Readit News logoReadit News
zeke commented on How should I introduce my 13-year-old daughter to programming?    · Posted by u/AsifMushtaq
zeke · 2 days ago
My kids played Minecraft, and one installed Lua to automate parts. Occasionally he would show me what he was working on and I could offer suggestions.

We also set up a Linux computer as a Minecraft server and I was available to help with questions. It is a beginner level admin job with a purpose they can see.

If she has an idea for a web page or service, help refine it to something possible and implement.

zeke commented on VIM Master   github.com/renzorlive/vim... · Posted by u/Fluffyrnz
soperj · 4 days ago
Oh man, I use markers all the time. ma y'a

mark a spot, then yank or delete everything to that line. Way easier to do it accurately rather than 13yy or however many lines you're yanking.

zeke · 4 days ago
You can use <shift>v then move to your start line and type y or d. This way you see the text marked before yanking or deleting. <control>v is similar. And gv will reselect the marked area.
zeke commented on GCP Outage   status.cloud.google.com/... · Posted by u/thanhhaimai
zeke · 3 months ago
mapbox maps seemed to be down for a few minutes about an hour ago. I wonder if it is related.
zeke commented on Ask HN: How long do you ever leave your server running without updates?    · Posted by u/bagol
zeke · 3 months ago
myHetzner$ uptime

19:08:00 up 1709 days, 16:01, 2 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

I'll probably just order a newer server and move over before rebooting now. There is no money riding on it.

zeke commented on Mapping latitude and longitude to country, state, or city   austinhenley.com/blog/coo... · Posted by u/azhenley
mynameisash · 3 months ago
> For deciding if a user is in Texas you could create a simple polygon completely inside Texas and one in Oklahoma.

This seems like the obvious optimized v1: create extremely compressed (simplified) polygons wholly within the proper geopolitical borders. You get 100% true positives for a significant fraction of queries, and any negatives you can still kick to GMaps. I understand wholly-local is the goal here, but as others have pointed out, even small error rates can be unacceptable in some scenarios.

zeke · 3 months ago
Yes, just paying for the between spots is exactly what I thought later in the day. Then check every month which areas cause costs and add those to the in-house polygons.
zeke commented on Mapping latitude and longitude to country, state, or city   austinhenley.com/blog/coo... · Posted by u/azhenley
zeke · 3 months ago
For reducing the number of points I've often used mapshaper.org.

For deciding if a user is in Texas you could create a simple polygon completely inside Texas and one in Oklahoma. 99% would fall in the simple polygon and the rest go to the detailed polygons. Or create bounds near the complex river borders and use the detailed polygons there.

On the other hand I just use simple, non-optimized functions for qquiz.com.

zeke commented on Bletchley code breaker Betty Webb dies aged 101   bbc.com/news/articles/c78... · Posted by u/danso
icosian · 5 months ago
Only about a dozen years ago Bletchley was inviting former codebreakers back for an annual reunion. I used to go along to hear the talks, meet some of them and get books signed, including by Betty Webb. I'm glad they eventually got the recognition they deserved.

We have almost lost the chance now to hear personal testimony of WWII. I've met several Battle of Britain pilots too, but the last died in Dublin recently:

https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2025/0318/1502596-hemingway/

zeke · 5 months ago
In 2001 in the small town of Hartsville SC, one of the youngest code breakers gave his last two public talks. He had been hired by Turing because he was one of the few studying both math and German at the start of the war.

Besides being very interesting it felt odd to hear all this in such an out of the way place. Well after the war he collaborated on some books with a professor teaching at the college there.

zeke commented on Ask HN: What is your favorite lesser known VIM shortcut you can share    · Posted by u/irishmansevilla
zeke · 6 months ago
:Lexplore opens a split window with a directory listing you can navigate.

:33Lexplore opens the split with a slimmer, 33% width, window. :Lex<tab> to autocomplete if you do not want to type as much.

zeke commented on Adventures in mapmaking: the search for grayscale tiles   newsletter.pnote.eu/p/map... · Posted by u/przem8k
zeke · a year ago
To not load openstreetmap's servers, you could pull the tiles to your server and host them. Then only grab a tile from OSM when you are missing one.

This would also let you set the grayscale on the tiles using imagemagick convert.

Neat project and thanks for the write up.

zeke commented on Cliff Stoll, the mad scientist who wrote the book on how to hunt hackers (2019)   wired.com/story/meet-the-... · Posted by u/ColinWright
quesera · a year ago
Cliff Stoll was an unwelcome demonstration that not all adults are as clueless as they appear to disaffected, smarter-than-thou teenagers.

Cliff showed that a smart adult with an outsized curiosity and more than a bit of persistence, could keep up -- and even marshal resources to reassert the dominance of order and adulthood.

This was a good lesson, at the right time, for many people!

Also, Cuckoo's Egg is an entertaining story. I read it again a few years ago, and I enjoyed it more this time than I did when it was published. :)

zeke · a year ago
I read it last year after it was mentioned here. Thought it was nice that pg had a cameo at the end of the book.

u/zeke

KarmaCake day55July 24, 2007
About
Programmer and Systems Support

I have 25 years of experience with Unix and Linux, system support, programming and scripting in Perl, JavaScript, file transfers, lots of troubleshooting. Also some Python.

Fun side project: qquiz.com, a maps based geography teaching game, JavaScript, Go, nginx.

US citizen in the US. Fluent in German.

zeke.selby@gmail.com

View Original