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yannovitch

174 karma · joined August 14, 2011

http://yannkempf.fr
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yannovitch··on Ask HN: Does retro computing make you feel younger or older?
For me it’s one of these “it’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey” kind of things.

Few years ago one day I discovered retropie and decided to install it. Was a bit of a rabbit hole for me but in a good way, reminded me when I first installed Linux when it was still on multiple floppy disks.

And it was quite cool that my son discovered Duke Nukem 3d or Mortal Kombat that I played with my cousins in my youth.

yannovitch··on Ask HN: How do I balance all my 200 interests in life?
I'm like you. I call that "being passionated in passions" ^^ (rough french translation).

What I would recommend is to truly question what is the deep root of the interest ("where does it comes from") : Is it in reaction (for example, is it to escape something ? Is it because it's easier to have an other interest than to push when it becomes a bit harder? ...) ? What has captured your interest precisely at this moment ? If you answer all these kind of questions, I think things will begin to sort out already naturally.

If I go deeper in the answer, as we all are mostly in "productivity-oriented life" (or at least utilitarist-oriented life), our environment (friends, life, ...) tend to push us to do things which "has to" be "useful". Useful for our advancement in career, useful for an instantaneous joy, ... But when we reason like that, we tend to forget that not everything has to be useful. It's good to be passionated. To have many interests. Even not useful.

Just be gentle with yourself. In the end, it's not a race to the bottom. It's YOUR life, not the others, and it's yours to choose what you want to do with it.

yannovitch··on Ask HN: What are the economics of a streaming based record label?
As a studio owner and music shop co-manager, what I would recommend is rather to have an approach of "where is the added value" + "funding model".

"where is the added value" >> For example if you own a recording studio with lots of very high-end equipment, and you ask for bands to sign with your label in exchange for a reduced rate. Or have new technology (for example, I am one of the first studio in the city to have Dolby Atmos). Etc...

"funding model" >> Rather than trying to make money from streaming only, the value of the band is generally in the community it can gather. Community which can be asked for money with Patreon. Or merchandising sold in concerts. Etc...

yannovitch··on Ask HN: MacBooks seems to be the only viable option these days
Actually, if I may, Caran d'Ache was the "nom de plume" of a French satirist, who died in 1909 (before the russian revolution), but the Swiss company was inspired by his name and his life, as he was one of the first to create what would become (sort of) newspaper comic strips.
yannovitch··on Show HN: Keep your bookmarks clean and up-to-date
I have around 40.000 bookmarks that I try to keep organized (as resources for my blogs, future ideas, etc...). I have an hard time keeping track of what's not good anymore.

Is your extension a good fit for such a large collection of bookmarks ?

(Plus, I'm on firefox, so +1 for a firefox extension)

yannovitch··on Kodi 19.0
I, for one, use it mostly with legal extensions to watch public videos and listen to internet radios, because I have an old TV without smart features, and it does the job well.

I use it too to "cast" Youtube videos to the TV (very easy to do with the "Kore" app (or "Send2Kodi" for iOS users)), as I don't want to use Chromecast.

yannovitch··on An open-source AirPlay mirroring server for the Raspberry Pi
Very interesting, if it has indeed the video capabilities that Shairport (& shairport-sync, ...) lacks.
yannovitch··on Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana
Some food for thoughts :

- https://drewdevault.com/2021/01/19/Elasticsearch-does-not-be...

- http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2018/12/14/open-source-confronts...

yannovitch··on The Mac is losing me
Seeing where the industry is going, I'm thinking more and more of having "one computer per purpose" rather than trying to have "one computer to rule them all" (and in the darkness bind them, ahem, sorry, I digress ^^).

To explain a bit more, I do writing, development, photo editing, video editing, music production. Nowadays, my sole computer (besides multiple Raspberry Pi) is a gaming laptop running Windows. It can handle all of these tasks.

Before that, I had a 2012 MBP, but when I wanted to upgrade to an other mac with 32GB RAM, a good graphic card and Thunderbolt 3 in the end of 2015/beginning of 2016, the option of that much RAM and a good video card just wasn't there at the time, and so I switched to the Windows world again.

I've been able to upgrade the gaming computer over the years to 32 GB RAM, I now have 3 (!) SSD in the computer, and it runs what I want quickly enough (except for Lightroom, but that's an other story ;)).

But for development, the feeling just isn't there, even with WSL/WSL2, it's just not as straightforward as macOS with homebrew or macports, not to talk about Debian or Archlinux which are even better, so for me, it always feel like "death by a thousand cut" to develop on Windows platform.

For video, ProresRAW is only available on Apple, and I want to futureproof my future cameras in that aspect too. Or maybe I could go the BlackmagicRAW path to be able to do it in the Windows or Linux world, or converting to Prores4444, but ProresRAW and BlackmagicRAW don't seem to like each others, and in video, I don't want to spend my time fighting the computers and the codecs. So I'll probably have to switch to Mac in the long run for that.

For the sound part, in my point of view, there is still nothing coming close to Mac with CoreAudio, even if Linux is good (with Jack & cie), macOS is miles ahead when it comes for example to plugin or DAW support. And in Windows, it's still not as good as mac for Audio, at least in my perspective.

For the photography part, Darktable is getting good and faster than Lightroom, but still not as efficient in workflow than Lightroom or Capture One. Buuut it's getting close.

So I think more and more of buying one laptop just for Linux & development (or even stripping a Chromebook of Chrome OS and installing Linux on it ?). Use my iPad for writing, because it's the most enjoyable "sit on a couch and write" experience. And maybe buy a M1 (or M2) Mac for Audio, Video, Photo.

There still remain the question of buying a beefy workstation with for example 128GB RAM and beefy graphic card and 10GBe and RAID, to handle the big audio/video/photo project. I wanted to go the Hackintosh route, but now with ARM, I don't know if it's a futureproof purchase...

yannovitch··on Open-source self-hosted comments systems for static websites
What I would prefer over a self-hosted commenting system, is a way to automatically publish on Hacker News my blog post, and to have the comments here, as the discussions are almost always more interesting here anyway.

I know that this does exist already, but what I would like too is to have the hacker news thread of comments shown on my website.

Does somebody know some way to do that ?

yannovitch··on Signal is finally bringing its secure messaging to the masses
Sorry, but I still fail to see how it's considered a good to have used $50 million to make "yet another messaging app" (because anything "for the masses" is "yet another thing" because of network effect).

With 50 million, one would have hoped instead that they would have helped improve XMPP, that they would have developed the "perfect" XMPP client that everybody could and would use, and that they would run "for free" one XMPP server with all the features one can expect of a good messaging service while letting the hard-core base have their own server if they want (no need to support the hard-core base, they do it already on their own).

Or maybe with Matrix if one really don't want to contribute to XMPP, but still, with OMEMO, ... I feel like all the "security features" are coming to the XMPP world.

I still believe that if you're not in control of the whole chain (open source client + open source server), you're not in control at all, because you still have to believe the they are doing what they are promising they do, without being able to verify it.

yannovitch··on “Why Using WhatsApp Is Dangerous“
I, personally, think that neither Telegram nor Whatsapp, nor even Signal, are good for privacy.

Even if Pavel Durov say that Telegram has verifiable builds and open source client, as long as you're not in control of the whole chain (server+client), you're not in control at all. Even with e2e, an adverse party can always have access to lots of metadata, or with vulnerabilities as disclosed in this blog post, get access to the actual content.

Now that OMEMO is widespread in the XMPP world, I try to push in that direction, but as an other user has said, the hardest part is to get users to move to your "new" solution.

yannovitch··on Computer Architecture – ETH Zürich – Fall 2019
Not the OP, but I studied at ETH Lausanne and visited at ETH Zurich, and it was my best academic memory, surpassing Paris, London or the other universities I attended. So I recommend you a lot to try to get into this School, it's one of the best in the world, and the price of the education is a bargain compared to the comparable US universities.
yannovitch··on Google chief: I'd disclose smart speakers before guests enter my home
As this website is called HackerNews, I would suggest to install rather one of the numerous IoT platform such as Home Assistant or OpenHAB, and connect one of your devices to it. A Raspberry Pi is more than enough to do the job.
yannovitch··on Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel
My problem with Joplin is that it's not "true" Markdown (because of the metadata) - as such, I can't just use it as a "let's finish later properly this Markdown file" kind of solution.
yannovitch··on Matrix.org hacked
maybe because, among many other reasons, it takes so much f time for something to change in the XMPP world, because you have to wait for the XSF to validate any change, then all the server devs to implement it, then all the client devs to implement it, then all the sysadmin to update their (very often very old version of) XMPP server, then for the users to update their clients (which, with Android fragmentation for example, is a PITA) ?
yannovitch··on European Parliament approves copyright reform
Wow. Europe shot itself a massive bullet in the foot for the next EU elections.
yannovitch··on European Parliament approves copyright reform
Can you link to the law you're referring to ?
yannovitch··on Ask HN: Best way to turn a simple static website interactive with PHP?
No need to use PHP. Example of forms with a static website or static site generator : https://forestry.io/blog/5-ways-to-handle-forms-on-your-stat... Example of comments for static sites or SSG : https://darekkay.com/blog/static-site-comments/ ( I recommend personally Isso )
yannovitch··on How Discord Went Mainstream
I honestly don't understand why, especially on Hacker news, we do not push much more for privacy-oriented solutions. Moreover, with Matrix/Riot, or with XMPP/Conversations, viable alternatives exist, and if we all would put the energy to make these softwares better rather than putting it into proprietary solutions like the one described here, the open alternatives would already be much better than the proprietary ones!

Sure, as I've read in this thread, Discord is intended for the same kind of discussions that would happen in a public space, or in a group, not for the "truly private discussions",so "no need for all the privacy features "... except you do, precisely for these reasons!

I mean, Discord is privately-owned, a public space by its verynature is not. If I'm talking about anything beyond how nice is the weather, such as my political thoughts, or what I love, I don't want anybody (but possibly me) to be able to make a profit through it!

yannovitch··on A Japanese Love Hotel
Faux, I am pretty sure I remember seeing a "love hotel" in Strasbourg too, which billed by the hour (not a big fan of hotel in general, so don't know more about that)
yannovitch··on Fully managed PostgreSQL databases
Sweet, but personally, I very much prefer to use a standardized approach like a Docker (or even K8S) PostgreSQL cluster rather than having to deal with a vendor API.
yannovitch··on Openwrt 18.06.2 released
Personally, I prefer to use each platform for their strengths.

I was looking for a good router which could handle high VPN speeds, while still being usable. I found for 50 bucks on ebay a "thin client" which sported an AMD cpu with AES hardware acceleration, and a PCIe socket to put an Intel 2xGBit PCIe card I had lying around. Installed pfSense on it. Works flawlessly. Use few watts (because thin client).

I then found for 50 bucks on ebay a Ubiquiti Unifi AC.

I haven't messed too much with it actually, because I find crazy you need to install a whole Java suite with Mongo and everything to just run the Unifi Controller to be able to configure a bit the Unifi Access Point. I'm considering putting OpenWRT on it. Though I think I will still try this Unifi Controller, because of the advanced guest capabilities, which is still not as good on OpenWRT.

And then I bought a Ubiquiti Nanostation AC for a Wifi bridge.

For this one, I indeed replaced official firmware with OpenWRT because I can't stand that Ubiquiti makes standard Wifi unusable to push their "Air" technology. I want standards before anything else.

In the past, I "resurrected" cheap TP-Link MR3420 I had for an other project, which were bricked. Amazing that after all those years, I could still reuse hardware thanks to opensource software !

So yes, a BIG thank you to OpenWRT developers ! If any of you are out here, please receive my gratitude =)

yannovitch··on Why We Chose Rails to Build Gitlab
Very interesting, thanks! One idea I had was to push "plugin-ability", for example not everybody want to have the Gitlab Pages function, or some might want to completely replace Gitlab-CI by Drone or Jenkins, and all that could help lower the memory requirements. Or maybe I'm wrong?
yannovitch··on Why We Chose Rails to Build Gitlab
Thanks, VERY much appreciated !
yannovitch··on Why We Chose Rails to Build Gitlab
"Ruby was optimized for the developer, not for running it in production," says Sid. "For the things that get hit a lot and have to be very performant or that, for example, have to wait very long on a system IO, we rewrite those in Go … We are still trying to make GitLab use less memory"

Honestly, I think that Go is beginning to be where Rails was few years ago, and lots of developer friends want to hop on the Go train because everybody is doing the same.

In the same time, I'm thinking about switching to Gitea or Gogs + Drone.io, because Gitlab takes just too.damn.much.memory ! Seriously, 8GB RAM to even just begin with ? (Because yes, 4GB RAM + 4GB Swap is not viable). Even my biggest website is not consuming as much.

So if I could suggest something, it would be a global rewrite in Go or something like that, to lower the requirements, not just one or two parts (excuse me, microservices ;)).

Just my 2 cents

yannovitch··on Apple Turns Its Back on Customers and Nvidia with MacOS Mojave
I bet that this is due to Nvidia pushing their agenda with CUDA, as opposed to Apple championing either Metal or OpenCL.
yannovitch··on 8×8 has acquired the Jitsi team and technology from Atlassian
Nice to see Jitsi here. I have studied in Strasbourg,France where Jitsi was first developed and have followed its development from the very beginning. Big up to you guys !
yannovitch··on Netlify raises $30M to replace webservers with Application Delivery Network
By the way, does someone know if Netlify offer their webserver code with an open source license ? I can't find such a repository on their github profile ...
yannovitch··on Netlify raises $30M to replace webservers with Application Delivery Network
Netlify has been very tempting these last years, and it looks like they're constantly upping their game, but still, I think will pass.

Why ? Because it's a US company. I am trying very hard to give the least data I can to companies under the Patriot Act, and by subscribing to Netlify, which afaik have their main datacenter in the US, I would be "offering" it all my most precious content. So even if it is more work, I will host my static websites on my personal Gitlab instance (which has lots of workers based on Docker to automatically deploy your Hugo/Jekyll/... website).

Or do you think I am being too paranoid ?

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