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jorams

4,053 karma · joined August 1, 2014

You can reach me at hn at joram dot io
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jorams··on I bought ISO 8601-1:2019 and 8601-2:2019
Monday is considered the first day of the week in many countries[1].

Week years are based on the year in which most of the week occurs / whichever year contains the Thursday.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_the_days_of_the_week#...

jorams··on Yank: Yank Terminal Output to Clipboard
> The only place I've seen the word "yank" in computing is in Emacs context, where it means "paste", not "copy"...

This is a confusing difference between Emacs and Vim. Emacs uses it for pasting, Vim uses it for copying.

jorams··on Do you really want Linux phones
I have a pretty good setup for MPD on Android. It's not perfect, but quite nice.

https://www.joram.io/blog/android-streaming-mpd/

jorams··on I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service
I find Gandi to have pretty thorough information on all TLDs they offer. The page for .de[1] lists one rule to keep in mind.

[1]: https://www.gandi.net/en-GB/domain/tld/de

jorams··on Speed Is the Killer Feature
Having used Teams, Zoom, Skype, Google Meet and Jitsi, I'm having a very hard time understanding why people go through the pain of Teams, Zoom or Skype.

Jitsi and Google Meet don't employ any dark patterns, they are fast, they are reliable, they are easy to use. (I do use them only in Chromium.)

Zoom desperately wants me to download their client, even going so far as to require multiple failed attempts before showing the button to join using the browser. Then it wants me to complete a CAPTCHA before letting me join. If I do use the client it opens several separate windows and asks if I want to join using desktop audio. (Of course I do, and if you still want to ask please keep it in the main window.)

jorams··on Reddit CEO: Platform doesn't plan to ban pornography
> It's alright like that, although it's still not a great use of time.

I don't understand why you go through this effort at all. A filtered view is why r/popular exists.

jorams··on How I cut GTA Online loading times by 70%
> This bug wouldn't present in the first couple years with the limited amount of DLC

GTA Online loading times have been infamous for a very long time. They were already unjustifiably bad when they released the game for PC, and at that point engine programmers would surely be involved.

jorams··on Google Workspace for Education storage policy changes
> no definition of recent

They've been very clear that it's 2 years, and they will notify you before they remove anything.

jorams··on K-9 Mail is looking for funding
The README has a single section about Pro features, and it starts with "All pro features are convenience or advanced features".

That definitely looks like the non-pro version is meant to be a free-to-use product.

jorams··on Comp.lang.c Google Group has been banned
Monopolistic platforms don't own the copyright on user-generated content. The users do, and they license it to the platform.
jorams··on OpenStreetMap in Realtime
I think the duration for each changeset just depends on the number of map elements it touches. Every map element gets 1.5 seconds. Every individual yurt is a map element so that changeset gets a lot of "airtime", but a changeset that just adds one building is only visible for 1.5 seconds.
jorams··on OpenStreetMap in Realtime
The element ID for it is "queuesize". I think it just fetches a batch of recent changes then queues them up. When the queue gets empty enough it fetches a new batch, and the number still in the queue is what you see.
jorams··on Uncovering a 24-year-old bug in the Linux Kernel
They do, you just don't hear about it.
jorams··on Google could have killed Facebook with the flick of a switch
I've heard, and keep hearing, so many stories about frustrations with Facebook's tools for advertisers that the situation described doesn't surprise me at all. Somehow this massive organization with >50 000 employees and billions of users can't seem to produce quality software that allows people to pay them for access to those users.

Small tasks turn into multi-day endeavors just because the tools keep crashing over and over again, losing all state. Managed advertising accounts just vanish from interfaces. Random buttons turn into "try again" roulette.

It's a good thing their ads are (apparently) effective.

jorams··on Apple silicon M1 as-a-Service
If you do that, there's a real risk you'll end up having to pay more than your max price. Say your max price is $2500, but you bid $1 million. Then it turns out 10 others have a max price of, and bid, $10000. You are now on the hook for $10000, significantly more than your actual max price.
jorams··on Just because I have a vertical screen doesn’t mean I’m on a phone
One of the things "Request desktop site" is supposed to do is report a larger effective viewport. For a responsive site, that should switch it to a desktop view. Does iOS Safari not do that?
jorams··on Msync: Maintain lower-bitrate copy of your music files
Rather than keeping a lower-quality copy of my music on my phone, I stream my own music library by running MPD[1] in a satellite setup. All files are served by a simple webserver[2] that converts them to Opus when requested, to save bandwidth. Music I never listen to never gets converted. I wrote about my setup here[3].

This won't work on iPhone, since MPD hasn't been ported, but it works great for Android.

[1]: https://www.musicpd.org/

[2]: https://git.sr.ht/~joram/transcoding-music-server

[3]: https://www.joram.io/blog/android-streaming-mpd/

jorams··on Many use cases don’t require Kafka (2019)
> I work for a large CDN, with many thousands of servers pushing near line-rate out of our NICs... we certainly can't vertically scale that.

A CDN is essentially "horizontal scale as a service". The vast majority of products are very different.

jorams··on "ERROR: could not open temporary file" after upgrade to Mac OS Big Sur
Setting the SA_RESTART flag using sigaction[1], which Postgres does, makes it invalid behaviour. Even according to Apple's (confusingly worded) documentation[2].

[1]:https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/s...

[2]: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Sy...

jorams··on "ERROR: could not open temporary file" after upgrade to Mac OS Big Sur
Returning EINTR is valid behaviour, but not when SA_RESTART is set. The POSIX documentation for sigaction[1] is quite clear about that, even if Apple's corresponding docs[2] are confusingly worded.

[1]: https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/s...

[2]: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Sy...

jorams··on "ERROR: could not open temporary file" after upgrade to Mac OS Big Sur
While open[1] is documented for macOS to be able to return EINTR, the documentation for sigaction[2] seems to specify (in confusing wording) that setting SA_RESTART prevents that. It seems to me like a bug in macOS, since they're going against their own documentation.

[1]: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Sy...

[2]: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Sy...

specifically:

> If a signal is caught during the system calls listed below, the call may be forced to terminate with the error EINTR, the call may return with a data transfer shorter than requested, or the call may be restarted. Restart of pending calls is requested by setting the SA_RESTART bit in sa_flags. The affected system calls include open(2), read(2), write(2), sendto(2), recvfrom(2), sendmsg(2) and recvmsg(2) on a communications channel or a slow device (such as a terminal, but not a regular file) and during a wait(2) or ioctl(2). However, calls that have already committed are not restarted, but instead return a partial success (for example, a short read count).

jorams··on "ERROR: could not open temporary file" after upgrade to Mac OS Big Sur
> which means I have the disadvantage of having to stay up-to-date on things like dhcpcd and systemd and coreutils

In the past 8 years of regularly updating my rolling release Linux systems, I have spent significantly more time reading headlines about macOS releases breaking software, than I have spent staying up-to-date with dhcpcd, systemd and coreutils. They are ridiculously stable.

jorams··on Making our new homepage fast and performant
I agree "the new IE6" is a tad much, but this...

> there are a growing number of areas where Chrome and Firefox have nearly identical behavior and Safari is the odd one out.

...is definitely true for me when developing relatively simple sites. I develop in Firefox and it's been a long time since I've had to change any CSS to make it work in Chrome. Meanwhile Safari has had broken default SVG sizing for years now (unless they fixed it recently), ignores padding on <select> (so you need to set the height) and other things like that.

It's all minor, but it's annoying to deal with. Especially considering you need Apple hardware to test with.

But I can't complain too much, since I also still need to support IE11.

jorams··on Why can't I write code inside my browser?
> Requiring a novice to learn arcana of a 30 year old Unix system before they can learn to program is purely extraneous.

The thing is, that's the system they are using. Node.js is a programming runtime for that system. Node.js has a GUI installer that sets everything up correctly, it's just not an IDE.

Jetbrains has an IDE, WebStorm, that probably works just as well as the Java one. It can automatically download Node.js for you, so the same experience as for Java is available there as well.

jorams··on Why can't I write code inside my browser?
What would be the layer below it? It's certainly not GUIs, which are a significantly more complex layer of abstraction.
jorams··on Ask HN: Does your employer want you to state pronouns in email signature?
> Your statement of being "LGBT / neutral" seems strange to me

I think the / in that sentence is supposed to be read as "and", so:

> I am LGBT and neutral regarding the the use of pronouns.

jorams··on Setting goals for 2021 – A brief guide about personal goal setting
> It's like when people say "I'm feeling melancholy". NO! You're feeling melancholic!

While I fully agree with you and it sounds incredibly weird, dictionaries don't agree with you on this one. They consider "melancholy" a synonym of "melancholic".

jorams··on Wordpress market share keeps growing
> Who the hell wants to create new blocks for each sub-heading and paragraph when they're writing regular articles? The old editor is much easier to use.

You add new paragraphs by just pressing enter, and you make it a heading by typing (part of) "/heading". It's less work than in the old editor, and it even produces reasonable markup (entirely unlike the old editor). If you don't want to design a new web page, just... don't? You don't need to press every button available.

jorams··on Wordpress market share keeps growing
> I don't want to interrupt my thinking by clicking to add blocks, I just want one big white sheet of virtual paper, to start writing untill the end.

There's a lot to criticize Gutenberg for, but this is not one of them. It's a big white sheet of virtual paper, and you can write your paragraphs without any clicking. Pressing enter opens a new paragraph, you can make it a heading by starting with (part of) "/heading" and pressing enter once more. It's easy to add more complicated blocks, but you don't have to.

jorams··on No Cookie for You
If they're not using Google Analytics anymore, it's probably time to remove the request to 'gascrolldepth.js' from the blog as well.
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