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TkTech

1,317 karma · joined November 12, 2012

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TkTech··on SpaceX's Starship launching to orbit for first time ever today
All rocket development is weapons development, which is why ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations) classifies rocket and space tech as sensitive national security items and is why foreign nationals can't even work on Starship. The entire US space program was funded for military development in the first place.

The difference between Starship and a missile designed to kill people is a simple swapping of the payload. More realistically given vehicle costs, its an ideal heavy lift platform for cheaply placing other weapon vehicles into orbit - a stated goal of the current administration.

> This will help grow Starlink. Plenty of people are already enjoying their Starlink connection in places where the previous provider had either absurdly low quality for high price, or where connectivity was not a thing at all.

Plenty of people are also using Starlink to wage war, and its already become political as access is provided and removed at whim.

I love space. I love space technology. I work on a game set in space. I am not enthusiastic about notorious individuals having the will and capability to mass-weaponize space.

TkTech··on SpaceX's Starship launching to orbit for first time ever today
This is ballistics weapons technology, being progressed by a country that can't stop missile striking people, who has recently declared its intent to heavily weaponize space, whose leader has recently "claimed the moon", who is actively declaring its desire to annex its own allies, done by a corporation whose profits will be almost exclusively concentrated in a very small group of the already-wealthy in a country with horrific wealth disparity.

The V-2 was also a technological achievement. Doesn't mean the UK was cheering it on.

TkTech··on Show HN: Godot and Rust based multiplexer (terminal panes and more)
On top of that, if you wanted to godot-rust is a extremely well supported - we've used it extensively and have nothing but praise. There are several other language bindings with varying levels of support too, no need to stick with C++ if that's really their line in the sand.
TkTech··on Show HN: Godot and Rust based multiplexer (terminal panes and more)
Surprisingly - if you're using the standard controls - Godot's UI components are fully integrated with AccessKit.

For everything else, https://gameaccessibilityguidelines.com/full-list/ is a great checklist.

TkTech··on Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices
> intersting take, I'm not Canadian but wasn't there some pretty draconian bills that were passed where you could be reported for voicing or sharing your opinions on some things ?

Not a thing. You can't post hate speech or threats of violence.

> That already seems like a hard barrier for any sort of Canadian social network especially when you require your users to dox themselves and open themselves to all sorts of scrutiny.

Also not a thing. I was pretty clear all they get is a is_a_human".

> The problem with all of this is that it creates a sterilized politically correct environment that won't have the same pull as a public square that upholds freedom of speech like American ones.

Also not a thing. American platforms practice widespread self-censorship and have no protection under the law except from the state.

TkTech··on Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices
From their FAQ[1] the plan is to allow other countries eventually but for now it's read-only for non-Canadians. I imagine they have no interest in private KYC like Persona and integrating with national identity providers can be a real pain, if that country even has a unified service.

[1]: https://gandersocial.ca/faq/

TkTech··on Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices
Oh thank you for this, that's fantastic. Still some edge cases (thread expansion seems odd?) but just having it as an option is great.
TkTech··on Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices
An interesting new one for Canadians (that's built on AT and interops with bsky) is https://gandersocial.ca/. It uses our national postal service's identity validation, so it dramatically reduces foreign actors and bots, and without handing PII to shady private companies like Persona. They collect no PII either, they just get an "is_a_human" response back from Canada Post.

You can still do read-only things like see threads and follow users as an anonymous user. Just can't post or comment. Only thing I don't like is that it's app-only for now.

TkTech··on Half of Europe's towns and villages have fewer residents than 60 years ago
> Not enough software engineers converting to farming? Shocking.

I kinda have to disagree with this. Sure, there's not a lot of software engineers grabbing a hoe and moving to a quiet rural farming village. But oh boy is there a lot of money being a software engineer working on farming.

I'd have to say more software engineers are working in agriculture today than ever before - it's one of the reasons why the rural areas can shrink. State programs for mechanization and increasingly advanced and hyper-specific machines are allowing crops that were labour intensive just a decade ago to be done by a team of 2-4. We went apple picking last year and the field next to us was having its apples harvested by flying drones (which was a real "we're living in the future" moment for us) while a worker sat in a lawn chair nearby reading a book.

Then there's the pushes to remove transport costs and grow closer to the cities. All of our family's lettuce, tomatoes and cucumber come year round from greenhouses on the roof Walmarts, warehouses and other big block stores, just a few blocks away - https://montreal.lufa.com/en/farms. 100% "touch-free" automated greenhouses are being built and have entered full productivity - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITRts-KOkuM&t=44s. Cheap electricity and thousands of overbuilt (snow load) flat roofs are a good combination for city greenhouses. These "farms" employee directly and indirectly plenty of engineers of all kinds.

TkTech··on Running local models is good now
For many companies (country-dependent) that's not really why they use cloud services vs purchasing. It's tax shenanigans and business process overhead. OpEx vs CapEx, and a small (%) bump in the huge AWS bill no one will even notice or a $30k+ invoice for hardware that has to go through rigorous review and 3 departments.

Same reason people pay for things through the AWS marketplace (like Vanta) instead of having to go through their invoicing process.

TkTech··on Hetzner Price Adjustment
This continuing trend is going to do a fantastic job of ensuring fewer and fewer individuals can launch casual projects and gating (non-VC) startups to those who already have the means.
TkTech··on I don't want my search engine to think for me
No, those search engines will simply stop being used by people that care. Google's "AI results" have already wrongly accused people of being sex offenders and make up gibberish constantly. They are a blight and a scourge. There are already many lawsuits against the garbage it invents.

The "quality" of your prompt is irrelevant when you're feeding it to something that just imagines things.

TkTech··on Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL
Webalayzer! I'm not sure there were really any other options at the time other than writing your own. Parsed the apache logs and gave you pretty detailed results and you could see the usage (in kb, which tells you how long ago this was!) broken down by date and IP.

Once you added a redirect rule for the IP to apache you'd just check your log and see the IP that was hitting you every couple of minutes poofed for a good few hours.

TkTech··on Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL
I used to just start giving any IP downloading way too much a redirect to multi-tb NASA images. This was a long time ago but it was surprisingly how many would follow redirects and never time out. Wouldn't see a request again for hours and then its right back to downloading a new part of the sky.

Those images also used to crash all the early GUI irc and chat clients that showed inline images without size checks...

TkTech··on Building durable workflows on Postgres
sorentwo is the author of Oban. He's not using CockroachDB, he's supporting it as a valid Oban target.
TkTech··on Just Use Postgres for Durable Workflows
pg_timescale can take you pretty far for metrics and would be Good Enough for almost all users. Totally agree on raw, high-volume logs though.
TkTech··on Building durable workflows on Postgres
In pg19 https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=commit... will land, which significantly improves NOTIFY performance. Right now LISTEN/NOTIFY doesn't scale to very busy instances because a `NOTIFY` within a transaction takes a global lock.
TkTech··on Exit IP VPN servers mitigation rollout
No, not usually. Few ISPs are willing to risk blacklisting.

Just like scrapers (and a lot of VPNs are quietly using their custom VPN clients to sell your own IP [and data] to scrapers) it's mostly a "don't ask don't tell" situation for IP sourcing. You use a multitude of IP providers and if a scandal happens you just say "We didn't know!" and move on to the next. Almost always grey-market, very rarely through legitimate providers.

TkTech··on Tell HN: Fiverr left customer files public and searchable
It's very unfortunate but a significant amount of the most damaging stuff in this is from the underprivileged and those with minimal means who were trying to find help they could afford. Non-profits trying to get website help, confidential reports for charities trying to get translations, children seeking therapy (fiverr has a therapy category!?) for some truly dark stuff.

Utterly inexcusable that this is still up after so many hours.

TkTech··on Tell HN: Fiverr left customer files public and searchable
Personally, this is the funniest one to me. It turns out Fiverr uses cloudinary for their internal documents as well. (Note: this one is not confidential and is public information)

https://fiverr-res.cloudinary.com/image/upload/f_pdf,q_auto/...

TkTech··on TikTok will not introduce end-to-end encryption, saying it makes users less safe
Which has never worked. Korea had a system to prevent kids from gaming after midnight for something like 15 years. All it did was make Korean kids very good at memorizing their parents ID.
TkTech··on Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS
Is this not just Windows LTSB/LTSC? Which has been a thing forever.
TkTech··on Oban, the job processing framework from Elixir, has come to Python
I kinda have my own https://github.com/tktech/chancy :P
TkTech··on Oban, the job processing framework from Elixir, has come to Python
> Support only options aren't going to cut it in our experience; but maybe that'll be different with Python.

That's totally fair, and I can only speak from the sidelines. I haven't had a chance to review the architecture - would it possibly make sense to swap from async as a free feature to the process pool, and make async a pro feature? This would help with adoption from other OSS projects, if that's a goal, as the transition from Celery would then be moving from a process pool to a process pool (for most users). The vast, vast majority of Python libraries are not async-friendly and most still rely on the GIL. On the other hand, Celery has absolutely no asyncio support at all, which sets the pro feature apart.

On the other hand, already released and as you said it's much harder to take a free feature and make it paid.

Thanks again for Oban - I used it for a project in Elixir and it was painless. Missing Oban was why I made Chancy in the first place.

TkTech··on Oban, the job processing framework from Elixir, has come to Python
A combination of LISTEN/NOTIFY for instantaneous reactivity, letting you get away with just periodic polling, and FOR UPDATE...SKIP LOCKED making it efficient and safe for parallel workers to grab tasks without co-ordination. It's actually covered in the article near the bottom there.
TkTech··on Oban, the job processing framework from Elixir, has come to Python
Celery + RabbitMQ is hard to beat in the Python ecosystem for scaling. But the vast, vast majority of projects don't need anywhere that kind of scale and instead just want basic features out of the box - unique tasks, rate limiting, asyncio, future scheduling that doesn't cause massive problems (they're scheduled in-memory on workers), etc. These things are incredibly annoying to implement over top of Celery.
TkTech··on Oban, the job processing framework from Elixir, has come to Python
The Oban folks have done amazing, well-engineered work for years now - it's really the only option for Elixir. That said, I'm very confused at locking the process pool behind a pro subscription - this is basic functionality given CPython's architecture, not a nice-to-have.

For $135/month on Oban Pro, they advertise:

    All Open Source Features

    Multi-Process Execution

    Workflows

    Global and Rate Limiting

    Unique Jobs

    Bulk Operations

    Encrypted Source (30/90-day refresh)

    1 Application

    Dedicated Support

I'm going to toot my own horn here, because it's what I know, but take my 100% free Chancy for example - https://github.com/tktech/chancy. Out of the box the same workers can mix-and-match asyncio, processes, threads, and sub-interpreters. It supports workflows, rate limiting, unique jobs, bulk operations, transactional enqueuing, etc. Why not move these things to the OSS version to be competitive with existing options, and focus on dedicated support and more traditional "enterprise" features, which absolutely are worth $135/month (the Oban devs provide world-class support for issues). There are many more options available in the Python ecosystem than Elixir, so you're competing against Temporal, Trigger, Prefect, Dagster, Airflow, etc etc.
TkTech··on Improving the performance of WAT parser
Sure, here's a Rust/WASM procedural skybox generator I threw together the other day, and is much, much faster at 16k renders then Javascript. https://tkte.ch/night-sky/
TkTech··on Show HN: Dock – Slack minus the bloat, tax, and 90-day memory loss
I might have missed it, but no mention of _where_ data is stored in the FAQ and seems critically reliant on Cloudflare.

In a changing world, what's the selling point for those outside of the USA? Why would our company pick this over self-hosting when our country is threatened with American annexation almost weekly? If I go with Zulip, mattermost, rocket.chat, matrix, etc I introduce maintenance overhead but I don't have to worry about unstable politics or a disliked tweet getting us sanctioned and banished from American-hosted services. The chat platform we use internally is critical business infrastructure and so we're required to ask these kinds of questions for business continuity.

TkTech··on Germany's Merz admits nuclear exit was strategic mistake
Hard to understate just how expensive. Here in Montreal where ice storms kill and cause billions in damage, we still don't bury the main transmission lines. We been burying almost everything _in_ the city where having to repair millions of individual connections (again) would be impractical, but it's relatively simple to repair the limited major lines into the city.

From CBC:

> Current estimates are that it would cost five to 10 times more to distribute electricity to a big city via underground cables, and that not all of nature's problems would be alleviated even if that were done.

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