Hacker News Reader

dochneon Why don't more developers “use the platform”?

They announced that AngularJS was being rewritten in 2014 with no obvious migration path and didn't release Angular2 until 2016.

That was 2 years of "well, everything you write will be legacy"

dochneon A Map of Every Lighthouse on the Planet

My favourite bit about people who use OpenStreetMap data for lighthouses is that they end up including <https://www.google.com/maps/@52.2647013,-2.1151705,51a,15y,2...> lighthouse in the exceptionally landlocked Droitwich (shows up as Hanbury Wharf Lighthouse)

dochneon Why don't more developers “use the platform”?

I mean, prior to React the big Framework at the time was AngularJS 1 - a hellscape of two way data binding.

Talking about one-way data flows was an excellent way to speak to a lot of tortured souls at the time (who had just found out they were going to be forced to migrate their projects to something else anyway due to Google's absolutely insane "we're deprecating this, we'll have a replacement for it at... some point, good luck").

dochneon Anecdotally, programmers dislike "reduce"

I like it, but it is by far the most ungainly of the three with the most footguns in it's usage.

While not as functionally pure, I always appreciate the Ruby each_with_object https://ruby-doc.org/3.4.1/Enumerable.html#method-i-each_wit... as a more pleasant interface for it.

dochneon You Want to Visit the UK? You Better Have a Google Play or App Store Account

All of my EU friends living in the UK have now applied for citizenship.

The risk profile for "I have indefinite leave to remain" has moved from "this won't be an issue at all" to "we have no trust in the government on this" in a few short years.

Profoundly depressing

dochneon Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade

I've never quite forgiven python for the time I tried to update it using yum, it failed which is then broke yum - not a fun place to end up.

Treating python as a project level dependency rather than a system level dependency is just an excellent design choice.

dochneon PHP Almost Generics: Guided Journey Through the Official Compile-Time Proposal

The foundation is a very recent affair.

The real improvements all came from the hard work of the developers who were around during the 7.* releases who did excellent work.

Most importantly at that time we had Nikita Popov who was incredibly helpful.

Hack/HHVM definitely gave it a nice kick of motivation though.

dochneon Stone blocks from the Lighthouse of Alexandria recovered from seafloor

One place I would love to visit is the Tower of Hercules which was built in the first century and based on the original plans of the Lighthouse of Alexandria.

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

dochneon What would a Kubernetes 2.0 look like

My main beef with HCL is a hatred for how it implemented for loops.

Absolutely loathsome syntax IMO

dochneon Why young parents should focus on building trust with their kids

I mean, it's asking kids if they want a ball of sugar - that does feel like a pretty sure thing.

dochneon 'Mainlined into UK's veins': Labour announces public rollout of AI

It's a farsicle example as the bottleneck is getting the council to fix the potholes.

dochneon Ruby 3.4.0

Experienced teams know to be careful and sparing with its use.

dochneon We Built a Self-Healing System to Survive a Concurrency Bug at Netflix

AWS charges instances in 1 hour increments - so you're paying 150% the EC2 costs if you're doing this every 2 hours

dochneon FreeWP Is Here to Shake Up the WordPress Ecosystem

It must be horrible working for Automattic at the moment having to deal with this seemingly never ending farce.

dochneon Please stop putting cookie pop-ups on your website (2022)

The Insites GDPR checker[1] does this.

[1] https://insites.com/free-website-gdpr-check/

dochneon Jelly Star – The Smallest Android 13 Smartphone

I had one of the predecessors to this (the Jelly 2) as one of my strategies to cut down on smart phone usage.

It was a nice idea (as it introduced pain points of using it as a distraction device), but the battery life ended up being abysmal to the point that I couldn't trust it to complete a day. Having a tiny smart phone and then having to take a battery pack for it was absurdity.

It also led me to appreciate how much I'd come to rely on always having a good camera in my pocket. The picture quality was poor enough that the photos would leave me feeling genuinely quite sad.

dochneon Why is Prettier rock solid?

If you're reading a PR diff on GitHub you can get it to ignore whitespace diffs by adding ?w=1 to the url - complete lifesaver in this kind of situation.

dochneon Daft Social: Anti-social social network for minimalists

MSN Spaces had this feature back in 2006! Makes me feel nostalgic!

dochneon The browser's biggest TLS mistake

It still remains a mystery to me why browsers felt they should "fix" this server misconfiguration.

It's particularly vexing to me as the main reason that people end up with misconfigured servers at all is because after they've configured their new cert (incorrectly) their web browser gives them a tick and they think they've done it right - after all, why wouldn't they?

dochneon Insomnia REST client now requires an account

My understanding is that Postman unfortunately pulled the same thing lately, so that's unfortunately a no-go for you.

I've previously had good experiences with Paw (now RapidAPI) - https://paw.cloud/, but given that they are closed source and have started giving away the software rather than charging for it, I'm not filled with optimism they won't do a similar rug pull.

dochneon Wappalyzer no longer open source?

Thanks here go to the work done by the awesome-archive[0] project without whom this day would have been much more frustrating.

[0] https://github.com/awesome-archive/Wappalyzer/pull/1