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melx

239 karma · joined January 11, 2023

Hey! Greetings from the UK. I'm senior Python developer available for contract work. Looking for reliable Elixir dev? That's me too!

https://mlexs.dev

Viewpoints are my own and not the viewpoints of my employer (that's also me).

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melx··on Meta pitches EU to charge a $10 subscription for ad-free Facebook and Instagram
Exactly. They probably see their ads revenue is getting saturated by now, so a subscription model is a way to keep the revenue as the same level or higher.
melx··on Show HN: Zany – Favicon API
or just "ignore" the favicon altogether:

  <link rel="icon" href="data:," />
melx··on Asus Formally Completes Acquisition of Intel's NUC Business
I bought my first NUC only few months ago, and could not be happier (maybe except that Intel has sold off....). I use it as my primary machine for programming and data analysis. I read reviews that said it's noisy little machine yet I heard its fans once or twice, in my very quiet office.
melx··on What every software developer must know about Unicode in 2023
Try the night mode (top right corner)...

It's black text on black background (I'm on mobile Firefox on Android).

melx··on An Introduction to LiteStack for Ruby on Rails
Something else will be a problem...before size of sqlite is a problem.
melx··on BT confirms it's switching off 3G in UK from Jan next year
A very costly replacement?!

The UK smart meter rollout is/was the most expensive among countries that went this route of smart meters.

Or move up North (or Scotland) as "our", ekhm, "smart meters", are using a radio technology.

melx··on How (not) to apply for a software job
"Well, it sounds like they've mastered the art of 'Ctrl+C' and 'Ctrl+V'!" *

* generated by ChatGPT itself

melx··on Erlang/OTP 26.1 Released
Yyyy... Erlang has great adoption - examples:

- Ericsson (they designed Erlang) is using it for its mobile products/networks. Approx 40% of all mobile traffic worldwide goes through Ericsson's infra.

- WhatsApp used/uses Erlang - again millions (billions?) of users

- Bet365 / Klarna use Erlang - millions of users

- from OSS, RabbitMQ, is written in Erlang

I could go on... Erlang has great adoption, but it's probably smaller than, e.g. Python, due to Erlang's specific applications.

melx··on U.S. national debt hits $33T for the first time
UK's debt-to-gdp reached 100.5%, and France has about 112.5% (many other western economies probably have similar level of debt.)

I'm not economist, so can someone tell me what does such high debt mean in short/long term perspective?

melx··on Bard can now connect to your Google Apps and services
I was thinking...maybe Bard read your post and decided for itself.
melx··on Bard can now connect to your Google Apps and services
Someone asked[0] what happened to Bard just 10 hours ago (or 8 hours if relative to this posting).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37564768

melx··on I digitalized Berlin's registration form
Good point! But what... if it's French Belgian person from France... is this still "French from France", or "French from Belgium" ? The Belgian person lives in France ;-)

Also, you missed other language codes for French: fr_BI, fr_BJ, fr_BL, fr_CA, fr_CD, fr_CF, fr_CG, fr_CH, fr_CI, fr_CM, fr_DJ, fr_DZ, fr_GA, fr_GF, fr_GN, fr_GP, fr_GQ, fr_HT, fr_KM, fr_LU, fr_MA, fr_MC, fr_MF, fr_MG, fr_ML, fr_MQ, fr_MR, fr_MU, fr_NC, fr_NE, fr_PF, fr_PM, fr_RE, fr_RW, fr_SC, fr_SN, fr_SY, fr_TD, fr_TG, fr_TN, fr_VU, fr_WF, fr_YT.

melx··on I digitalized Berlin's registration form
I'm from UK, and I got "United Kingdom, United States, Germany" as three first countries.
melx··on I digitalized Berlin's registration form
The OP wrote this is based on "navigator.languages" feature in the visitor's browser. So if your preferred language is set to e.g. French, then you shall see France at the top of dropdown.
melx··on Mwmbl: Free, open-source and non-profit search engine
On that topic I love the Welsh-English encounter of civil servants thinking they understood each other[0]

[0] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7702913.stm

melx··on I digitalized Berlin's registration form
Kudos on the nice UX for dropdown with countries. I wish more websites do it. Usually, it's "United States" at the very top, and 194 other countries in a loooooong list.
melx··on Swedish criminal gangs using fake Spotify streams to launder money
Money muling (the activity I described above) is a type of money laundering.
melx··on Swedish criminal gangs using fake Spotify streams to launder money
There is...you're asked about your bank account, then few days later you receive $100,000 along with info to send it to another 5 accounts $20,000 each. Guess what happens next?
melx··on Phoenix 1.7 for Elixir: Edit a Form in a Modal
I compile the tarball using Dockerfile, as the target OS must be the same as source OS to compile it (I deploy Debians on remote, and use Fedora locally). Then there's bunch of mix tasks to bundle the js/css assets - it's all really there ready to be used. The other day I spent half a day implementing same behaviour for Django app.
melx··on Britain's roads can't keep up with our cars
I hope the deer had survived the encounter.
melx··on Ask HN: Why does Google rank the real Python documentation below content farms?
Not an answer to OP question, but if you find yourself googling "python endswith" (as per example) then your DX is somehow broken.

Invest in good code editor with linting. No more googling for such trivial things

melx··on Ask HN: Why does Google rank the real Python documentation below content farms?
I wanted to start a new search engine that would index content from ad-free websites only.

Then I realised StackOverflow has ads nowadays and my search offering would be useless for like 98% of devs.

melx··on Phoenix 1.7 for Elixir: Edit a Form in a Modal
You can host Elixir apps on PaaS like Gigalixir[0] or Fly.io[1] (no associated with these).

I personally use mix release[2] that assembles a tarball of itself (together with BEAM), then rsync that to Hetzner, restart the remote process and viola. I like simplicity.

Re cluster of nodes, the easiest would be to use a library[3] to automate the formation of said cluster.

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

[1] https://fly.io/docs/elixir/getting-started/

[2] https://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/mix-otp/config-and-r...

[3] https://github.com/bitwalker/libcluster

melx··on Phoenix 1.7 for Elixir: Edit a Form in a Modal
Phoenix components for the win!

But as a side note, I got rid of modals in my app, as showing modal on mobile devices is bad UX (IMO). Then, my Elixir code became smaller/simpler too. Win-win.

melx··on Caddy is the first and only web server to use HTTPS automatically and by default
HAProxy 2.8 has improved[0] Let's Encrypt integration by using acme.sh (so you can get rid of certbot). It still needs a cron job/systemd timers to do renewal of certs but acme.sh is just bash script so you don't need (extra?) system deps for installing it, while certbot requires Python and 12 python libs on my system (Fedora). And nowadays the "recommended" way to get certbot is via Snap (package manager)...

[0] https://www.haproxy.com/blog/haproxy-and-let-s-encrypt

melx··on Caddy is the first and only web server to use HTTPS automatically and by default
Well, we're in 2017 (read the thread I posted above), and in that year Caddy was distributing[0] the binary as licensed product. Apache licence applied to its source-code only (e.g. when you build the server from source - which only few people did).

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20180216153020/https://caddyserv...

melx··on Caddy is the first and only web server to use HTTPS automatically and by default
I think you meant the Let's Encrypt was new. They started on November 18, 2014, and Caddy's first release was on 28 April 2015.
melx··on Caddy is the first and only web server to use HTTPS automatically and by default
> Adding a sponsor header is harmless

Harmless or not - I think it's worth looking past this point. Maybe the http header was a way for them to search the internet and find *commercial* sites that didn't pay for Caddy license? Not very pro behaviour.

melx··on Reasons to not use your own domain for email
On topic of death.

Look into setting up "lasting power of attorney" (LPA), or your country's equivalent.

When you're no longer here, probably the last thing your spouse/children/family will care about is a bloody domain and its associated email accounts.

melx··on Caddy is the first and only web server to use HTTPS automatically and by default
I did benchmark it against nginx and found Caddy to be 5-7x times slower, but like all benchmarks go...results are subject to ones requirements (or mistakes).

What got me away from using it:

- the directives feel intuitive but as soon as I needed a complex config it all became a chain of very implicit strings

- the caddy author(s) decided few years ago to add custom http header with their sponsors[0]. That header could not be removed, it's no longer present in current Caddy but the bad taste still remains.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15238315

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