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Grollicus

1,052 karma · joined March 3, 2016

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Grollicus··on Django Garnett – simple multilingual models for Django
They seem to store all translated strings in a single jsonfield instead of using a separate column for each language.

That means there's a bit more overhead while loading (and you can't exclude unneeded language fields), but it allows dynamically changing languages during runtime without needing a migration.

Grollicus··on Optimizing Postgres text search with trigrams
I'm currently thinking about the multi table search problem and lean towards updating the index table in the ORM (save method of the corresponding Django models in this case). Postgres doesn't seem to support incremental updates of materialized views yet, and always recomputing the whole table just because some few rows changed seems very much overkill to me. That it integrates better into the rest of the app and makes configuring the indexed columns easier is just a bonus.

Not that Postgres probably wouldn't handle the full table refresh effortlessly as it generally does - at least at my scale. But that feels kind of icky to me and I'm surprised there doesn't seem to be a better solution for this yet - everyone building a search function for their site must run into this and I'd expect it to scale terribly at dimensions startups generally aim at.

Grollicus··on Meta facing order from Irish regulator to suspend data transfers to US
Schrems II is based on the argument that there is no due process for EU citizens to even check if data collection in the US is legal. That's a constitutional argument, it doesn't help to change laws. Or, well, as "constitutional" as it can get with the EU.
Grollicus··on Meta facing order from Irish regulator to suspend data transfers to US
How do you think the EU can give in here? They've tried it twice and European courts have decided twice that it's impossible.
Grollicus··on Google Maps ToS can be summarised as: Don't use it
For now you could use a nitter instance - for example replace twitter.com with nitter.net, so this submission becomes https://nitter.net/pmzakrzewski/status/1494967388428804103
Grollicus··on The Dubai Debt Trap
Why shouldn't it be?

Rule of law basically means laws apply to everyone the same.

Grollicus··on Study: Effectiveness of Apple's app tracking transparency
They could also report this behavior to the appropriate regulators and let them handle the enforcement. Maybe they'll take their time, but they will get there.

In the end this is not a technical problem but a juristical one.

Grollicus··on Use of Google Analytics declared illegal by French data protection authority
There is no different solution. The EU tried twice to build this kind of solution and EU courts have shot it down twice with the argument that in the face of no legal representation of EU citizens in the US it is not possible.

So the US needs to move here or it can not happen.

Grollicus··on Could we please get back the master-branch on this repository?
I'd expect you'd still create an empty repo (same as in the web UI) and then push the branches you want to push. You don't configure a branch name in the web ui as well.

But that's why I'm asking where OP found that and not just saying they're wrong.

€: There's also https://docs.github.com/en/rest/reference/repos#update-a-rep... where you can set the default_branch?

Grollicus··on Could we please get back the master-branch on this repository?
I just created a new repo with just a master branch. Where does Github force anything?

They're sure suggesting it - their suggested commands to initialize a new repo will create a main branch. But you can just ignore that suggestion?

Grollicus··on We’re fine without Facebook, German and French ministers say
I think the interesting thing is that Facebook seems to finally begin to take SchremsII seriously.

It is a sword of Damocles hanging over all US companies doing business in the EU and it is something that needs to be solved by the US side, as European courts have shot all attempts by the EU down.

I hope this is a beginning for the US to finally tackle their due process deficiency.

Grollicus··on What's inside a digital pregnancy test (2020)
I remember this discussion coming up at least once before. AFAIR the argument was that many people had problems interpreting the test strips (not waiting long enough, mixing the results up). So they built a more foolproof way of reading the strips, which then tells you exactly what's up in simple words.

Edit: Turns out there's a response in this thread that says the same and in better words. [1] Man I hate twitter UI.

[1]: https://twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/130178603213683507...

Grollicus··on Is it safe to use __secret_internals_do_not_use_or_you_will_be_fired?
I suspect they'll soon have an issue where someone wanted to get fired but it didn't work...
Grollicus··on I paid for a perpetual license of TeamViewer. Stop calling and emailing me
Ads are a legal risk as the degree of separation required between content and advertisement is surely dependent on the jurisdiction.

For example some youtube influencers lost a court case in Germany because they didn't make that clear enough (or didn't try to at all).

So I'm very surprised Spotify didn't just forbid uploading ads to their platform.

Grollicus··on LogJ4 Security Inquiry – Response Required
You'd probably need all of the 10 days to fight through all of their supplier management forms, answer pointless questions about security certifications, people involved and if you do business with iran.
Grollicus··on Poll HN: What operating system do you primarily develop on?
Which OS do you mean?

The OS where my text editor runs?

The OS where the build system runs?

The OS where the software I'm developing runs for testing?

The OS I log into first thing in the morning?

I think this poll is so unspecified the responses aren't going to be that meaningful.

Grollicus··on I got pwned by my cloud costs
Do you have any substance to your allegation of Microsoft hiding behind their pricing model?

This is very straight forward from their view, before: almost no traffic = almost no costs, now: huge traffic = $$$.

On the other hand, it doesn't seem that Troy did try to talk to them about this and seems to want to eat the costs himself. As it was his mistake. I think that's commendable. I also think with the amount of free advertisement Troy has done for them they'd be open to this and I can imagine we might see a followup post like "MS was so nice they waived my costs".

Grollicus··on Ask HN: Firefox connection problems after enabling DoH?
It seems another workaround is disabling the collection of usage data:

https://twitter.com/vanilla_chief/status/1481546294489489409

€: It seems telemetry does no longer triggers the bug as they've changed something on the server side? So this probably won't help anymore.

Grollicus··on Upgrading Executable on the Fly
If you really want to have no SPOF you'd probably build something like this:

Multihomed IP <-> Loadbalancer <-> Application

By having the same setup running on multiple locations you can replace the load banacers by taking one location offline (stop announcing the corresponding route). Application instances can be replaced by taking the application instance out of the load balancer.

Grollicus··on How to build large-scale end-to-end encrypted group video calls
Mumble has a bunch of issues, the main one being their confusing UI, especially on mobile clients. I'm regularly in mumble conferences and for example accidentally switching the room instead of pushing the push-to-talk button happens quite often.

There's also a bunch of more technical problems. For example as mumble uses a udp protocol it handles dropped frames badly, like on a spotty wireless connection. Results in missing audio. Not just that sound doesn't arrive (in both directions) but it also doesn't tell you something's wrong.

Mumble has problems with changing audio setups which require a restart of the client.

Also no video, no simply calling people - you need to go to a server and they need to go there, too. Basically stopped innovating some time ago and everone else moved further.

Grollicus··on Rclone: Rsync for cloud storage – CLI to sync between cloud storage providers
I'd like to piggyback here and add a second requirement: I'm currently looking for a storage provider that supports pulling backups from the outside. Kinda surprised this is not more of a topic, as it should be a simple way to make backups more robust against compromise?

Seems rsync.net supports this (see sibling comment). Any others?

Grollicus··on Calling Rust from Python using PyO3
I recently wanted to use some rust crates from Python and decided to give PyO3 a go and I must say it works really well.

Took about one evening to plug it all together and get it running. The guide at pyo3.rs was really helpful and maturin to build binary packages just works. You pass in python types and they arrive as rust-native types. Makes writing code feel very native.

The result: https://github.com/Grollicus/pyttfwrap takes a string and splits it as it would wrap when rendered with a given TTF font. Most of the code is about keeping a reference to the loaded font as that's an expensive operation.

Was some great fun and I'm sure I'll use it some more.

Grollicus··on The Surreal Horror of Pam
Oh it's this awesome blog again.

If I understand Tailscale correctly a PAM module that knows which machine it is running on and the username logging in will allow them to decide on a per-machine level if the current client is allowed to go there (to this account), so it could bring their authentication game to a whole other level.

Not sure if they should do that (or if anyone should do that) but it's an interesting thing to think about. Even if it's just to hide away some of the pain that are the PAMs/LDAP Groups of this world.

Grollicus··on Hetzner Cloud Goes US (Ashburn/VA)
When we thought to rent a dedicated server for our hackerspace we initially put "Bernd Liefert" (a german in-joke) as the responsible admin down and they basically told us "lol no we know our jokes, too". We had to tell them a real, existing person as contact or they wouldn't have rented us the box.

So can confirm, they also reject European orders.

Grollicus··on Leaving the Apple ecosystem behind
I'm running Arch on my home laptop and my server. Had one breakage in ~5 years where sshd wouldn't start anymore because they deprecated and then removed a config option. What do you do that regularly breaks?
Grollicus··on Username ending with MIME type format is not allowed
I suspect because Isaac Asimov was named before any of these problems with his name were a thing and his name is not something artificially constructed to cause problems with buggy computer systems.
Grollicus··on Username ending with MIME type format is not allowed
> I am not a native English speaker (and I don't work at Gitlab) but I am curious and interested in using proper terms, as I think as developer that naming is a very important skill.

That is it for me too and why I think this change is so annoying.

WIP means something is being worked on. [0]

Draft can mean the same, but it also has a bunch of other possible meanings. Note that if you search in both of your sources, you'll find "sketch" as an explaination. It can mean the same, but it can also mean a bunch of other things. It's a strictly worse name.

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/WIP

Grollicus··on Username ending with MIME type format is not allowed
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_application_firewall

Basically something to extract boatloads of money from enterprise customers by annoying THEIR customers so they can't write "<script>" in texts in their application.

Or, less tongue-in-cheek, a way to harden web applications against known attack patterns like sql injections or xss-attacks. As they work on pattern recognition and don't know anything about your application they sometimes get in the way. But they'll probably check some box for some security audit so they're used.

Cloudflare for example offers one at https://www.cloudflare.com/waf/

Grollicus··on Username ending with MIME type format is not allowed
Are they though? What I can think of (broken upstream reverse proxies that do mime type inference by filename) would warrant a WE_USE_BROKEN_LEGACY_SHIT_UPSTREAM config flag so that it doesn't get in the way of normal users.

So I'm probably missing something and I'm really curious for the underlying vulnerability.

Grollicus··on Username ending with MIME type format is not allowed
Gitlab recently exchanged the "WIP" prefix for merge requests (Work in Progress = started to do something but didn't complete it yet) for "Draft", which has connotations of throwing the draft/sketch away to build the final product.

Which is definitively not what is meant there. But I think it shows that Gitlab is not a company I'd go to if I wanted linguistic precision.

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