alx_the_new_guy (u/alx_the_new_guy)

alx_the_new_guy commented on Pee.ie – Public Toilets Near Me Ireland pee.ie/... · Posted by u/austinallegro

lfaw · 8 months ago

what search engine/service do I need to use to find public toilets on OSM? I tested it with public toilets but was only able to find one 'dog toilet' within city limits...

alx_the_new_guy · 8 months ago

https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/1Wqq

Basically this

Fiddle with the query, and you can extract pretty much whatever you want from the OSM database

alx_the_new_guy commented on Ask HN: Who is pretending to be hiring? · Posted by u/neilk

neilv · a year ago

I've heard startup founders pretending to hire, like it's a common best-practice.

Personally, I don't think it's very honest, and I'm going to wonder what other honesty they have flexibility about.

I wonder whether any of the third-party job-posting sites has figured out ways to say you're not much hiring -- or only hiring/promoting internally, or only filling a funnel for possible future openings, or only hiring if a rare unicorn comes along -- without that looking negative to people who only want simpleton metrics.

Maybe the cooling of "growth" theatre startups will make it OK to sound like you're not "growing" right now.

alx_the_new_guy · a year ago

The most obvious approach I can think of would be some sort of post-application questionnare and comparing that to the companie's job posting, sort of, stats.

Say, the company has a lot of job postings, but the all the applicants say they're auto-rejected. That's a decently clear indicator.

Also, if you link your linkedin/stackoverflow/github or something, there could be a more or less automatic way of evaluating you as a candidate in general and your fit for this/similar position, which could be fed back into the post-interview questionnare processing. Obviously, not that good a way to evaluate candidate fitness, but a way nonetheless.

Rings privacy alarm bells, but oh well. Someone could build a decentralized version of it which would work via a browser extension. And, actually, 3rd party hiring companies have a way better relationship with the companies hiring than with the candidates, so I very clearly can see this mechanism weilded against us.

alx_the_new_guy commented on Have ‘hobby’ apps become the new social networks? theguardian.com/technolog... · Posted by u/throwaway55479

jamil7 · a year ago

Yeah, I used to use Strava to track rides when I was cycling a lot and at some point realised it just made feel bad about my own performance. I run a lot more than I ride now and only take my keys with me. I check the time before I leave and know roughly how far and log it in my calendar. Running without any tech or music/podcasts/audiobooks has also helped me focus on technique and breathing and gives me a proper break from everything.

alx_the_new_guy · a year ago

Garmin Connect is actually fairly decent. Tracks activities (also sleep, which I find pretty useful), fairly detailed stats, little to none social features and a little gamification with challenges and achievements.

Also the watch reminds you to move from time to time.

Komoot is great for planning of "trips" and "stealing" other people's routes. I've done couple of them and you kind of never know what you're gonna see there (hopefully not agressive dogs), all of them were pretty enjoyable. It has a bit of a social aspect, but barely anyone uses it where I live, so IDK how it is.

One thing I miss from Strava are segments (or whatever they're called) - short parts of your route with it's own leader-board. Has "speedrun, but IRL" vibes, which is pretty cool IMO.

alx_the_new_guy commented on Google removed Organic Maps from the Play Store twitter.com/organicmapsap... · Posted by u/faebi

lioeters · a year ago

I agree, Organic Maps is often better than Google Maps for walkable trails, bicycle and hiking paths. I found there are some paths mapped on OSM that are not mapped at all on GMaps.

On the other hand, GMaps is better for up-to-date commercial data like stores and their opening hours. Its navigation system is better too. As much as I'd like to drop all Google services from my life, Maps is too useful to let go.

alx_the_new_guy · a year ago

You can download one of the dozens of OSM-editing apps like: - streetcomplete - vespucci - everydoor and either add that information yourself or leave a note for other people

alx_the_new_guy commented on OnlyFans' porn juggernaut fueled by a deception reuters.com/investigates/... · Posted by u/achow

pram · a year ago

“We had a really close relationship,” he told Reuters. “I trusted her.” He even tattooed her birthdate over his heart – “at least what I believe is her birthdate.”

I’m having a hard time forming an opinion on this. Yeah I guess he kinda got scammed, and it’s definitely exploiting lonely people, but also… trying to establish a relationship with a porn star? Getting a tattoo of her birthday?

Guy has an insanely serious lack of self control. Like a degenerate gambler.

alx_the_new_guy · a year ago

>exploiting lonely people

>lack of self control

Not quite "been there, done that", but anecdotally being lonely/alone accelerates and reinforces any "mental illness"-ish behavior. "Eating your own dogfood" type of thing, but in a bad way - it's a positive feedback loop, probably with combination of feeling guilt, inferior, being ashamed, not wanting to admit you messed up, and so on.

What I'm saying is - could be you, or me, or anyone else really. If the psyop is good enough and there isn't an external support structure to provide a "reality check", it's actually fairly easy to fall into this rabbit hole.

alx_the_new_guy commented on The internet is already over (2022) samkriss.substack.com/p/t... · Posted by u/thinkingemote

alx_the_new_guy · a year ago

Again, returning to the "it's not the internet itself, but the content on it" thing.

Facebook and microblogs use the same infra and can be accessed via the same means (web browser, etc).

At least from anecdotal experience, the really good stuff has been getting easier to find through IRL-ish means, like asking a colleague for the invite link.

I haven't really seen behind the invite veil much, since I'm about as far as it gets from someone cool you'd want in your group chat, but from what I've seen, "good" things are happening and thoughts are thought. It's just happening in private.

There were comments or an article somewhere about someone being sad about "very deep technical discussions being held on discord servers and that knowledge being ultimately lost". I don't think it's that bad of a thing though since that knowledge was never intended for the public and being ultimately lost and forgotten is what the people writing said messages are expecting of it. Certainly, as a person, I care more about myself having less of a digital papertrail than someone in the indefinite future not being able to solve their nieche non-essential problem.

I could elaborate more on the "onlyfans has replaced sex" and the such, which are, IMO, while somewhat true, are conclusions to which the author arrived to from a wrong place, thus continuing to think in that direcion would get them further from the truth, not closer to it.

In the end, just as human brain is a sort of general purpose multimodal input-output machine, the internet can be used for all sorts of purposes. The good ones will stay, the bad ones will fall out of fashion, without getting a solid cultutal foothold. The test of time works as well as ever.

alx_the_new_guy commented on Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else? · Posted by u/Crazyontap

alx_the_new_guy · a year ago

Kinda lame compared to what other people post here, but this is what probably 90% of the "I just use it myself" software is IRL:

- the most "impressive" one right now, though barely realized since I've just had the idea this week, is a debug/log library that spawns child multiple processes with consoles attached (since you can allocate just one console to a process in windows) and allows for debug info stream separation and rich-ish text features like color

- i've started writing a custom "set of commands" (90% IO, tied to a specific hardware modules, no algebraic functions or anything, so not exactly a programming/scripting language) language specifically for, sort of, programming-illiterate people so that they could easily implement test algorithms without asking software devs to do it. It got nowhere bc I didn't have time to implement it

But my a high level hardware emulator I'm using to debug GUI in production-ish environment uses whatever is left of it.

- environment management software that assigns PATH and other variables. Those commonly ship with software, but I havent really seen people writing their own for general env management

- my friend couldn't get Sony Vegas to produce good chromakey results, so he cobbled together some javascript to do it

- I've built a python notebook to analyze my bike rides combining Garmin Watch (gps + HR) and OSM data (estimating speed vs power vs road conditions).

- since (last I've checked was like a year ago) cmake devs value json adherence over readability in CMakePresets, I've written some scripts that convert jsonc to json. Also, those can convert string arrays to strings and add other QoL and readability improvements

- also, since CI/CD pipeline at work uses pretty old cmake that doesn't support presets and is a ton of work to upgrade due to it being airgapped (I will not elaborate), I've written a script that converts a preset into a shell script. Not completely, just the options I use.

- i guess a lot of custom diagnostic software I've written at work, though that doesnt really count since this is what I'm actually supposed to be doing, instead of most of the above and jeneral software shenanigans

alx_the_new_guy commented on Let's Stop Asking "Why Do You Want to Work for Us?" In Interviews nelson.cloud/lets-stop-as... · Posted by u/nelsonfigueroa

gizmo686 · a year ago

I think it more "a person capable of empathising with the users". Knowing the internals of how the baseball industry operates isn't relevent here. The relevent experience is being familiar with how the viewers interact with baseball.

Having said that, it seems like this applies mostly to frontend people writing the consumer facing portions. There are plenty of jobs where your users are other people in the company, or partner companies. In those cases, understanding the bussiness tends to be far more important than understanding the user experience.

For parking garages, the relevent experience would be someone has used them a lot. Or at least someone who is familiar with driving a car.

alx_the_new_guy · a year ago

>In those cases, understanding the bussiness tends to be far more important than understanding the user experience.

Never understood the take that internal systems need a good UX because they very much do. Having been a consumer of ass-backwards designed software components, bad UX (apis, functions, other stuff) will inevitably propagate through the product and will rear their ugly head somewhere. Not to speak about "friction" and development velocity and so on.

Why yes, implementing this feature will cost you something like 2 hours. Not implementing it will either cost someone 4 hours to do it themselves or two hours over and over again to code around the lack of it. Please don't waste other people's time.

alx_the_new_guy commented on Dev rejects CVE severity, makes his GitHub repo read-only bleepingcomputer.com/news... · Posted by u/rntn

nostrademons · a year ago

There's an interesting point hiding in the article about security being an emergent property of the whole software system.

Many libraries are flagged with CVEs because they can be used as part of the trust boundary of the whole software system, and they have corner cases that allow certain malicious inputs to give outputs that may be surprising and unexpected to the clients of the library. The library developers push back and say "Can you point to one real-world vulnerability where the library is actually used in the way that the CVE says constitutes a vulnerability?", effectively pushing the responsibility back onto the clients of the library.

But that's exactly how real malware usually works. Individual components that are correct in isolation get combined in ways where the developer thinks that one component offers a guarantee that it doesn't really, and so some combination of inputs does something unexpected. An enterprising hacker exploits that to access the unexpected behavior.

There isn't really a good solution here, but it seems like understanding this tradeoff would point research toward topics like proof-carrying code, fuzzing, trust boundaries, capabilities, simplifying your system, and other whole-system approaches to security rather than nitpicking individual libraries for potential security vulnerabilities.

alx_the_new_guy · a year ago

>The library developers push back and say "Can you point to one real-world vulnerability where the library is actually used in the way that the CVE says constitutes a vulnerability?"

From my understanding of the article, the developer suggested people provide not a "real-world vulnerability" but an example of one - a small project that exposes said vulnerability and steps one has to take to abuse it. And what he got irritated about was lack of such examples.

More so since he had been effectively email-DDoSed and had to chase some entity to mark the vulnerability as resolved, which probably took orders of magnitude more time, energy and soul from him, than actually fixing the bug.

But the _actual_ problem is the thanklessness (preferably material) of the work put into such open source projects, developer burnout and what not. Guy probably made like 1000$ total off of those millions of downloads per week. Understandably, he doesn't want his time being seemingly wasted discussing and fixing such seemingly unimportant issues.

Making open source materially rewarding and a more or less legitimate occupation is the real issue.

alx_the_new_guy commented on Japan's birth rate falls to a record low as the number of marriages also drops abcnews.go.com/Internatio... · Posted by u/jnord

RestlessMind · a year ago

> but it does still give one a shiver to envision what we'll have to master to navigate this process down to the projected population equilibrium.

Easier said than done. This is where I see the most of hand waving. Robots haven't materialized yet, neither any political will to shrink the safety net.

alx_the_new_guy · a year ago

>Robots haven't materialized yet, neither any political will to shrink the safety net.

Human-like general-purpose robots - yes. Except, by definition, a robot, essentially a programmable mechanism, not something human-like.

Stuff like warehouses is getting increasingly automated, planes basically can fly and land themselves without human in the loop, autonomous cars are not here, but are coming in the next decade probably.

Personally, I haven't bought a cup of coffe a human made in at least a decade. That's some poor barista's salary not getting paid.

Not that I would know the difference between a 5/10 coffe from a machine and a theoretically 10/10 coffe a professional would make. And a machine makes one for a whole lot cheaper.