I was so productive I managed to finish the work inside of a day that I've been having trouble with the past two weeks. Maybe HN should have planned blackouts? :D
A while back I changed my search engine's crawl data to be ZSTD compressed JSON. It's a bit finnicky to work with, but I'm beginning to realize just how powerful this is.
and it spewed out samples of domains with a header like X-Adblock-Key. (I'm not great with JQ, so there's probably a better way of doing this, but this unga bunga approach works too)
Specifically, today I did some research on a few tags and headers supposedly associated with "Acceptable Ads" (a standard for showing ads through complicit adblockers), and ended up with a fairly reliable fingerprint for a network of domain squatters that have been a nuisance in my search engine database. Turns out they're basically the only ones that use the headers and tags I was looking at, so now I'm onto their IP-ranges as well.
I read half way through this free book by Sven Yrvind called “WITH FOUR SQUARE METERS OF SAIL AND ONE OAR” which is sort of a manifesto about building small boats and living simply. He’s a super interesting guy, I don’t even know how to sail and I was pretty glued to it. Not sure why I decided to latch on and go deep on the subject but you can find it here if you’re interested: https://www.yrvind.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/ex_lex_eng...
Yrvind is such a legend - he has had me on a micro-cruiser kick for quite a while now. He has a youtube channel that's worth checking out - he's a character that's fun to listen to as well.
Other interesting boat designers (this is sort of my obsession):
You might check out Matt Layden's designs for similar micro-cruisers.
A totally different but equally iconoclastic designer is Dave Zeiger, of TRILOBOATs. Those are great big liveaboard boats sailed up in Alaska, but they tend to be built on the cheap and breaking all the rules of traditional boat design.
The late Phil Bolger influenced Dave Zeiger, if you want to go even deeper. Well known for his "brick boats" and pioneering the "instant boat building" techniques that leverage plywood and epoxy.
There's also James Wharram, who pioneered Polynesian-style catamaran designs and making them at home, and is pretty much single-handedly responsible for the boom in catamaran designs we've seen over the last ~50+ years of yacht design.
Pulled two solar panels off one of my arrays, because a few of them have hot junction boxes from bad connections. Replaced those with spares and got the array back fully online (one of them has been bypassed for arc fault warnings that, digging into the junction box, look legit).
Then I replaced all the fancy, spring loaded, "replace the back of the junction box for new functionality!" interface stuff with some vintage, 1980s style soldering and bypass diodes. Because I don't care about the optimizers on my well-sited array with no shading, and I don't need rapid shutdown for a ground mount array, etc.
And then proceeded to short the leads, put them in the sun, and ensure that the junction box guts didn't get hot, while observing just how brutal on panels doing this is - you really highlight the difference between cells thermally, when in "normal running," you don't see any differences in the array.
And now I'm writing all this up as a blog post. :)
I rode my motorcycle to the beach where I helped a little girl build sand castles and capture mole crabs in a bucket. Then we released the mole crabs and I rode back home to hackernews.
I smugly commented "Dang" on one of the status updates on twitter and spent time with my girlfriend. Now HN is up again and I spend time consuming meta-content regarding the outage (such as this thread).
Cleaned up my desk and started backing up my (recently passed) brother in law's Surface. It got an expanding battery and we're worried it'll break and we'll lose all of his logins and pictures and docs.
Jonathan Coulton started by writing one thing a week. Most of them were meh but there were some that were good. Turns out the important thing is perseverance.
once you have a good development for mechanical aspects you absolutely should record yourself and listen, so you can train your ears for the sound. your own ears will lie to you a lot, and the room/hall acoustics matter. the signal gear for amped instruments matters as well. if you want to play for people you have to train your ears so that you know what good sound, sounds like to most people.
Restarted my phone thinking something wrong with it. Then changed to Cloudflare DNS instead of PiHole thinking it maybe pihole issue. Because when does HN ever go down :D
I feel you: I recently migrated my network setup to a VM based solution and it has been a bit volatile the first week; especially while I tweaked it or learned some details. But it worked well for the last week, and all of a sudden HN doesn't work... Pihole? Ipv6 or ipv4? Random libvirt iptables? Opnsense unhappy? Thank God for isitdownorjustme!
Nothing in particular. I checked HN in the morning. Hmm, it's down. I went ahead to have breakfast, played a round of games, called up some hotel to resolve some reservation issue, checked up on the various ways of embedding 3D model in html, watched some short Youtudes I meant to catch up, and went out of the house. In the evening when I checked again, it's up!
I walked to the gas station, drank an iced coffee, ate a sandwich while listening to a book and enjoying the forest. Wrote a README for a project I've been working on the past week. Then I noticed HN was down :(
I had to resort to unabated onanism during the outage. I am now 30 pounds lighter and when I walk it sounds like two dried beans rattling round in an empty coffee can.
P.S. This is one of those comments where I debated 'should I or shouldn't I post it' so probably not a good idea to do so but meh, what the heck. Dan & co did a sterling job and it sounds like the CEO of M5 gained some useful insight so every cloud has a silver lining etc
I did my usual (probably excessive) amount of news/periodicals reading, but grew frustrated frequently that I couldn't post to HN to get comments/input from others. One notable example (during the first of yesterday's outages) was an NYT article [1] The Robot Guerrilla Campaign to Recreate the Elgin Marbles. This hadn't been submitted to HN at the time (as far as I could tell), but it's there now [2] - sadly, with no comments at the time of posting this.
Anyhow, the article referred to "3-D printing" to make copies of the marbles, but the writing was confused and to me it looked like automated carving, so I wanted to post it to see what others here thought. As it happens, having just checked the article again, the original copy has been amended to read "3-D machining" rather than "3-D printing" - but there's no correction notice to say that the article was changed. Mind you, the clue is still in the url: ... science/elgin-marbles-3d-print.html
Without HN, then, I read my stock sites as usual, but felt deeply that I missed the sanity-checks/informed input from HN commenters. It was lonely, in a way, and also made me fret about my missing issues with articles that usually others at HN would point out; different perspectives, questions about credibility or robustness of stats/data/methods of obtaining info on which articles might rely.
Install a uptime-kuma[1] at my home server... Then get a Telegram notification while hacker news is up again. Actually I self-host more service myself and it was use to monitor those services.
I went to the Art Institute of Chicago and was blown away by the collections there. I didn’t have nearly enough time to see everything, but I particularly enjoyed the Architecture and Design gallery. I would have had less time there if HN was up because I tried to check it before leaving.
Handed out a couple grams of nicotinic acid, explained the flush, taught some people how to surf, explained how wifi radar works, how to hack various devices, how to avoid getting a speeding ticket, explained how a chemical in 1 litre of grapefruit juice is enough to slow up the liver metabolism of some medication which can put you in an embarrassing potentially life threatening situation if one is a male who has taken 50mg of sildenafil and more...
I spent some time watching some stuff on YouTube, including Part 1 of a documentary about Oracle and how they changed the database world. I can't wait for the SQL...
I went and checked https://brutalist.report/ to see what the latest HN posts they had, read the headlines and then moved on. A few hours later I went to HN and they were back.
I wasn't worried about it, I figured dang and others were working on it and would have things back online.
I do depend on HN for taking a break from coding though and it was tough not getting my fix on demand :D
I go there on occasion. It's really sad to see how far it's fallen. It has all of the news stories that were posted elsewhere, just a day or so later. And none of the discussion. It's more like k5 right before it went blooey.
I visited San Francisco in June 2013 and worked at an office for a month. I had a habit of browsing HN and Twitter during the working hours and from the work computer. I was also very productive. Always got things done. Days go by and I observe people working. I realized that many people would spend time on social media only when they were having lunch and were extremely productive the rest of the day. I thought to myself “If I am working then what these people are doing and if they are working then what is it that I am doing?”
I seriously questioned myself and made a decision. No more social media on the work computer and during the working hours. Ever since then I am only reading HN and Twitter when I am on my phone when I am on a break. I haven’t even realized HN was down.
Me and my partner walked the town in the sun, had ramen soup at the pier, checked out an art gallery then had some coffee. After coming home we opened up some nice german weissbiers and watched Brazil.
This morning the forecast was rain, and I expected the day to turn out much worse.
Started doing the Jetpack Compose tutorial(s) for like the 3rd time and thought: "Everything changes, but nothing changes. I am paid to stay atop this schizophrenic elephant of an industry." Then took another gulp of ItsGonnaBeBetterThisTime KoolAid.
We've implemented Compose in production for a few months now. It's actually been my favorite new thing.
Most of the new stuff increases the time it takes to get work done, but Compose appears to reduce it by half on simple tasks, and a lot more on complex tasks. There's also some stuff on View tech debt which isn't less apparent, but I think Compose is here to stay.
The official tutorials are quite bad though. Probably better to try building something, paying for a book, or just reverse engineering something off GitHub.
I did a lot of work on the company I am bootstrapping.
I also read about the pcg random number generator, and a bit about the feuds between its inventor and a competing research group that invented the Xorshift random number generator.
I replaced the LCD assembly on a MacBook someone gave me with one I bought of eBay. Somehow I succeeded and I didn't even break any of the ribbon cables.
I prepared a spreadsheet of the approximate amount of karma I would’ve received had HN not been down and will be submitting a reimbursement request to dang.
Looked up alternative ways of castling in chess because I'm very bored of the standard kingside and queenside castling so, I was trying to find strategies using the old style of play like before the two-piece-one-move castling of today was formed. Right now it seems a lot of games I play online end up with the same openings. Chess 960 helps with that, but I don't like to play that all the time either.
There's a material analogous to permanent magnets for charge... called an Electret. They are one of the reasons N-95 masks work.
They also might shield gravity a bit. Now I need to get a 50kv DC power supply to make my own in bulk, and find out. I expect it to be interesting, but no new physics.
I cleaned my office and moved furniture while waiting for compiles to finish. Got the keyboard next to my desk now, hopefully this encourages me to practice more often.
Also cables are organized under my desk, never thought I'd see the day
Wondered how HN might best implement mandatory offline periods during the day. I’m thinking something like it’s offline for an hour every other hour so only a total of 12 hours uptime a day.
Finished mastering my latest EP and uploading it for release on Monday. Also did a bit of compiler warning cleanup on multiple UNiXes for next release new code work.
I didn't realise it was down. It depends on for how long it was down. Gardening, cooking and eating dinner, getting the children ready for bed, watching TV.
Watched the latest Shut Up and Sit Down board game review video. Now I’m wondering if I should get the Air, Sea, and Land expansion and/or Space Station Phoenix.
Eh… Duolingo? Or other bite-sized language material. I personally like Beelinguapp. Its readings are small enough yet are quite fun to read for a beginner
I’d never heard of blind. I downloaded the app to try it out. Oh, they need my work email for verification? Hell no. I understand the rationale, but they do know that IT can see all my work emails, right?
I checked news sources more directly from the websites i am personally familiar with instead of using the hacker news front page as a filter + expanded domain
onion2k|3 years ago
They'll be so disappointed.
ghetzel|3 years ago
muh_gradle|3 years ago
fnordpiglet|3 years ago
messe|3 years ago
Sakos|3 years ago
cosmotic|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
marginalia_nu|3 years ago
Could literally just do
and it spewed out samples of domains with a header like X-Adblock-Key. (I'm not great with JQ, so there's probably a better way of doing this, but this unga bunga approach works too)Specifically, today I did some research on a few tags and headers supposedly associated with "Acceptable Ads" (a standard for showing ads through complicit adblockers), and ended up with a fairly reliable fingerprint for a network of domain squatters that have been a nuisance in my search engine database. Turns out they're basically the only ones that use the headers and tags I was looking at, so now I'm onto their IP-ranges as well.
higerordermap|3 years ago
BonoboIO|3 years ago
joshstrange|3 years ago
I watched a lot of progress bars and actually watched the CLI output for things building.
_fat_santa|3 years ago
christophilus|3 years ago
Layke1123|3 years ago
migueloller|3 years ago
[1] https://craftinginterpreters.com/
CSMastermind|3 years ago
memorable|3 years ago
kamranjon|3 years ago
diablerouge|3 years ago
Other interesting boat designers (this is sort of my obsession):
You might check out Matt Layden's designs for similar micro-cruisers.
A totally different but equally iconoclastic designer is Dave Zeiger, of TRILOBOATs. Those are great big liveaboard boats sailed up in Alaska, but they tend to be built on the cheap and breaking all the rules of traditional boat design.
The late Phil Bolger influenced Dave Zeiger, if you want to go even deeper. Well known for his "brick boats" and pioneering the "instant boat building" techniques that leverage plywood and epoxy.
There's also James Wharram, who pioneered Polynesian-style catamaran designs and making them at home, and is pretty much single-handedly responsible for the boom in catamaran designs we've seen over the last ~50+ years of yacht design.
OK, infodump over.
jarrenae|3 years ago
The sheer utility of every component of the craft is awesome.
Syonyk|3 years ago
Then I replaced all the fancy, spring loaded, "replace the back of the junction box for new functionality!" interface stuff with some vintage, 1980s style soldering and bypass diodes. Because I don't care about the optimizers on my well-sited array with no shading, and I don't need rapid shutdown for a ground mount array, etc.
And then proceeded to short the leads, put them in the sun, and ensure that the junction box guts didn't get hot, while observing just how brutal on panels doing this is - you really highlight the difference between cells thermally, when in "normal running," you don't see any differences in the array.
And now I'm writing all this up as a blog post. :)
6502nerdface|3 years ago
messutied|3 years ago
password4321|3 years ago
hans1729|3 years ago
Have a great weekend everyone!
O__________O|3 years ago
Obviously, the homepage: https://news.ycombinator.com/
HN’s official status page: https://mobile.twitter.com/hnstatus
This URL checks if the API is up: https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/1.json?print=pret...
HN Search Engine: https://hn.algolia.com
AWS Route 53 status, it is the service that manages HN’s DNS: https://cloudharmony.com/status-of-dns-for-aws
YC DNS record: https://whois.gandi.net/en/results?search=ycombinator.com
HN’s official email: hn@ycombinator.com
Note: Intentionally left off YC, since it appears to be unrelated beyond the DNS.
_________
Forgot something, let me know. Thanks!
O__________O|3 years ago
https://check-host.net/ip-info?host=https://news.ycombinator...
http://50.112.136.166/
https://search.arin.net/rdap/?query=50.112.136.166
O__________O|3 years ago
https://hn.hund.io/
danso|3 years ago
https://ocrmypdf.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
tommiegannert|3 years ago
bbkane|3 years ago
nfriedly|3 years ago
It should be possible to replace the battery with a good one, e.g. https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Microsoft+Surface+Battery+Pack+...
gffrd|3 years ago
Tade0|3 years ago
There was an attempt to ingest them, but I prevented that from happening.
unzadunza|3 years ago
AlphaWeaver|3 years ago
klipt|3 years ago
rolph|3 years ago
spaceisballer|3 years ago
FigurativeVoid|3 years ago
zabi_rauf|3 years ago
archi42|3 years ago
rozenmd|3 years ago
Figured I'd point it at Hacker News to get an update when my uptime monitoring detected it was up again.
The second outage gave me time to dogfood it a bit: https://hackernews.onlineornot.com/incidents/0LB6mQLmkozD
gffrd|3 years ago
ww520|3 years ago
mholt|3 years ago
proactivesvcs|3 years ago
yababa_y|3 years ago
jjgreen|3 years ago
NickRandom|3 years ago
P.S. This is one of those comments where I debated 'should I or shouldn't I post it' so probably not a good idea to do so but meh, what the heck. Dan & co did a sterling job and it sounds like the CEO of M5 gained some useful insight so every cloud has a silver lining etc
samizdis|3 years ago
Anyhow, the article referred to "3-D printing" to make copies of the marbles, but the writing was confused and to me it looked like automated carving, so I wanted to post it to see what others here thought. As it happens, having just checked the article again, the original copy has been amended to read "3-D machining" rather than "3-D printing" - but there's no correction notice to say that the article was changed. Mind you, the clue is still in the url: ... science/elgin-marbles-3d-print.html
Without HN, then, I read my stock sites as usual, but felt deeply that I missed the sanity-checks/informed input from HN commenters. It was lonely, in a way, and also made me fret about my missing issues with articles that usually others at HN would point out; different perspectives, questions about credibility or robustness of stats/data/methods of obtaining info on which articles might rely.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/08/science/elgin-marbles-3d-...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32026156
chazeon|3 years ago
https://github.com/louislam/uptime-kuma
RheingoldRiver|3 years ago
brycewray|3 years ago
redmen|3 years ago
It was nice and I wish there were more outages.
tintedfireglass|3 years ago
binarynate|3 years ago
silisili|3 years ago
toddm|3 years ago
fouric|3 years ago
Terry_Roll|3 years ago
jasoneckert|3 years ago
ayewo|3 years ago
oblib|3 years ago
I wasn't worried about it, I figured dang and others were working on it and would have things back online.
I do depend on HN for taking a break from coding though and it was tough not getting my fix on demand :D
sidcool|3 years ago
inasio|3 years ago
ssl232|3 years ago
deltarholamda|3 years ago
onion2k|3 years ago
TheSmoke|3 years ago
I seriously questioned myself and made a decision. No more social media on the work computer and during the working hours. Ever since then I am only reading HN and Twitter when I am on my phone when I am on a break. I haven’t even realized HN was down.
digitalsankhara|3 years ago
MrDresden|3 years ago
This morning the forecast was rain, and I expected the day to turn out much worse.
klipt|3 years ago
travisgriggs|3 years ago
muzani|3 years ago
Most of the new stuff increases the time it takes to get work done, but Compose appears to reduce it by half on simple tasks, and a lot more on complex tasks. There's also some stuff on View tech debt which isn't less apparent, but I think Compose is here to stay.
The official tutorials are quite bad though. Probably better to try building something, paying for a book, or just reverse engineering something off GitHub.
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
mywacaday|3 years ago
pclmulqdq|3 years ago
I also read about the pcg random number generator, and a bit about the feuds between its inventor and a competing research group that invented the Xorshift random number generator.
account-5|3 years ago
jacklyn577|3 years ago
robotbikes|3 years ago
Apreche|3 years ago
300bps|3 years ago
27182818284|3 years ago
raffraffraff|3 years ago
TedShiller|3 years ago
chainwax|3 years ago
dllthomas|3 years ago
WhiteOwlEd|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
tr1ll10nb1ll|3 years ago
mikewarot|3 years ago
They also might shield gravity a bit. Now I need to get a 50kv DC power supply to make my own in bulk, and find out. I expect it to be interesting, but no new physics.
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
mgh2|3 years ago
There might be an overlap of demographics... largely Indians under H1B
https://www.teamblind.com/
stevenalowe|3 years ago
eimrine|3 years ago
quicksnap|3 years ago
fnordpiglet|3 years ago
bsima|3 years ago
Also cables are organized under my desk, never thought I'd see the day
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
tiborsaas|3 years ago
galgot|3 years ago
Unbeliever69|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
fuzzfactor|3 years ago
How long was it?
Is there any post-mortem?
>Where'd you go?
Depends on how long it was out.
>What'd you find?
Now I find if you spend too much time away from the internet, you'll never keep up with what's happening in the real world.
Or something like that.
mentos|3 years ago
mdaniel|3 years ago
While looking up that link, TIL about what "delay" does, too, so thank you :-)
qwertox|3 years ago
sva_|3 years ago
layer8|3 years ago
viper00|3 years ago
jimnotgym|3 years ago
Start a rubbish piece of software, proving again that reach is the most important thing these days
tcfhgj|3 years ago
jszymborski|3 years ago
peapicker|3 years ago
Agentlien|3 years ago
irrational|3 years ago
itsmemattchung|3 years ago
siskiyou|3 years ago
clintonwoo|3 years ago
hintymad|3 years ago
oneepic|3 years ago
memorable|3 years ago
akpa1|3 years ago
petewailes|3 years ago
We're launching in Sept.
freedude|3 years ago
swat535|3 years ago
TheMiddleMan|3 years ago
alberth|3 years ago
roxaaaane|3 years ago
proactivesvcs|3 years ago
jjtheblunt|3 years ago
hansword|3 years ago
likortera|3 years ago
ge96|3 years ago
black_puppydog|3 years ago
cahoot_bird|3 years ago
PeterWhittaker|3 years ago
tekknolagi|3 years ago
dwd|3 years ago
pilom|3 years ago
manquer|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
wffurr|3 years ago
shakezula|3 years ago
smashah|3 years ago
FredPret|3 years ago
A4ET8a8uTh0|3 years ago
ImKevinArcher|3 years ago
throwawaymaths|3 years ago
didip|3 years ago
moomoo11|3 years ago
AdamGibbins|3 years ago
zakki|3 years ago
jeanlucas|3 years ago
_benj|3 years ago
glotchimo|3 years ago
_Algernon_|3 years ago
spiffytech|3 years ago
dtmmax33|3 years ago
formerkrogemp|3 years ago
frompdx|3 years ago
ardit33|3 years ago
I love HN but Blind is more entertaining for sure.
jstx1|3 years ago
irrational|3 years ago
layer8|3 years ago
ericskiff|3 years ago
amerine|3 years ago
tmaly|3 years ago
happy-go-lucky|3 years ago
aw9f70gae|3 years ago
2OEH8eoCRo0|3 years ago
openthc|3 years ago
throwaway292939|3 years ago
holler|3 years ago
karlzt|3 years ago
tomcam|3 years ago
culopatin|3 years ago
772eaerttac|3 years ago
quickthrower2|3 years ago
thdespou|3 years ago
luxuryballs|3 years ago
adamius|3 years ago
max23_|3 years ago
reachableceo|3 years ago
kasperset|3 years ago
devin|3 years ago
xwdv|3 years ago
petsormeat|3 years ago
bloomingeek|3 years ago
andsoitis|3 years ago
borissk|3 years ago
randomdata|3 years ago
lubien|3 years ago
elasticventures|3 years ago
rcurry|3 years ago
zzixp|3 years ago
jazzyjackson|3 years ago
"masks of the illuminati"
holler|3 years ago
j_kao|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
jspaetzel|3 years ago
wdfx|3 years ago
gigatexal|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
jmpman|3 years ago
DiabloD3|3 years ago
hericium|3 years ago
Kenneth39|3 years ago
cosmojg|3 years ago
nsomaru|3 years ago
tus666|3 years ago
timeon|3 years ago
spacemanmatt|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
mysterydip|3 years ago
ok, now refresh...
It won't be up that quick, you have to be patient!
...
refresh...
chefkoch|3 years ago
maxfurman|3 years ago
anigbrowl|3 years ago
BeFlatXIII|3 years ago
DantesKite|3 years ago
barsonme|3 years ago
misiti3780|3 years ago
JohnHaugeland|3 years ago
jdshaffer|3 years ago
752963e64|3 years ago
[deleted]
cupofpython|3 years ago
I checked news sources more directly from the websites i am personally familiar with instead of using the hacker news front page as a filter + expanded domain