Hacker News: mshenfield

New comment by mshenfield in "Developers are building communities that act as their own miniature power grids"

mshenfield — Fri, 11 Aug 2023 00:03:00 +0000

25k per unit, assuming the battery lasts 5 years, is uneconomically high at $5k/year per home.

A 100kw generator can produce enough power for 100 homes, costs ~$50k all in, and ~$1k per day in fuel costs to run during an outage. Assuming the generator also lasts 5 years, that's only $100/year per home, 50x less than the battery solution.

Batteries are for the foreseeable future way too expensive.

New comment by mshenfield in "Twitter was down"

mshenfield — Mon, 06 Mar 2023 17:59:05 +0000

It's back

New comment by mshenfield in "Starbucks illegally fired US workers over union, judge rules"

mshenfield — Thu, 02 Mar 2023 15:52:04 +0000

No. Companies just have to re-hire fired employees and pay lost wages and benefits. IMO Starbucks should pay a large punitive fine that gets split between the fired workers and the NLRB.

New comment by mshenfield in "Google to reduce workforce by 12k"

mshenfield — Fri, 20 Jan 2023 19:32:30 +0000

I've never seen anyone directly make this case. Most people seem to want their colleagues (many of whom are friends) to keep their jobs more than they want the stock price to go up.

New comment by mshenfield in "Atom was archived today"

mshenfield — Fri, 16 Dec 2022 06:59:15 +0000

I'm still not convinced VSCode is faster and better. My Atom setup was never slow, the only thing that wasn't instantaneous was code completion. For me, it felt like VSCode came out of nowhere and surpassed Atom for inexplicable reasons.

New comment by mshenfield in "Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun"

mshenfield — Fri, 04 Nov 2022 16:17:34 +0000

Twitter won't die, but it won't make much of a profit either. Elon Musk will find another buyer in 2 years for $25 billion and make most of his money back while leaving the company saddled with most of the $11 billion in debt financing.

New comment by mshenfield in "Never trust a system that seems to be working"

mshenfield — Mon, 17 Oct 2022 15:04:17 +0000

Also a good reminder why exceptions and optionals exist. Bonkers that "I didn't get a response" defaults to 0.

New comment by mshenfield in "Imagen: An AI system that creates photorealistic images from input text"

mshenfield — Thu, 25 Aug 2022 14:59:29 +0000

I like Pixlr, I use pixlr.com/e. It's free and web based and has always worked well for me.

Did that happen recently? It says in Pixlr's site they're owned by INMAGINE.

New comment by mshenfield in "Imagen: An AI system that creates photorealistic images from input text"

mshenfield — Thu, 25 Aug 2022 07:07:13 +0000

These tools are amazing for prototyping. I had an idea for a promotional poster, and seeing my idea just by writing it felt like magic. The generated image had too many artifacts to use, but gave me a guideline to follow when creating the real thing in Pixlr.

AI content generation (text, image, source code, video, music) will be a huge boon for prototyping where applied judiciously.

New comment by mshenfield in "Twenty years of my blog"

mshenfield — Mon, 13 Jun 2022 18:47:52 +0000

I had the luck of getting to interact with Simon a little at my first real programmer job at Eventbrite. You would never know meeting him that he was one of the creators of Django, (and TIL querySelector!). He was infectiously curious and excited about programming in a way that bubbled over to most people he interacted with. He would also enthusiastically engage with what you were working on, even the beginner project I had at the time. I don't know him well, but my impression was not just of a great programmer, but a great colleague and an authentically positive person.

Congrats on twenty years!

New comment by mshenfield in "A Trail Tale"

mshenfield — Sun, 12 Jun 2022 15:59:56 +0000

Love everything about this. The 6+ lawyers of parallax background really make it feel alive.

Is the background generative in some way, or is each layer in a loop?

New comment by mshenfield in "Sunsetting Atom"

mshenfield — Sat, 11 Jun 2022 04:34:15 +0000

I used Atom for a long time after it was cool. I just loved the idea of an editor I could extend using the standard web tools and frameworks. Overall love this project, and still am a little miffed that VSCode ate their lunch. Best of luck on everything Nathan and the team do.

New comment by mshenfield in "Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?"

mshenfield — Thu, 07 Apr 2022 21:33:47 +0000

Thanks for acknowledging how much harder this is when you use a cloud-specific feature. Modifying your codebase to migrate off some cloud specific service seems like it would be by far the hardest part of switching clouds.

New comment by mshenfield in "We replaced rental brokers with software and filled 200 vacant apartments"

mshenfield — Thu, 08 Jul 2021 17:29:58 +0000

Even though this begins with a pitch for empowering tenants, the customers are the landlords. The value for landlords comes at the expense of tenants in several ways.

* It prevents tenants who don't meet income or other requirements from even looking at the unit.

* It makes tenants liable for noting damage as soon as they view a unit to avoid it being attributed to them, a daunting task.

* And it removes a face to face interaction that forces some accountability on landlords who don't provide a clean/cared for unit.

Notably absent is a mechanism for tenants to provide feedback to landlords on the listing. The Questions feature is helpful, but not designed for concerns/praise.

New comment by mshenfield in "Emoji Under the Hood"

mshenfield — Fri, 26 Mar 2021 13:28:35 +0000

It's a post about emojis, but I feel like I understand Unicode better now?

New comment by mshenfield in "Google Removed ClearURLs Extension from Chrome Web Store"

mshenfield — Wed, 24 Mar 2021 14:42:18 +0000

Does Google contact developers before taking down their extensions?

New comment by mshenfield in "10 Years of Open-Source Visualization: Did I learn anything from D3.js?"

mshenfield — Wed, 24 Feb 2021 06:45:15 +0000

I used d3.js for one of my first programming projects. I was grateful and impressed that almost every question on Stack Overflow was answered by Mike Bostock or Jason Davies.

I'm (a little) older and (a little) wiser, and know this kind of support is a huge amount of work. It sounds like "focus[ing] on learning and broadening your perspective" is what fueled all those answers I so appreciated.

New comment by mshenfield in "Many small queries are efficient in SQLite"

mshenfield — Tue, 16 Feb 2021 19:45:00 +0000

One trick of `pragma journal_mode = WAL` is that even with synchronous normal, SQLite syncs when you close the last connection [1]. So re-using a connection is key to getting the full benefits if you're executing commands from a single thread/process.

[1] https://sqlite.com/wal.html#the_wal_file

New comment by mshenfield in "Software engineering topics I changed my mind on"

mshenfield — Sun, 24 Jan 2021 18:55:04 +0000

This list is self-consciously blunt/rude (correlating programming practices with intelligence and sanity) and unaccountable ("who knows what I'll believe in a few more years"). It's an annoying combination. I imagine many reader will haughtily deploy these commandments against their colleagues.

New comment by mshenfield in "Rqlite: The lightweight, distributed relational database built on SQLite"

mshenfield — Fri, 22 Jan 2021 16:43:39 +0000

Going from a local db to one over a network has at least one risk. The SQLite docs gives developers the okay to write "n+1" style queries (https://www.sqlite.org/np1queryprob.html). When the db is on the same file system as the application this pattern is fine. But as soon a you add a network call it becomes a potential bottleneck.