Hacker News: nicwest

New comment by nicwest in "Itch.io Taken Down by Funko"

nicwest — Mon, 09 Dec 2024 10:24:03 +0000

https://bsky.app/profile/karmn.bsky.social/post/3lcuc4dqudc2...

It's hard for me to read this any other way.

New comment by nicwest in "UK Threatens End-to-End Encryption"

nicwest — Mon, 24 Apr 2023 12:43:26 +0000

then when they back down we could have "UK threats to end end-to-end encryption end"

New comment by nicwest in "Launch HN: Hypercontext (YC S21) – Meeting notes, actions, and OKRs in one app"

nicwest — Mon, 19 Jul 2021 17:36:24 +0000

your website appears to have a bunch of meta data on it from something called soapbox. If I link to your website in slack it comes up with a "That looks like a Soapbox link. Would you like to install the Soapbox app" message. I assume a recent-ish rebrand?

What was the thought process there?

New comment by nicwest in "New Model M Is an American-Made Keyboard That Puts a Spring Back in Your Typing"

nicwest — Thu, 18 Feb 2021 09:45:16 +0000

There was an awesome project a while back to recreate a new buckling spring keyboard:

https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=79141.0

https://www.modelfkeyboards.com/

New comment by nicwest in "Bluetooth Trackball Mark II"

nicwest — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 11:23:39 +0000

Have you tried the trackballs formerly known as "Clearly Superior" now "Xtrac" apparently[1]. I like the physical scroll wheel and dedicated middle mouse button, the internals are mechanical not optical (I have had problems with kensingtons in this regard), and there are some fairly alluring foot peddle expansion ports on the back that I've not played with yet.

if you do go down this route, I would suggest avoiding a model with an LED in it. while it looks cool for sure the LED is positioned so that shines right in your eyes if you put the device front and center (like in between a split keyboard).

[1]: https://xkeys.com/xkeys/trackballs.html

New comment by nicwest in "Ask HN: Suggestions for books about API design?"

nicwest — Sat, 05 Sep 2020 15:43:41 +0000

Consumer centric API design

https://github.com/tlhunter/consumer-centric-api-design

New comment by nicwest in "Most-favorited Hacker News posts"

nicwest — Wed, 02 Sep 2020 15:16:57 +0000

I think it's interesting that out of all the news articles about famous people that have died, Ursla le Guin is the one that turns up in this list.

New comment by nicwest in "Ask HN: Self-taught webdev with lots of free time. What should I learn?"

nicwest — Thu, 13 Aug 2020 00:48:03 +0000

Go helped me learn about designing good interfaces, and how to write tests using dependency injection rather than just patching stuff out.

New comment by nicwest in "Ask HN: Self-taught webdev with lots of free time. What should I learn?"

nicwest — Wed, 12 Aug 2020 10:21:03 +0000

I found that learning and writing some Clojure and Go made me think better about the code I was writing in my main language (python).

I enjoyed working through Clojure for the brave and true: https://www.braveclojure.com/clojure-for-the-brave-and-true/

and the go tour is probably the best introduction I've ever had to a language: https://tour.golang.org/welcome/1

Ask HN: Any Literature on “Pace Layering”?

nicwest — Thu, 21 May 2020 11:24:06 +0000

A few months back I saw a comment[1] from one of the stripe co-founders where they mentioned they were thinking about "pace layering" and how it applied to their company and processes.

A quick google turned up an interesting article summing up a concept with the same name[2] by Stewart Brand. In the Acknowledgements section he mentioned a chapter in his book, which I tracked down and read[3]. While there are some clear parallels to software/product development, and I actually enjoyed it much more than I thought I would, I was left with more questions than real answers.

I'm wondering if anyone can point me in the direction of some more reading material on the subject, preferably in a tech/business context? Personally I like to do my professional reading with books, but articles, talks, podcasts, etc would also be super useful.

Thanks Team!

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20929631

[2]: https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/issue3-brand/release/2

[3]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38310.How_Buildings_Learn

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23257096

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by nicwest in "Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?"

nicwest — Thu, 14 May 2020 07:28:49 +0000

I'm investigating the way that encounter difficulty is estimated in Dungeons and Dragons. I've felt for a long time that the influence the number of opposing monsters have is somewhat exaggerated.

New comment by nicwest in "Show HN: A set of standard document templates"

nicwest — Mon, 20 Jan 2020 02:50:41 +0000

- Post-mortem

- Incident report

- Scheduled down time

New comment by nicwest in "Algorithm Removes Water from Underwater Images"

nicwest — Thu, 09 Jan 2020 13:53:20 +0000

Also I imagine that depth would be a significant factor

New comment by nicwest in "How to Exit Vim"

nicwest — Wed, 08 Jan 2020 11:35:32 +0000

Mileage may vary depending on language support, but vim does have a go to definition feature[1][2]. I believe there is also out box error checking for some languages, and if that is not enough for you (and at the risk of offending a large number of vim purists), there is a fantastic plugin called ALE[3] that will likely provide you with what you want.

1: https://vimhelp.org/pattern.txt.html#gd

2: https://vimhelp.org/pattern.txt.html#gD

3: https://github.com/dense-analysis/ale

New comment by nicwest in "Unmortgage, the ‘part own, part rental’ housing startup, with partners AllianzGI"

nicwest — Tue, 09 Jul 2019 14:33:11 +0000

> Are taxes and maintenance costs shared proportionally?

Day-to-day maintenance (replacing lightbulbs, shelf falling down etc) is your responsibility. Plus you get to decorate however you want (at your cost). All other taxes and maintenance costs are shared proportionally.

> Who gets to decide when to call the plumber?

You do. There's a home emergency cover plan in place (costs shared proportionally) so you can get someone round 24/7, 365 days / year.

> If you fail to pay your rent, can they evict you?

Yes, but if you just need a couple of months to get back on your feet, we won't.

> What happens to your share then?

You still own it, but any rent arrears would be netted off.

> Can you sublet?

Not at the moment.

> Can you sell your share on the open market, or only back to the company, at whatever price they decide is fair market value?

The latter, but there is an option to go to the open market together. Price is determined by a regulated independent surveyor, not by Unmortgage.

https://www.unmortgage.com/faqs

https://www.unmortgage.com/how-it-works

source: I am an unmortgage employee.

New comment by nicwest in "OpenSCAD: Software for creating solid 3D CAD objects"

nicwest — Wed, 02 Jan 2019 10:24:43 +0000

I recently bought a 3D printer and have enjoyed programing objects in cljoure with scad-clj.

https://github.com/farrellm/scad-clj

This is biggest project I know of that uses it:

https://github.com/adereth/dactyl-keyboard

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk3A41U0iO4

New comment by nicwest in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2018)"

nicwest — Mon, 03 Dec 2018 16:58:55 +0000

Millions of people are stuck in the rent trap, with no way to own a home. At Unmortgage we are reinventing homeownership to bridge the widening gap between renting and buying with a mortgage.

We are funded for the next 3 years after the largest seed raise in Europe and are looking for people to join us at this early stage.

We work in a Agile (XP+TDD) team in a stunning office above Bank station, London. The Stack is React, Python running on Kubernetes in Google Cloud. Everyone gets their hands dirty and there are no silos allowed.

Here are all our exciting jobs: https://jobs.lever.co/unmortgage/

If you have any questions about the backend jobs you can drop me a line at nic.west@unmortgage.com, or chee.diep@unmortgage.com for the frontend jobs, or alternatively our CEO ray@unmortgage.com for all of the above and any additional information about the company.

New comment by nicwest in "Ask HN: Did any Show HN posts turn into successful startups?"

nicwest — Thu, 20 Sep 2018 09:09:08 +0000

I think this was the company that became pebble (correct me if I'm wrong).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2221579

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3290884

New comment by nicwest in "Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub"

nicwest — Mon, 04 Jun 2018 01:22:22 +0000

> Git doesn't include better built-in support for issues, wikis, PRs / code reviews, and releases

I feel like a lot of these features could be handled with git-notes[1]. For example git-appraise[2] uses the git-notes feature for a code review system:

[1] https://git-scm.com/docs/git-notes

[2]https://github.com/google/git-appraise

New comment by nicwest in "Matias Click Switches: Tactile mechanical keyswitches"

nicwest — Fri, 16 Mar 2018 14:58:18 +0000

so while it's not exactly the all in one service you describe, you can do something similar already:

http://www.keyboard-layout-editor.com/

to design your layout, then

http://builder.swillkb.com/

to design a layer case, files go to a laser cutting service,

then you would need a controller of some sort (commonly something like a https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/), switches, diodes, usb ports, etc.

then hand wire everything together.

tmk/qmk is more or less a defacto standard in custom keyboard firmware:

https://github.com/qmk/qmk_firmware

here are some examples of people generating firmware with webtools, I don't know what they use on the backend.

https://www.massdrop.com/configurator/ergodox

http://qmk.thevankeyboards.com/