Hacker News Reader

michaelper22on Generating a Java program with 90% less code

Or the ORM (Hibernate by default) is abstracted behind Spring Data interfaces. It's pretty easy to autowire the EntityManager if you need it.

michaelper22on Your throat hurts, your brain hurts: the life of the audiobook star

In the US, in particular at least one NYC government agency, unionized "system analyst" jobs are common. They get a defined salary based on experience and level, an assigned eight hour shift with half-hour lunch break, and a clock that must be punched into on time. Another has kind and caring help desk people who nevertheless carefully watch the clock.

michaelper22on New In Postgres 12: Generated Columns

Here's one of my current use cases: We have a folder tree table in our (formerly nested sets, then closure table, now materialized path), and we cache a materialized version of the path with the folder names. There are some places in the app where you can look up a node by its full path, and this column should conceptually be unique. Obviously an unindexed VARCHAR(2048) is bad to filter on, but MySQL indexes can only cover the first 767 bytes (we used utf8mb4). So we have another column, PathHash CHAR(40) AS (SHA1(path)) VIRTUAL, and then a unique index on that.

michaelper22on SQL Window Functions

MySQL only as of 8.0, which also added CTEs, more JSON features, and index features relevant to indexing JSON.

michaelper22on Mozilla takes action to protect users in Kazakhstan

Worked for a publicly traded energy company that does this.

michaelper22on Kaspersky in the Middle – what could possibly go wrong?

I was dealing with MySQL running on a Windows server box with McAfee Active Response running (MarService.exe). It has a feature for tracking files created/deleted, which is accomplished by hashing all new files, saving them to its own local DB, and presumably pushing them to the management server async. The app running on MySQL frequently creates many new tables and fills them as part of SOP, so the disk was constantly hammered by both MySQL and McAfee...

michaelper22on My Home Lab Server with 20 Cores / 40 Threads and 128 GB Memory

Yup. My USG and US-8-60W both run hot enough to not want my hand on for very long (the power supplies are pretty warm too).

michaelper22on GitHub is down

AdoptOpenJDK builds are hosted there too; found out about the outage trying to download one.

michaelper22on I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)

Notwithstanding the row length and column count limits, did you also give MySQL more memory? Setting InnoDB buffer pool size to 3 or 4 GB might help; its default is about 134 MB.

michaelper22on Why we're ending support for MySQL

"One does not simply use an ORM against multiple database types."

michaelper22on Someone in New York is pulling emergency brakes, destroying subway commute

After the Queens Blvd locals (M/R) terminate in Forest Hills, they loop around through Jamaica Yard, meaning non-revenue track. Stragglers being asked to alight is a common sight.

michaelper22on Amazon rolls out machines that pack orders and replace jobs

This box of rubber gloves is SIOC and hopefully isn't too attractive to porch pirates: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01JGLWP3S

michaelper22on Ask HN: What does your development stack look like in your favorite language?

1. Install Windows (7/10 Pro 64-bit)

2. Install Java 8

3. Install Eclipse; configure eclipse.ini to use jvm.dll for launching and set max heap to not all my RAM

4. Install Tomcat; configure Eclipse to use Tomcat installation

5. Install MySQL 5.7

6. Install Toad for MySQL Freeware (no longer available; might break under MySQL 8.0 when the time comes to upgrade...)

6. Eclipse -> New Maven Project

michaelper22on On Internal Engineering Practices at Amazon

Morgan Stanley revealed at a recruiting event that they follow this practice. "You can definitely use Apache Spark! It's been reviewed by our Enterprise Architecture team; some APIs were removed, and we substituted 'Morganized' variants of others, which you won't find code/docs for on Github ;)"

Given the npm debacle, I could totally see even a small org running an internal Maven repo with approved versions of (popular, and especially obscure) libs.

michaelper22on Add detailed message to NullPointerException describing what is null

Probably SAP's, since Hybris is an SAP product.

michaelper22on A new class-action lawsuit takes aim at real estate agents and their 6% fee

I don't understand how this racket is allowed to operate. From my experience (three NYC apartments through realtors), the landlord's realtor provides pre-screening of "desirable" tenants for the landlord, showings, collecting paperwork from the prospect, and handing over the keys. None of this adds value from the (prospective) tenant's perspective, but the tenant must pay the fees (in all three cases, one month's rent).

michaelper22on Whitespace killed an enterprise app

My college, part of a larger university system, was in the first wave of campuses to switch from a hodgepodge of legacy stuff (CICS-based student info system, with other apps probably in classic ASP and ASP.Net, plus other vendor products) to PeopleSoft (Campus Solutions, HCM, Finance, etc.). The major complaints - from students, staff, and faculty alike - were about excessive pageload times and significantly more clicks to do simple things. They added huge sticky headers and layers-upon-layers of portals.

Perhaps the only people happy with the migration were the Oracle sales reps.

michaelper22on Moving from Go to PHP Again

> Can extend itself as it runs. For example Wordpress, running off of php files can download plugins to its own server (which are just more php files) to instantly extend itself. Without restarting or redeployment. (What other web platforms can do this?)

Java: Use a classloader to load a JAR and instantiate one of its classes: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60764/how-should-i-load-...

.Net - use an AppDomain (or other methods): https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1137781/correct-way-to-l...

michaelper22on Why tech’s favorite color is making us all miserable (2018)

Honda Accord too between 2012 and 2017 MYs (don't know about after the '18 redesign), except the Sport trim which has red.

Fortunately, on all trims you can freely switch the infotainment screen BG color between red, green, and blue.

michaelper22on Roadmap to becoming a web developer in 2019

Nice to see relational DBs before NoSQL (learning the old and tried before the new). To follow that same pattern, SOAP should be earlier than REST. Taking a WSDL and running it through a client code generator is a fast and type-safe way to develop.

michaelper22on The West Coast is beating the East Coast on transportation?

Though this probably counts as rarely, least some of the trunk line I've been on give the illusion of high-ish speeds. Examples: - Queens Blvd express (Forest Hills to Roosevelt Ave, Roosevelt to 36 St) - 7 Ave IRT express (from far downtown to 96th St) - Lexington express (City Hall to 125th, save for going through the switches south of 42nd St)

michaelper22on After 60 Years, I-95 Is Complete

Many more crossings in the NY metro area are now open-tolled for both EZPass and toll-by-mail: Whitestone, Throgs Neck, Tappan Zee

michaelper22on Bank of America questions customer’s citizenship, freezes accounts

Make that 1.80% now :)

michaelper22on A Map of Wireless Passwords from Airports and Lounges

Requires a geek for a few hours and Ubiquiti network gear: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/1unif... (from https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/07/enter...) Even integrates with Facebook WiFi to abstract away the auth systems (and further degrade privacy!)

michaelper22on Bank of America questions customer’s citizenship, freezes accounts

Make that 1.75% for savings at Ally now.

michaelper22on A Life-Saving Checklist (2007)

Process street is a web app: https://www.process.st/

michaelper22on App Maker, Google’s low-code tool for building business apps, comes out of beta

I did QA for a Pega BPM project at a regulated company, working with an off-site (though on-shore) Pega consulting firm. Aside from the usual big-co version of "agile", and that this was a legacy rewrite, the process was more or less the same as regular C#/Java development.

Funny thing with Pega is once you break out of the normal BPM-style flow, you'll write almost as much code as an all-code platform, just cookie-cuttered into form fields.

michaelper22on How 2 M.T.A. Decisions Pushed the Subway into Crisis

The L train already uses CBTC (i.e automatic train operation); fast speeds are issued by the computer.

michaelper22on Monthly Amazon Prime membership fees are about to increase

Trees were killed to make those boxes in the first place (do they have 100% recycled boxes yet?). Better to not order than to dump or even recycle the boxes.