jvanvleet's comments

jvanvleet | 2 years ago | on: Chromebook Plus

This is fairly close to my revelation as well. I don't run "heavier duty programming" as OP says local anyhow. VSCode runs wonderfully, battery lasts forever and I run anything beyond trivial in some cloud instance. They are so light, the battery lasts so long and they are so cheap mine just bounces around in my backpack and is always with me.

jvanvleet | 2 years ago | on: 20 Years of Gentoo

Gentoo was the "gateway drug" that got me moved over from FreeBSD. I loved FreeBSD ports and Portage scratched that itch with a Linux kernel. Eventually the need for less excitement and a little more predictability caused me to move on. I also miss it at times.

jvanvleet | 3 years ago | on: Connecting a 1980s Pinball Machine to the Internet

It just floors me that today you can order up a custom PCB for a few dollars if you are willing to wait a few weeks. What a world.

jvanvleet | 3 years ago | on: Jetnet Acquires ADS-B Exchange, a community-fed ADSB aggregator

This is my situation as well. If you travel a lot, having something light Flightaware giving you more detailed information about what is really happening with your flight or airport is wonderful and starting a feed was a fun way to get more features.

jvanvleet | 4 years ago | on: Sweden sends just 1% of its trash to landfills

If the trash was sorted so we buried "caches" of plastic separate from chemicals, cardboard, electronics, etc I think there is some short term sense here. My issue with landfills is that mixing all that stuff into a big pile in the ground just makes more useless for the future. I believe that future us might find a way to make use of some of these types of waste if they were separated and easy to get back. To put it another way, at least make it as easy as possible for the future to try to fix this if we must be so wasteful.

jvanvleet | 4 years ago | on: Threads (1984) – Documentary style account of a nuclear holocaust and its effect

The only movie to give me nightmares and sleepless nights. The Day After had little impact on me but Threads was on a whole different level.

For some reason I also still remember a scene from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Bulletin - the news crew trying to understand why the NEST bomb squad was running away just before cutting out...

jvanvleet | 4 years ago | on: What kind of Apple Mac did Arthur Dent have?

Way back when Adams also posted occasionally on his own Usenet group. When he did the answers were often very similar. I got the distinct impression of someone who had found something he was very good at but not particularly interested in doing.

jvanvleet | 4 years ago | on: DynamoDB 10 years later

I was one of these. However I now understand that the pricing nuances reflected a reality that I appreciate. We used DDB in a way that was not the best fit and the cost was a reflection of this.

jvanvleet | 4 years ago | on: Ask HN: What kind of projects make a junior candidate stand out from the rest?

Accepted pull requests to open source projects run by someone else. If PRs look even decent that will almost guarantee an interview with me for a young dev. It will guarantee me a look at just about anyone.

jvanvleet | 4 years ago | on: When “Foundation” Gets the Blockbuster Treatment, Asimov’s Vision Gets Lost

I agree. The majority of the reactions here to Foundation seem exactly the way I felt so many years ago to the Starship Troopers movie. I hated seeing it in the theater with a passion and it was because I was one of the people that read and enjoyed the book. Even today when the ST movie is talked about as a cult classic I bristle a little bit - but I can see now it is good as a movie unrelated to the book and a disappointment to a fan.

jvanvleet | 4 years ago | on: Building a vision of life without work (2015)

This is myself as well. HN is a kind of a National Geographic of technology to me.

jvanvleet | 4 years ago | on: Why is the Moscow Metro so grandiose compared to other Soviet architecture

Years ago I made a single reply to askhistorians that survived and got a handful of upvotes. Nothing special and yet the one reply I have any pride in.

jvanvleet | 5 years ago | on: Commodore SX-64 keyboard restoration

I am curious about the silicon oil. I assume this is a solution for places where there is not a lot of rubbing/use? Some searching did not turn up any indication this was a common use nor permanent.

jvanvleet | 5 years ago | on: Zoom corrects usage numbers: says it has 300M daily meeting participants

I agree. Been using Zoom for Ubuntu and it "just works".

jvanvleet | 6 years ago | on: Jules Verne’s Most Famous Books Were Part of a 54-Volume Masterpiece

Mine too. Tom Swift and the Bookmobile that brought them changed my life. It also had a few of the "new" Tom Swift adventures and I later learned there was an "old" series that start with Tom Swift and his Wireless Message and Tom Swift and his Electronic Rifle.

jvanvleet | 6 years ago | on: The Afterlives and Second Acts of America’s Movie Palaces

A wonderful single screen space in my home town was converted into a pool hall. You picked up the balls and paid for the table at the ticket booth and they reused the theater seats on a raised platform along the tables for viewing. It was really something.

jvanvleet | 6 years ago | on: Reducing Wasted Food at Home

I really believe you know someone that could use the compost. I have three other families feeding mine.

jvanvleet | 7 years ago | on: New for AWS Lambda: Use Any Programming Language and Share Common Components

True. In-VPC has extra costs.

jvanvleet | 7 years ago | on: New for AWS Lambda: Use Any Programming Language and Share Common Components

https://github.com/awslabs/aws-lambda-cpp makes claims of millisecond cold start.