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woutervdb

26 karma · joined November 11, 2012

I'm Wouter van den Brink. I do stuff.
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woutervdb··on Laravel raised money and now injects ads directly into your agent
I agree that there's a strong need for ad blockers nowadays. I also use uBlock Origin on all my browsers. But I'm not sure if a world that is completely devoid of advertising would... work. Advertising (in some form) is a necessary evil, I think.

Any business needs customers to make revenue and, well, exist. So any business needs to have some way to make themselves known to potential customers.

In the case of Laravel, they offer an open source framework completely for free, and pay for the development man hours through their commercial offerings, e.g. Laravel Cloud. That commercial offering is not bad: they offer a very smooth way to deploy your Laravel project. In order for the offering to make any revenue, potential customers need to know that it exists, at least. They're still free to choose whether they want to use that commercial offering, or if they want to deploy their project on their own.

Previously, making sure people knew Laravel Cloud existed was done through the Laravel home page. But nowadays more and more people "consume" a framework's documentation through their AI tooling, and they no longer visit the home page.

In a comment [0], which is conveniently being left out of both TFA and most comments on HN, the maintainer even explains that the addition was not meant as a literal advertisement, but as a way to make sure new users of the framework at least _know_ that they can deploy their application on Laravel Cloud. And they are even actively asking for suggestions on how to rephrase the addition so that the AI Tooling does not see it as "you MUST use Laravel Cloud" gospel.

[0]: https://github.com/laravel/boost/pull/758#issuecomment-42589...

woutervdb··on Proton Meet isn't what they told you it was
Keyword is "like": a service like Proton. No idea if and what data they have offered to their government. I was merely trying to offer an explanation to the parent commenter, who was wondering how people can critique pricacy-focused services offering data when required by law.
woutervdb··on Proton meet isn't what they told you it was
I think the key difference is the amount of data the service can offer when it is asked to do so by some legal entity. Signal famously claims to barely have any useful data to turn over when ordered to do so [1]. If some provider states they are pricacy-focused and protect your data from governments, but can still offer loads of your private data when ordered to, that damages their privacy claim.

EDIT: "some provider like Proton" -> "some provider", never wanted to imply Proton specifically did or does this.

[1] https://signal.org/blog/looking-back-as-the-world-moves-forw...

woutervdb··on Show HN: The HN Arcade
I like the idea, but the UI gives me a headache, especially when the "found words" are still loading. I think it might have to do with the contrast?

If relevant, I'm loading the website on a 27" IPS display under normal daylight conditions.

woutervdb··on Temporal Programming, a new name for an old paradigm
Could you not tackle this problem by not allowing this mingling of 'next' and 'current' variables? You would only allow a next variable to be a computation of current variables. Not sure to what extent this would limit the application of the paradigm, though.
woutervdb··on Should you use www or not in your domain? (2017)
Google: a lot, most of their services has one. However, I believe they use an OAuth (-ish) service rather than session IDs to manage authentication, so cookies aren't really an issue.

YouTube: no major subdomains as far as I know. Facebook: aside from developer resources (which require you to log on with Facebook), none really.

Baidu: not familiar with it, so no idea.

Wikipedia: one for every language. Furthermore, the Wikipedia of each language seems to be completely separate, both in content and accounts.

Reddit: a lot. Aside from the obvious api.reddit.com, users may use <whatever>.reddit.com and the subreddit's CSS may use this info to change the looks of the subreddit.

Instagram: no idea, but I believe the main interface is simply on instagram.com.

Netflix: just netflix.com.

Twitch: as far as I know just the main domain, no subdomains.

Spotify: a few services, like open.spotify.com and play.spotify.com, but they all require you log on separately.

It's pretty mixed, with some websites having a lot of subdomains, but not all of them requiring or using shared cookies.

woutervdb··on Ask HN: What advice would you give to your younger self?
Thanks! Interesting concept.
woutervdb··on Ask HN: What advice would you give to your younger self?
Thanks a lot. To be honest, I've already went through the "change" described in the article, but the article helped me see the better picture. I now have a reasonable social life and a happy relationship with my girlfriend. Thanks a bunch for your comment and advice, have a nice day!
woutervdb··on Ask HN: What advice would you give to your younger self?
>Romantically, this

Thanks for an inspring and helpful read! This actually helps me (a 17 year old) out a lot.

woutervdb··on W3C HTML JSON form submission
> wow[such][deep][3][much][power][!]

And there goes my interest for this submission. Don't use overused memes in a submission. Liking the idea though.

woutervdb··on Sikuli Script
Reminds me a bit of Scratch[1], a tool that came pretty popular when the Raspbery Pi came out. Very simple programming interfaces that work with simple graphics, but can do a lot of things.

[1]: http://scratch.mit.edu/

woutervdb··on Dear clueless assholes: stop bashing bash and GNU
Great explenation. To add to your story: imagine being the car manufacturer, doing this all for free (as in beer) and still having people more or less wishing you dead for building a city car not suitable for offroad use. It simply doesn't add up and makes you feel pretty miserable, I guess.
woutervdb··on Dear clueless assholes: stop bashing bash and GNU
I know about Shellshock and I know what it means. However, I think it's wrong to blame bash for the fact that almost everything seems to be vulnerable. Those developers were wrong by using untrusted user input in places where it didn't belong. It's the FSF's responsibility to release a fix simply because the whole world depends on their (the world's) own stupid mistakes when developing their programs.
woutervdb··on Dear clueless assholes: stop bashing bash and GNU
What you're missing here, is that bash wasn't the software with an error. It's like you use ice cubes for building a house, observing your house is melting and then blaming the developers of ice cubes for making such horible building blocks. Ice cubes were never meant to be used to build houses with.
woutervdb··on Show HN: Super Looper – Disco Sequencer App
Awesome. If you lower the tempo a bit, you can create pretty neat patterns.
woutervdb··on Codefights
Liking the idea, too bad it's simply an awful experience with all the HN traffic. I hit "Sign up with Facebook", then "Edit what CodeFights can see", and the counter had already begun. After authenticating I got an empty pop-up which I closed by myself, and I finished the challenge. I then got the error "Authentication error".

However, I like the idea and understand that this experience is not what you've made so I'll give it a chance and upvoted it.

woutervdb··on YouTab: Automatically get chords for music
Great site, awesome project, good stuff. However, I found some kind of a "bug": http://i.imgur.com/elpJSS8.png At this point, you can't see what "kind" of F the first F is. They clearly are different, however I'm not a musician so I wouldn't know what it should be.
woutervdb··on Prose, a content editor for GitHub
Too bad the site doesn't work on my phone at all. Xperia T using Dolphin Browser. Gives me all kinds of floating boxes and a useless progress spinner.
woutervdb··on Git – A simple guide
Finally, a guide i understand! Thanks!
woutervdb··on Show HN: It's Popcorn Time - Stream movies using node-webkit and backbone
Doesn't seem to work here. I'm in The Netherlands, if it helps. Clicking "watch now!" shows "Buffering video..." for a short while, but after that, it doesn't do anything.

[edit] After a while it started playing. However, I had very few FPS on Win7.

woutervdb··on How Blender started, twenty years ago
Actually, you don't need to edit your server -at least with Lighttpd-.

PHP automagically (or is this expected behaviour?) gets the string appended to /index.php for you! Check out the example at http://private.woutervdb.com/examples/url-query/index.php/We...!

I've made no changes to my webserver configuration. Works on Lighttpd on my laptop and webserver, not sure if Apache and IIS do this as well.

woutervdb··on Dutch intelligence agency AIVD hacks internet forums
...wow. That's pretty creepy.

I'm Dutch myself and I knew that the AIVD tapped a lot, but mining data from forums?!

woutervdb··on Visual Studio 2013 Launches With New Online Tools, Browser-Based Code Editor
Please read the whole article.

>The other feature in private beta is codenamed “Monaco.” It’s a cloud-based code editor that enables lightweight editing for Windows Azure websites.

woutervdb··on Visual Studio 2013 Launches With New Online Tools, Browser-Based Code Editor
Am I the only one to notice this[1]? Looks pretty okay aside from that.

[1] http://uploads.woutervdb.com/files/5283a1c42f8bc.png

woutervdb··on Moving forward on improving HTTP's security
>You have 10mbps connection! At your home! How much do you pay for it?

I hope you understand it's mbit. If so, I've got 50mbps over here and I pay €50 (that's about $67 USD) per month, which includes 50 TV channels and interactive TV (I'm Dutch, I hope I described it correctly)

The situation (s)he describes is fairly common; I've got a Raspberry Pi and an old laptop running as servers over here, on which I do experiments and host small websites. They've got StartSSL certs, which suck, but they do their job at least. If you put enough effort in the process and not just blindly fill in the forms, you'll get there.

woutervdb··on Kotlin: A statically-typed language that compiles to JVM bytecode and JavaScript
English is not my native language and I'm kinda busy, so it's pretty hard for me to explain myself, sorry.

I'm saying that languages like these (if I understand correctly), when compiled, result in a program generated by said language, "written" in another language, like Javascript, Java, Python or something.

Personally, I see no value in doing so. It creates a bit of an "overhead" (you compile it twice), and you actually don't really see what happens in the layer below the layer you're working in: the JS/Java/Python layer.

Say you've been working in the language FooBar, which creates, say, Javascript. Now most examples of code generators I've seen don't really care about the readability of the code they output. They have a readable, human-created bootstrap.js loading the default handler, and a bunch of semi-obfuscated .js floating around.

Usually, this doesn't matter. However, I see a lot of these languages appear on HN lately. The problem I'm starting to see is that, when we've got 10,000 alternatives to FooBar, people all start using different FooBar-like languages, and it becomes a mess. If you, for example, like to write in BarFoo, then we have a problem. We both understand JS, but the generated code is a mess. What do?

Then again I could be wrong. :P

woutervdb··on Kotlin: A statically-typed language that compiles to JVM bytecode and JavaScript
Another day, another new programming language that compiles to [popular language]. I'm sorry, I may be looking at this from the wrong perspective, but in my opinion, they're starting to lose their value. Sure, accessing a hard language (like C, or Python (for me, I find Python difficult at times) by writing your own dialect or higher-level language can be fun and maybe can make your workflow better, for me it doesn't.

Actually, I view these higher-level languages as the program that ships with a Raspbery Pi (don't know what it's called, sorry), which uses a drag and drop interface to create loops and create a game. You'll learn the basics of programming, but having a company where everyone speaks their own higher-level language won't really work. You're especially fked if you've got a developer that has to read the generated code, in a lot of cases.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, I'm still genuinely interested in the purpose of such languages!

woutervdb··on Ask HN: What is your favorite gmail alternative?
A domain for a project of mine uses GMail for e-mail (I don't trust my server with hosting a 99.99% up mail server: it's too cheap to be able to), while my personal website uses Microsoft Window Live Domains. My WLD is then used inside GMail though, so for the client I can't really give any good recommendation. The server for WLD seems fine, not good.
woutervdb··on Ask HN: When is it a good time to "Show HN"?
Projects are never done. You'll always be improving, releasing new versions, fixing security issues, making your application/product fit in with the rest et cetera. A good moment to show HN is, I guess, the moment where your potential users can really see what your app will be like when it's near completion, in a way that they will share it with others. And about your "product": good luck!
woutervdb··on Ask HN: Help me pick the best icon alternative for a new fitness app
The last two are too "plastic" for me. The first two seem nice, I'd guess I prefer the first, because the second doesn't seem to fit in with the other ios7 icons.

Sorry to not agree with the rest and thus create a gap lol :P

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