Hacker News Reader

xctr94on A revelation about trees is messing with climate calculations

I’ve been reading agroforestry and permaculture books for a while — I’d love to get into farming —, and this has been known for ages.

Even if not fully understood, it’s well known in agro that trees raise the humidity level of an area and create micro-climates that increase the amount of rain (e.g. of doing nut trees in a valley).

I think… modern agriculture just forgot/ignores ancient knowledge.

xctr94on The German group buying ticket dodgers out of prison

They are not… nice. I’ve never had to deal with them, but the way some of them treat people makes you wonder how little power it takes to turn some people into mini-dictators.

I’m not taking sides in this matter. We should all pay for the services we use, etc.

xctr94on macOS Sonoma is available today

I empathize with your feeling, each OS release has been less and less interesting.

Widgets? I didn’t care for them on Leopard or iOS, why would I clutter my desktop with them now?

Notifications have gotten worse and worse to handle. System Preferences is awful to use now. All the cutesy apps you can’t uninstall…

I’d be happy to pay again for macOS if the list of ‘features’ included fixing long-standing bugs and annoyances, making things more stable, and bringing back features and UI that were both simple and effective.

Bah.

xctr94on macOS Sonoma is available today

For the past year or so I thought I was being silly for feeing the 1P has gotten so clunky. Now I get it. I had no idea they had migrated to Electron, but the app is much shittier. It can’t even remember which window size I’ve set it to, and prefers to reopen in whatever size it wants. (We’re a business customer.)

xctr94on Earth’s average 2023 temperature is now likely to reach 1.5 °C of warming

Are people this dense?

Do you understand that last ~2C the permafrost melting accelerates climate change out of our control, and that the end result in a post-5C world is that the ozone layer goes to shit because of all that methane?

Do you understand food production shutdowns once we get beyond a certain carbon threshold?

It’s warmer now, but it won’t be very nice when you have to live in a cave because skin cancer will develop so quickly.

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees:_Our_Future_on_a...

xctr94on How to evaluate a product roadmap, for engineers

Cue ‘Developer Hegemony’, a great book on this topic. Yes, as an engineer, you should be interested in vision/strategy/product. Otherwise you’re just executing, and the opportunists will get promoted ahead of you. The book explains it much better than me.

xctr94on Cisco Acquires Splunk

It can go as high as 500–1500x compared to some competitors. I wonder how amazing Splunk is to be worth the price tag.

xctr94on Almost everyone in Europe is breathing toxic air

As a resident of Belgium, bad air quality isn’t anything new. Government subsidies for company cars, pass-through highways, unreliable train system, etc.; these things add up.

We knew the situation was bad, but supposedly getting better [1]. The ‘official’ numbers are quite far from the ones The Guardian is publishing. The situation is getting better… wow.

Paraphrasing a song, yeah, it’s better, compared to bullshit.

[1]: https://www.healthybelgium.be/en/health-status/determinants-...

xctr94on Americas richest 10% is responsible for 40% of its planet heating pollution

The argument is that we’re going after the wrong things, usually. Of course we want to improve things across all vectors, but we’ve been disproportionately asking the lower and middle classes to make sacrifices; and have been too lenient with corporations and the ultra-rich. Most pollution isn’t caused directly by the things we’ve been fighting.

xctr94on Single-bladed floating wind turbine promises half the cost, more power

It’s literally explained in the article what happens at almost 4x the speed you mention.

xctr94on Breakfast cereal is in long-term decline

It could be good food. You can make a profit whilst serving the public good, that’s something corporations just can’t get into their heads.

Nestlé in Europe has made a few versions with more whole grains and less sugar, with no detectable change in taste. For a while, I was eating rice-based low-sugar breakfast cereal with added vitamins, simply because the alternative was a pastry and coffee (very busy work weeks). I despise Nestlé, but, hey, at least here’s a healthier version of our product — not healthy, healthier.

The race to the bottom in terms of sugar and additives might also be a factor as to why breakfast cereal is in decline. Make better products and we’ll buy them.

xctr94on Show HN: Keep – GitHub Actions for your monitoring tools

The complaint doesn’t seem to be about GitHub Actions, but YAML. I agree 100% percent, as soon as I saw that Keep is using YAML, I closed the tab.

Nope. Nope. Nope.

It’s like going back to Mongo without schemas and relational checks. We have perfectly good configuration languages with schemas, checks, imports, logic, etc. YAML is unacceptable in this profession.

xctr94on Lie still in bed

I empathize and can second this as well. For a few years I’ve been visualizing a spaceship I travel in. By now there’s a lot of detail, so it doesn’t always work; but if the day got me in a sour mood, at least I know my ‘special’ space is waiting for me at bedtime.

xctr94on Why Htmx Does Not Have a Build Step

Needlessly snarky… it adds a lot of value if you want to enhance HTML with dynamic behaviors that would be cumbersome to write in plain JavaScript.

xctr94on Jobs and Gates banned their kids from iPads and other devices they created

I empathize with the sentiment, but we grew up in a different ecosystem. (I’ve assumed your age bracket a bit judging from the comment.)

The lack of online ‘low effort’ content to consume was part of why the tool itself was fascinating. “Okay, what is this terminal thing for?” is something that happens _in boredom_. Your curiosity has space to come up if you’re not constantly overloaded with content to consume.

xctr94on System settings that aren’t in System Settings

Before the System Settings redesign, this was quite possible. Even more so if you use Alfred. I’m Catalina I think I’ll get the right setting 1 out of 5 times, if that much. The redesign is absolute garbage.

xctr94on Expo – Open-source platform for making universal apps for Android, iOS, and web

This seems quite good, if reviewers don’t reject the app on the basis that not enough of it is native. We’ve gotten push back from Apple for all sort of minutiae.

Thanks for the tip tho :)

xctr94on Google’s nightmare “Web Integrity API” wants a DRM gatekeeper for the web

Subpar on what? That’s the important part. For my non-techie family, it seems to do everything they need WHILST saving a lot of battery life. If that’s the criteria, it’s a great browser.

I’d never use it due to lack of uBlock Origin and good dev tools, but it’s hard to argue with the speed and battery efficiency on macOS.

xctr94on Expo – Open-source platform for making universal apps for Android, iOS, and web

After 4 years of doing cross-platform mobile, I loathe React and React Native by now, and I dislike Expo. But… suggesting any other alternative is tricky.

True native development is, indeed, much better. But a small team will be hard-pressed for doing good work on both platforms, especially once you start fiddling with more important APIs. Configuration and getting your system to compile things to properly is almost a job in itself. Sigh.

KMM, Flutter, and MAUI are all promising, but with different trade-offs.

So we’re stuck with RN/Expo… At least Expo promises some stability between upgrades, by handling the package compatibility checks for you. Well, when it works.

“Make a progressive web app”: yes, that might be the way to go; provided you can get the users to ‘install’ it on their devices. For some companies that’s not optional due to different pressures (e.g. teachers would expect students to have our app installed on their phones).

Neither of these 2 solutions is that simple. There are trade-offs involved, and each team must compromise where they can/are weaker. All in all, if you MUST do RN, at least Expo saves you a lot of headaches with config/build/compatibility. It’s mediocre, but worlds better than pure RN (at least for me).

xctr94on Advice for Operating a Public-Facing API

HTTP 413 Payload Too Large is the appropriate response, not silently truncating content because you wanted to be ‘optimistic’ in your replies to clients.

xctr94on Tell HN: Upgrade your Metabase installation

I got an email directly from Metabase.

xctr94on Launch HN: Highlight.io (YC W23) – Open-source, full stack web app monitoring

That's the one feature we don't care about at all.

We specifically avoid features like that (e.g. in PostHog) because it would be hard to explain to our customers why we're doing it.

Capturing session logs? Now we're talking, that matters. We're doing it in-house by relaying logs from our apps after a certain amount has been collected.

xctr94on Launch HN: Highlight.io (YC W23) – Open-source, full stack web app monitoring

Congratulations on the launch :)

Do you have plans for a React Native/Expo integration? I’d move our monitoring in a heartbeat!

xctr94on Ten years of “Go: The good, the bad, and the meh”

Amen. I’ll give Microsoft crap any day, but the most popular language on Earth is now routinely developed with a sane type interpreter that eliminates entire error categories.

xctr94on The office is a theatre for work (2019)

A lot of work being done at the lower levels is for done in the name of the same farcical issues pointed in the thread. We spend lots of time building absolute bullsh*t. The reality is a lot of these nonsense is fed from high-up without a good rationale.

I’m in a position of power now, and I’m constantly fighting for the idea that we should build what delivers the most value to our users. Nothing else. Any other ‘feature’ is a waste of time, effort, and money.

So I disagree. People in the trenches seem — to me at least — to have a much better grasp of the product, what it does, what it looks like, and how it’s really used. The further up you are from the trenches, the more you’re relying on reports of reports, proxy metrics, and so on; which further detach you from reality.

xctr94on What makes developers productive?

Ironically, Atlassian has an article against measuring productivity: https://www.atlassian.com/blog/productivity/the-problem-with...

xctr94on Actors union will join writers on strike, shutting down Hollywood

You’re conflating economic value with artistic value. The worth of a painting is a highly speculative number based on a few rich people deciding they want to trade in art. Artistic value is independent from it. Art may resonate with you, yet be economically worth nothing.

xctr94on FastAPI 0.100.0 release notes

https://www.scienceofpeople.com/sarcasm-why-it-hurts-us/

Sarcasm isn’t funny to everyone; GP was understandably confused. This isn’t Reddit.

xctr94on JavaScript Gom Jabbar

Progress, the one thing JS has too much of, too quickly, without stabilizing for quality.

There are a number of benefits (see the link below). We could argue JavaScript shouldn’t be isomorphic, as it barely does its job well on either end. Node might in fact be better off without the ‘pollution’ of client-side packages, but well…

https://www.reddit.com/r/node/comments/rby64z/why_esm_what_d...

xctr94on Water heavily polluted with PFAS in 15 km radius around Dordrecht chemical plant

I had the same reaction.

In fact, it was in The Netherlands that I first saw the award-winning report in their decades-long chemical war on the community surrounding one of their plants in the US. It’s what made me stop buying Gore-Tex.

Shame it’s always the same people, never held accountable. Shame.