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jbotdev

387 karma · joined January 31, 2021

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jbotdev··on Norway takes a stance against Google Analytics
I think that’s a bit extreme. What if I’m doing analytics via server-side logs rather than client-side (e.g. Google Analytics)? Are we supposed to ban server logs too? What happens when I want to actually troubleshoot issues with my site?
jbotdev··on Apple: $52,000 Mac Pro Is Now Worth $1k
Title is misleading.. You get $1k if you decide to trade it in with Apple. Technically it’s still worth more on the second-hand market.
jbotdev··on I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing
It’s still used by the SEC to render company filings on their EDGAR site. I can’t find the exact files/docs, but I’ve rendered filings like this using the XML and XSLT they provide: https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/320193/00003...
jbotdev··on The gas industry is paying Instagram influencers to gush over gas stoves (2020)
Forget climate and respiratory issues, I’ve gone induction out of pure convenience and don’t miss gas at all. My induction cook top heats up faster, has more precise control, retains less heat on the “burner”, and is way easier to clean. The only downsides I’ve found are you can’t char things on a flame, or use copper pots.

It seems like people keep comparing gas to “regular” electric stoves, which are definitely inferior in many ways. The biggest issue is they’re very inefficient, and take forever to heat anything.

jbotdev··on Amber Monitors (2020)
The Bloomberg Terminal still has amber-on-black text as the default for a lot of its content, presumably to mimic the original amber displays they used in the 80s. The funny thing is a lot of people just associate that color scheme with the Terminal now, not realizing that it used to be common for monitors back then.
jbotdev··on Production Twitter on one machine? 100Gbps NICs and NVMe are fast
I think people overestimate how much CPU time a typical CRUD app spends on actual business logic, even with an interpreted language like Ruby or Python. What I’ve seen is the bottleneck is largely memory, such that you can pack a ton of these apps on a machine with a few cores and a lot of RAM.

The stuff that actually is CPU-bound often ends up being written in an appropriate language, or uses C extensions (e.g. ML and data science libraries for Python).

jbotdev··on Slack's private GitHub code repositories stolen over holidays
The article did mention that this breach did not include the “primary codebase”. Where is the rest of the code hosted? I’m guessing some private Git server (e.g. “on-prem” GitHub/GitLab Enterprise)?
jbotdev··on Microsoft workers to form company’s first union in the U.S.
https://archive.is/oy7YN
jbotdev··on The privatization of policing
Technically this is talking about “private security” rather than “law enforcement. The primary goal of private security is typically the security of their clients, not enforcing the law. The article in particular talks about private security preventing crime by addressing root cause (e.g. helping those in need).
jbotdev··on The privatization of policing
Well, if the problem they’re addressing is largely petty crimes against businesses like shoplifting, you really only need private security in the business districts. Preventing crime in private homes seems like it’s a much harder task for either private or public security, given the coverage area required.
jbotdev··on Ask HN: Help – Locked out of 10 years Gmail account
There are a few open source options out there (e.g. run IMAP backup script via cron). I personally use CubeBackup [1] on a local NAS, which covers mail/drive/photos. I then have a job that backs up that directory off-site using rclone.

[1] https://www.cubebackup.com/

jbotdev··on Ask HN: Help – Locked out of 10 years Gmail account
Hope you get your account back.

I’ve been on the fence about migrating off Gmail, but after reading threads like this, I put a contingency plan in place. Backups of my Google account are done hourly, and I have a custom domain/workspace account so I can move the domain elsewhere if needed.

jbotdev··on My building has replaced our keys with an app
My point is if you’re requiring smartphones, realistically you’re only going to target those two OSs. That’s independent of the fact that requiring it to rent an apartment is bad. Pick apart that last 0.1% and it’s mostly end of life devices like Windows/Blackberry.
jbotdev··on My building has replaced our keys with an app
I agree requiring a smartphone in general is a bad idea, but realistically 99.9% of smartphones in the US have iOS or Android. Maybe outdated Android, but I think HN sometimes overestimates the prevalence and practically of alternative smartphone OSs (or gapps-free Android).
jbotdev··on Obsolete Sounds: collection of disappearing sounds and extinct sounds
My point is there seems to be no ban on factory-installed alarms (source: I have purchased new cars in NYC in the past decade with working alarms).
jbotdev··on Obsolete Sounds: collection of disappearing sounds and extinct sounds
I’d like to add to that list: [gas/ICE] motorcycles, modified car exhausts, pretty much any small gas engine (power washers, snow blowers, generators).

Leaf blowers I’m afraid are here to stay, but the electric ones make a less annoying sound at least.

jbotdev··on Obsolete Sounds: collection of disappearing sounds and extinct sounds
They may have banned after-market alarms, but factory-installed car alarms are standard on pretty much every new car in the past 10+ years anyway. I still hear those go off on occasion in NYC.

I’m actually having trouble finding a source on the exact rules of the ban, but there are old news articles suggesting that after-market alarms with motion activation were the focus: https://www.qgazette.com/articles/car-alarm-sales-banned-by-...

jbotdev··on reMarkable 2
It feels closer to writing on paper (or eink) rather than on glass. The main downside is it reduces the clarity of the screen a bit, but I find it acceptable for most media (YouTube, photos, etc.).
jbotdev··on reMarkable 2
I came to a similar conclusion after looking into rm2 and trying one of the similar Boox tablets. They may run android, but security and OS updates seems to be a low priority for these eink tablets.

I ended up getting an iPad Air with the pencil, and one of those matte screen protectors. The OS may be locked down, but I can still choose from a wide variety of note apps/clouds (currently use GoodNotes), and security is obviously top notch.

jbotdev··on Is OpenStack fighting a lost battle?
I think this misses a much larger issue, which is that running your own datacenters (or just your own hardware) is becoming very unpopular. OpenStack could have all the features in the world, but at the end of the day you need a team to run it.

Having worked with large footprints on both OpenStack and AWS, it’s also clear that there are just inherent difficulties with running your own hardware, especially in your own data center. Even if you make the investment in a good infra team, it’s cost prohibitive to get anywhere near the experience of something like EC2 in terms of hardware availability and hourly billing. Not to mention they’re literally inventing their own hardware for things like high-performance storage and ARM servers.

jbotdev··on Sony Android TVs waste 25W in standby due to built-in Google Chromecast
I have a Sony OLED TV from 2020 with Android TV and Chromecast, and power usage on my UPS is reporting as 0W when off (probably rounding down). I never had to disable it, but I also never setup network connectivity or the Android TV features in the first place.
jbotdev··on Why do domain names sometimes end with a dot?
Reminds me of when I was in school, and you could access blocked sites by appending a dot. Presumably their firewall had a bunch of domain block rules that didn’t take this into account, and the vendor didn’t think to check for both variations of a domain.
jbotdev··on Framework Ethernet Expansion Card is now available
What would you do on one of these laptops that would take advantage of a 25Gb connection?
jbotdev··on Old school Linux administration – my next homelab generation
I think nowadays requiring that all application developers should also do ops (DevOps?) is a bad idea. Sure they should have basic shell skills, but when you’re on Kubernetes or similar, understanding what’s underneath is not vital. Instead, rely on specialized teams that actually want to know this stuff, and become the experts you escalate to only when things really go sideways and the abstractions fail (which is rare if you do it well). If your budget is too small for this, there are always support contracts.

As someone who’s been hiring for both sides, I see this reflected in candidates more and more. The good devs rarely know ops, and the good ops rarely code well. For our “platform” teams, we end up just hiring good devs and teaching them ops. I think the people that are really good at both often end up working at the actual cloud providers or DevOps startups.

jbotdev··on An Introduction to Ractors in Ruby
You can still use native threads, as long as you’re not expecting them to improve performance with multi-core CPU usage. The main purpose is typically to perform several I/O operations in parallel (e.g. multiple external API calls). That’s why Ruby applications often rely on “worker pools”, which are essentially forks, to scale performance across cores.

Edit: as the sibling comment mentions, that’s part of what Ractor is trying to solve.

jbotdev··on An Introduction to Ractors in Ruby
I’ve found it interesting to see several different concurrency frameworks for Ruby over the years with mixed success (e.g. EventMachine), along with the multiple built-in primitive (fibers, threads, forks). The patterns I’ve seen most used in the real world essentially involve distributing the work elsewhere, rather than getting concurrency right locally, for example:

* Run a bunch of background workers (Sidekiq/Resque), and queue up a job for each item you want processed in parallel.

* Provide relatively granular HTTP APIs, and have your JS frontend call them in parallel with AJAX, instead of having the server handle concurrency.

I think this is just the nature of Ruby being widely used for web apps where performance isn’t a big concern. That said, I’d love to see Ractor catch on, since it’s a pattern built into the language everyone could standardize on.

jbotdev··on Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus
What is it about free services that brings out the worst complaints from people? I understand the paid plans aren’t cheap for small projects, but then maybe don’t rely on a free service for archiving important information.
jbotdev··on Study finds link between 'forever chemicals' in cookware and liver cancer
Cast iron is also very heavy, and hard to clean if you get anything stuck to it. You can’t really soak or wash it with soap/water without re-seasoning it or it’ll rust.

It has its upsides if you put in the work. I’ve given up and opted for mid-range non-stick (coated steel and/or copper, not anodized aluminum) or high end stainless.

jbotdev··on Who is collecting data from your car?
I have a car with Here maps, but it never occurred to me that a side effect of it having a data connection is data collection. I’ve been used to car navigation systems being offline, but it seems newer models like to search online for results, which of course exposes a lot of data to their servers.

I wonder if you turned off the “online” search results and routing if it would shut off data collection, or if you’d have to physically cut off the cell connection.

jbotdev··on Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, and AWS crash course series
What do you think people use to build systems like these?

A lot of medium/large shops build their own deployment and BaaS platforms on top of Kubernetes/Terraform/AWS. You just don’t hear about them as much because they often aren’t provided as a service externally, and aren’t open sourced. (I work with and on such platforms)

The mistake I see people often make is assuming it’s worth using such complex tools directly with a small project. People like the flexibility but don’t understand cost to build/maintain it.

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