jay-barronville

This comment is so relatable.

For years, I made the conscious decision to focus entirely on enjoying moments instead of taking photos and recording videos. I now regret having been so strict about that.

Before I got married and settled down to work on building my family, I had so much fun as a single man. I traveled to so many places, enjoyed many concerts, went to lots of events/conferences, etc. Fast forward to now, I have nothing to show for most of it (other than maybe passport stamps and whatnot). Sometimes, I wish I could show my wife what it was like when I was in this or that country, but I can’t—it’s all just in my head!

My wife is pretty much the opposite of me when it comes to this. She has snapshots of most of her adult life. I came to truly appreciate her commitment to maintaining snapshots of our lives after we had our first child, because I noticed how quickly our little baby was growing and I constantly wanted to see how he looked and what he was doing a month ago, two months ago, etc. If it had been up to me, we likely would have very few of the photos and videos we have now.

This type of project is why I love HN. This work is brilliant!

Almost every question I had, you already answered in the comments. The only one remaining at the moment: How long exactly have you been working on PyXL?

> They did provide funding to dnsmasq: https://nlnet.nl/bluehatsprize/2024/1.html

You just reminded me that I need to make a donation to `dnsmasq`. I rely on it every single day (including for a couple critical projects and it has never failed me) and I’ve yet to donate anything to the project. I feel a bit guilty about that!

I appreciate you writing the post and I enjoyed reading it.

Congratulations for ending up on the front page! (I hope the server hosting your blog is okay!)

Impressive work, @juecd!

> > npm install ai

> How is this allowed/possible in npm? Don't they have mandatory namespaces?

No, scopes (i.e., namespaces) aren’t mandatory for public packages on npm. If a name is available, it’s yours. Sometimes, some folks have published packages that are either empty or not used, so you can reach out to them to ask them to pass it on to you. At least a few times, I’ve had someone reach out to me asking for a package I had published years ago that I did nothing with and I passed it on to them.

> Your assumption is that the challenge or concern about regulation is the difficulty of dealing with vagueness. As I pointed out, this is not the case, but the hesitancy and destructive power of imposing your will on others.

> […]

> I think a judge would also demand a consistent principle and definition to guide regulation.

Very well said across the board.

My stance is that any time—literally any time—someone is proposing and/or promoting a policy that can stifle, chill, and/or suppress free speech in any way, even if indirectly, the bar for justifying such a policy must necessarily be extremely high.

In theory, I actually agree with many of the arguments against advertising, but there’s a clear slippery slope with this “let’s ban advertising” line of thinking, so yes, the bare minimum is being able to concretely define what advertising even is in such a context.

Like many C hacks, this is a fun one, but hacks like this should absolutely be avoided for any serious C code–the magic is simply not worth the potential bugs!

> That said, as a parent to teenagers, I don't know that I believe that age verification is such a terrible idea. The reality is that there's a lot of fucked up porn out there and blocking it effectively across all networks and every device is non-trivial. I understand this is a minority viewpoint on HN.

I agree with you. I’m very pro-privacy/anti-surveillance and pro-freedom, so I’m entirely against the invasive ID-based systems, but the problem you highlight is pretty real and has to be addressed somehow, and I’m just not sure what the solution is.

As a parent of very young children, I’d hope that we’ve already figured this out by the time my children are teenagers.

Also, I doubt your viewpoint is actually a minority viewpoint here—it’s more likely those with your viewpoint just won’t post it here.

> Or in Hong Kong.

Time zones are a conspiracy. George is living in the future.

> It ain't March 8 either

I didn’t even notice that. That obviously means George is living in the future.

> Imagining that there's anything "normal" about that knucklehead is why "masculinity" is such an easy target for parody.

You’re certainly entitled to your opinions and ad hominems. Many folks, including myself, disagree with you, so there’s that.

> Maybe, but the gold chain, million dollar watch wearing CEO talking about masculine energy doesn't help the brand.

Why not exactly? Between Meta’s great contributions to the open-source ecosystem and Mark behaving more like a normal man nowadays, right now is the only time in a long time that I’ve considered applying to go work at Meta. I’ve heard several of my colleagues and friends say the same thing in recent months.

> What always surprises me is how "sleep" is the ingredient I need here. Yes repetition helps. But space out the repetition with sleep and "woah! i get it!" is often uttered.

I really relate to this. In fact, a lot of times, when working on a difficult problem, I’ll intentionally go take a nap when I feel stuck, and more often than not, I’ll wake up feeling like the problem is much easier than I thought before my nap. I can’t explain why it works so well—it just does!

> If it doesn't align with the HN groupthink it gets hammered out of view.

Yup. The following is a concrete example…

HN commenter [0][0]:

> If things keep going the way they are going, [a country with an authoritarian government that makes favored industries subsidized] could describe the US just as well in a few short years.

Me [1][1]:

> Why do you think so?

For asking this reasonable question, I received a bunch of downvotes but not a single response. Of course I can assume the reason is because I’m supposed to just accept the premise that Trump is bringing about an authoritarian government, but I really don’t, and a majority of American constituents (who voted for him) don’t either.

Before emigrating to the U.S., my parents and my family lived under real authoritarian regimes, under which family members were sanctioned, tortured (some still have the marks on their bodies to this day), and even killed for their political viewpoints, so I actually find so much of this hyperbolic rhetoric rather offensive when there are billions of folks all across the world who actually have to live under such regimes.

Rather than doubling down on the hyperbolic rhetoric, it might be a good idea to, in good faith, try to understand why half of your fellow Americans see the state of our country so differently from you, which requires good-faith intellectually diverse discussions.

The ultimate irony in all of this is that a lot of folks seem to not understand that, when it comes to politics, simply alienating the other side, is one of the most counterproductive things to do, because while you won’t have to “suffer” hearing their viewpoints, they’ll simply resort to using the one tool they can still use: their vote. This is why Trump’s 2024 win was so shocking to so many when it was so obvious to anyone actually paying attention and listening. The same applies to AfD coming in second in Germany.

Months before the 2024 election, I told a friend of mine (who’s a big Democrat donor in Georgia) that I think the Democrats are wrong about the Hispanic vote, and he told me, “I love you bro but if you think Hispanics are voting for Trump the way he speaks about them I got a bridge to sell you. Trump is cooked!” After the election, he followed up, “I’m all ears now, what did I not understand?” It was too late though.

I knew I was right about the Hispanic vote, not because I have a crystal ball, but because my church is filled with Hispanics and I learned so much about how they think politically and so much of the nuanced perspectives within their community by listening to them, meanwhile the Democrats think almost entirely in terms of identity politics.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43159998

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43163139

It’s so interesting that here on HN, on virtually any political topic, virtually the entire commentary is one-sided, and virtually all comments providing dissenting views are simply downvoted and/or flagged out of existence (often with no actual counter-arguments).

On technical topics, this place tends to be so awesome—I learn so much by just reading the comments—due to the intellectual diversity of the viewpoints, but on anything even remotely touching politics, it turns into an entirely unwelcoming echo chamber.

I guess one could argue that this is a pretty good representation of how divided our country is (for those of us who are Americans), but I think it’d be so dope if the same folks who tend to have these great intellectually diverse discussions on technical topics could also do the same for the topics affecting us all (i.e., politics), but I guess that’s just wishful thinking.

> When are people going to stop accepting North Korea stole your money, we're innocent?

What are you suggesting here? Can you elaborate?

> Reminds me of the Alphasmart, it was such a great device: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaSmart

Agreed. I own one of the early AlphaSmart devices (I own and collect some old-school software and devices) and I plan on keeping it for a long time.

> I like it as is, a piece of art on how corporate speak is unrealistically obtuse.

Definitely obtuse. Why unrealistic though?

> Is there a way to poke for bus speed and vram amount?

Unfortunately, I’m not aware of any way to reliably get this type of information browser-side.

If you really want to see how far you can get, your best bet would be via fingerprinting, which would require some upfront work using a combination of the manual input you already have now and running some stuff in the background to collect data (especially timing-related data). With enough users manually inputting their specs and enough independently collected data, you’d probably be surprised at how accurate you can get via fingerprinting.

That said, please do NOT go the fingerprinting route, because (1) a lot of users (including myself) hate being fingerprinted (especially if done covertly), (2) you need quite a lot of data before you can do anything useful, and (3) it’s obviously not worth the effort for what you’re building.

I was a Laravel user for years and I was a speaker at the very first Laracon in 2013. Although I don’t really use PHP/Laravel professionally anymore (with the exception of a project at my job a couple years ago, a few personal projects over the past 5 years, and a project I maintain every now and then for an old client), every time I look at all of the progress Taylor Otwell and the team have made over the years (without sacrificing the experience or ecosystem) while elevating the PHP ecosystem along with them, I’m just in awe.

I’ve said this before [0][0] and I’ll say it again: I truly admire Taylor—he’s one of those rare and brilliant humans whose contributions and work leave a personal lasting impact on you.

Congratulations on launching Laravel Cloud!

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38596346

> If things keep going the way they are going, that could describe the US just as well in a few short years.

Why do you think so?

> I've now rebuilt the tool from the ground up, switching from a Puppeteer-based crawler to an invisible iframe approach.

Where can I go to learn more about your invisible `<iframe>` approach/implementation?

> Even if I don’t get any customers I’ll continue developing it for my own needs!

That’s the spirit! A buddy of mine created a tool/API to solve his own problems, opened it to the public and launched it, but he got very few sign-ups, so he just continued to use it for himself. Recently, about two years later and out of nowhere (without doing anything other than the original bit of SEO he did), he started to see a bunch of sign-ups (including paid) and then started receiving feedback and support request emails from customers. Most folks would’ve just called it quits on the product at least a year ago, but he just kept using the product for his own projects and left it open to the public just in case it was helpful for anyone else. Obviously, YMMV, but good luck with this!

I’m on mobile right now, but I think I’ll give it a try when I’m back at my computer.

> can you make it detect the device somehow, maybe with some additional permissions, instead of user selecting from a dropdown?

Detecting CPU and GPU specs browser-side is almost impossible to do reliably (even if relying on advanced fingerprinting and certain heuristics).

For GPU’s, it may be possible to use (1) WebGL’s `WEBGL_debug_renderer_info` extension [0][0] or (2) WebGPU’s `GPUAdapter#info` [1][1], but I wouldn’t trust either of those API’s for general usage.

[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WEBGL_debug...

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/GPUAdapter/...

> No, this is what Actual Life looks like once you get past 30.

This made me chuckle.

> I reckon a single loud motorcycle could disturb tens of thousands of people, potentially waking or startling them, raising blood pressure etc. in a single 10 minute trip.

What absolutely grinds my gears is when a loud motorcycle or sports car drives through my residential neighborhood right after patiently rocking my baby to sleep.

Interestingly, as a motorcycle and sports car owner myself, I never thought about that aspect for even a second until I became a dad—I drive much more gently nowadays (especially in residential neighborhoods)!

> sidenote - is NextJS really the best “convention over configuration” approach for react? I’d love to just use ember, but most of the community has moved to react, but I really enjoy the opinionated approach

You might like Remix [0] (I do).

[0]: https://remix.run

I’ve had to deal with Bilt [0]. In case you’re not aware, they have a “feature” called Instant Link that automatically pulls ALL of your personal and sensitive financial data from financial institutions, including your credit card accounts, balances, etc. They apparently do this via a partnership with a company called Method Financial [1].

It’s frankly the most intrusive thing I’ve ever encountered in any software I’ve ever used—I’m not sure how it’s even legal, but this is America where we have no real privacy rights.

Instead of giving you the option to opt in for them to get this level of access, they automatically enroll you into it when your account is created, pull your data, and then allow you to “opt out” afterward, which enables them to have access to your personal and sensitive financial data anyway. And since you literally must have an account with them if your building uses their services for rent payments, they’ve effectively rigged the system to force millions of folks to unknowingly give them access to their personal and sensitive financial data.

Anyway, in your Bilt privacy settings, there are some options you can disable (including Instant Link), and I recommend that you disable ALL of them, although given the dark practices of this company, I don’t even trust that those settings are actually honored.

Side note: Did you know about a company called Method Financial that somehow has real-time access to ALL of your personal and sensitive financial data? Did you know that this company you never heard of that has said access then sells that access to the highest bidder? Do you remember agreeing to any of that anywhere? Yeah, me neither (on all counts)…

[0]: https://www.biltrewards.com

[1]: https://methodfi.com

> How do you audit that the issuer is printing coins backed 1-to-1 by USD reserves?

You’re asking the wrong question, since DAI isn’t backed 1:1 by USD reserves like fiat-backed stablecoins (e.g., USDC). It’s a decentralized crypto-collateralized stablecoin—it’s backed by a variety of assets, including cryptocurrencies and real-world assets, with mechanisms to ensure over-collateralization.

I’m on mobile and it’d take forever to explain the entire protocol to you here, so I recommend you read the white paper [0] if you’re interested in understanding how it all works.

[0]: https://makerdao.com/en/whitepaper/