mattjaynes

If you don't have access to a bidet, just use the "dab of lotion on the TP" technique.

Wipe like normal. Then put a bit of lotion on new folded TP and wipe. Repeat a few times until the TP is completely clean. It's not at the level of bidet, but it gets you pretty squeaky clean (try it).

Best is to use thicker lotion with enough "slipperyness", like true cocoa butter, etc. Cheaper lotions generally don't work as well. Keep a small tube of the lotion in your backpack if you need it when you're out and about.

(Fun fact: I submitted this technique as part of my YC application years ago and PG mentioned it to me when I ran into him at Stanford)

One of my favorite films. Can't think of anyone who could have played Olive more perfectly. Underrated classic.

That's fair. I have limited experience with the rest of their offerings. They only came onto my radar because of regular critical CVEs that needed urgent fixing. The communication from the company had no hint of apology - just "hey, better fix this before your server is p0wned" - which did not seem like they were to be taken seriously.

I have a client who was using JetBrains' TeamCity CI product. Was a clown show of vulnerabilities that allowed attackers access to internals.

Do not use their products. If you must for some reason, be sure you subscribe to critical CVEs of the products you are using and update them immediately and rotate your credentials. Ideally re-install on a fresh server. Never have the service available via the public web, it will be hacked - only use their products behind a VPN.

https://blog.jetbrains.com/teamcity/2024/02/critical-securit... https://blog.jetbrains.com/teamcity/2024/03/additional-criti...

I love Kevin Kelly, but I really wished he would have done more with his recent book "Excellent Advice For Living" which is essentially a similar list of extremely brief "advices". They are all excellent, but it's an overwhelming list of nuggets of wisdom without any context or stories or anything else for the mind to process. So I end up going from point to point and quickly burn out on what quickly becomes a shopping list of unrelated wisdom points.

If this had just been a calendar of a point of wisdom per day that you can ponder, that would have been much better. Or better yet, a book with short chapters that elaborate on each point with a story so that your mind has the time and context to absorb it.

Hopefully he does that at some point, because there are a lot of gems here which are underserved in the no-context list format.

Ask yourself, how much brighter is it outside than inside (assuming a sunny day vs a brightly lit office)? Before looking into this, I would have guessed 2X or 3X, but would you believe it's actually over 100X!

I bet most people's guess would also be off by 1 or 2 orders of magnitude.

Even outdoors in the shade, it is over 50X brighter than indoors.

(For specific numbers and comparisons, see: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6656201/ )

Apparently, our eyes adjust so quickly to the difference that we have a very poor sense of the magnitude of light change between indoors and outdoors.

I bring this up because one of the largest factors in myopia development appears to be outdoor light exposure in childhood.

Genetics are likely a factor too, but light exposure seems to have a huge effect: "The prevalence of myopia in 6- and 7-year-old children of Chinese ethnicity was significantly lower in Sydney (3.3%) than in Singapore (29.1%), while patterns of daily outdoor light exposure showed that children living in Singapore were exposed to significantly less daily outdoor light than Australian children." (from the same study linked above)

The obvious takeaway for parents, schools, and governments: ensure your children have plenty of outdoor playtime. It will greatly reduce instances of myopia (not to mention the benefits from higher Vitamin D levels, exercise, etc).

(This is a repost of my comment from 3 years ago on the same topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25909557 )

For more, I'd recommend Jason Carman's recently released videos on Terraform:

Overview and tour (~20min): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NngCHTImH1g

Deeper Interview (~40min): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekEdq6PhC0Q

Thanks - I was curious to check "ninja" and "rockstar". They seem to have peaked 8-10 years ago (from a quick glance). Was surprised they are still used at all after taking that pounding from job ads for so many years.

Backblaze's B2 is cheap - but if your'e using them in production you must include these costs:

* their weekly 2 hour maintenance window 11:30-13:30 PST (which usually has no downtime, but sometimes is a full outage in the middle of the US day)

* having to file support tickets when your error rates increase above a usable threshold (for us about once a year for the last few years)

* support which does not look into the issue, just asks tons of questions as if they do not have error logs or any visibility on their end

* false success on uploads where B2 says it successfully saved your file but it is 0 bytes on their system (ALWAYS verify the upload despite B2's success code)

* extended outages if there's a high severity CVE (ex: they shut down for 10 hours for the Log4j2 CVE)

They have the best price - but when comparing options, it is simply not a directly comparable product to more mature cloud storage services.

(edit: formatting)

It's never been easier or cheaper to run systems.

And yet, engineers would rather deliver a pizza by organizing an expedition team, climbing Mount Everest, taking a picture of the pizza at the summit, then fly the pizza back home, rent a Lamborghini and drive the Mongolian rally race, then 18 months later deliver said pizza.

While they do that, just get on a cheap scooter and drive it down the street. Win.

On this question, David Heinemeier Hansson's talk at YC's Startup School 2008 still holds up great today. Was the first time I heard of the concept of the Fortune 5,000,000

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY Transcript: https://indiefounder.substack.com/p/full-transcript-of-dhhs-...

No, this is not simply "long-form", this is "in medias res" where the story starts at a heightened moment of tension, then abruptly stops and rewinds to go back to fill in details of how they got to this exciting moment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_medias_res

Sometimes it's done to great effect, like in Fight Club (film starts with him at the climax with a gun in his mouth, then rewinds and tells the story).

However, it is often used as a clumsy device by novice writers. They use it to get the audience to stick around for their mostly boring story.

I see this a lot on Youtube. The Youtuber will start with a compelling question and story, like "There he was... tied to the wall as he watched the firing squad load their weapons with gun powder.... But before we continue our story, what is gun powder? Well, it's composed of potassium nitrate, blah, blah, blah...."

You can tell if "in medias res" is done well or poorly by how you react to it. If you are excited for the detour, then it's done well. If instead it feels like a long annoying interruption you want to skip, then it's done poorly.

For me, it's done poorly in this article. I read the first compelling section, then the writer slows everything down to a snail's pace to go into some very dry history of NASA without ever really giving a good payoff to the story he opened with.

Yes, but helping these people save face smoothes the transition. My guess is that those folks were waaay out of their depth and they naturally made naive mistakes. It doesn't benefit anyone to stomp on them. I'm sure they learned hard lessons, and Sam's message is what we call "grace", which is classy.

Is it politics? Sure, but only in the best sense. By not dunking on the losers, he builds trust and opens the doors for others to work with him. If you work with Sam and make a mistake, he's not going to blast you. It's one reason that there was such a rallying of support around Sam, because he's a bridge-builder, not a bridge-burner. Over time, those bridges add up.

Silicon Valley has a long memory and people will be working with each other for decades. Forgiving youthful mistakes is a big part of why the culture works so well.

Reminder: B2 is great for backups, but is not good for production assets that you expect to be available 24/7. They have a weekly maintenance window on Thursday for an hour. It often doesn't involve an outage, but sometimes it does. You need to account for that in your production planning.

ZFS on Linux has improved a lot in the last few years. We (prematurely) moved to using it in production for our MySQL data about 5 years ago and initially it was a nightmare due to unexplained stalling which would hang MySQL for 15-30 minutes at random times. I'm sure it shortened my life a few years trying to figure out what was wrong when everything was on fire. Fortunately, they have resolved those issues in the subsequent releases and it's been much more pleasant after that.

I'm one of the many who hadn't heard of Traefic until MRSK mentioned it. The marketing seems very (overly?) targetted at cloud microservices and container-specific tech[1]. Is that just marketing, or is it really not a good fit for monoliths on bare-metal?

[1] https://github.com/traefik/traefik "Traefik (pronounced traffic) is a modern HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer that makes deploying microservices easy. Traefik integrates with your existing infrastructure components (Docker, Swarm mode, Kubernetes, Consul, Etcd, Rancher v2, Amazon ECS, ...) and configures itself automatically and dynamically. Pointing Traefik at your orchestrator should be the only configuration step you need."

For aviation noobs (like me) wondering how low the balloon would have to be in order for a helicopter to be an option for retrieval:

"The maximum altitude which can be reached during forward flight typically depends on the ability of the engine to breathe the thinner air rather than the rotor's ability to provide lift. Turbine-engine helicopters can reach around 25,000 feet (7,620 meters). But the maximum height at which a helicopter can hover is much lower - a high performance helicopter can hover at 10,400 feet (3,170 meters)."

Source: https://www.virginexperiencedays.co.uk/experience-blog/how-h...

Or maybe stop worrying about theoretical macro trends and go build something valuable right now?

Wow. There seems to be 2 main responses to this. 1) Sadness and depression or 2) Excitement and possibility

I really expected this thread to be more of #2 since historically Hacker News has been full of ambitious founders and founder-like engineers.

The great leaps in automation, especially with the recent AI developments is any founder's dream. To be able to go faster with less friction than ever to create something valuable for the world. Now this is within reach of even more people.

It's an amazing time - for those who choose to see the possibilities.

Somewhat related...

On Wireguard's homepage[1] it says "[Wireguard] is even capable of roaming between IP addresses, just like Mosh. There is no need to manage connections, be concerned about state, manage daemons, or worry about what's under the hood."

Has anyone been using Wireguard as a successful Mosh replacement? Would love to hear your experience.

[1] https://www.wireguard.com/

Edit: added link

'Replicated' has been doing SaaS setups locally (on-premise) for a few years and I've heard good things (though haven't used them myself): https://www.replicated.com/

"Only boring people get bored."

This has been a life-long challenge - in a good way. Whenever I feel boredom approaching, I try to change the situation or come up with a more creative way of viewing the moment. Not always successful, but it's a good practice.

Man, I really had to search to find which payment gateways they support. I guess it makes their docs evergreen to not mention any, but it's one of the first questions many new users will have. After searching their docs with no luck, I finally just had to look at their github repos for plugins and there you can see some of them: https://github.com/orgs/killbill/repositories?q=plugin

And to continue the Grace Hopper example... Remember that she transitioned to computing from being a Mathematics professor at Yale, so she was able to leverage her previous training into the new career.

Try and do the same if you can. Leverage what skills you've already gained to switch into a career where they are a big advantage. Then you are starting nearer to those already in the field, not the beginning.

I've had good results with this PPA for using later versions of ZFS on earlier Ubuntu versions (though it's only at zfs 2.1.5 at the moment, but it should be updated in not too long): https://launchpad.net/~jonathonf/+archive/ubuntu/zfs

Link to the resulting essay (for those that quickly got distracted by the great content, like I did): http://www.paulgraham.com/13sentences.html

This reminds me of the "If it saves just one life" fallacy...

Even the most ardent believer of this fallacy will often break when confronted with real costs to their own life.

For example:

Cruel Capitalist: If lowering the highway speed limit to 40 miles per hour (64km/hr) would save 20,000 lives per year on US roads, should we do it?

Bleeding Heart: It would be inconvenient, but yes, it would save lives!

Cruel Capitalist: And if lowering the highway speed limit to 20 miles per hour (32km/hr) would save 40,000 lives per year?

Bleeding Heart: You know, maybe some people just aren't meant to live that long. Isn't the planet getting overpopulated anyway?

Honest question: How do cafe owners make the best of workers using their cafe as a work place?

I've heard it referred to as the "laptop hobo" problem: customers that come and buy a small coffee and take up a table for 4+ hours.

How have you seen cafe owners handle this well so that they sustain the business and avoid the freeloader problem?

Sometimes I see "No Laptops" signs in cafes, but I'm sure there are better approaches.

Scientific squabbles aside, "getting jacked" is one of the most important things a man can do to increase his attractiveness to females.

But if you decide to go down that path, don't make it unnecessarily difficult. Your number 1 priority should be sustainability. This is the mistake I see my friends make over and over. They will start highly motivated, do too much, then quit after a month or two. My top sustainability rule is "I must feel better after my workout than before my workout." This ensures I don't kill my motivation for the future days. You want to create an upward spiral of small successes.

Also, you don't need to join a gym or other special program. While they can be helpful in some circumstances, they can also create a lot of friction in your life. You want the bar to be as low as possible for working out. I started with resistance bands at home and found that amazingly sustainable. While others were struggling to get dressed and travel to the gym, I was happily lifting heavy bands 5 minutes after getting out of bed, then continuing with my day in under 30 minutes.

Start with first principles: 1) push/pull movements with sufficient resistance, and 2) eat sufficient protein, but don't eat excessive calories, and 3) get sufficient sleep (bad sleep will make progress nearly impossible) [bonus: walking is the best 'cardio' to use when trying to gain muscle]

If you want to dive deeper into the science of optimizing your gains, I'd recommend Dr Mike Israetel, who has the least fluff and most scientific (and entertaining) content I've found: https://www.youtube.com/c/RenaissancePeriodization/playlists

I started lifting about 6 years ago after being newly single, and my own anecdata was that as I lost fat and put on significant muscle, the dating experience changed dramatically for me. Dating just seemed 5X to 10X easier. Not to mention the many other obvious life improvements that come with being fit (confidence, health, energy, performance, etc).

I've seen many friends in the last few years start and fail, but by keeping the friction low and the process enjoyable, I've made it a habit that I've kept unbroken the last 6 years.

Focus on keeping the bar low and the enjoyment high - there are no bonus points for suffering.

"Only boring people get bored" was maybe the best advice I ever got.

I was a teenager and was getting a ride home from a friend of the family.

He asked "How's life going"

And I was in the midst of answering "It's bor.."

But he cut me off and said "Don't say 'it's boring'. ONLY BORING PEOPLE GET BORED."

It was like a splash of cold water in my face, and I always remembered that.

Whenever I start feeling bored now, I remind myself of that quote and start mentally exploring ways to shake things up and break out of the rut. If my mind isn't feeling that creative, then I start looking at what others are doing in my situation and often I'll find some thread of their creativity that I can use to get myself started.

The more you fear being labeled as "boring", the more motivated you'll be to avoid those doldrums.