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markthethomas

1,542 karma

Principal Engineer working and playing in Southern California.

Thoughts: ifelse.io Tweets: @markthethomas

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/markthomas; my proof: https://keybase.io/markthomas/sigs/Xo6ShpozhyBgkeWDsay9TAJWrU2Egnz-w6I2rlp2pAw ]

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www.nytimes.com 3mo ago

SpaceX strikes deal with Cursor for $60B

markthethomas
101pts1
paybacktime.app 1y ago

PaybackTime.app: survived the Eaton fire in LA, so I made an app

markthethomas
1pts1
pdfsplitter.ifelse.io 1y ago

Show HN: Split Pdfs by Page or File Size

markthethomas
1pts1
www.costbot.net 3y ago

Show HN: I built a price-tracking tool

markthethomas
4pts3
ifelse.io 3y ago

Some Helpful, Free APIs I Run with Fly.io

markthethomas
2pts1
querytime.dev 4y ago

Show HN: MongoDB Katas / Practice Problems

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2pts1
www.griddler.gg 4y ago

Show HN: Griddler, a Wordle clone built for free and fun

markthethomas
1pts1
github.com 4y ago

Remix Goes Open Source

markthethomas
4pts3
unicorn.computer 5y ago

Oracle Migration to Austin to Take Place over Next 100 Years

markthethomas
5pts4
unicorn.computer 5y ago

Airbnb IPO Shares to Include 'Cleaning Fee'

markthethomas
2pts1
isbusy.app 6y ago

Show HN: Free personal status page for remote work

markthethomas
4pts1
ifelse.io 6y ago

MongoDB Performance Fundamentals: Indexing and Indexes

markthethomas
2pts0
ifelse.io 6y ago

MongoDB Query Perf. Understanding the Query Planner and Advanced Index Types

markthethomas
2pts0
unicorn.computer 6y ago

Apple Says It Time to Start Using 'Summer' Side of MacBook Pro for Charging

markthethomas
4pts0
unicorn.computer 6y ago

WeWork to Accept Oil Barrels as Tenants

markthethomas
35pts6
unicorn.computer 6y ago

Zoom To Launch Streaming Service

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5pts1
unicorn.computer 6y ago

Google Lays Off 50% of Staff as April Fools' Day Cancelled

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3pts3
unicorn.computer 6y ago

Unicorn.computer – “The Onion” for Tech Stuff

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2pts1
unicorn.computer 6y ago

Investigation Finds Docker Desktop Just Distributed Cryptomining System

markthethomas
1pts1
unicorn.computer 6y ago

Unicorn.computer

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5pts1
news.ycombinator.com 6y ago

Quacks.dev – Rubberduck Debugging as a Service

markthethomas
1pts1
ifelse.io 7y ago

Secure and Ad-Free Internet Anywhere with Streisand and Pi Hole

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306pts108
ifelse.io 7y ago

Better, Faster, More Secure Backups with Restic

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3pts0
ifelse.io 8y ago

A map of the React ecosystem

markthethomas
2pts0
facebook.github.io 8y ago

React 16

markthethomas
914pts338
airbnb.io 8y ago

Enzyme v3 released

markthethomas
53pts3
www.wikitribune.com 9y ago

WikiTribune's Crowdfunding campaign ends in 16 hours

markthethomas
1pts0
ifelse.io 9y ago

A Conceptual Introduction to React Components [tutorial]

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1pts0
ifelse.io 9y ago

50% Off the React in Action MEAP

markthethomas
3pts0
github.com 9y ago

Show HN: Check iphone 7 availability via the CLI

markthethomas
2pts0

hey thanks so much for trying things out! I really, really appreciate it. Totally hear you on the search experience. I currently use Meilisearch (https://www.meilisearch.com/) for the search backend. I love how crazy fast it is and generally have had a nice experience running the system myself. But I totally hear you on the semantic search side of things.

I am definitely hoping / planning to offer that unified "view this product across stores" feature — that would be killer. Just have to work on the ML stuff to get that sufficiently good and get the data in a good spot. The CozoDB thing looks very promising, will check it out! Thanks again

I'm working on Costbot, a price tracking tool designed to help online shoppers save time and money by monitoring price histories and alerting them when their favorite products hit their target prices. The side-project recently become done "enough" to be shared in small fashion, and wanted to ask for feedback/thoughts etc. on here.

I'm a staff software engineer by trade, but love working on side projects in my (relatively rare) spare moments. This has been a fun project, involving some new things I hadn't worked on before (extended parsing / crawling, scraping, headless browsers etc.). Hoping to put together a write-up on the tech soon.

KV.js 3 years ago

This looks super cool! I have a use case where I store some stateful stuff in Redis that a worker constantly interacts w/ and updates. Redis is great, but the project is a very side thing and would love not to have to pay for bandwidth / just embed it inside of it. Going to take a look at this and see if I can make it work! Didn't see any serialization formats, so might just do that myself. Ty for building this!

That's a good point / thing that I've not thought about as much here. I would be much more frustrated if my primary datastores were hosted there. As things stand, their semi-hosted offering never really made sense to me (esp. now lol), but I do think if you get into the game of DB hosting there's almost another level of expectation even beyond basic compute (oddly enough)

Yeah, I saw; I've kept up w/ everything pretty closely. Still decently frustrating as a paying customer, but I hope they can figure it out. If they can and can show some real reliability, I'll be an even bigger fan.

Been a fan of fly and have had most, if not all, of my side and semi-side projects on there for some time now. But...the ratio of good/fun/snarky blog posts to reliable service has gotten a bit too large for me, starting to look for other providers at this point just in case they can't turn this trend around. Honestly been a good object lesson for me in the importance of backing up marketing/hype/"mind-share" stuff w/ absolute rock-solid performance/reliability or just forgoing the former for the latter.

As an aside, it's also taking down some decently-load-bearing web infra like unpkg => https://www.unpkg.com/

see also https://community.fly.io/t/app-went-dead/11397/60

Hey all!

I put this together in some spare time over the past few weeks. I'm a senior software engineer who's recently switched to permanently-remote work due to Covid-19. It's been a bit of an adjustment for me and my family, too, so I wanted to make some tools to make it a little easier for everyone. I often find it hard for my family to know if I am busy, "busy", or "please please don't interrupt" busy. isBusy solves that by unifying all your work and personal calendars and presenting an easy to understand status page.

I hope this makes working from home a little easier for everyone! Let me know what you think or if there are things I can improve!

[dead] 6 years ago

ack I hope not. The line between The Onion and reality has definitely become too blurry