Hacker News Reader

towelrodon How do you do, fellow web developers? A growing disconnect

Yes, but remember the much more important rules of programming:

You aren't gonna to need it[1]

Do the simplest thing that can possibly work[2]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_aren%27t_gonna_need_it 2. https://www.ronjeffries.com/xprog/articles/practices/pracsim...

towelrodon Critical theory is radicalizing high school debate

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/1/16/20991816/i...

The most interesting part of this article to me was the end, where the author argues about how important High School Debate is and how Kritiks are the ruin of this important tradition. I was a HS debator in the early 90s, before K's were popular, and from my experience debate was already a fun but ultimately harmful activity. The whole idea was to spew a constant stream of arguments that didn't have any merit as quickly as possible, hoping the opposing team would forget to respond to just one out of 100, and then you win.

HS Debate already trained a generation of win-at-all-costs, who cares if you are right folks like Karl Rove. I don't see how the current generation of kritik based debate could possibly be any worse

towelrodon Give up GitHub: The time has come

I should not have to opt out. GitHub should have to respect my license. I already said they can use my code, as long as they keep an attribution intact (via a BSD license, for example)

GitHub is taking my code and ignoring the license. I don’t understand why anyone would think that is ok.

towelrodon Inside the longest Atlassian outage

The linked article directly talks about this, at this level of downtime customers are promised a 50% discount. That's what the SLA means, effectively

towelrodon Blizzard Postpones World of Warcraft 15th Anniversary Event in Taiwan

FIFA hasn't done anything like this, have they? Only thing I can remember recently is when Shaqiri and Xhaka had political celebrations after a World Cup game, and they both escaped punishment:

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2018/jun/25/swiss-xhaka...

Even then, the potential punishment was a 2-match ban. They wouldn't have stripped Switzerland of the victory,banned them for a year, and taken away all the money they earned throughout the entire season (all things that Blizzard did)

towelrodon Apple Removes HKmap.live from the App Store

Most companies have been trying the "seat at the table" approach for the last ~10 years and this is where it got us.

towelrodon No More Cheap Shipping for Chinese Sellers

That post, like everything else I can find about this news, is a year old. Did this really happen?

towelrodon Optimal Taxation with Rent-Seeking (2011)

Isn't there a fairly toxic political question buried in this paper as well? Who is going to decide which behaviors are rent-seeking and which are productive?

towelrodon The true cost of an Uber ride is higher than it seems

This article is based on a naked capitalism article [1] from 2016. That article adresses the China criticism under the section:

"Uber Losses Not explained by Uber China and No One Can Explain How Profitability Can Be Achieved"

The losses covered in that article don't include anything from China.

[1] https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/11/can-uber-ever-delive...

towelrodon Nintendo Switch

> They weren't buying it for portability, like Japanese customers usually did; they were buying it because it was the cheapest way to play videogames

That's not true, they are buying a 3ds so they can play Pokemon. Without Pokemon every kid I know would rather have an iphone/ipad than a 3ds. (I'm talking about Pokemon Omega Ruby style games, not Pokemon Go).

towelrodon Show HN: PDFlower – Reflow PDF papers for small-screen reading

Interesting and I might have a use for this professionally. But there is no indication on the main page about how it works (web service? code library?). And it forced me to login on the second page, so I closed the tab.

towelrodon Show HN: Hapibelly, Rotten Tomatoes for Restaurants

Or... what? It says "Do not access or use the Site..." but what would be the penalty for using a site like this outside of the terms of service?

towelrodon Pokemon Go is a huge security risk

Wait, you revoked access from within google, and then the pokemon app was able to give itself access again without asking for permission?

towelrodon Airbnb's impact on cities

More to the point: Airbnb shifts regular, tax paying renters into a grey market -- non-renting, non-tax paying economy.

If a city/country wants to base its rental units on a day-by-day, airbnb model, then fine. The problem is when airbnb comes into a regular market and "disrupts" that market by not paying hotel taxes or following local subletting laws.

I say that as someone who very recently used airbnb for a great deal in NYC, and was admonished by the host not to talk about our situation in the lobby, the elevators, or anywhere else someone might overhear.

towelrodon “Oculus removed the headset check from the DRM in Oculus Runtime 1.5”

The person you are responding to never said "because we can't catch their wrong doing all the time"

towelrodon Jacob Appelbaum Leaves the Tor Project

I can't believe this is still the top comment. If Jacob Applebaum is a rapist, then that is horrible and of course he should step down. But this comment links to 3 tweets that are all duplicates of each other.

Is there any reason to think that Jacob Applebaum is actually a rapist? I would really like to see some proof of that, before jumping to any conclusions.

towelrodon Malware scam appears to use GPS data to catch speeding Pennsylvania drivers

The redacted email also says it contains a picture of the license plate. How could that come from a cracked phone?

It sounds more likely that some photo based speed trap has been compromised.

towelrodon Rbenv 1.0.0

That's not really true. We still run some older Apache camel components that require Java 7. And when Java 8 first came out it had bugs that crippled Solr, it took a long time before that was stable enough to use everywhere.

towelrodon It’s Comcastic, Or: I Accidentally Bought a House Without Cable

When you hand over the card, make sure to say "Valar Morghulis".

towelrodon What is Tcl?

Also in the older tcl (not sure about 8.5+), it would parse { characters inside comments as if they were real braces in the code. So if you put a comment like:

    # I want to escape the { in the next line

then it would cause your code to fail because of unbalanced { characters.

towelrodon What is Tcl?

Thanks -- that does seem to be working ok for me. I'm going to try it out, since I'm having a hard time finding a tcllib rpm for RHEL.

towelrodon What is Tcl?

Maybe we get different search results. When I search for 'perl json' it leads to http://search.cpan.org/~makamaka/JSON-2.90/ which is a mature and easy to use JSON client. It does talk about backwards incompatible changes from version 1.0 -- but that was back in 2007.

When I search for 'ruby json' I get http://ruby-doc.org//stdlib-2.0/libdoc/json/rdoc/JSON.html, which is part of the standard library.

When I search for 'java json' I get several libraries, all of which are actively supported: www.json.org/json, gson, and Jackson.

I don't really understand your comment about significant implementation issues that aren't issues at all with Tcl. Could you give an example? What edge cases aren't covered by the standard Perl and Ruby JSON libraries?

towelrodon What is Tcl?

Can you expand on this? What other languages have you learned, and how are they less useful than Tcl?

towelrodon What is Tcl?

I frequently write tcl, and I work in a company that has been using it in production for 20+ years. I've written thousands of lines of Tcl, but I only go back to Tcl when I have to work on legacy stuff these days. I wouldn't even remotely consider writing something new in Tcl.

I really wish someone would take charge of wiki.tcl.tk and cut out all the nonsense. For example, I am currently in need of producing some JSON from one of our Tcl apps. So I search for JSON and I get this:

http://wiki.tcl.tk/13419

It starts out pretty promising -- listing a bunch of competing JSON implementations for tcl -- which is unusual for a wiki.tcl.tk page. But then it quickly devolves into the usual stream of consciousness that infects every tcl wiki page. What am I supposed to actually do?

At first we have a big list of different implementations; that makes sense, every language is kinda like that.

But before the first page is even finished, we get weird "string is double gotcha" stuff from gchung, including "you should use the following" 100 character regex! How about: you should use this module for doing this usual thing that every language in the world can do?

Then, we get JMN's thoughts about how a JSON generator is better than a JSON parser. Apparently TCV solved this himself in 2009 (but, no code referenced). Very quickly we get into "here's my version!".

I'm not complaining about all these guys contributing different solutions. But can't the community gather around one of them? It's like searching wikipedia but always landing on the "talk" page.

Hey tclers, try this on for size. Google for "perl json" and see if you get a real response that explains how to do it, or a bunch of random guys talking about how they solved it themselves. Then try "ruby json", "java json", "python json".

That is why tcl is dead.

towelrodon Ruby DSL Handbook

That's one of the things I like about Ruby DSLs. Because the DSL is just Ruby, you can do things like:

    [:foo, :bar].each do |attribute|
        attr_reader attribute
    end

You probably wouldn't want do actually do that with attr_reader, but it is just an example.

towelrodon Photos Preview

In 10 years time, the NSA will be able to decrypt anything that is encrypted with 2015 encryption. And that's assuming they can't decrypt it now.

Privacy is important, but let's be honest, you basically can't hide from the NSA.

towelrodon UX Crash Course: Fundamentals

The UX on this site would be better if every link did not open in a new window, especially since each article is so short.

towelrodon Why You Should Never Use MongoDB

I'm pretty ignorant of MongoDB so I'm genuinely interested in your response: How would you solve the problem in the epilogue, namely "a chronological listing of all of the episodes of all the different shows that actor had ever been in"?

Did Sarah model the data poorly ("We stored each show as a document in MongoDB containing all of its nested information, including cast members").

Or is there an easy way to extract that information that Sarah just doesn't know about yet?

Keep in mind the constraints in the article, for example: some shows have 20,000+ episodes, actors show up in 100s of shows, and "We had no way to tell, aside from comparing the names, whether they were the same person".

The last part seems like a really straightforward relational critique to me. If you don't break the actors out into unique entities then you can't compare them across shows. But if you do break them out into unique entities, then how to you present the show information without doing joins?

towelrodon Why You Should Never Use MongoDB

I think you are missing the point of the article. If you read down to the Epilogue it explains how the "perfect" application still didn't work with MongoDB once the clients started asking for more features.

My read was that even when you think you don't have "graph like relationships" in your data, you actually do.

The original author did say this, but I would like to add: if you don't have "graph like relationships", then your data is pretty trivial and any data store will do.

towelrodon iOS 7 before and after screenshots

Speaking as a 39 year old developer curmudgeon who routinely downloads new apps: I am not going to click around and discover your interface if it isn't obvious in the first few minutes.

As an example, the new flat google maps app is a disaster. It took me weeks to figure out how to do fairly simple things, like how to cancel turn by turn directions. My wife is totally lost, as a long time iphone 4 user trying to use the flat iphone 5 version. When she tries to navigate while I am driving, she is constantly confused while I say, "no! just swipe down hard enough that the app thinks you are going back, then click on the box, then click the x, then swipe up, and stand on your left foot!"

But we have to have a map, so we use it.

As a startup, this is what you should think about: Is your app as useful as google maps? If not, then you can't afford to make it unusable with a trendy flat interface.