News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here? by xena on Tuesday July 04, 2023 @02:08PM (#36590458)
https://xeiaso.net

Near 400 posts, writing about a lot of stuff. Here's some of my favorites over the years:

- https://xeiaso.net/blog/anything-message-queue - Anything can be a message queue if you use it wrongly enough

- https://xeiaso.net/blog/a-weapon-to-surpass-metal-gear - A weapon to surpass Metal Gear

- https://xeiaso.net/blog/%F0%9F%A5%BA - : the best sudo replacement

- https://xeiaso.net/blog/sleeping-the-technical-interview - Sleeping Through the Technical Interview

- https://xeiaso.net/blog/experimental-rilkef-2018-11-30 - I Put Words on this Webpage so You Have to Listen to Me Now

https://xeiaso.net/feeds to subscribe. Been considering an email list.

Re:Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here? by ignoramous on Tuesday July 04, 2023 @02:31PM (#36590795)
...but you also dunk on hn folks on twitter *ducks* ;)
Re:Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here? by xena on Tuesday July 04, 2023 @03:18PM (#36591399)
Only the bad takes. I've been meaning to make a podcast or something where I debunk bad orange site takes and explain why they are wrong.
Re:Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here? by photonerd on Tuesday July 04, 2023 @10:40PM (#36594951)
God knows there’s enough material
Re:Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here? by some_furry on Tuesday July 04, 2023 @11:37PM (#36595262)
An endless resource. If handled well, it could improve matters somewhat.
Re:Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here? by xyzzy_plugh on Wednesday July 05, 2023 @07:56AM (#36599094)
I think I might pay money for such a service.
Re:Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here? by s3p on Tuesday July 04, 2023 @02:16PM (#36590571)
Very thoughtful adblocker message. I disabled my uBO for your website :) thanks for the content!
Re:Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here? by xena on Tuesday July 04, 2023 @02:50PM (#36591052)
Thanks! I recently just got a new lens for my camera after all of the income from last month came in. It's a very used 35mm lens for my D3300 and the autofocus is a bit broken, meaning that I'm forced to do the focus manually (which is something I want to get better at anyways).
Re:Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here? by INGSOCIALITE on Tuesday July 04, 2023 @11:42PM (#36595296)
So the ads don’t just pay for the debilitating server costs and the cost of your text editor? :winking Unicode emoji:

In all seriousness, I really enjoyed the sudo replacement post. It was fun to read

Re:Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here? by xena on Wednesday July 05, 2023 @04:19AM (#36597352)
That combined with Patreon does! I'm likely going to spin up a small corporation so that I can funnel my side income through there and avoid having to go through the logistical nightmare of double income tax because of imperialist IRS policies. Sometimes I justify fun purchases that I could afford anyways (eg: very used camera lens or that Anbernic Win600 that I ended up liking for 2D games but couldn't hold comfortably enough to use the sticks) with ad/Patreon income. Sometimes it ends up on the blog anyways. Stay tuned!
Re:Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here? by tlavoie on Wednesday July 05, 2023 @05:47PM (#36607624)
Speaking of the ad-block message, perhaps it is worth adding who/what ethicalads.io is. I too un-blocked them on yours site, partially because their approach seems more justifiable than others I've run across. I wouldn't even mind un-blocking ads that are self-hosted by a site I like, but nobody does that any more. Anything that smells of surveillance capitalism can stay on my shit list though.
Re:Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here? by lippihom on Wednesday July 05, 2023 @11:03AM (#36601409)
Ethical Ads (https://www.ethicalads.io/) looks interesting, wish there were more ad-tech companies like this. Would love one focused on the travel niche.
Re:Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here? by iddan on Tuesday July 04, 2023 @02:45PM (#36590987)
I love your blog! One of the best websites I encountered
Re:Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here? by xena on Tuesday July 04, 2023 @03:09PM (#36591278)
Thanks! I try. Hacker News isn't my primary target audience, but I've come to peace with the fact that I'm well-loved there. I could really do without the harassment from the less tolerant side of the userbase, but I figure that this is the price of success.
Re:Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here? by troupo on Tuesday July 04, 2023 @03:10PM (#36591288)
Your blog gives me hope that personal quirky interesting places on the Internet are not dead
Re:Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here? by xena on Tuesday July 04, 2023 @03:40PM (#36591625)
Here's hoping! I have also been bringing that energy to the work blog (eg: https://tailscale.dev/blog/headscale-funnel), and it's been working really well. I'm working on turning the user personas that we're tracking in DevRel into Socratic characters. It's a slow process, but writing is never fast consistently.
Re:Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here? by BLKNSLVR on Tuesday July 04, 2023 @09:03PM (#36594417)
Never fast consistently or consistently never fast?

I find the latter.

Re:Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here? by xena on Wednesday July 05, 2023 @04:44AM (#36597571)
It depends.
Re:Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here? by pjaoko on Tuesday July 04, 2023 @09:16PM (#36594494)
I second that. It's got so much personality.
Re:Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here? by jmpavlec on Tuesday July 04, 2023 @04:08PM (#36591905)
Loved the sleeping through the tech interview post you highlighted. Very amusing. Great writing style.
Re:Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here? by xena on Tuesday July 04, 2023 @05:16PM (#36592594)
Thanks! I have been working on that style of writing some more. I have another story in that "universe" called Protos (https://xeiaso.net/blog/protos) that you may enjoy. I'm working on some more, but it's a very subtle kind of magick that you have to poke at from all angles simultaneously. It takes effort.

I'm sure I'll come up with something eventually, I might do one about spatial computing. That seems like it could be a fun topic for this kind of satire.

Re:Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here? by zbentley on Wednesday July 05, 2023 @12:21AM (#36595490)
That post reminded me (and perhaps is a contemporary of) "Hexing the Coding Interview" by aphyr/Kyle Kingsbury.
Re:Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here? by xena on Wednesday July 05, 2023 @04:36AM (#36597509)
Very intentionally. Those posts stand out to me as a brilliant level of technical writing that I want to reach some day.
Re:Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here? by dharmab on Tuesday July 04, 2023 @04:13PM (#36591959)
I link your blog around to my colleagues quite a bit, thanks for the interesting and informative articles!
Re:Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here? by oliverobscure on Tuesday July 04, 2023 @04:27PM (#36592112)
Xe, thank you so much for your work. I love reading your blog, it’s calming and makes me laugh. I look up to you as someone who I would like to be in my professional life. Best wishes :)
Re:Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here? by poyu on Tuesday July 04, 2023 @06:45PM (#36593465)
I love your writing and website! Thank you!
Re:Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here? by xena on Tuesday July 04, 2023 @06:47PM (#36593481)
You're welcome. I try. ^^
Re:Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here? by joshghent on Tuesday July 04, 2023 @06:59PM (#36593597)
Love your writing. Keep it up
Re:Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here? by tournacat on Tuesday July 04, 2023 @09:05PM (#36594423)
I really like your website/blog! It's one of my fav blogs out there that I'd wholeheartedly recommend to anyone. I also like the fact that the ads are not intrusive at all
Re:Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here? by jackblemming on Tuesday July 04, 2023 @10:49PM (#36595000)
Can you explain how sleepsort is constant time when it requires looping through n items?
Re:Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here? by wetmore on Wednesday July 05, 2023 @12:00AM (#36595389)
The runtime is bounded by K, where all numbers you sort are less than K.
Re:Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here? by jackblemming on Wednesday July 05, 2023 @12:40AM (#36595572)
From an analysis perspective, I do not believe you can call an O(n) algorithm constant because you could run it on a computer with n cores.

From a practical perspective, I do not believe it is bounded by K, where all numbers you sort are less than K. Consider an array of one hundred trillion items, each being the number 1. This is bounded by the array length, not the number 1.

Re:Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here? by xena on Wednesday July 05, 2023 @04:39AM (#36597533)
Realistically, I don't know what the complexity of that algorithm is or if it's possible to have one. Making the argument it is constant time is intended to be a bit of a joke at how difficult it is to give it a time complexity. My interpretation of it as constant time (temporal multiplicand multiplied by the largest value in the list) is going by wall clock time, which is arguably the time that matters in an interview.
Re:Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here? by RGBCube on Wednesday July 05, 2023 @12:26AM (#36595506)
Could you disclose how much you make through ethical ads?
Re:Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here? by xena on Wednesday July 05, 2023 @04:25AM (#36597403)
It's just enough to be a headache tax-wise, but not enough to be a viable replacement for my dayjob. Something like $50-$200 USD per month. Slow months are less, months where I post bangers are more. Combined with Patreon (consistently $200 per month), it's enough to make all of my hosting costs covered. It's seriously incredible that I can have that much support for not a lot of work. I am also looking at further cost-optimizing things so that I can move my website to something like Fly. My server that my website is hosted on is like 55€ per month and the main reason it needs something that chonky is because Tokio performs better when there's more runner threads.

Otherwise I've also been considering pooling money for a bit and buying a proper server to drop into a datacentre near where I live. That could be fun!

Re:Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here? by fullofdev on Monday July 10, 2023 @09:43PM (#36675491)
do you mind to share ho many visitors / month for this data?
Re:Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here? by month13 on Wednesday July 05, 2023 @12:51AM (#36595626)
Wanted to chime in, been a long time reader, it's great work.
Re:Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here? by denysvitali on Wednesday July 05, 2023 @02:26AM (#36596225)
Nice seeing you on HN again. I really like your blog posts and I hope you'd post them here more often :)
Re:Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here? by xena on Wednesday July 05, 2023 @04:44AM (#36597567)
I've found out that self-posting on hacker news gets you super deranked. If you really like the writing, please be the one that posts it here.
Re:Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here? by dang on Friday July 07, 2023 @12:36PM (#36634306)
People are welcome to post their own stuff as long as it's part of a mix of unrelated/interesting submissions. What gets accounts "super deranked" is when they only post their own stuff or use HN primarily for promotion (this is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

Your account hasn't been doing that at all, so you're fine, and certainly welcome to post your articles if you want to.

Re:Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here? by gotlou on Wednesday July 05, 2023 @02:44AM (#36596360)
Another long time reader chiming in to appreciate your great work.

https://xeiaso.net/blog/paranoid-nixos-aws-2021-08-11 is one of my personal favorites, as well as https://tailscale.dev/blog/headscale-funnel

Re:Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here? by LoulouMonkey on Wednesday July 05, 2023 @04:37AM (#36597518)
I quite liked the article on Metal Gear!
Re:Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here? by moss2 on Wednesday July 05, 2023 @08:12AM (#36599263)
Very nice blog!