ColinEberhardt

funny to see juggling GUFs on hacker news, and a reference to the IJDb.

I was the creator and maintainer of the IJDb for a great many years. It was sad to have to finally shut it down, but it had had its day :-(

$2 million per line? that is one of the most productive days of coding I have ever had!

I'll start my VC fuding round tomorrow ;-)

This is a fantastic idea

This whole legal debate exists because of ambiguity. Open source licences were written before large-scale training became a thing.

Rather than settle this ambiguity on court, why not remove it altogether? Personally I think we should be adding new clauses to licences that either explicitly approve or prohibit the use of code for training of models.

I just had to check whether you were 'the' Colin Wright, and looking at your profile I think you are. Small world!

I am a fellow juggler, and used to run the Internet Juggling Database. We also very briefly bumped into each other in a corridor at Leeds Uni Physics department about 25 years ago ;-)

Very good point, I'll fix that for next year's survey. Fortunately for people working with WebAssembly those two terms are synonymous, so this will not effect the results.

For those of you who are interested in the changing shape of the various timezones, moving to standardised offset, the rise and fall of daylight savings, I wrote a blog on the subject a little while back, "Exploring 120 years of timezones"

https://blog.scottlogic.com/2021/09/14/120-years-timezone.ht...

Possibly related to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25032105&p=2

Author here! I'll hold me hands up to getting the maths wrong.

With Strava, you can choose metric or imperial units. However, I discovered that this only effects activity distances (which the API reports in km or miles). Elevation is always reported in metres (via the API).

I've fixed that now: https://github.com/ColinEberhardt/running-report-card/commit...

Yep, totally agree. For now we are focussing on plain-old-JS with VueJS. Nothing more. It's just frustrating that the UI component library we want to use (FluentUI) requires React & TS, which in turn require a bundler / build system, which leads to a world of pain!

> Hello from the other person on HN in the NE.

Oh wow, small world! Looking forwards to returning to the Town Wall at some point in the future.

No, my feeling is that it is getting worse. Dependency graphs are getting bigger, our tooling is getting more complex.

https://blog.scottlogic.com/2020/12/22/software-crisis.html

I am a JavaScript / TypeScript / Web developer and I am throwing stones within my own glass house!

Because we want the application to have a modern look and feel, and this Python developer has a genuine desire to start learning about modern web technologies.

Continuing my morning rant on here a little ...

I'm an experienced developer, I have a pretty good ideas of what these boilerplate projects are trying to achieve. However, at the moment I'm helping Python dev get up-to-speed with web development.

They are creating a desktop app, and wanted to use MS FluentUI, a React UI component library.

I'm now trying to teach them JavaScript, webpack, TypeScript, React, ESLint, ... Help them resolve dependency issues. Explain bundlers, the various different module systems ... the list just keeps getting longer!

I have also recently built a regex engine. In my case it was for AssemblyScript (a new TypeScript-like language that compiles to WebAssembly).

https://github.com/ColinEberhardt/assemblyscript-regex

I was really impressed with just how many fantastic blog posts there were that introduced the key concepts, and also how easy it was to create my own regex engine.

The bigger challenge was testing. I ended up using the PCRE test suite which I transformed into a suitable test suite for my engine:

https://github.com/ColinEberhardt/assemblyscript-regex/tree/...

True, both were mentioned in passing - but it would be good to hear about how sustainable this is?

If an open source maintainer relies on GH sponsors, Patreon, Open Collective then they are going to have to invest time in marketing themselves to the community. It's an odd dynamic.

A great article - and lines like this really resonate with me "More than project management skills or technical expertise, empathy is the most important skill in open source."

However, the article doesn't address the most obvious question, how does Henry fund this activity?

Thanks Paul, really appreciate that :-)

Just FYI, we're a medium sized software consultancy based in the UK. We do quite a lot of work in financial services, which is why you'll find quite a few posts on performance and cutting-edge web technology. I started the company blog 12 years ago and now we have ~50 authors creating some amazing content. Unfortunately I don't have the time to write quite as much as I used to!

That's really interesting, thanks for sharing those results. So easy to go down the route of premature optimisation!

This tool is very cool - however it appears to be written in JavaScript. I can't see any evidence of the use of WebAssembly.

“1 out of 600 sites execute wasm code”

“50% of all sites using WebAssembly apply it for malicious deeds”

WASI is a system interface for WebAssembly modules, it is not an implementation. Therefore, these are quite different.

However, they could have decided to use WASI as the interface for their wasm runtime, but it looks like they didn't

Well spotted, thanks. I've just fixed that :-)

That's a good question - with d3fc we have a component for label layout, but this is designed for labels within the plot area, avoiding overlaps / collisions etc ...

https://d3fc.io/api/label-layout-api.html

I have thought about creating a more advanced axis that provides more powerful tick label layout. We already have our own axis component:

https://d3fc.io/api/axis-api.html

The purpose of this is to support the decorate pattern.

There are some pretty powerful open source financial charting libraries, for example:

http://rrag.github.io/react-stockcharts/ http://techanjs.org/ (although no longer maintained)

Although I'd argue that it isn't that hard to create your own, entirely bespoke, chart from scratch using D3 (and d3fc as an accelerator)

I think that will come fairly soon - I forgot to mention that the reference types proposal also include multiple table support https://github.com/WebAssembly/reference-types/blob/master/p...

the tooling is quite immature at the moment - and tools like Emscripten especially add a lot of bloat. In the future wasm modules will be a lot slimmer. The Rust community are certainly leading the way on that one.