It cost at the very least the salary of a software engineer, though most likely a lot more. Autodesk is not some passion project of a group of volunteers who just want to keep it up. At large companies, I have seen few models of how to run public facing legacy services that don’t “align” with the company any more and as a result there is very little interest in them. They are all expensive in terms of personal and always a potential PR disaster to manage. Doubly so if it’s something that requires moderation like a forum.
You have the “there is a dedicated team for ‘legacy stuff’. They just inherit all dead end projects in the company”. If you are gonna have that model, that teams scope is ever growing, and so is their size. It’s not a shiny job either. “I maintain projects no one cares about” is not interesting or shiny and most good people will move to something else.
There is also the “since you started it, you own it now” approach. Where the virtual team that started a service, will sort of own it forever. It’s this thing that just hover over a team’s shoulder forever. Though “forever” usually means until a manager comes along who is loud enough about not wanting to deal with that shit anymore. It only causes issues when things go down, break, need updating, etc and they don’t want to work on that anymore.
There is the “the ownership of this random ass service will fall wherever we randomly draw and redraw random organizational lines. It’ll keep forever bouncing between random teams as no one cares about it, and no one wants it, and everyone argues that “it actually belong in fabric because it’s the only remaining consumer of their v2 APIs”, “fabric thinks this is more business layer because its main audience are end customers”, “business unit thinks it’s actually more UX as it’s running on the same domain”
And there is always the looming PR issue when an eventual issue happens, a ton of infighting over the lack of clear ownership and once they are over that, the person who has to fix it has no idea what this thing is and needs to get up to speed. Then you get a post on top of HN or Reddit or twitter etc saying “{Insert multimillion/billion dollar company random service} has been down for a week” and a lot of people like “seriously, they can’t figure out how to run that? I run one just for my ham group and it never goes down”
If this seems oddly familiar, you may actually have read it before, and no plagiarism is involved. Moser wrote the beginning of this article in the middle of his classic essay, ”Why Chinese is So Damn Hard” https://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html
> Can you imagine a well-educated native English speaker totally forgetting how to write a word like "knee" or "tin can"? Or even a rarely-seen word like "scabbard" or "ragamuffin"? I was once at a luncheon with three Ph.D. students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all native Chinese (one from Hong Kong). I happened to have a cold that day, and was trying to write a brief note to a friend canceling an appointment that day. I found that I couldn't remember how to write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 "to sneeze". I asked my three friends how to write the character, and to my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the character. Now, Peking University is usually considered the "Harvard of China". Can you imagine three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word "sneeze"??
I'm working on https://nuenki.app/, a language learning tool. It teaches you a language while you procrastinate by inserting translations of appropriate-difficulty sentences into webpages as you browse HN etc.
Currently trying to reduce costs by switching from using DeepL (high quality, low latency, high cost) everywhere to a hybrid that also uses Claude (high quality, high latency, low cost) for text that is far from the user. Also experimenting with Gemma 2 9B via Groq to go in between them, but it's bad at following instructions and I don't quite trust the quality numbers I'm seeing for it (they're benchmarked with gpt-4o as a judge).
I'm also trying to work out marketing. I'm not good at it, and I dislike it, but I need to get good at it. Currently considering Reddit ads for awareness, some content marketing going over the technical details (there's some fun language processing and performance optimisations), and... I feel that's not enough, but I'm not sure what to add to that.
I'm running on very little budget (I just left school and I'd rather not go into my limited savings over this), so I can't afford to just throw money at ads.
I built an English-speaking website that helps immigrants settle in Berlin.[0] It has been my full time job for a while. Most English speakers know about it, but it's nearly invisible to Germans, who would also benefit from the content and tools I have worked on.
I'm currently adding an automated AI translation feature to my custom static site generator, so that I can translate the website to multiple languages and reach more people. I'm trying to make the process as seamless and automated as possible, because I'm running this website solo, and there are only so many hours in a day.
It's a surprisingly tricky endeavour! As usual, the first 80% are easy. It's getting the last 20% right that requires a lot of work. There are so many small hurdles. For instance, translating the URL structure and translating the URLs within the content, getting the translations to be accurate, getting the SEO right, translating the templates and the JS tools I've built, keeping the costs low.
Those are way too abstract advice when you start programming.
You can only understand them because you lived those situations, which implies experience you don't have.
I would say (specifically to my young self):
- There is no substitute for doing. Less tutorials, more coding.
- Stop being obsessed with quality: you are not at the level where you can provide it yet. Do dirty. Do badly. But ship. Some people will be mad at you, and they are
right. But do it anyway. Yes, reboot the servers with users on it. Yes, commit the spaghetti. You'll reach the level you want to avoid doing all this.
- The users don't care about the tech. They care about the result.
- Doing something for the hell of it is worth it. Just make it separate from the point above so they don't conflict.
- Programming is a battle against complexity. Again and again. Put that on a post-it. Make your decisions based on it. You will suck at it, but try.
- You have imposter syndrome because you are an imposter. You are really bad. It's ok, doctors hurt people for years while learning to save them. Don't sweat it. It will come.
- You need faith it will work out. On the long run, you'll get better at this. But in the short term also. You'll find the bug. You'll figure out the solution. It will happen if you keep at it even if it can be frustratingly long and unfair. Even if it doesn't feel like that right now.
- The right team is way more important than the right tech. If you are alone, get in touch with people who will lift you up from time to time.
Other users have provided the link, but my heart sinks a little every time I see this brought up, especially when the commenter is singled out by name. People forget that this is a real person. He also happens to be a great HN contributor, and has been for many years.
I realize it's internet fun to point neon arrows at people seeming outrageously wrong in the past, but the truth is that people aren't reading that comment accurately and there's a huge dose of hindsight fallacy here.
When BrandonM wrote "I have a few qualms with this app", he didn't mean the software. He meant their YC application. (Note the title of Drew's post: "My YC App"). He wasn't being a petty nitpicker—he was earnestly trying to help, and you can see in how sweetly he replied to Drew there that he genuinely wanted them to succeed. We should be so lucky for all responses to "crazy new ideas" to be that decent. This community would be healthier, and actually the current thread is a standout example of how far from true it is.
The criticisms he was raising turned out to be a non-issue in hindsight, but were on point in 2007, when the idea of file synchronization was widely derided as a solution-in-search-of-a-problem which only technical users would ever care about, users who (as the comment pointed out) could already roll their own solutions. The idea had recently been publicly mocked in a famous blog post*, so it was on people's minds as the prime example of an idea only technical users would ever care about—and even YC funded Dropbox because they believed in Drew, not the idea.
This genre of musical sandbox is a really satisfying and fun rabbit hole. You can even take it to production (mainly ambient music production, that is). My favorite for usage inside DAWs is Droplets, which works as a plugin but also has a web version: https://fynthesizer.github.io/Drip/
There are other plugins for this, each with its own personality. For example Bitwig's Ricochet is a totally different take on the same idea, where they managed to make it usable for more rhythmic purposes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFvIYkTGRzA
1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
2. It doesn't actually replace a USB drive. Most people I know e-mail files to themselves or host them somewhere online to be able to perform presentations, but they still carry a USB drive in case there are connectivity problems. This does not solve the connectivity issue.
3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?
The EU gets a lot of heat for many things (and rightfully so), but this is an area where it is actually doing wonders in favor of consumers.
Here is the directive adopted by the EU Council to promote the repair of broken or defective goods, also known as the right-to-repair (or R2R) directive:
"The directive adopted today enshrines a new right for consumers: the right to have defective products repaired in an easier, cheaper and faster way. It also gives manufacturers the incentive to make products that last longer and can be repaired, reused and recycled."
The Farbrausch demo and a talk by Will Wright on the (originally planned) procedurally generated design of Spore lives rent free in my brain every time I see the list of 100's of gigabytes of queued game updates in Steam nowadays.
Eleven Labs is still very far above open source models in quality. But StyleTTS2 (MIT license) is impressively good and quite fast. It'll be interesting to see where this new one ends up. The code-switching ability is quite interesting. Most open source TTS models are strictly one language per sentence, often one language per voice.
In general though, TTS as an isolated system is mostly a dead end IMO. The future is in multimodal end-to-end audio-to-audio (or anything-to-audio) models, as demonstrated by OpenAI with GPT-4o's voice mode (though I've been saying this since long before their demo: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38339222). Text is very useful as training data but as a way to represent other modalities like audio or image data it is far too lossy.
In the spirit of sharing, cuz I think this is a great script (thank you), I prefer using maim over scrot simply because it has a --nodrag option. Personally feels better when making selections from a trackpad. Click once, move cursor, click again.
We did a similar migration (somewhat larger database) with ~20 seconds of downtime and much less work... using the magic of AWS RDS Blue-Green Deployments [1]. Surprised they aren't mentioned in the thread yet.
Basically, you spin up a new Blue Green deployment with any desired changes (in our case, we were upgrading Postgres major from 13 to 15). While your blue configuration continues to serve traffic, AWS uses logical replication to keep the "green" deployment in-sync. You can keep modifying (or testing) the "green" deployment (eg you could load test it if you wanted to), as long as you don't do any writes to it (writes still have to go to your live, blue configuration, and are replicated to green).
When you're ready, you run the "switch" command, and AWS does a few things for you: run checks to ensure blue/green are in sync, stops writes and connections, waits a few seconds to ensure replication is caught up, renames your database, then allows connections/writes again. We had less than 20 seconds of downtime, by our count. And, we had a primary and several read replicas and AWS successfully switched the full configuration over with no hiccups. You don't even need to switch your configuration because AWS swaps the database URLs for you. Green becomes blue, blue becomes old blue, and when you're ready, you delete "old blue".
Highly recommend! They do have some restrictions (for instance, not sure if it would work if you're switching accounts, etc).
I think this does not work well for mobile devices. Spacing and the font size is too large. Hence, a lot of screen space is wasted and the user has to scroll more. Larger font sizes on mobile are usually not a good idea as the device tends to be closer to your eyes anyway.
A snippet that could work better in my opinion is the following:
html {
max-width: 70ch;
/* larger spacing on larger screens, very small spacing on tiny screens */
padding: calc(1vmin + .5rem);
/* shorthand for margin-left/margin-right */
margin-inline: auto;
/* fluid sizing: https://frontaid.io/blog/fluid-typography-2d-css-locks-clamp/ */
font-size: clamp(1em, 0.909em + 0.45vmin, 1.25em);
/* use system font stack: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/font-family */
font-family: system-ui
}
/* increase line-height for everything except headings */
body :not(:is(h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6)) {
line-height: 1.75;
}
> A terminal is a physical device with a keyboard and screen connected to a computer running various OS types. A tty is the Unix device name for a physical or virtual terminal connection. A shell is the Unix command interpreter. A console is a generic term for a primary i/o device or interface. In unix terms the console is where the boot/startup messages are sent to. After bootup the console effectively becomes a terminal.
Adventures come to those who seek them. One can find big expensive adventures for six months out in the mountains, or small free/low cost adventures like volunteer fire fighting, painting, rock climbing, cooking, dancing, acting, making music, deep friendships.
Our lives are filled with exactly the richness we seek. Travel is just a catalyst to get us up off our sofas and make new friends. Having moved many times, I can assure you that one can do that today without moving.
I've met many unemployed travelers who mope inside all day and watch Netflix. I've also met many hard working people who've lived in the same house for twenty years but live rich, incredible lives filled with small adventures.
I've personally found immense use in tracking life according to the Moon's phases. 1/2/4 week intervals turn out to be a good timescale for tracking things like plant growth, project progress, etc.
My brother passed from Multiple Myeloma earlier this year. This was a rather rare instance of that disease as my brother was turning 30 in the year he contracted it. Usually you’re much older if you contract it and it may be found once something else is found.
What he would not be able to explain is how the palliative care went. I expect the author wont be able to unless he is lucky (or unlucky depending on your views on life and death) to last months/years. Unless you set aside a good bit of money/have a fairly good facility near you, you’re probably going to rely on friends and family for care. In the US your insurance should cover the palliative care facility and their efforts but getting a dedicated bed will cost extra. My brother worked for Apple and they did an outstanding job being supportive and had a lot of extra programs and perks to help cover many of the costs.
I’m located on the East Coast but took two months off from work to help care for my brother. He ended up just needing three weeks. He wrote that post right in the in between of a decline that “gradually and then suddenly” would accurately describe. He went from being cleared to drive to unable to do so within two weeks
His actual death was due to chronic kidney disease and the eventual renal failure/body tail spin. Eventually eating and drinking wasn’t a reasonable or interesting thing to do. You’re in a race to consume calories but unable to keep them in your body. Your next thought might be, “drink sugar water” but you’re also limited in how much water you can drink and managing sodium and potassium in your body. Also at this point there is no outsmarting your predicament. This is where your mind goes in alternating cycles. Eventually things go poorly enough that your blood oxygen level plummets and you lose consciousness. From that point what you experience is all a thought experiment for medical professionals and the people wondering if you’re feeling any more pain at this point.
If you find yourself in this situation you need to find good advocates that will help you find some ability to become ready to die and eventually tell you that you’re done fighting and to enjoy the time you have. My brother got a day and a half of not having to think about potassium and sodium and dialysis before he became unresponsive and another few days before he passed. If I am in charge of advocacy again I’d try to extend that to at least the last week. In our case that wouldn’t have been too hard to do because they started warning us that his BP and pulse were marginal for dialysis and they were threatening to decline treatment in several sessions.
Once you get to Palliative Care, and especially the point all treatment has been stopped, your advocates/family will be the ones giving you drugs to keep you comfortable. The palliative care providers train your advocates/caretakers on how to give morphine and other drugs. If you’ve picked people that are particularly well organized they'll take good care of you between the nurse visits.
Keep emotionally unstable people away from the nurses. We almost lost my brother’s care because one of his friends stopped taking his medications and seeing his therapist the week he heard the bad news. This turned into a really bad situation where the nurses were just a moment from walking out the door.
Palliative Care is not fun but I have a hard time imagining a more humane way to go aside from legal assisted suicide.
My aunt - one of 9 kids, and the only one who assiduously avoided alcohol and tobacco - died at 60 from cancer on her tongue. It took about 6 months from diagnosis to death.
You never know when your life will change. Death is possible anytime, but also an accident, injury, death of a loved one, it can be anything. I had an early-to-mid-life crisis in my early 30s where my own mortality became much more real to me and it altered my thinking and behavior.
I honestly can’t say if a quick, sudden, unexpected death is preferable to a long, drawn out, terminal death that gives a long time for careful thinking and study. I think I would prefer the latter despite the indignities and pain that you succumb to, as the author clearly shows. The idea that you can be walking down the street and have a heart attack or aneurysm is deeply disturbing to me, although I know people who died this way and it is a fairly likely way to die.
We should always, always, always be thankful for what we have. If you wake up and you can walk, if your children are healthy, if you have food to eat. So often today we let small grievances and petty issues ruin our happiness. In reality these problems are nothing compared to true suffering.
A friend is a hospice worker for dying children, who helps assemble their memory books and plan their final events and wishes. She does this work week after week with multiple children at a time. Imagining the slow death of my own child, planning memories, explaining to them about heaven, it is an astronomical amount of suffering that I cannot force myself to follow a logical thought experiment to conclusion.
I have followed along with this brave man’s story. It can happen to anyone, at any time.
One idea that comforts me is that every single living creature that existed before me has died, and every creature that exists now will die, and everything in the future will die. You cannot have the gift of life without the curse of death. While we all die alone, we all experience death - it is only lonely in the actual experience but it is something that all of us will participate in.
In my experience lying still doesn't really work, because it's a deliberate practice with a goal and your brain starts analyzing that as well. You know the inner voice that says: I am still not calming down, I am still awake.
I once read that sleep therapists sometimes give people with bad sleeping problems the opposite advice: keep your eyes slightly open and try to stay awake. Not in the sense that you should put on loud music, put lucifers between your eyelids, etc. But just lie down and don't try to fall asleep. It often works, because people let go of the goal to calm down and get asleep (which makes it hard to do exactly that), once you let go, your body does what it wants to do, calm down and sleep.
A similar approach works very well for me: just stop caring. Ensure that you are on a regular schedule for going to bed and waking up (so that you biological clock doesn't get confused), don't drink alcohol (bad sleep quality), don't do anything exciting the hours before going to bed (heated discussions on HN), and write down stuff that bothers you before going to bed. Let your body do the rest. If you are awake for some more time, then just interpret it as: my body isn't tired yet, I am just going to enjoy the cosiness of my bed.
It cost at the very least the salary of a software engineer, though most likely a lot more. Autodesk is not some passion project of a group of volunteers who just want to keep it up. At large companies, I have seen few models of how to run public facing legacy services that don’t “align” with the company any more and as a result there is very little interest in them. They are all expensive in terms of personal and always a potential PR disaster to manage. Doubly so if it’s something that requires moderation like a forum.
You have the “there is a dedicated team for ‘legacy stuff’. They just inherit all dead end projects in the company”. If you are gonna have that model, that teams scope is ever growing, and so is their size. It’s not a shiny job either. “I maintain projects no one cares about” is not interesting or shiny and most good people will move to something else.
There is also the “since you started it, you own it now” approach. Where the virtual team that started a service, will sort of own it forever. It’s this thing that just hover over a team’s shoulder forever. Though “forever” usually means until a manager comes along who is loud enough about not wanting to deal with that shit anymore. It only causes issues when things go down, break, need updating, etc and they don’t want to work on that anymore.
There is the “the ownership of this random ass service will fall wherever we randomly draw and redraw random organizational lines. It’ll keep forever bouncing between random teams as no one cares about it, and no one wants it, and everyone argues that “it actually belong in fabric because it’s the only remaining consumer of their v2 APIs”, “fabric thinks this is more business layer because its main audience are end customers”, “business unit thinks it’s actually more UX as it’s running on the same domain”
And there is always the looming PR issue when an eventual issue happens, a ton of infighting over the lack of clear ownership and once they are over that, the person who has to fix it has no idea what this thing is and needs to get up to speed. Then you get a post on top of HN or Reddit or twitter etc saying “{Insert multimillion/billion dollar company random service} has been down for a week” and a lot of people like “seriously, they can’t figure out how to run that? I run one just for my ham group and it never goes down”
Why bother is usually the final approach.