Hacker News Reader

You can recompile libc if you want to change the limit, or at least you could in the past.

time4teaon Covert web-to-app tracking via localhost on Android

If you work for meta, you're on the baddies team.

(Other bad guys are around too)

time4teaon Swift at Apple: Migrating the Password Monitoring Service from Java

Absolute bs.

This falls into the category of "we rewrote a thing written by people that didn't know what they were doing, and it was better"

Large class hierarchies (favour composition over inheritance since 1990!), poorly written async code (not even needed in java, due to virtual threads), poor startup times (probably due to spring), huge heaps sizes (likely memory leaks or other poor code, compounded by inability to restart due to routing and poor startup times)

Yawn.

time4teaon A lost decade chasing distributed architectures for data analytics?

If it fits on a single disk, it's not big data.

Me, circa 2007, when lovely hadoop guy trying to tell me how good it was for 10m rows of data... It was much slower than Oracle free version as I recall.

time4teaon I failed a take-home assignment from Kagi Search

It's totally unreasonable to ask somebody to do so much free work, and the outputs are hard to judge, and likely not the candidate's own work anyhow, so almost entirely pointless.

Remember kids "just say no"

time4teaon Maryland's 24/7 Work Zone Speed Cameras Issued 48,000 Tickets in 2 Months

Because speed limits are advisory.

Because I have a fast car

Because I was in a hurry.

Because I had something really important to do.

Because the shops were closing/little Johnny would be late for school.

Because I'm self entitled?

time4teaon Fixrleak: Fixing Java Resource Leaks with GenAI

This could be interesting, but all the example code is so poor, and the extent of the fix so limited that it feels like this is 'AI' for the sake of it.

Stringly-typed, catch-log-ignore, generates warnings in IDE anyway...

Fixed 90 of 125 errors that were found by a different technology... probably.could have been fixed by one developer in 1-2 days anyway - how long did this take?

time4teaon Matt Godbolt sold me on Rust by showing me C++

aka use Tiny Types, they will help you.

Been true in all statically typed languages for decades!

It's good advice.

time4teaon I'd rather read the prompt

Love that final thought.

(AI slop). If it's not worth writing, it's not worth reading.

Perfect.

time4teaon Oxide’s compensation model: how is it going?

Variable pay for sales roles is the driver of vast amounts of broken behaviour. You've seen it it your own companies, but also in the various financial crashes. It immediately sets everyone's goals in non-coherent directions. Wonder why your favourite software is getting so crap? Pressure from "sales execs" cos they are getting a bonus for the poorly thought out, inconsistent crappy feature they sold to some enterprise.

time4teaon CATL unveils new EV battery that charges as fast as pumping gas

https://www.google.com/search?q=175Wh%2Fkg+in+Wh%2Flb

Yes Yes No

time4teaon A New ASN.1 API for Python

20+ years ago used ASN.1 for talking between micro services. (HTTP Services, as they were called then) Very performant. Had to buy OSS tools licence but other than that quite nice.

time4teaon There are two types of dishwasher people

The article says 3-5 gallons for a dishwasher cycle, but this is loads!

Recent UK dishwashers use less than 2.

time4teaon Tell HN: Camelgate NPM Outage (Cloudflare)

Scunthorpe problem

time4teaon Devs say AI crawlers dominate traffic, forcing blocks on entire countries

Yeah my small site got 170k requests from one bot in a few mins. Of course it was rate limited, but didn't seem to know 429 or 444 (drop connection) so kept on coming back for more. I do have ipset drop too but at the moment takes a person to enable it... just so much effort to stop these **s. Exhausting!

time4teaon One year after switching from Java to Go

The jvm is a pretty insane beast. It will do usage based recompilation, escape analysis for memory, so non heap allocation is super fast, has great memory safety... But a lot of people use it with spring/spring boot, a technology designed to work around the complexities of a particular type of middleware software in the late 90s and early 2000s. It's cargo cult programming of the highest order. In the OP, the author is comparing apples with oranges, with a bit of misunderstanding that java/jvm means spring boot, and while that is true for a lot of people and certainly a lot of stuff on the internet implies that 'this is the way', it's not required. Startup times of ~100ms are absolutely standard for a big program, similarly unit tests taking 1ms. I prefer to write kotlin rather than java, as it's a nicer language ,IMHO, but still those bytecodes run on Jvm and same stuff applies.

Edit: im not advocating writing 'ls' in java, and I would also agree that java uses more memory for small programs, so its not a systems programming language probably.

Just use new() it's pretty fast.

time4teaon Show HN: 2048 turned 10 this year, I built an updated version to celebrate

Just another scam Internet surveillance.

Why do you need to share tracking data with many hundreds of shady organisations.

time4teaon C++ proposal: There are exactly 8 bits in a byte

formerly or formally?

time4teaon About synchronous disk replication

Memories of EMC Symmetrix SRDF. Was a bit more expensive then though, but it was quite nice.

time4teaon Decker: A reincarnation of HyperCard with 1-bit graphics

There was a NASA laserdisc at school with loads of shuttle information. It was hooked up to a Mac running HyperCard, for navigation and displaying info. It was pretty cool, although I think at the time I didn't appreciate it as much.

time4teaon Ask HN: How to handle user file uploads?

A lot of people here are telling you to do stuff, but not really explaining "why".

A different suggestion would be to build a threat model.

Who are your uploaders? Who are your viewers? What are the threats?

Only when you've figured out what the threats are, can the solutions make sense.

Internal site? Internal users? Publicly available upload link? What media types? ....

Threat modelling is a thing that adds lots of value (imho) when thinking about adding new capabilities to a system.

time4teaon SFMTA's train system running on floppy disks; city fears 'catastrophic failure'

Raspberry pi controller $30, couple of people to make it work - let's say $500k. Sure... there are loads of things that probably need attention, but maybe you don't need to fix them all at once?

time4teaon Ask HN: How to run an old-school mailing list?

I used mailmanlists.net for a few years and it worked very well.

(No association)

time4teaon Research shows that people who BS are more likely to fall for BS (2021)

And hilarious that the article about BS is behind a BS, illegal in the EU, cookie banner.

time4teaon Observable 2.0, a static site generator for data apps

Importing libs from a cdn is a big no-no for almost any system I work on - they are just another way of surveilling users on the Internet, and building information about the insides of organisations.

time4teaon AdGuard Home: Network-wide ad- and tracker-blocking DNS server

You might be interested in py-hole. It's just a python script and some dnsmasq configuration, it runs on openwrt, is free and close to zero cpu usage.

https://github.com/time4tea-net/py-hole

time4teaon How a software glitch at the UK Post Office ruined lives

In UK law, it is presumed that computers systems work perfectly, and it is up to the "other side" to prove they didn't.

In short, if the computer said so, it is a fact, in court.

Lots more information here

https://evidencecritical.systems/2022/06/30/briefing-presump...

time4teaon Heat pumps, more than you wanted to know (2023)

It's Intelligent Octopus Go.

You need a smart meter. It's electricity only.

You (and I) get £50 credit with this link: https://share.octopus.energy/happy-frog-559

time4teaon Heat pumps, more than you wanted to know (2023)

(I have a heat pump)

You can get electricity at 7.5pkWh. With a battery, I get 12h of cheap electricity per day, and the rest at higher prices.

At the coldest time of the year, I'm getting an average of 20pkWh.

This is just a fraction above break even gas/electric.

The rest of the year its no contest, heat pump wins.

My energy usage for heating is down by 60% year on year

My bills are the same as they were 3 years ago.

time4teaon New UK record for wind power set today – 21.81 GW between 0900-0930 GMT

Can confirm that in my 1920s house, now with heat pump, my energy use is now a fraction of what it used to be, since replacing boiler with heat pump.

Before: Jan 600kWh electricity, 3300kWh gas = 3900kWh

After: Jan 1580 kWh electricity, 20kWh gas (cooking hob)

So in total, 41% of previous amount, and for heating, 30%.

So yes, for crappy uk houses heat pumps are totally fine.

Adding in solar pv, and a time shifting battery, and the bills are maybe £2k per year lower than they would be.