HN user
http://johnj.com
This is a pet peeve of mine, so when a headlight went out a few weeks ago I asked my mechanic about bulb options. He said he had no other choices for me, so now I am part of the problem too.
Seems like a classic Tragedy of the Commons situation / use case for regulation....
Highly recommended... I found it quite beautiful and moving, and it's the only film I've felt compelled to write a blog post[1] about. "Seeing the film (made just last year) transforms the memory of the Towers from one of trauma to something more like transcendence."
[1] https://johnj.com/posts/man-on-wire/ [2009]
Edit: add year
I basically want to build a custom e-reader with a RasPi Zero for learning/home use, 8-10inches would be great.
Though smaller than your target size, I did[1] something similar, and it was great fun. I believe there are still Waveshare hats with larger display sizes.
Aaron Reed's 50 Years of Text Games[1][2] is a fantastic journey into the history and the possibilities of text-based games. I got the physical book and was surprised to find it as engaging as a novel. Each chapter takes one year between 1971 and 2020 and picks a game from that year to discuss in depth. While it might not help with the writing per se, you might good ideas there (several of the games discussed are in the "Adventure" lineage).
We had one of these at CERN in the experimental physics group I was in 1990-1991. I had no idea they were rare or that the line was a failure. It was certainly faster than the other machines the group had access to at the time (except an onsite Cray, access to which was restricted only to members from "Western" countries for political reasons).
And, possibly, Clojurists are more likely to use the word, because of: https://clojuredocs.org/clojure.core/reify
Not the OP but:
One can develop with TDD in Clojure quite smoothly depending on choice of tooling; with CIDER in Emacs there are keyboard shortcuts to run tests for the current namespace or the entire project, so feedback can be very fast (if your tests are fast). I've also used (some time ago) test runners that stay running and re-test when a file is saved.
In fact, it can be nice to do one's explorations in the REPL and then reify one's discoveries as tests.
Regarding types: I will say that working on larger Clojure (and Python) projects with somewhat junior teams made me more curious about type systems. Clojure's immutable collections and the core abstractions they are built around are great, but it can take some skill and discipline to keep track of exactly what kind of data is flowing through any particular part of your program. But, there is some support for à la carte strictness in the language via Spec, Malli, structured types, etc.
Very nice potential in this idea. A few related use cases I would like:
- population density
- average cost per square foot
- distance from river or lake (I live in Chicago)
This is really nice, and I hope you continue with additional texts, as I have been trying once again to pick up Latin basics, using YouTube videos and Wheelock's Latin (which is one of the best foreign language books I've ever seen).
It would be nice to be able to add the macrons or even acute accent characters to show emphasis syllables as another toggle-able option -- ChatGPT seemed to do OK with that task for me just now.
I love the concept and the implementation. Do you have a write-up on the implementation anywhere, blog posts, anything?
It's a pleasure to see an online store implementation that doesn't use the Web or rely on some mobile app.
I liked this for two seconds; then all the pictures loaded in the browser window, and its usefulness to me plummeted. Similar to other commenters, I actually prefer text-only in this context; in particular, the first picture displayed just now was animated, and incredibly distracting.
I would probably use this or at least play with it extensively if not for this "feature." I find that, unlike "real" newspapers, leading images in blog posts and even much larger sites are frequently a net negative (a trend greatly worsened with the advent of AI image generators).
I loved Hofstadter's writing on Lisp in Metamagical Themas and adapted the code in the last article of the series to Clojure for a study group at work, written up here[1].
[1] http://johnj.com/posts/oodles/
edit: clarification
Saw a number of votes here for keeping them separate. Having struggled with the question for a long time, I'll voice my vote for unifying them.
I've been a SWE for 25+ years and an artist for longer, showing art online as early as 1993 (anybody remember Gopher?), and blogging semi-regularly since the early 2000s. Originally I kept a strict separation between the two out of fear that people interested in one topic wouldn't take me seriously if I had any trace of another.
A few years ago I finally decided that being "taken seriously" was perhaps not that important and I just threw everything together in the same pot, under a single domain and implementation. I do tag each post with one or more topics, and I have an RSS feed for each topic, so people with more specialized interests can subscribe just to the topics they care about. I also eliminated all analytics and comment features as distractions not relevant to my main goals, namely: capturing, refining, and sharing my thoughts about whatever topics I care about.
As a result, I've found I've enjoyed writing and looking back at my previous work more. I realized that my blog was for me, and the maybe five other people in the world who like it the way I do.
As for "building a personal brand" and "developing an audience," others would know much more about that -- I believe, without much evidence to support it, that it will lead to more happiness if you focus on finding your true voice and writing with integrity about things you care about, rather than thinking about ways to get more eyeballs on your pages. YMMV.
I hope you'll consider sharing your URL when you're ready. (http://johnj.com is mine.)
See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38058843 for a link to a text-only version; however, IMO their "translation" lies as much in Jane English's photos and the entire book presentation, as it does in the purely English language rendition of the text. I prefer other translations (including Le Guin's) for just the words, but Feng/English is still my favorite overall.
Anyone here use the NiceGUI Python web app framework the OP used? There is mention of Electron-like cross-platform ability, which I assumed meant that one could generate a standalone app with it, but I did not find mention of that in the online docs.
My very first was Naive Set Theory by Paul Halmos. Way over my head in 7th(?) grade but my first intro to math beyond pre-algebra stuff.
Lately I've enjoyed, but did not finish, the Joy of Abstraction by Eugenia Cheng, on category theory. And there was a differential geometry book whose name I have forgotten but whose exercises I really enjoyed, because I could do them in my head while riding the bus, just by thinking about them.
I'm not particularly well read on mathematics (had a lot of math in college, hardly any since) but I would like to circle back to reading more at some point.
I do like some "hard" fiction like the Stephenson mentioned in TFA, as well as Pynchon and David Foster Wallace, but my mind immediately went to some of the harder technical writing I've enjoyed - The Art of Computer Programming; SICP and other Lisp texts, math books, etc.
I once spent a very pleasant short vacation on a beach on Lake Michigan reading Peter Gabriel Bergmann's "Introduction to the Theory of Relativity," finding pleasure in gradually unraveling the notation, the mathematics, and the ideas, in a quiet and beautiful setting.
It always surprises me when I meet engineers who don't enjoy reading technical books, but different strokes and all that. It takes a kind of patience and persistence to unravel a technical text, which can be its own reward if you're not trying to solve a specific technical problem at the moment.
The mention of Jamie Zawinski[1] caught my eye; quoted in the article as owner of DNA Lounge in SF, he is probably known for many other things by HN dwellers: namer of Mozilla, one of Netscape's initial employees, Lisp hacker during the 80s/90s, and featured in Peter Seibel's book, Coders at Work (which is why the name stood out for me).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski
Edit: typo
I wonder how hard it would be to keep the S-expression syntax when the new one is implemented. As a C and Lisp programmer I'm intrigued by the possibilities - C-family syntax being IMO more readable, but Lisp providing unparalleled (in my experience) metaprogramming possibilities.
It's been about two years since I regularly interviewed people (and longer since I was interviewed), but imagine some of the following might still be helpful.
Presumably, you're interviewing people you want to work with on your team, which is not just about technical skill, but also trust, the ability to communicate, etc.
Repeatedly ask candidates to explain what they're doing and thinking. Rote reading off some text in another window or copy-pasting should be a dead giveaway you don't want to work with the person, particularly if you've asked them not to use AI tools.
Make your interview problem open-ended enough that you can calibrate for somewhat varying ability / nervousness / surprises. If your workplace allows use of AI tools (I imagine the list of those that don't is shrinking rapidly), consider allowing them during the interview but ask them to disclose their use, just as you would expect your colleagues to do while working with you. Someone using, say, Copilot should be able to explain why they are accepting or rejecting the tool's suggestions and show they can adapt the results to suit, on the fly.
If I were a candidate in your interview, asking for anything intrusive such as a phone camera pointed at the keyboard, etc. would likely be an instant deal-breaker for me. Remember that they are (or should be) interviewing you as well.
In my last few jobs we had interview segments which were purely hands-on coding, and other segments which were more design oriented and conversational. I imagine (and now I'm thinking more broadly than your company in particular) that as the tools get better, you'll see more places allowing AI tools for hands-on work, but an increased emphasis on communicating and problem solving. These design problems can be hard to come up with and facilitate, but they can also tell you a lot about how the candidate will communicate, and think on the fly.
Good luck!
Oh god, yes, I'd like to use, or perhaps make, a service which maintains a list of ad-free pumps. (Preferably a service that didn't show me ads... so, yes, I'll pay for it...)
I went ten times to the South Pole (in Austral summer) from 1997 to 2011, stopping in McMurdo each way for a period ranging from hours to days.
While there definitely is jargon in the US Antarctic program (and presumably overlapping-but-distinct sets of jargon for the New Zealand, Australia, and Great Britain programs), it seems a stretch to call it "Antarctic English." Pronunciation varies a lot more from program to program and even from participant-to-participant (scientists tend to be a fairly international bunch) than the subtle single-station per-season continental drift cited in the papers referenced in the Wikipedia article.
That said, I still find the jargon entertaining:
- Skua - discarded items that can be usefully repurposed by someone else
- Toast / toasty - burnt out, irritable, need to go home...
- Beaker - scientist/engineer working as a "grantee" (funded by NSF scientific grant) rather than by the contracting company which handles most day-to-day operations
- Freshies - precious, sometimes rare (especially at places like Pole) fresh fruits and vegetables
and finally
- Pole - The South Pole. Because those two extra words are so much work to actually say out loud....
[edit: fix typos]
I remember the diagrams in Crafting Interpreters and thinking what a great application of hand-done diagrams it was. So glad you did them that way.
Also left handed, BTW. If you're ever interested in going it even more old-school -- dip pens with India or Sumi ink are the absolute bomb. The ink is blacker than anything I've seen except perhaps in intaglio/etchings -- it can be made darker than fountain pen ink because there is no fear of clogging. Yeah, there's a bit of cleanup after every use, but very satisfying too, for some use cases.
Ironically, Rembrandt used[1] smalt, a glass powder with cobalt which is now known to be fugitive in some formulations; this includes Rembrandt works in the National Gallery in London[2].
[1] https://heritagesciencejournal.springeropen.com/articles/10....
[2] c.f. their excellent book, Art in the Making: Rembrandt
Was he known for small paintings before these portraits were rediscovered?
Small is relative, but I've viewed (and occasionally copied and/or drawn) Rembrandts in maybe a dozen or so museums in the US and Europe and have never seen any close in size to the ones shown in the article -- those are much smaller than was typical for him. This Wikipedia page[1] should give you an idea of typical dimensions.
would you expect significant deterioration of the paint if it was actually painted 400 years ago?
That depends very much on how they were cared for, and what support they are on (e.g. copper paintings tend to age very well; paintings on canvas somewhat less so); but certainly there are many paintings in pretty good shape that date from the seventeenth century.
(Not a professional appraiser, just a painter who occasionally sells his own work and a big Rembrandt fan, but I'd be curious to see a picture of your painting if you ever cared to share ...my email is on my website linked to my profile. Good luck!)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_paintings_by_Rembrandt
Bought new and still use: RadioShack multimeter from the early 2000s
(sadly, the RadioShack soldering iron bought around the same time just shorted out)
Bought used and still use: 1950s ToastMaster toaster
The "Illustrations" credit on the cover is covered up by the "Programmers Press" but it looks like it is John Klossner. The hand-drawn illustrations are great, definitely one of my favorite aspects of the book.
Increasingly (in Chicago) I've been seeing restaurants and cafes that are credit card- / debit card-only.
This translation was my introduction to the text, and is still my favorite. Though I've seen other translations I prefer purely on a textual basis, I find their combination of photos, handwritten calligraphy, and English text very powerful still.
(Parenthetically, I got to meet English about twenty years ago and have her inscription in my copy of the book. She studied high energy physics at Madison about twenty years before I did.)
"The Centralia mine fire is a coal-seam fire that has been burning in the labyrinth of abandoned coal mines underneath the borough of Centralia, Pennsylvania, United States, since at least May 27, 1962."