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I explored an adjacent topic - a UI component that seamlessly transitions from a nullable boolean to a multi select. I wrote a short blog post[1] and there is a page with this UI component in action[2].

It was a fun experiment and I liked the result. Still, I wouldn't do this outside of a hobby project (at least not without a very good reason and a lot of resources).

[1]: https://merely.xyz/blog/2023/001-lets-design-a-new-form-elem...

[2]: https://merely.xyz/lenses


> But sand is quite expensive so my question is, why sand and not water?

The article says they will use a byproduct from a local industry, perhaps it's available for cheaper.

"The sand itself will also be sustainably sourced – it’ll consist of crushed soapstone, which is a manufacturing byproduct of another local industry. This material can apparently conduct heat even better than regular old sand.".


> The article says they will use a byproduct from a local industry, perhaps it's available for cheaper.

Cheaper than water?!


It's the not the cost of obtaining the water that makes water less viable, it's the cost of storing superheated water. Water has this pesky ability to expand 1600 times larger when it goes over 212 degrees Fahrenheit. That means that if not handled carefully you get deadly steam explosions.

Hot sand / crushed rock doesn't have the same problem. If you read in the linked article it says

> with the sand heated to somewhere around 500-600 degrees Celsius (932-1112 °F).

That would be extraordinarily hard to do with water as you'd need significant containment and safety measures.


If that water has to come from underground, yes, it would be cheaper and easier to just grab surface stone and crush it for material to make a heat battery.

Also, water tends to make for a horrible heat battery as it is much more thermal-emissivity than rock particles. You need all sorts of additional insulation to retain the heat, whereas the sand will insulate itself.


Recently discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39625919 (2 days ago, 199 comments)


This is a power product manufacturer. I'm sure at some point they considered porting this to an actual chainsaw; the lack of screen must have been a blocker. I guess a lawnmower is the next best thing they could come up with.


With the advent of good battery chainsaws we’re only a few years away from one having a diagnostics screen, and which point doom on a chainsaw will be possible.


> With the advent of good battery chainsaws we’re only a few years away from one having a diagnostics screen

"hear that? that's the sound of.. inevitability." - Agent Smith


I've had mixed results. Some visits were fine, especially those where I wasn't logged in. During others I've seen errors, often when writing comment replies or voting.


A kill switch seems a practical and trivial solution. E.g. something toggled when a monthly bill exceeds a configurable amount.

I’m guessing many hobby users would set that to $100, end of story.

I don’t understand why it’s so unpopular to offer that. I’d imagine the providers would benefit too in the long run.


It would be practical for the user, but not for the company.

Why does this not exist after years (more than a decade since EC2) of cloud computing?

Because it is not good for the VC investors.


AWS Lambda has had this knob for quite a few years, it’s called “provisioned capacity”, and it defines an upper bound to function concurrency.


While helpful, this is not the same. E.g. a global kill switch could be harder to overlook and easier to manage.


You can set a hard budget on most cloud providers, including Azure etc. I actually did this thinking I was just setting a budget alert and that was a new and interesting way to interrupt production.


> You can set a hard budget on most cloud providers

Note that the submission references serverless providers, specifically netlify and vercel. I don’t think these support an easy to configure kill switch - in any case it wasn’t easy to configure in the scenarios listed on the page.


This is a highly welcomed feature however, I don’t think AWS has it.


Feature requests:

1. Convert leading indentation to tabs or spaces at random.

2. Insert trailing spaces.

3. Use varying indentation styles - pick at random from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indentation_style#Overview


This is rookie-level shittifying. What it needs to do is insert `with` blocks at random, with various levels of nesting, so you completely lose track of the scope of any object property.


Too "bad" that `with` blocks are forbidden in strict mode and most JS is strict mode by default now. You could somewhat approximate it with lots of unadorned blocks and complex object destructuring.

    {
      const { prop1: a, prop2: A, prop3: xTy } = obj
      // …
      {
        const { prop1: A, prop2: xTy, prop3: a } = obj
        // …
      }
   }
Something like that.


Heh.

And randomly add "-Decorator" suffix to class names.

Ages ago, I tried to diplomatically explain to our Senior Architect Grand Poobah (and my team lead) that one set of Decorators are actually Chain of Commands. And that they shouldn't be silently swallowing exceptions.

After a few minutes, he says "u/specialist, I'm surprised someone with your experience doesn't understand architecture." Then gets up and walks away.


Rather than putting identifiers into MOckiNG sPongeBob CasE, it should apply a standard case convention (including initialism, Systems Hungarian with incorrect types, etc) at random for each identifier.

  function Make_List(firstString, second_string, chThirdString) {
    var a = [firstString, second_string, chThirdString];
    return a;
  }


That’s exactly what my company’s legacy code base looks like.. No one wants to reformat the files because then it will mess up with git history.

It was horrendous to look at at first, but I’ve gotten used to it by now and just apply the same random style to whatever snippets I modify. :)


> No one wants to reformat the files because then it will mess up with git history.

GitHub will use a file `.git-blame-ignore-revs` to allow blame to ignore commits that make those kind of changes. (This is the format used for the `--ignore-revs-file` option to `git blame`.)


Git has something for every occasion I ever encountered with a need for something I knew was technically possible but didn't know if git would let me do it. It let me do it every time, truly the hacker's utility.



Swap randomly between direct style (async/await) and pre ES2017 .then() chaining.

Minify every third variable randomly.


> Minify every third variable randomly.

So, Go?


Whenever there is a chain of method calls put all in a single line.


Is there a demo?

I’m especially interested in how this approaches page flow - would it keep the concept, or render everything as a single “page”.

For context, in my pet project I wanted to actually keep the pages; I ended up rendering a pdf and then using pdf.js to render that in html.


> Is there a demo?

https://tikz.dev/ is generated from http://mirrors.ctan.org/graphics/pgf/base/doc/pgfmanual.pdf. As someone else says,


This is fun on mobile, tested on ios; I had to close the “works on desktop only” popup (via a popup blocker), but then I could tap to move in that direction and I enjoyed playing this way.


Requesting Desktop Website also works.


If you make something that lives on the web and doesn’t support all platforms, please consider showing the unsupported platforms a screenshot or video.


Or, well, just let them friggin' open the thing at their own risk. Grrrrrr.


> This is a gem to help extract data from vBulletin Forums, specifically those which you have no control over.

https://github.com/lloydpick/vbulletin

This is a very old tool, it’s hard to say if it will work; then again, seems very relevant too so worst case it could provide an inspiration.


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