Hacker News Reader

xrstfon The Goals of XML at 25: and the one change that XML now needs

I find it incredibly hard to understand anything in TOML that is more than simple, unnested key-value pairs. If you get into arrays, maps etc. then TOML is a nightmare to read.

The "O" in TOML is not deserved in my opinion.

xrstfon Cryptocurrency buzz drives record investment scam losses

> We had those scams from beginning

I tend to disagree a bit. In the early days, most scams at least pretended to have some non-pump-and-dump usecase. Like Dentacoin or Filecoin. You could at least pretend to "buy filecoin today so you can store PB's worth of data in a year" or "buying Dentacoin now because in a year you need some dental work done".

Nowadays all new tokens/coins have 0 usecases attached and only exist to be pancake swapped and pumped and separating other people from their money. It's all about lending, yielding, farming, interest rates, staking, ...

xrstfon Cryptocurrency buzz drives record investment scam losses

Don't forget Internet Computer Protocol (ICP), which tries to replace the Internet but is also based on it.

xrstfon Bumble closes to give 'burnt-out' staff a week's break

Yeah, your first comment made it sound to me like the country shuts down (grocery stores, home improvement stores, furnite stores, banks, offices, government agencies, taxis, ...) ;-)

I found one Austrian source ( https://www.vol.at/wo-die-produktion-urlaub-macht/3314076 ) mentioning the issue and I can see how it would make sense for some industries to need some maintenance time each year.

xrstfon Bumble closes to give 'burnt-out' staff a week's break

Citation needed. Germans do not quit working for 2 weeks in the summer. Where did you get that from? What German companies shut down for 2 weeks in the summer of 2019?

xrstfon Bumble closes to give 'burnt-out' staff a week's break

Can you give some examples? I live in Europe and have never experienced that in my country suddenly everything stops for 2 weeks in the middle of the summer.

xrstfon The first Black-owned social job network built on blockchain launches Juneteenth

EU-friendly archive: https://archive.is/AL9cX

xrstfon Althttpd: Simple webserver in a single C file

You mean CGI[1]?

[1] https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Common_Gateway_Interface

xrstfon Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

Good thing there are many spam knock-off sites re-using their content, so we don't need to start an archiving campaign like with Geocities.

xrstfon New Firefox

Is it coincidence that comments are turned off on _all_ videos on YouTube[1] related to the redesigns?

What options do I as a "normie" have to give feedback? Is there really only one way, to use the ancient Bugzilla and hopefully finding a ticket somewhere?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/c/firefox/videos

xrstfon Go += Package Versioning

A lot of this seems to hinge on "go get" being the best way to get Go source code. Most discussions I've read so far come down to "well, this might be cool, but it would break go get, so we cannot ever do it".

I for one could live without go get alltogether. In 99% of cases it boils down to a simple git clone anyway, which could (should?) be done by the package manager anyway.

Maybe it's time to re-evaluate the existence of go get, now that we're seeing that "just clone master and hope nothing breaks" has obviously not worked for everyone outside of Google? Maybe bundling Go (the compiler and linker) with tools for fetching source code wasn't such a good idea after all?

Just my 2 cents...

xrstfon Equifax security freeze PINs are the timestamp of when you request the freeze

The cert is signed by GeoTrust and works perfectly fine on my Chrome on Windows 10.

[Edit: Ah, the chain is incomplete, see https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.equifaxse...]

xrstfon Caddy 0.10 Released

We are using Caddy as a simple reverse proxy in Docker environments. The configuration is a bit simpler than nginx and we love the tiny Docker images we can create (not sure how large an nginx-full installation is).

That being said, we did run into a few issues that forced us to go back to older Caddy versions, like broken websocket support or the timeout issue in 0.9.5. Also, sometimes the documentation is a bit lacking and unclear. DNS resolution seems to be flaky sometimes (we're using alpine-based containers and sometimes Caddy just won't resolve names of other containers, even though a curl inside the container can resolve the names just fine).

So if you've got a working nginx setup, I'd say stick with it. For new projects it is worth to check out Caddy. The issues we ran into occured early in our development process, they didn't just suddenly happen in production, so once you've tested everything, Caddy just works.

xrstfon Show HN: A Web-to-RSS Parser in Common Lisp

I have been running my own instance of Tiny Tiny RSS (with ~30 feeds) for years and couldn't be happier. Migrated from Feedly because of their usability and annoying upgrade reminders.

xrstfon The Most Expensive Anti-Pattern

> But a lot of things about php sucked, at least 10 years ago when I stopped needing to write it.

Sadly you missed out on the major advances that happened in the PHP ecosystem, like properly namespaced code, massive performance gains since PHP 5.3, Composer, modern frameworks, the PSR initiative (even though one might not agree with all their "standards") and so much more. So I would not judge PHP's evolution by that one proposal ;) A lot more were accepted, implemented and released, from type annotations to the spacechip operator. Personally I'm thankful that nobody further pursued the idea of tainted strings for PHP.

xrstfon Smaller and faster data compression with Zstandard

Quick benchmark on a 194MiB SQL dump:

    gzip -9: 27.574s, 48MiB output
    zstd -9: 14.182s, 41MiB output

Thanks, I'll gladly use zstd as a drop-in replacement for my daily backups. :)

xrstfon The Myth of RAM (2014)

Are your questions maybe answered in part IV of the series, the FAQ[1]?

[1] http://www.ilikebigbits.com/blog/2015/2/9/the-myth-of-ram-pa...

xrstfon Fixing JSON

Because using certain keys could break your JavaScript (and JSON was designed to be a subset), like

    { delete: "me" }

If you don't want to keep a list of known keywords around, just insisting on quotes is the easier way.

[EDIT: See also this YouTube video, where Douglas Crockford explains it himself: https://youtu.be/-C-JoyNuQJs?t=5m]

xrstfon Stop Treating Marijuana Like Heroin

Is your client possibly the same person who was interviewed for Penn & Teller's "Bullshit" on the "War on Drugs" episode[1]?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQS910WVlKc

xrstfon Facebook will start showing ads to users even if they’re using an ad blocker

Discussion about this seems to happen in this submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12254680

xrstfon Making Django CMS as easy to install as WordPress

I see your point and share your pain about key-value tables in SQL systems.

xrstfon Making Django CMS as easy to install as WordPress

"Everything is a key-value pair" is flat out wrong[1,2]: There are four key-value tables (commentmeta, postmeta, termmeta and usermeta), but most of the meat of Wordpress is stored in regular tables.

[1] https://github.com/ronaldbradford/schema/blob/master/wordpre...

[2] https://codex.wordpress.org/images/2/25/WP4.4.2-ERD.png

[EDIT: Corrected myself about the number of KV tables]

xrstfon Why Uber Engineering Switched from Postgres to MySQL

> not throwing any effort into postgresql

The amount of research about the on-disk internals of both PostgreSQL and MySQL are a lot more effort than I would have probably spent (granted, I don't have a team of highly paid devs at my disposal, but still, I've seen technical decisions made on the basis of Google Trends...).

xrstfon Gatsby – A Static Site Generator for React

I'm pleasently surprised that the generated sites work just fine with JavaScript disabled (at least on the author's blog). Which on the other hand makes me wonder why I (as the visitor) need to download a 700KB JS blob that contains all blog posts, React and other things just to read the content.

Without JS: 4 requests, 20 KB transferred, DOMContentLoaded @ 360ms

With JS: 27 requests, 518 KB transferred, DOMContentLoaded @ 22.07s (includes Disqus)

For caching purposes, it might make sense to split the bundle.js into a app.js and content.js and only update the content.js on re-deployments. Not sure if this is just on the author's blog or on every site built with Gatsby.

xrstfon Nano is no longer a GNU project

I use it constantly, because I'm quicker making small edits with it than with vim. I would sorely miss it if it's not installed on a server.

xrstfon “autocomplete=off is ignored on non-login input elements”

One is `autocomplete`, the other is `aria-autocomplete`.

xrstfon PhpMyAdmin Project Successfully Completes Security Audit

On Windows, I recommend using HeidiSQL, which handles SSH tunnels for you using PuTTY's plink.exe.

xrstfon Scaling to 100M: MySQL Is a Better NoSQL

I wonder if using the memcached plugin for InnoDB[1] would speed things up even more, at the expense of not having flexible queries (and thereby introducing multiple roundtrips) anymore. Presumably, they are using simple "SELECT * FROM table WHERE id = ?" in most places anyway, so that could be an okay tradeoff to make.

[1] https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/innodb-memcached.htm...

xrstfon A language that compiles to Bash and Windows Batch

Is there a way to get this as a precompiled Windows binary? I really want to give this a try, but I'm just sooo lazy and don't want to install OPAM if there's maybe a way around that.