HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

wldlyinaccurate

1,299 karma · joined August 12, 2012

submissionscomments
wldlyinaccurate··on Fast
It brings me genuine joy to use websites like HN or Rock Auto that haven't been React-ified. The lack of frustration I feel when using fast interfaces is noticeable.

I don't really get why so many websites are slow and bloated these days. There are tools like SpeedCurve which have been around for years yet hardly anyone I know uses them.

wldlyinaccurate··on I know when you're vibe coding
I think the parent comment means "commits" in the sense of the actual changeset; not just the message.
wldlyinaccurate··on Deno in 2023
I deployed my first non-trivial Deno app to production in 2023. There were some teething issues with learning to keep the lock file in sync, especially in a repo with multiple entry points each with separate lock files. Some of the granular permissions stuff didn't work how I expected, to the point where I almost gave up and just allowed network to/from all hosts. But overall the experience was good, and I have positive feelings towards Deno. I look forward to seeing where they take it.
wldlyinaccurate··on Ask HN: Can we do better than Git for version control?
Can you clarify what you mean by "version control of branches"? Branches in Git are just labels of objects. Are you talking about having a history of which objects a branch has previously labelled, like the reflog?
wldlyinaccurate··on Firefox got faster for real users in 2023
The web is getting faster, yes. This manifests as a constant (albeit slow) downward trend in global aggregate metrics. We think this trend is mostly due to Google pushing performance metrics being linked to search rankings.

However the data presented in this post shows obvious step changes in performance that correlate with browser version rollout. It would be disingenuous not to attribute this to a concerted effort on performance improvements from the Firefox team.

wldlyinaccurate··on X says it is worth $19B, down from $44B last year
Weird that in the process of "restoring free speech", Musk permabanned dozens of journalists who had ever been critical of his companies.
wldlyinaccurate··on Tire dust makes up the majority of ocean microplastics
All vehicles in NZ pay road user charges; EVs have just been exempt to encourage uptake. There are RUC weight classes but they only exist to separate light (<3500kg) and heavy (>=3500kg) vehicles rather than distinguish between a Nissan Leaf (1600kg) and a Ford Ranger (2100kg).
wldlyinaccurate··on 66% of Americans say they want extended European-style vacation policies at work
Hopefully you realise how lucky you are, and that your situation is the exception in the USA rather than the standard.
wldlyinaccurate··on Do not leave XPS laptop in any sleep/hibernate/standby mode when placed in a bag
I've had the opposite experience with Macbooks. WiFi randomly dropping out, battery dying overnight while the laptop is closed, external display settings not being persisted, randomly switching from my external microphone to the built-in one halfway through a call... Sometimes reading through these threads I feel like the only person in the world who has somehow had three faulty Macbooks in a row.

I've now had three generations of XPS 13 with Ubuntu. They're not perfect (the battery drains over 3 or 4 days instead of overnight) but overall my experience has been much better.

wldlyinaccurate··on Hiring Developers: How to avoid the best
Google's interview process lends itself to finding people who really want to work at Google. Nobody would go through that process to work for a small unknown company, even for the same total compensation.
wldlyinaccurate··on The Sweden experiment: how no lockdowns led to mental health, healthier economy
> If I was gonna bet, my money would be on the lockdowns not doing anything. The virus did what it did no matter how hard humans tried to control it

Tell that to New Zealand, who have had less than 3,000 cases in a population of 5 million. They did this with strict border controls (people on inbound flights must isolate for 2 weeks) and quick response to community transmission (several lockdowns totalling 40 days).

wldlyinaccurate··on Care about your users, don't minify your JavaScript
Whoa, I had no idea they'd fixed the inlining-by-size - thanks for pointing that out!
wldlyinaccurate··on Care about your users, don't minify your JavaScript
I can't tell if this is satire or not, but I'm assuming it's genuine.

Compression is not a replacement for minification. The client still needs to parse and run the uncompressed source code. Minification provides measurable performance gains for clients by reducing parse times and p̴o̴t̴e̴n̴t̴i̴a̴l̴l̴y̴ ̴e̴v̴e̴n̴ ̴a̴l̴l̴o̴w̴i̴n̴g̴ ̴f̴u̴n̴c̴t̴i̴o̴n̴s̴ ̴t̴o̴ ̴b̴e̴c̴o̴m̴e̴ ̴s̴m̴a̴l̴l̴ ̴e̴n̴o̴u̴g̴h̴ ̴t̴h̴a̴t̴ ̴t̴h̴e̴y̴ ̴c̴a̴n̴ ̴b̴e̴ ̴i̴n̴l̴i̴n̴e̴d̴ (the inclining part is not true anymore; see child comment).

Licence retention isn't a reason to skip minification either. Practically every modern minified retains licence comments.

And finally, your users can still read the original source code if you ship source maps.

Care about your users, please minify your JavaScript :)

wldlyinaccurate··on How to publish Git repos that cannot be republished to GitHub
Git commit hashes _are_ deterministic. Run `git cat-file -p <hash>` on your two hashes. The timestamp in the committer field will be different. That is why the hash changed.
wldlyinaccurate··on Is the web getting slower?
I've been working in the web performance monitoring space (https://speedcurve.com/) for 3 years now, and the 3 years prior to that I was doing a lot of performance work at the BBC. I can't share the data for obvious reasons but I can confidently say that the web is getting measurably slower every year, despite connection speeds increasing drastically over the last few years.

We like to over-simplify and try to attribute it to things like JS frameworks, advertising, media-heavy pages, etc. The truth is that it is all of these things, and so much more. Yes, devices are more powerful, but we are also asking our devices to do more. Yes, connections are faster, but bandwidth doesn't help with things like TCP slow start or browser concurrency limits. On top of all of this, our perception of speed is changing, so things can _feel_ slower than they really are.

wldlyinaccurate··on Remote work is reshaping San Francisco, as tech workers flee and rents fall
Is this a shitpost? I honestly can't tell. You start off by saying you've only ever visited SF and then go on to make a load of generalisations as if you know SF like the back of your hand.

Also this:

> there are very few attractive girls at bars, or at offices, or even on the street, compared to just about anywhere in the world. and if that's not why you go to bars, i have to ask -you'd enjoy going to bars with mostly men? because that's cool too -once in a rare while

Is so awful that the only explanation is that the whole thing is a shitpost.

Boom, mystery solved. Case closed.

wldlyinaccurate··on Rediscovering the beauty of text on the internet
Chill out, friend. Parent comment kindly suggested the use of a gender neutral noun to make the passage more inclusive. No one is forcing you to use nonexclusionary language. If you want to exclude over half of the world's population over fears of an invented oppressive regime then you are most welcome to.
wldlyinaccurate··on You download the app and it doesn’t work
Doesn't Android have the same problem? If your app isn't in the Play Store, it may as well not exist.
wldlyinaccurate··on Analytics Without Google
I'm not associated with them at all, but Fathom are worth looking into if you want an analytics platform that respects user privacy: https://usefathom.com/
wldlyinaccurate··on Things from leaked audio of Mark Zuckerberg and his employees
> Here’s an idea... if you don’t like what somebody writes online, don’t read it.

The problem isn't that people "don't like" what elected officials say. It's that people often take what elected officials say as truth without even considering that it might be false (they must be Smart and Good if they're in office, right?)

Fact checking and censoring prominent figures isn't going to affect people who already have strongly held beliefs. But it will make a difference to people who are impressionable or vulnerable or don't know any better.

wldlyinaccurate··on Ask HN: If you could work remote where would you live?
I left NZ in 2011 and came back recently. It's still more or less the same place I remember. If you are an active outdoorsy type, I don't think there are many places in the world that compare to NZ. Where I live I can be at a surfing beach within 10 minutes. Rock climbing in the hills in 10 minutes. Skiing in the Southern Alps in 2 hours. Hiking a beautiful trail in 2 hours (with warm modern huts available for 5 NZD/night). All while having access to free healthcare, and a decent disposable income thanks to a relatively low living cost (Auckland is an exception).

Downsides are poor public transport (cheap Japanese imports mean everyone chooses to own a vehicle), expensive food compared to EU or USA, and few jobs outside of the tourism & service industries.

wldlyinaccurate··on Heat Pump Water Heaters
If you think the presence of a power grid is the same as having power 24/7, you need to spend some time in other parts of the world. In some places you are lucky to have power for 12 hours a day.

You're looking at this from a position of privilege. When I say "cost is another reason", what I'm really saying is that many people literally can't afford the electricity or the electric heater itself. The vast majority of the world's population earn no more than a few US dollars a day. They are saving for their next meal and hoping they can afford to have their shoes repaired soon. They aren't in a position to consider how they can be more environmentally friendly. They just want to survive.

wldlyinaccurate··on Fast or Slow
> We actually created this as an internal tool because there wasn't anything that would give you a clear indication of site performance from DNS lookup to connect to TTFB to page render from around the world.

Out of curiosity, did you look into any paid services like SpeedCurve or Calibre? There are also OSS projects like SiteSpeed or WebPageTest.

Full disclosure: I work at SpeedCurve. We've had customers cancel their accounts in the past because they wanted to build their own performance monitoring tool. To the best of my knowledge, most of those customers have come back because building and maintaining a tool like that is no easy task.

...Which I guess is a strange way of saying congratulations on building a performance monitoring tool!

wldlyinaccurate··on Linux touchpad like a MacBook: April 2020 update
The touchpad on my current gen Dell XPS 13 is superb on a stock Ubuntu install. I'd love to know how much of the "bad touchpad" reputation that Linux has is down to low quality hardware versus software support.
wldlyinaccurate··on Heat Pump Water Heaters
I'm not disagreeing that wood burners have a negative effect on air quality, but there are plenty of valid reasons to burn wood for heating. Not having access to a stable uninterrupted electricity supply is one reason. Cost is another reason. A good cast iron wood stove can be quite efficient and will continue to put out heat long after the wood has finished burning.

Yes, we should all aim to pollute less. But we should not attach stigma to things that for many people is their only choice of heating, transport, etc.

wldlyinaccurate··on Why I’m Leaving Elm
> The leadership didn't respect the opinions or capability of its end users

This was the major sticking point for me when it came to Elm. I invested a lot of time into Elm and even published a few packages. Many things contributed to my giving up Elm, but the final straw for me was when the core team removed some userland APIs under the guise of "we can't trust developers not to use these to write bad code". Myself and several others tried to convince Evan to reverse this decision, to no avail.

wldlyinaccurate··on [dead]
No, no, please no. Practically every health agency in the world is trying to discourage the general public from stockpiling masks right now. They will not prevent you from contracting COVID-19. They will prevent people who actually need masks from being able to acquire them.

The rest of the advice on this page is good. The premise that everyone should wear a mask is not good. It is harmful.

wldlyinaccurate··on How our QA team leverages Gitlab’s performance testing tool
Really cool to see the Gitlab team focusing on performance. I just wish they'd look at front-end performance as well as API response times. Something like WebPageTest or SpeedCurve will measure metrics that better represent the user experience, like when important parts of the page are rendered or become interactive. Maybe with visibility into these metrics, the engineering teams could make Gitlab less painful to use on my old laptop :)
wldlyinaccurate··on Vendors who charge extra for single sign-on
I just finished adding SSO to the (very small) SaaS company that I work for, and this page gives me mixed feelings.

Yeah, SSO is a security feature and you expect to get security for free. But SSO is not free for us as the service provider. We pay a vendor (Auth0) a decent amount of money to handle all the hard stuff. We also have to manually set up SSO for each of our customers who want it, which can take anywhere between 10 minutes to several hours depending on whether the customer has set up SSO before. For these reasons, we charge an annual fee for SSO on top of the regular subscription fee. We're just not big enough to absorb the cost.

wldlyinaccurate··on Vendors who charge extra for single sign-on
Auth0's pricing really disappointed us, but we don't have the resource to switch to another vendor at the moment. We're a SaaS who need a few dozen enterprise SAML connections, but each connection only has 5-10 logins per month. Their sales team flat-out told us that our only option is the $25k/year enterprise plan plus more for each connection. It's totally bonkers.
Page 1 of 9Next →