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vlasky

220 karma · joined April 8, 2018

Computer Systems Engineer
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vlasky··on NEC V20 CPU: A bit of pep for an XT
I think it's a caching issue. I got it to render properly by adding a cache-busting query string to the URL:

https://dfarq.homeip.net/nec-v20-cpu-a-bit-of-pep-for-an-xt/...

vlasky··on HTML over WebSockets: real-time SPAs with barely any JavaScript
On the contrary, Meteor.js is alive and well! Version 3.5 was recently released with major performance and scalability enhancements:

https://forums.meteor.com/t/meteor-3-5-is-out-change-streams...

vlasky··on Show HN: AISlop, a CLI for catching AI generated code smells
Happy to share your AGENTS.md?
vlasky··on Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
It's alive and well!
vlasky··on Magic Wormhole: Get things from one computer to another, safely
For desktop PCs, Rymdport (formerly wormhole-gui) may be suitable. It's cross-platform with pre-built binaries for FreeBSD, Linux, macOS and Windows on x86-64 and arm64:

https://github.com/Jacalz/rymdport

vlasky··on Magic Wormhole: Get things from one computer to another, safely
Wormhole William is available for Android devices:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.sanford.wor...

vlasky··on Linear sent me down a local-first rabbit hole
I'm the defacto maintainer of the Meteor MySQL integration. Since 2015, I've been involved in the design and maintenance of six different Meteor webapps for real-time geospatial applications built for B2B and B2C.

Given this, I reject your assertion that Meteor is limited to MongoDB and "toy apps".

vlasky··on Linear sent me down a local-first rabbit hole
Meteor is alive and well and actively maintained. It just doesn't get attention for some reason. Version 3.3.1 was released 4 days ago.
vlasky··on Why it is (nearly) impossible that we live in a simulation
But does our universe obey Popek and Goldberg's virtualization requirements?
vlasky··on Math That Matters: The Case for Probability over Polynomials
Base rate fallacy is a key part of many erroneous human decisions or judgements. This could easily be taught in high schools:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy

vlasky··on Man who lost Bitcoin fortune in Welsh tip explores purchase of entire landfill
Maybe "tragicomic" would be a better word.
vlasky··on Google kills diversity hiring targets
It's not "strictly illegal" in Australia. Our anti-discrimination bodies across the country frequently grant exemptions to employers allowing sex-based or race-based discrimination in favour of certain groups (e.g. women, Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people), in order to "improve access to specific jobs, programs or services".

Here is a list of the current exemptions in NSW:

https://antidiscrimination.nsw.gov.au/organisations-and-comm...

vlasky··on Low Cost Mini PCs
I can also suggest Morefine. I bought a couple of AMD Ryzen 5900HX mini PCs from them:

https://morefine.com/

vlasky··on Australian government approves AAPowerLink project to export solar to Singapore
I'm Aussie and I can't believe this Sun Cable project is being taken seriously by our government.

The longest submarine power cable in the world - the Viking Link - is a mere 756 km long and cost US$2.2bn to build. Sun Cable calls for a 4,200km submarine cable to be built!

I do not expect the construction cost to scale linearly and I shudder to imagine the maintenance difficulties and expenses.

Back in December 2015, Australia's 290km long undersea Basslink cable broke causing the 2016 Tasmanian energy crisis. It took 6 months to get it working again. Basslink eventually went into receivership on 12 November 2021.

Something to ponder.

vlasky··on Ngtop – Request analytics from the Nginx access logs
ngxtop is also very useful for providing real-time metrics:

https://github.com/lebinh/ngxtop

vlasky··on Bob Newhart has died
I'll never forget Bob Newhart's heartfelt eulogy for Krusty the Clown. It was better than some real life ones I heard!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTZ7lVT7b-Q

vlasky··on My dad and I replaced a 100MB HDD with a 1GB HDD for $100. When did this happen?
I wouldn't want to see this sort of post everyday, but I thought it was an interesting forensic exercise - kind of like carbon dating.

Just for fun, I used ChatGPT 4o to answer the question. It reckoned 1997.

vlasky··on How the voices for ChatGPT were chosen
I'm surprised that you can't configure the pace or pitch of the voices. The Web Speech API, around for a long time, has that capability. I'd also love to have the option of Australian and British accents.
vlasky··on Try to make sudo less vulnerable to Rowhammer attacks
This software mitigation technique for Rowhammer could also be useful for improving the reliability of programs running on microcontrollers in high radiation environments, e.g. satellite in Earth orbit.

By maximising the Hamming distance between binary values used in enumerations (enum variables) and boolean variables, one could detect if the code has entered an invalid execution path and then trigger a watchdog reset, e.g. an else statement or a switch statement with a fall through case that would not normally be reachable.

vlasky··on Linux on a Commodore 64
How long does a kernel recompile take?
vlasky··on New Zealand teachers shocked at leaked curriculumn – 'Where's the science?'
You've hit the nail right on the head.

In the late 19th century, New Zealand raised one of the greatest scientists of all time - Ernest Rutherford, a pioneer of atomic and nuclear physics, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908. He is often referred to as "the greatest experimentalist since Michael Faraday".

Now New Zealand is introducing a new science curriculum that has no mention of physics or chemistry! Only last year the NZ government made Maori mythology part of science education.

I see this as another indicator of New Zealand's continued evolution into an impoverished agrarian backwater where social justice ideology is worshipped as the state religion.

I'm Aussie and am fond of New Zealand. It's our next-door neighbour. I enjoyed my brief visits there and found it to be a beautiful country with many good people. Unfortunately, their isolation and naïve idealism has made them complacent as hell about their economic future and their civil liberties.

We face similar regressive forces here in Australia, but I feel they've taken a far stronger hold in New Zealand. My heart breaks.

vlasky··on FIFO can be Better than LRU [pdf]
I wonder how difficult it would be to enhance Redis to support FIFO with Lazy Promotion and Quick Demotion.
vlasky··on Ask HN: What challenges are you facing offshoring development to India?
I am from Australia - a country with very high labour costs. Some years back, I trialed outsourcing programming tasks to developers based in India, only to consistently receive shockingly bad quality work. Over the years, I have also helped clients fix up shoddy work written by such developers.

I will never forgot the moment I encountered this MySQL query from hell that brought a customer-facing webapp to its knees:

    select oldurl, newurl, id, dateadd from  jos_sh404sef_urls where newurl <> ""  AND oldurl not like '%vmchk%' AND newurl not like '%format=feed%' AND newurl not like '%format=pdf%' AND newurl not like '%print=1%' AND oldurl not like '%__404__%' AND (  soundex(oldurl) = soundex('not_found') OR  oldurl like '%not%' OR  oldurl like '%found%') GROUP BY oldurl limit 500;
Other developers I have engaged from other places, especially ex-Soviet countries, were far more competent and seemed to care about a job well done.

In my view, the Indian government needs to encourage its industry and educational institutions to study the teachings of W. Edwards Deming to instill a culture of quality. Back in the 1950s, Japan was ridiculed for the quality of its manufactured goods and within a decade after embracing Deming's advice, they became known for their excellence. Perhaps India can also experience such a renaissance.

vlasky··on A C64 MP3 Player
I remember I could play 128kbit MP3s in full quality using mpg123 running under Windows for Workgroups 3.11 ONLY when I overclocked my 486DX4-100 to 120Mhz.
vlasky··on Ask HN: Easiest and cheapest full-stack frameworks that you love?
There is also a MySQL integration with Meteor.

I'm the defacto maintainer of this package and the Node.js package mysql-live-select.

These implement pub/sub and reactive queries using the MySQL binary log as the event source:

https://github.com/vlasky/meteor-mysql

https://github.com/vlasky/mysql-live-select

vlasky··on CTEs as lookup tables
This also works in MySQL 8.0.19 and above but the syntax of the CTE example needs to be tweaked to use the ROW() constructor:

    WITH countries (code, name) AS (
        SELECT * FROM (VALUES 
            ROW('us', 'United States'),
            ROW('fr', 'France'),
            ROW('in', 'India')
        ) AS codes
    )
    SELECT data.code, name FROM data LEFT JOIN countries.code = data.code;
vlasky··on Setting the TZ environment variable avoids thousands of system calls (2017)
To all programmers here, the TZ=:<zonefile> syntax is currently unsupported in the icu library (International Components for Unicode):

https://unicode-org.atlassian.net/browse/ICU-13694

https://github.com/unicode-org/icu/pull/2213

This affects all packages that have icu as a dependency, one of them being Node.js.

https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/37271

I discovered this the hard way when some code malfunctioned shortly after daylight savings time kicked in.

vlasky··on Ask HN: What could a modern database do that PostgreSQL and MySQL can't
I'm the defacto maintainer of the Meteor MySQL integration and the Node.js package mysql-live-select.

These implement pub/sub and reactive queries using the MySQL binary log as the event source:

https://github.com/vlasky/meteor-mysql

https://github.com/vlasky/mysql-live-select

vlasky··on Australia is becoming a surveillance state
Just curious - whereabouts in Europe have you lived and in your opinion, what are the best places for an Aussie expat?
vlasky··on Utopia: Nineteen Eighty-Four with Smartphones, Set in Australia
Jack Smythe returns to visit his brother in "Utopia" - a future Australia where citizens are under constant government surveillance.

Privileges are awarded and revoked via a social credit system. The only place where people can speak freely is in the bathroom of their homes.

Citizens of Utopia snitch on each other with their smartphones in exchange for a 10% commission on fines imposed by the government.

A timely and chilling warning of the future that could await us. The road to tyranny will be paved by many incremental changes, each barely noticeable on its own, but devastating as a whole.

Starring Will Gabriel as Jack Smythe.

Runtime: 15 minutes

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