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Man I loved my Pebble but I’d say the three things I use my Apple Watch for most are: telling time (++), reading notifications (~), and getting Siri to set timers or control my Home Assistant* (—-).

Since Apple simply won’t allow 3rd party apps the full api access they need to do everything, I’m stuck with my Apple Watch if I want all the Apple stuff, and I’m too lazy/annoyed to try to switch ecosystems.

*via Apple Home via Homebridge


Fellow Home Assistant/Apple Home user here.

You may already be aware, but Apple Home/Siri can talk to Home Assistant directly using https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/homekit/ which is how I have it set up. You can also have HomeKit devices paired directly with an instance of the HomeKit Bridge, or expose devices in your Apple Home to Home Assistant.

Out of interest, what API access are you missing?


Time to cut out the middle man (Apple / homebridge) and speak to HA directly? I didn't check the capabilities of Pebble, but knowing HA, there's probably a way.


HA now supports MCP ( https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/mcp_server/ ), so just connect it directly to one of the assistants.


There is a (relatively recent, for the Pebble-verse) Home Assistant app on Rebble that works with the current Home Assistant version. You can even do voice control and stuff.

You can also do timers, reminders, web searches and similar basic assistant things with Bobby - another recent addition to what the Pebbles can do: https://rebble.io/2025/03/24/introducing-bobby-our-new-pebbl...


Conversely, this argument is a good reminder to me to never brick myself in to the Apple ecosystem by buying their products.


The other magic ingredient is salt. A tiny pinch of salt can balance out sour and bitter flavors in surprising ways, and be otherwise undetectable. I’ve “fixed” a lot of cocktails that way.


This reminds me of when a student pub hosted a wedding party. As we got to the dance floor there were drinks on offer. I grabbed a Cuba Libre and essentially went "oh, that's the roughest on I've had, must be cheap cola on truly awful booze". Kept on sipping. Someone else complained. Then another one. We go back to investigate. Bartender has a taste. Grimacing.

Like bad and maybe salty?

Takes a minute before they track it down. They'd mixed up the salted ice cubes they used to keep champagne cold with the ones they use for drinks.

That one was rough. I had politely worked through my drink before we launched the investigation. Good party though and I did get a new drink which tasted fine.

I'm sure a tiny pinch can do wonders. Salted cubes, not recommended.


A little pinch of salt in the water is recommended for drip coffee as well to add a pop to the flavors and reduce bitterness.


weirdly, a few drops of maraschino liqueur (I go for Lazzaroni) can "stretch" out the flavors of a lot of "brown" liquors. I have no idea why. It kind of adds a strange almond-ish flavor on the finish, though.


A "eulogy" is a speech you make at a funeral in honor of the dead person. I think you meant "apology".


While that is the most common sense of eulogy, it's not the only one. A eulogy is also any speech that highly praises someone or something - which is most commonly done at funerals, which is how the funeral association came about (also probably by association with an elegy, which is an etymologically unrelated word that refers to a Greek poem dedicated to someone who passed away).

In many romance languages, eulogy doesn't have the funeral connotation, only the high praise one - so the GP may be a native speaker of a romance language who didn't realize this meaning is less common in English.


Yes I think I was thinking more a paean or apology though not sure apology is used in that sense much nowadays - perhaps apologia is clearer. In praise of would be better, thanks will edit just now.


The Greek transliteration "apologia" is often used for that sense of "apology" to skirt any ambiguity.


Encomium



> Try to solve bugs one layer deeper

This is one of the main things I try to impart to junior folks when I’m mentoring them or reviewing code.

It’s also one of the biggest red flags to me of someone who’s working above their level when I have to repeatedly press a more senior person to dig deeper and fix things at a deeper level.

You need to take the time to understand why the bug happened, or you’re just going to be patching wallpaper instead of fixing the plumbing leak.


> You need to take the time to understand why the bug happened, or you’re just going to be patching wallpaper instead of fixing the plumbing leak.

I think many would like to probe deeper but aren't afforded the time between sprint tasks. Management often pushes back for solutions that are good enough compared to exploration with an unknown duration until the solution is found.


Of course this can vary wildly, but I've never felt afraid to defy management on that one. Half the time, they don't even need to know. And the other half of the time... what are they going to do? Fire me? Fine, then their project will be filled with nothing but wallpaper-patchers and I'll be somewhere else doing good work.

(And of course, sometimes just patching the wallpaper is the right course of action, but it's rare to find management capable of accurately assessing this trade-off.)


Yeah, at a certain point I just stop caring what management thinks and just doing what I think is right. I usually don't get the recognition I think I deserve for preventing future issues but no one complains either.


Part of being senior is figuring out how to work in those constraints. In that situation I would push back my manager and tell them why root causing bugs will save us time in the long run and if they still don’t relent I would sandbag some of my time doing sprint tasks to root cause the bugs.


Which is why it's so important for teams to agree with management on a definition of "done" well in advance, to avoid this kind of argument later. Also why it's important for management to understand that velocity/estimation are Descriptive for long term planning, not Proscriptive and short term.


I recently encountered this in a hardware context. To “fix” a bug, instead of understanding the root cause, the designer’s patch just hid the first symptom. In a domain where bugs are remarkably expensive, this approach was terrifying to see.


Treat the disease, not the symptom. Always good advice.


I’m surprised by how many people cannot handle 5 Why’s. It’s substantially the same people who like wallpaper and putty.


I’ve been using Firefox almost exclusively for years with two exceptions. The web dev tools in Chrome are really just better. And recently my work made the decision to only allow Chrome for security reasons. I’m annoyed about that but I understand why, it’s not necessarily that Chrome is more secure but the central management tools are stronger and if they were only going to support one, they picked the one more people use.


The most impressive thing about this story is that they figured out the answer. They did the research, and nailed down that it was Nyquist who was was the productivity booster. It’s the exact opposite of the OP’s story, where management tried to fire the Nyquist-equivalent.


They found an answer that felt right to them. The reseachers weren't blinded to the context they were working in, and their hypothesis is essentially unfalsifiable so I would take it with a grain of salt.


All they figured out was that the smart people hung out together.


IMHO this is the right answer :)


Honestly, I'm kind of skeptical of the answer. I'm not saying that talking with Nyquist wouldn't be useful, probably it was, but what's stopping a dozen other things at least that useful from being part of the answer?


> I'm not saying that talking with Nyquist wouldn't be useful

No, you probably shouldn't be saying that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Nyquist

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist_frequency

> but what's stopping a dozen other things at least that useful from being part of the answer?

Because someone needs to act, and that's exactly what Nyquist did, in a very unobtrusive and non-confrontational manner.


Posting his achievements does nothing to prove speaking with him during lunch was useful in this context

> Because someone needs to act, and that's exactly what Nyquist did, in a very unobtrusive and non-confrontational manner

Seems like your headcanon. It reality they ate lunch together and passed ideas around.


For the record, I did recognize the name. That's why I believed talking to them was useful.


Concretely I'd suggest that Nyquist was probably most interested in lunching with other smart people who had interesting things to talk about.

I.e. there's no check or control on their output without lunch or breakfast with him, maybe it'd have been little different.


It’s a lovely story but a prime candidate for “correlation !== causation”.


Clicked to find out about how we're all measuring temperature wrong.


Clicked to find out how Anders Celsius was a con man, and, as a Swede, was relieved.


I was thinking that surely someone boiled some water and confirmed this at some point.


Clicked to find out what toxic chemicals I've been drinking.


I'm not a huge fan of cutesey names but a lot of those names are variations on or homages to Kubernetes (Greek for "Helmsman"): e.g Skipper, Harbor, and Helm from your list.


OK I read this as carbon-scrubbers which grow marijuana. I dunno, maybe it helps oxygenate the air. Or maybe I haven’t had coffee yet.


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