Best of Hacker News — March 2022

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   Hacker News·4y

   I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea

   In the year of our lord 2017 I had a Brilliant Startup Idea: use a structured database of clinical trials to provide simple, practical answers to common medical questions. I made a spreadsheet with every OTC painkiller trial I could find and used R to run a network meta-analysis, the gold standard of evidence-based medicine. After a few hours searching domains I came up with a name for my project: GlacierMD. I would spend $40K of my own savings buying clinical trials and paying contractors to enter said trials into the GlacierMD database. Two weeks later GlacierMD was dead.

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   Hacker News·4y

   I built a receipt printer for GitHub issues

   Andrew Schmelyun used a receipt printer to print out a ticket each time an issue was added to one of his GitHub repos. The printer uses the ESC/POS command set, for which there's established libraries in a variety of programming languages. He also used an old Raspberry Pi Zero W to connect from the internet to the printer.

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   Hacker News·4y

   elementary OS is imploding

   elementary OS, a Linux distribution that is currently ranked as one of the top 10 distros (according to DistroWatch.com), appears to be in the process of imploding on itself. Two co-founders are not pleased with each other and are attempting to part ways… and it is getting messy.

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   Hacker News·4y

   Google cancels our Google Play publisher account and ends my family’s source of income

   Google Play is the best application distribution platform of all time, but it fails in something very important, such as customer service for developers. When you have a problem with an application, the support team send you an email saying what the problem is, you correct it, you send an update and they review it. However, on other occasions the application is removed and in this case it is when the problem gets worse for the developer.

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   Hacker News·4y

   LibreWolf

   LibreWolf is an independent fork of Firefox, with the primary goals of privacy, security and user freedom. It is designed to increase protection against tracking and fingerprinting techniques, while also including a few security improvements. LibreWolf also aims to remove all the telemetry, data collection and annoyances.

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   Hacker News·4y

   C Isn't A Programming Language Anymore

   C isn’t just a programming language, it’s a protocol that every general-purpose programming language needs to speak. C was elevated to a role of prestige and power, its reign so absolute and eternal that it has completely distorted the way we speak to each other. C is the lingua franca of programming. We must all speak C.

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   Hacker News·4y

   Web3 is centralized (and inefficient!)

   Web3 platforms are in fact centralized, just as Web2 was. Web3 firms are for-profit businesses, and so are the VC firms backing them. You can easily run Nextcloud from your old PC instead of subscribing to Dropbox, but you can’t easily host a “dApp” on your MacBook instead of the public blockchain.

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   Hacker News·4y

   Lapce

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   Hacker News·4y

   IVANCA — I hate what video games have become

   I hate what video games have become. Once you stop playing a game 100% of the money you spend on it disappears, you can’t recover any of it, not 50%, not 20%, just nothing. I’m atheist that prays to all the gods the old and the new ones that Valve, Epic, Microsoft and all the companies doing this popular but insidious business practice get sued into the ground.

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    Hacker News·4y

    Solid.js feels like what I always wanted React to be

    React Hooks are neat, but error-prone. I’ve thought a lot about hooks and why they don’t feel quite right. I found the answer, by exploring Solidjs. The problem with React hooks is that they’re not truly reactive. If a linter knows when an effect is found, then it can automatically detect changes.

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    Hacker News·4y

    Microservices: Why Are We Doing This?

    The trend to build every single application as a series of tiny web services that talk to each other is growing in prominence. Many people picking up this idea have not seen the times before and just assume this is a ‘best practice’ Microservices are, in that essence, a religious belief that we should approach with skepticism - as is true with many things in software.

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    Hacker News·4y

    AI color palette generator

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    Hacker News·4y

    Developers spend most of their time figuring the system out

    Developers spend most of their time figuring out the system out. This is the single largest expense we have. If we want to optimize anything in our discipline we should look at this part first. In a decade, we should be measuring the "figuring out" time in terms of reading.

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    Hacker News·4y

    Mourning Loss of a Team Member as a Remote Team

    Last year our team lost Pete, a long time engineer. Pete took his own life. He had battled mental health issues for some time. Because he was a full time contractor and not an employee, there was no HR intervention to help. Because of his remote contractor arrangement, nobody outside of our team would have known that anything happened.

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    Hacker News·4y

    Google Docs New Feature: Pageless

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