Hacker News Reader

thdrdton Roof blows off new Tesla Model Y

There are also reports of parts breaking off the suspension as a Swiss man experienced last week while driving 200km/h.

Aren't these components that should be ok at least after 17 years of Tesla?

After watching Rich Rebuilds on YouTube I came to the conclusion they are just not very good cars.

I like Blazor, but to be fair, coming from VueJs, it feels not finished. Some things are just more complicated that they should be. But things are changing, so we will see what happens in the next releases.

thdrdton Covid-19 contact tracing study finds children key to spread

It is known covid mostly spreads as airosols. So is this studie related to badly ventilated schools?

thdrdton Apple sues Canadian recycling firm for reselling 100k devices, not destroying

"Contractor was breaking its contract pretty clearly."

Not in this case. Only when they could have prevented that employees were reselling the devices.

It looks like GEEP agrees with Apple and they are going after the people who resold the devices.

thdrdton What is the best dumb TV?

If you don't need a big TV a huge monitor is a good option. For me LG always stands out as a brand for it's low price compared to the image quality. They even have a 48" 4k monitor. Still not as large as a huge TV, but for most people big enough.

But keep in mind that the audio of most monitors is just bad.

thdrdton “Really successful people say no to almost everything”

I wish your comment was at the top.

Money as metric for success leads to destruction.

Someone who helps a stranger is successful.

I wish more people would understand that everything that devides us as humans leads to destruction. Everything that unites us leads to good things, which I call success.

thdrdton FreeCAD: A free and open source multiplatform 3D parametric modeler

Joko Engineeringhelp (channel with a lot of FreeCAD tutorials) just posted a video answering questions like: should I learn FreeCAD, can it be used commercially, how does it compare to industry standard tools?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udIBhVIy5MI

thdrdton FreeCAD: A free and open source multiplatform 3D parametric modeler

I think the only real options are:

* FreeCAD - Very powerful, very buggy/unstable.

* SolveSpace - Very powerful, takes time to understand the interface.

* OpenSCAD - Great for simpler objects.

* Blender - Not very good for CAD modeling, but with non-destructive modifiers and the new Extrude Manifold it can be used.

Personally I use Blender all the time for 3D printing. There are some tricks that can help a lot with precise modeling. For example you can draw a plane, but instead of extruding it you can use the solidify modifier to give it thickness. Then the thickness is non destructive. You can also view all edge lengths which help you to check if everything is ok. Since v2.9 you can now use Extrude Manifold which is not precise but works a little like Sketchup making some modeling much easier.

And a lot of time my workflow is: Create something in FreeCAD/OpenSCAD -> export to Blender (STL) -> add finishing touches -> 3D print.

thdrdton Autodesk Fusion 360 becomes almost useless for hobbyists

Your comment makes no sense in this context.

The people are not talking about free software as their right. It just sucks the price went from free to ~$300/y.

We all know Autodesk can do whatever they want. But they created an expectation by providing free features for years.

All they did is make people loose trust in them.

Most personal users will just move to other free or cheaper software.

thdrdton When you browse Instagram and find Tony Abbott's passport number

How does GraphQL fix the problem of showing different fields depending on rights?

thdrdton When you browse Instagram and find Tony Abbott's passport number

Lately I am thinking about building a framework for web APIs where the database stores the owner, group and other's rights for each entity. The framework will then fetch data based on the user and fills the models based on the rights set for each field.

Exactly for the reason shown in the article.

I believe right now it is still too difficult to do this in any framework. That's why developers take shortcuts and just expose all entity data or just make a mistake and forget about it.

Does anyone know if such a framework already exists? So per field rights, not per entity rights.

thdrdton Apple Fitness+

Does it matter? As a parent I might upload a private nude picture of my kids which is perfectly fine.

thdrdton Tracking users via CSS

Another trick is to use JavaScript to check if images have a size. Most bots don't download those assets to save bandwith.

thdrdton Web Performance Profiling: Google.com

Edit: I was too quick to judge your post. The article is indeed just about serving content, not about why their results are fast.

thdrdton Electronic music pioneer Simeon Coxe has died

https://puredata.info/ can also be added to the list. Visual programming audio and video.

Maybe you also like this talk of Andrew Sorensen on live coding music for inspiration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY1FSsUV-8c

thdrdton What's so hard about PDF text extraction?

Isn't the reason extraction is almost impossible that everything in a PDF is placed inside a box? So every line has it's own box and paragraphs don't exist. Paragraphs are just multiple boxes placed together. The context of sentences is completely gone.

thdrdton A controversial company using DNA to sketch the faces of criminals

This is an art project from 2013 doing the same thing:

http://deweyhagborg.com/projects/stranger-visions

thdrdton Scaling Erlang Developer Experience at WhatsApp [pdf]

There are things that could (should?) be done from the start. Most has to do with automation. For example automated build tools. Maybe you don't want automated unit tests in the beginning but those parts can be added later without changing the company's culture and stucture too much.

Or automated invoices. It is much easier to change this than changing a co-worker who manually created all the invoices.

thdrdton Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazon’s board of directors

Or Insomnia https://insomnia.rest/

thdrdton I'm a Coffin Confessor

What also bothers me: he is a private investigator who does undercover work but now he has his picture all over internet.

thdrdton .NET Memory Performance Analysis

She has some video's on her YouTube channel about this topic as well: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCk1EXxUVEKnPNV5gTAijSZg (cat included)

I don't think they were linked from the document on github.

thdrdton Apple Disabling 'Sign in with Apple' for Epic Games on September 11

Then they should first fight it before breaking it.

thdrdton Is the web getting slower?

"Want the same functionality across all Browsers? Better use Js."

This is not the point. The point is some developers just include big Javascript files because they don't know what other methods and options there are.

I have seen developers include Javascript to 'fix' things across browsers but it made things worse because the `let` keyword was not supported in some browsers at that time.

So it is not about if you should use Javascript. It is about the fact a website or webapp can and should be fast. But when a developer does not know about the technical aspects we will end up with multi-megabyte pages that take 10 seconds to complete.

About the `position: sticky`: it is not smart to promise a client a pixel perfect experience across all browsers (unless they want or need to and will pay the extra price). In the case of a sticky header you can support all modern browsers with two lines of CSS (`position` and `top`). The other 6% won't have a sticky header but still a perfectly working website. So imho you did not caught a mistake but a real world example.

thdrdton Is the web getting slower?

I have seen a lot of front-end developers who have no clue about the technical aspects of their work. They just use multi-megapixel images because 'they will look sharper'. When they need an icon from Font Awesome they just include the whole library. And because Bootstrap told them to do so, they nest as much DOM as possible.

I have seen websites where the homepage's HTML alone was over 1MB! in size. The only thing that got exited was my CPU.

Let me tell you: if you want a header with a background image where the text is aligned at the bottom you can just write:

  <h1>My header</h1>

There is no need to write it as:

  <div id="mainHeader"><div class="align-text-bottom"><h1>My header</h1></div></div>

And if you want to stick the header to the top you can use `position: sticky` in CSS instead of including a huge Javascript file that can do all kinds of fancy stuff you don't need.

But I am not sure I can blame those front-end developers. Deadlines are tight and it takes effort to learn about the technical aspects of front-end development.

My personal standard is that a page should be ready in 1 second. For huge sites 3 seconds max. I've been creating small and huge websites for over 20 years now and never had a problem with these goals. This includes webapps built with Javascript.

thdrdton Elixir Is Erlang, not Ruby

One example: a lot of objects are composed at runtime. So only at runtime you will know what the properties are.

thdrdton Elixir Is Erlang, not Ruby

LiveView is the reason my eye caught Elixir/Phoenix.

Currently I am working with Blazor (C#) and I really like that you can forget about Javascript (most of the time). I believe Blazor, LiveView and others are the future for webdev.

thdrdton Elixir Is Erlang, not Ruby

"and Phoenix is so full of magic (which isn't a good thing)"

Can you explain something more about why you think this is not a good thing?

Is it like Laravel (PHP)? Lots of magic so it is very easy to get started but a hell to maintain?

I really like to get started with Elixir (for webdev) but I am not sure if I should start with Phoenix.

thdrdton 'Super bacteria' survives for three years outside space station [video]

Do you think so? 3 years is not a very long time in space.

thdrdton 'Super bacteria' survives for three years outside space station [video]

About radiation: I once accidentally microwaved ants (trying to 'sterilize' potting soil) but they survived. Turns out more people microwaved ants and they found multiple reasons for their survival.

The main reasons are that they can transfer heat very easily and they do not contain much water relative to their volume.

So there is probably a lot more life that can withstand extreme conditions.

thdrdton Apple (Pro) Mouse (2014)

Unfortunately I had to use this one and the old hockey puck at work. While the form is different the pro mouse is just as bad as the puck. It gave me a lot of problems with my (meta)carpal bones.

The hockey puck is just worse because it's hard to see which direction is up.