_Donny's comments

_Donny | 1 month ago | on: TikTok users can't upload anti-ICE videos. The company blames tech issues

A few weeks ago, I reported a compilation video of ICE officers beating people. The description included the phrase "The deportations will continue :)".

I reported it for promoting violence, but TikTok found no violation of its guidelines.

It probably didn't help that the video was posted by the official White House TikTok account..

_Donny | 1 year ago | on: BareMetal OS

I used BareMetal and Pure64 as a source of inspiration and knowledge while writing an OS as a student. It is simple and well written.

I miss the days of reading AMD64 manuals and directly interacting with my hardware through assembly, and I want to get back to it.

What would be a good entry-point to OS development nowadays? I have the "FYSOS: The System Core" by Benjamin David Lunt. While I love the series, I wonder what other alternatives there are, perhaps supporting ARM?

_Donny | 1 year ago | on: Tiling with Three Polygons Is Undecidable

Woah! It is the same guy that got me through my algorithms course at university with his youtube MIT OpenCourseWare videos!

His lectures are absolute gold. He explains everything so clearly, simply, and efficiently.

I started skipping lectures in favor of watching his videos, and it saved me countless of hours -- and I got a perfect mark :)

_Donny | 2 years ago | on: The Reddit blackout will continue

Interesting. Personally, I find IRC incredible frustrating exactly because I can't easily see the history and continue conversations.

I usually connect to IRC channels through a browser client or a desktop app, but all too often, my browser would lose the connection or my computer would go to sleep, disconnecting me from the server. Also, sometimes the server would not let go of my disconnected nickname, so I would get one with one of more `_` appended to it.

Re-joining would not fetch the previous messages, and I would have anxiety that someone has replied to my message that I posted a few minutes prior, but I would never see...

I know that IRC bouncers exist, and I have even tried using `tmux` on a server to keep my irssi connection alive, but that is in no way user-friendly, even for a fairly technical person. Last resort is to find the public channel logs somewhere, if they even exist.

At that point, I would just give up and use Discord.

_Donny | 2 years ago | on: Ask HN: Has journaling improved your life?

I use Nextcloud hosted on Hetzner. It is pretty cheap and supports almost all systems I can think of. It feels a bit sluggish at times (slow sync, apps can be buggy), but I'm pretty happy with it.

Oh and the mobile app has a decent editor for text / markdown files :)

_Donny | 2 years ago | on: Ask HN: Has journaling improved your life?

I have been writing a journal for about 6 years now. I usually write 3 entries a week spanning from a few sentences to hundreds of words.

Personally, I feel there are many benefits to it, mainly:

1. It gives me time to think, to process my thoughts, explore ideas, and handle emotions. I often learn a lot about myself, what I did well, and how I can improve.

2. It is a great way to preserve memories. Only after I started writing my journal did I realize how much I forget about my past. I've always taken photos throughout my life, but those only capture a very small part of my life. My worries, the music I listened to, the TV-series I raved about, my dreams, my thoughts on the books I've read, the deep talks with my friends, are all preserved in my journal. It is easy to remember your vacations to exotic locations, but do you remember your everyday life from years back?

3. It can be meditative. It feels great to be able to sit for up to an hour and write without any barriers. I don't have to stress about my writing style, the words I use, embarrassing stuff about myself. I truly feel I can express myself to the fullest.

I'm really happy that I decided to write my journal in Markdown. This format can be opened pretty much everywhere, even on my phone or my moms computer. Furthermore, it enables me to do some crude formatting for code, create headings, and even attach images. And since it is digital, I can search in it pretty easily.

_Donny | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: What companies are embracing “HTML over the wire”?

I am incredibly annoyed by slow websites. I noticed that I have started using my browser in a very asynchronous way where I open multiple tabs, do a single action, and move to the next one. When I get to my last tab, the first is hopefully ready.

For instance, on GCP, I:

  0. Open 2 tabs for a 2 google cloud instance
  1. For each tab, I click on the action I want. E.g Logs, deployment, and networking. 
  2. Then, for each tab again, I click on the nested action I want
  3. Repeat step 2
It might sound like a lot, but each click easily takes 5-10 seconds, which is an excruciatingly long time if you spend a lot of day on that site -- and yes, it takes just as long doing it sequentially. Furthermore, I usually use fairly capable machines, so performance should not be an issue IMHO.

It does not happen on all sites, and I know GCP is a very complex site, but it happens often enough that it has become a habbit to me.

I love sites like Wikipedia or HN where everything is snappy.

_Donny | 4 years ago | on: Kagi: A Premium Search Engine

If this really lets me block certain websites for good, then I'm sold.

I absolutely hate those sites that scrape other well-known sites (like StackOverflow, Quora, Reddit) and add ads and SEO spam. They are increasingly better at being on the top of the search results, and I cannot get rid of them.

_Donny | 4 years ago | on: BlackBerry held the tiny keys to my heart

I completely agree, typing on 3310 was much more fun.

I absolutely hate typing more than 3 words on my iPhone. Not only are the keys too small for my large-ish fingers, but regularly typing in 3-4 languages completely messes up my finger-memory for each keyboard layout. Even worse, it completely messes up auto-correct.

I actually have a reoccurring nightmare where I need to send a distress message from my iPhone, but it refuses to write anything legible. I bet my subconsciousness agrees.

_Donny | 4 years ago | on: “Click to subscribe, call to cancel” is illegal, FTC says

Living in Europe, I couldn't believe that if I wanted to unsubscribe to New York Times, I would need to call one of their hotlines which operated in US time-zones. IIRC the open hours were after midnight in my timezone, and their local hotline was out of order.

I seriously thought that I had signed up for a phishing site ...

_Donny | 4 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (November 2021)

  Location: Copenhagen, Denmark
  Remote: Some days of the week
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Python, C/C++, C#, SQL, Django, Docker, Git, Linux, ML (Keras + TensorFlow)
  Résumé/CV: https://nx2098.your-storageshare.de/s/sYF85cyaixR9Bb9
  Email: jan~at~meznik.dk
Graduated with a MSc in computer science back in 2019. I have a passion for the scientific part of software engineering, I like to learn new programming languages and technologies, and I am very interested in low-level programming.

_Donny | 4 years ago | on: Lego Island Rebuilder

One of my very first PC games was the Lego Racer 2. Although the racing was not as good as in the first game, it still had some interesting elements.

I was completely blown away that I could build my own car and race in it. Furthermore, you could free-roam the world with your car, exploring the tracks, finding shortcuts, discovering secrets, and completing missions.

I felt very disappointed that I could not build my own house, but I was still amazed by the (limited) creativity that the game provided.

Funny how just a bit of freedom to create and explore in a game kicks off the fantasies in a child.

_Donny | 5 years ago | on: Quickdraw with Google AI

I drew a beautiful sea turtle; I was sure it was going to guess it! But no, it couldn't. Then I checked the training set, and it was full of tortoises...

I guess they should check their training set :P

_Donny | 5 years ago | on: I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility (2007)

I do not quite understand how the guys in the simulation can determine which level they are at. If L1 universe interferes with L2, will the guys in L2 see the divergence in L3? How do they determine their own level?

Fantastic story. Will read more from this author!

_Donny | 5 years ago | on: Casio F-91W: The strangely ubiquitous watch (2011)

I was really entertained by a little note in the manual for the watch:

"NOTE: THERE IS NO WAY unit components can be damaged or malfunction due to misoperation of buttons. If confusing information appears on the display it means entry sequence was incorrect. Please read the manual and try again."

I don't see many modern manuals stating this.

_Donny | 5 years ago | on: Ask HN: Are you depressed?

I hesitate to write that I am depressed after reading so many tragic and heartbreaking comments... My everyday life just seems so good in comparison.

I've recently graduated from a university and I have my first full-time SWE job as a backend developer. Although I really like my job and I can barely imagine a better workplace, I really dread my everyday life.

Working 8+ hours every day is soul-crushing to me, and with all other errands and a good sleeping schedule, I barely have time and energy for the other things in life that I enjoy. Dating, working out, being social, finding a place to live, as well as being quarantined is just overwhelming with a full-time job, I feel.

Since I've been getting negative work reviews, I called a career counselor. When he said that "I got to man up and prioritize my work above everything else", I was severely depressed and suicidal.

_Donny | 5 years ago | on: If you're hiring, be forthcoming about the dev experience

Not being able to select your own hardware for a job is perhaps one of my worst experiences to date.

At one company, I was handed laptop with an older version of Windows, preinstalled bloatware, 3rd party encryption software, anti-virus, VPNs, etc. Even worse, the laptop was about more than 16 inches and weighted over 3 kg because the company crammed in as much expensive hardware in it as possible -- so that the computer would fit everyones needs.

I understand the need for company IT policies, but global companies have such complicated policies it basically hindered all my work.

You won't believe the sigh of relief when I started at a small start-up company, and I was able to choose all of my hardware. The CTO ensured my SSH keys would grant me access to all the servers I would need.

_Donny | 5 years ago | on: 0.999...= 1

I think this is spot on, at least for me personally.

I am not very good at mathematics, so I never questioned my professors when they said that "You cannot treat infinites as regular numbers".

Perhaps due to that statement, I did not really pursue these kinds of equations. For instance, I do not really see how the algebraic argument on the Wiki is any different from:

  2 * inf = inf
  inf + inf = inf   (subtract inf from both sides)
  inf = 0
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