great, and it reminds me how delicate phrasing can be and how differently things might be interpreted.

I'm going to polish it up and lighten the tone quite a bit. Thanks!

trvrprkron Inspecting Yosemite's Icons

That's likely the Dropbox Finder item. This is where it appears by default when installing Dropbox. I'd guess that Dropbox Finder assets aren't completely compatible with Yosemite yet.

trvrprkron Share: The Icon No One Agrees On

Good icon, other than it looks like an axe at smaller sizes.

trvrprkron Google Drive is down (502. That’s an error.)

If all it took were millions of dollars and slightly harder thinking to make a completely failure-proof system, a lot of problems would suddenly and cheaply be solved. At the end of the day there's still hardware, software, network infrastructure, peering, random chance, and all of the imperfections in the humans designing these systems.

trvrprkron 3.99 One-Day shipping no longer mentioned in Amazon Prime

One-day shipping is still listed on the Prime Shipping upgrades page [1].

[1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_l...

trvrprkron Why I Left Medium

YAML was crafted to be usable by most mere mortals. Whether or not it achieves that in practice is another issue ... but I think most people who find themselves using a static-site generator could find their way around a YAML config file just fine.

trvrprkron A personal statistics dashboard and API

I find it more worrying that people are hand-wringing obsessively over any service that collects any amount of personal data. Promoting innovation and finding creative ways to approach problems are both much more important than enumerating the nefarious ways that people or groups or governments can use the resulting data.

While it's an important cause to fight for, some privacy discussions that are consuming various parts of the tech community these days are just silly.

I don't find anything about this service incredibly worrying. I'm much more worried about what we don't know -- the data-collecting activities we don't knowingly participate in. But since we don't know what we don't know, I try not to waste away my life hand-wringing over those things either.

trvrprkron Google Fiber coming to Austin

Well that's a strange way of putting it. I understand what you're getting at, but every city has its own character. What if you're bored or exhausted with the Bay Area's character? Yes, that's an internal conflict but also yes, moving elsewhere can solve it.

It may be a great town, but it isn't the only one and it certainly isn't the most exciting or engaging. There's too much else going on in the world to put one place on a pedestal.

trvrprkron Google Maps: “Treasure Map” mode

This riff is getting really old. People used Google Reader. Google took it away for its own reasons. It was Google's to take away. If anything, this creates a slight inconvenience to its users but a huge opportunity for someone else to come along and innovate.

Especially in a company the size of Google, there is no mutual exclusivity between working on Product X and implementing minuscule feature Y.

trvrprkron Simple launches Android app

Simple is explicitly not a bank[1]. It's a financial-experience-as-a-service -- they manage your interactions with depositing, withdrawal, budgeting, etc. Their partner bank takes care of the money itself.

[1]: https://www.simple.com/faq/#thebasics

trvrprkron Ask HN: What Software Did You Pay For In 2012

Sublime Text 2, Logic Pro, Rdio, 1Password for iOS, and a small handful of other iOS apps.

trvrprkron [dead]

Something very similar happened to me four or five years ago. I had just sat down at my laptop and opened the browser. Imagine my surprise when it correctly navigated to iGoogle, but under someone else's account. I looked around just enough to verify that I was locked into a session and then took some screenshots, wrote a detailed explanation of the past five minutes, and sent them along to Google. Never heard back.

The zip code in the iGoogle page weather widget suggested it was someone that lived in my general area, but I didn't recognize the name. This wasn't a shared laptop. I believe this also predated SSL-on-by-default so I guess it is possible traffic got mixed up somewhere.

trvrprkron How I Store My 1's and 0′s: ZFS + Bargain HP Microserver = Joy

From the article: "Why not Debian or CentOS? Cool, go that way if you prefer them. But personally I am in luuuuuurve with the Ubuntu ZFS PPA."

With Debian, you can use the PPA as-is. This requires adding that to your /etc/apt/sources.list and manually adding the signing key with apt-key.

Something else the author doesn't directly address is that ZFS on Linux is really only usable on 64-bit systems. Funny things may happen if you use the 32-bit version, such as OOPSing when doing simple things such as ls -a.

I've had nothing but great experiences with running this on my home NAS.