Hacker News: steerpike

New comment by steerpike in "Last.fm is now independent"

steerpike — Wed, 27 May 2026 23:16:59 +0000

Yeah. 100% agree here. The Pandora algorithm was an absolute breath of fresh air relative to every other recommendation system. Just constantly surfacing new and interesting music that I had never heard of but was exactly what I liked. I spent so long hunting for info on how they achieved it and if their taxonomies had ever been open sourced.

New comment by steerpike in "Celebrating Interesting Flickr Technologies"

steerpike — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 08:33:00 +0000

In a recent thread talking about Flickr URLs I mentioned a couple of interesting technical features that Flickr had also done that I thought were worth celebrating. When gwern mentions that you should write in more detail about those things I feel you have to take that seriously. This is that attempt.

Celebrating Interesting Flickr Technologies

steerpike — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 08:33:00 +0000

Article URL: https://medium.com/@brightcarvings/celebrating-flickr-technology-3c93c8ddecc2

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47347977

Points: 58

# Comments: 11

New comment by steerpike in "Unsung heroes: Flickr's URLs scheme"

steerpike — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 08:26:48 +0000

Flickr deserves a lot of praise for a number of technical advances that I wish had seen wider adoption. Their API was one of the first and honestly still one of the most enjoyable to actually use as a developer. It's still full of incredibly interesting API calls that you wouldn't expect from it unless you read carefully. Did you know, for example, that flickr API will provide you with the bounding box co-ordinates of different types of places? From a neighbourhood all the way up to a continent?

They implemented the Where On Earth ID (WOEID) which was a super useful way of disambiguating different places that shared latitude and longitude (for example, being able to disambiguate the Sydney Opera House, Circular Quay and Sydney Harbour which all can potentially share the same lat/long co-ords).

They implemented machine tags which are tags in the form of -

namespace:predicate=value

Which, when it was implemented by other sites with machine tags allowed you to get and group all kinds of interesting combinations of content.

Yeah, honestly flickr had some incredible tech the was so much fun to explore and use. That their vision of what the web could be wasn't the one that won is one of the great losses of the web IMO.

New comment by steerpike in "Ask HN: What happens when a new user's submission disappears?"

steerpike — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 01:08:50 +0000

If you join HN and immediately start posting links to your own site you'll almost certainly be flagged by users.

New comment by steerpike in "Where is London's most central sheep?"

steerpike — Fri, 24 Jan 2025 02:44:06 +0000

It's just a question of ease. Where we lived in Bristol (Hotwells) we were exactly 28 minutes walk from Queen Square in the center of the city where I worked and 29 minutes in the other direction to Ashton court estate which is a deer farm and 340ha estate owner by the City of Bristol.

New comment by steerpike in "Where is London's most central sheep?"

steerpike — Thu, 23 Jan 2025 23:11:41 +0000

So I'll caveat this by saying we were a couple of Australians living in the UK and one of the big differences we noticed between Australia and the UK is just how damn clearly delineated the seasons are in the UK. In Australia they all kind of smudge into one another while in the UK it's really very clearly 4 very distinct phases of the year.

One of the byproducts of this is that we found UK winter in London to be pretty damn hard to get through. London is an incredible city and there's a lot to love about it, but the winters are honestly a fucking slog. We discovered that UK winters are way more tolerable if you have the opportunity to get out into the countryside with proper gear and just enjoy the natural beauty as much as possible. It a cliche, but there is something delightful about a big walk in the cold that ends at a country pub with a good meal and a roaring fire.

Bristol in particular is a beautiful city for a number of reasons.

Decent sized - so there's always something to do and jobs and conveniences are available (at least pre-Brexit)

Amazing music pedigree - still good for live music and some incredible bands came out of Bristol and surrounding areas.

University town - so good nightlife and fun things to do.

The river Avon - it's a river town which allows for lovely walks and natural beauty

Decent hospitality - Coffee in the UK is often seen as a fucking crime scene by Australians but there are decent independent cafes here and there in the city

Engineering history - The man with the best name in the world Isambard Kingdom Brunel was an incredible engineer from Bristol who left his mark in a number of ways (not least the extraordinary Bristol suspension bridge which we lived almost directly under)

It's just really beautiful - things like the pastel painted houses along the hills of the city make it incredibly picturesque

New comment by steerpike in "Where is London's most central sheep?"

steerpike — Thu, 23 Jan 2025 10:46:46 +0000

When my wife and I lived in Bristol we developed a metric designed to measure how enjoyable a city was to live in that we called "time to sheep". Basically it's a measure of how long you have to travel from the center of the city before you're in the English countryside surrounded by sheep and the best cities have a low (but not too low) "time to sheep" metric. It helped explain one of the reasons we loved living in Bristol so much when we had such a hard time living in London.

Could also have been that Bristol is just a crazy beautiful city to live in, but where's the fun in that, right?

New comment by steerpike in "Ask HN: Favorite blog in 2024?"

steerpike — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 00:26:35 +0000

Jeremy Morrell apparently started a blog in 2024, wrote 3 posts for it, and each one of them would make my "top 5 blog posts of 2024" list.

https://jeremymorrell.dev/blog/

New comment by steerpike in "Mistakes as a new manager"

steerpike — Fri, 06 Dec 2024 21:30:35 +0000

100% agree with this. I would say that the other highly likely mistake new managers make is trying to code their way out of problems. It makes sense, right? Previously when you're an IC and a project ran into issues you could just "code harder" and get through it, but that's rarely the right solution when you're a manager and will likely exacerbate the problem itself if you disappear into the trenches trying to code your way through a critical path. Your role is no longer primarily solving coding problems it's solving people problems.

New comment by steerpike in "How Hard Should Your Employer Work to Retain You?"

steerpike — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 10:29:53 +0000

Honestly, in an industry that talks about how important collaboration is and then places the most authoritarian minded individuals as our lauded CEOs (Musk, Bezos, Gates, Jobs, etc, etc) I just find Charity such a fucking breath of fresh air in terms of communication style and the way she talks about and clearly lives her principles. Honeycomb may not be FAANG-sized, but I'd genuinely give more to work under her than any other current CEO I can think of.

New comment by steerpike in "AI agents invade observability: snake oil or the future of SRE?"

steerpike — Thu, 19 Sep 2024 02:25:13 +0000

Site Reliability Engineering.

New comment by steerpike in "Giving kids no autonomy at all has become a parenting norm"

steerpike — Mon, 03 Apr 2023 02:29:58 +0000

I believe the most common definition for this context of "production" is "mass produced commercial vehicle"

New comment by steerpike in "Ask HN: Which is your most favorite API?"

steerpike — Sat, 17 Dec 2022 08:19:30 +0000

One of the fun things you can do is using the set of places API methods.

flickr.places.findByLatLon returns a placesId based on a supplied lat/long of somewhere you might be interested in.

You can then use that placeId to get photos around that location with a call to flickr.places.getChildrenWithPhotosPublic

Even more amusing is that you can get the actual shape co-ordinates for that place (for example the shape values or the polyline values of your local suburb or city).

I can tell you that I didn't expect to be able to access the shapefiles, bounding boxes and polylines for essentially every suburb I needed for a location based app I was building 10 years ago from a photo app API.

New comment by steerpike in "Ask HN: Which is your most favorite API?"

steerpike — Thu, 15 Dec 2022 10:10:57 +0000

Flickr's API is still the best.

Does everything you want it to.

Has a few fun surprises that you didn't expect that make it even more fun to make things with.

Simple to use.

Well documented.

Test playground at your fingertips to experiment with any call you like.

One of the first APIs ever released and you can still count the number of other available APIs that positively compare on one hand.

New comment by steerpike in ""Ducks,” the Canadian cartoonist Kate Beaton’s new graphic memoir"

steerpike — Thu, 29 Sep 2022 06:20:13 +0000

It's probably not that complicated nor really that related to an agency. The simple fact is probably more that for a certain type of nerd with a literary bent Kate Beaton and Hark a vagrant hold a similar place in our heart as Randall Munroe and XKCD.

New comment by steerpike in "Ask HN: How influential can physical appearance be in professional environments?"

steerpike — Mon, 26 Sep 2022 10:09:35 +0000

Coming to grips with the hidden influence of my own physicality has been a long term struggle for me. I realised over a long time that the fact that I was over six foot, male, white, bearded, broad and articulate meant that people inherently saw me as significantly more capable and tended to defer to me in a multitued of situations. This wasn't something that naturally gelled with the way I viewed my own competencies, but it's also really, really, really hard to get people to stop doing. Basically I have a significant 'self discrepancy gap'[0] between 'Own Actual' and 'Other Actual' that I constantly need to work at. Years of experience have taught me that these kind of gaps are pretty common in our industry.

Yes it exists and think it's incredibly important for people to be aware of the power of their own physicality and not to abuse it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-discrepancy_theory

New comment by steerpike in "Ask HN: What Are Some Great APIs?"

steerpike — Sat, 04 Jun 2022 11:14:47 +0000

Flickrs API still hasn't been beaten and it was one of the original APIs ever released. Frankly I thinks it embarrassing for us as an industry that it's still one of the simplest and best APIs I've ever used.

New comment by steerpike in "Ask HN: What do you read for general knowledge?"

steerpike — Mon, 13 Dec 2021 06:28:06 +0000

Wikipedia Current events page is great https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events for an overview of major global events.

For a lot of other topics around general knowledge it can be very interesting to browse the various levels of 'Vital articles' on Wikipedia (ie, there are 11 Level 1 Vital articles, around 45K Level 5 Vital articles and around 1K Level 3 Vital articles). I like browsing the Level 3 Vital articles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vital_articles when I'm looking for something to read.

New comment by steerpike in "Second-guessing the modern web (2020)"

steerpike — Thu, 27 May 2021 23:19:05 +0000

I feel like this post just reached into my head and pulled out all my current thoughts about web development and the dominant architecture paradigm. I love it when someone articulates my thoughts better than I do.