Hacker News Reader

Continuouson Risky hack could double access to ventilators

This is ridiculous!

Hacks are ok with web and app deployments where you are able to patch and fix to your heart's content and the damage is not life threatening.

I have worked with the medical industry, the amount of formal validation and verification that goes through on software is insane compared to what we have in the "move fast and break things" world.

Even if it is "temporary" and "desperate" I would stay away from this mentality as much as humanly possible.

Continuouson Ask HN: Best tech for a web site 2018? (PHP, Rails, Django, Node, Go, etc.)?

Use the language your team is familiar with! If it is PHP don't hesitate just because it is not "cool"..

PHP was a great tool back in the day and today!

PHP with a decent framework like Laravel [1] or Zend Framework [2] really works well and addresses all the features that you have listed (except the last 2).

Uniquely among modern languages, * PHP was born in a web server *. Its strengths are tightly coupled to the context of request-oriented, server-side execution.

We've managed to develop several complex apps over the last 10 years on PHP. For Web Socket support, we use Socket.IO or Firebase and it both really well together with PHP.

If you choose PHP now, you are not alone. Many companies still choose PHP for their Web Application. Slack uses PHP for most of its server-side application logic [3]

[1] https://laravel.com/ [2] https://framework.zend.com/ [3] https://slack.engineering/taking-php-seriously-cf7a60065329

Continuouson Show HN: HtmlWasher – An HTML cleanup tool

This is brilliant!

I wrote an HTML file in Microsoft Word. Then uploaded that .html file which had 800 lines. HtmlWasher cleaned up all the file content, the endless meta tags, non sense IE style tags, etc.

Continuouson There's A Gold-Dispensing ATM on West 57th Street

This has been done before in several places before from Dubai to China http://whenonearth.net/withdraw-gold-atm-dubai/

Continuouson WebGL on iOS8 Safari and WebView

Unfortunately no,

No WebRTC audio/video or data!

Continuouson Mangalyaan, India’s First Mars Mission

I watched the lift off

Good launch and good start. All 3 stages complete. It's in space in a matter of seconds. Need another 45 mins to declare launch success and 10 months to reach mars!

Continuouson Web Framework Benchmarks Round 7

According to the charts, PHP performs well when there are multiple queries and in the case of Data updates.

I wonder of they setup PHP with APC cache (opcode cache) which is basic and easy setup to speed up PHP.

Continuouson Cheaper to rent in Barcelona and commute to London

It's a 4 hour commute!

Why would you live in Central London? You can commute for an hour into Liverpool St and get much cheaper rents.

Continuouson How not to validate email addresses

To add to the conversation. There is a way to check if a mailbox exists using SMTP. It works on Gmail and several other servers.

Python/PHP Code and explanation is here http://www.webdigi.co.uk/blog/2009/how-to-check-if-an-email-....

It was eye opening to understand the underlying SMTP protocol. There are some pitfalls too as mentioned in the article.

Continuouson Warning: Google Authenticator upgrade loses all accounts

I scan the 2D barcode on two apps Google Authenticator and Authy. I also set up SMS Backup and it works well for Gmail/Hotmail accounts.