Hacker News Reader

zapfon The Rust Trademark Policy is still harmful

Sounds bad. Hope Rust Foundation get their act together.

Yup. Can we build the same for less "power users"?

- A single startup file that starts up gitserver, a p2p node to enable repo discovery and submission of PRs.

- A web/electrum client that provides PR merge interface, and links to forks.

- user ids are their public keys, with non-unique nicks. There will only usually be one "jungly" on a repo.

We DO NOT need a blockchain for this. All those ethereum projects are messing things up by introducing an unnecessary coin that we really don't need.

zapfon Tell HN: GitHub is down again

Wish we could stop using such msft run nonsense, and build a p2p decentralised PR system. What's the challenges we need to address to make it happen?

zapfon GitHub Should Start an App Store

No it shouldn't. We can do without one more centralised gateway to apps.

zapfon Amazon Sidewalk

Crowdsourcing surveillance!

zapfon How and why GraphQL will influence the Sourcehut alpha

Had a similar experience.

Typed languages are great for systems development, and I think, not so good for writing web applications.

I also think, Ruby, Python, JS have dominated web dev world largely cause they don't come in the way of the developer having to constantly convert HTML (untyped) and JS (untyped)into types for the backend programming language.

Remember how ActiveRecord (not sure about SQLAlchemy) simply took away the pain of managing types? You didn't have to explicitly parse or cast "0.001" into 0.01.

zapfon How and why GraphQL will influence the Sourcehut alpha

Well said! Couldn't agree more.

The GraphQL confusion is one more bullshit in the world of web dev.

zapfon How and why GraphQL will influence the Sourcehut alpha

If you don't like REST, don't use it.

Whatever you do, don't even think that GraphQL will solve your problems. You were on the right track staying away from it till now.

I can't also advise enough to stay away from a typed language (Go in this case) serving data in a different typed language (gql). You will eventually be pulling your hair out jumping through hoops matching types.

After my last web project that require gql and go, I did some digging around, thinking, there has to be a better alternative to this. I have worked with jQuery, React, GraphQL.

My conclusion was that next time I will stick to turbolinks (https://github.com/turbolinks/turbolinks) and try stimulus (https://stimulusjs.org/).

zapfon How and why GraphQL will influence the Sourcehut alpha

I like my front end team to not write queries.

I have seen too many front end developers write queries equivalent to "select * from users, t1, t2, ... tn, left outer join on users.id = t1.user_id... etc etc etc".

I think that is just bullshit.

I prefer to tell the frontend people - these are the endpoints that backend team provides, go live with it. If you really have issues, talk to them, and they might just add a new endpoint for you.

If you let frontend developers dictate backend queries, all you will get is a big master cluster fuck. I am talking average joe developers that we usually find to work on startups.

zapfon Container technologies at Coinbase: Why Kubernetes is not part of our stack

k8s and even docker are trying to solve a problem not many people will ever face. However, being the sexy new things loads of people get sucked into integrating it into their stack from the word go.

Being reluctant to adopt new technology unless you really really need might be a more sensible thing to do.

zapfon Container technologies at Coinbase: Why Kubernetes is not part of our stack

My personal mantra of being a late adopter when it comes to cloud deployment tools has some benefits has served me well. I am even reluctant to integrate docker in my work flow. Git pull, build and deploy bash scripts are serving me well enough for now. Thank you very much.

zapfon Remote work has its perks, until you want a promotion

I have been remoting for over ten years now. The only rule I have now is to work with remote first teams. If there's an office where a big clique meets, you'll eventually feel left out.

zapfon I Keep a Journal

Thanks for sharing. Was a pleasure to read, and might inspire me to finally start keeping a journal.

The title could easily be switched to the original title "Why I keep a journal - by the designer of Prince of Persia".

Thanks for sharing anyway.

zapfon Today’s Javascript, from an outsider’s perspective

Thanks for those links. I found them really educational.

Does seem like we need some more tooling to avoid as much webpack pain as we can.

zapfon Today’s Javascript, from an outsider’s perspective

I have done close to a decade of work in js, with jQuery in 2008, all the way to react and webpacker madness.

I hope someone builds a wasm based front end framework. I did a quick search and MSFT seem to be on it with their Blazor framework. Unfortunately, I am not in a hurry to go learn ASP.NET or C# anytime soon.

Maybe we need a frontend framework in Golang that compiles to WebAssembly. I am rooting for Golang here, cause after a decade in Ruby/Python/JS, I am really enjoying going back to typed languages.

But even a python/ruby to wasm web frontend framework will be awesome. Anything that keeps me away from node hell.

zapfon Ask HN: How do you brand yourself as a freelancer?

Thanks for this excellent reply. I want to print this out and stick it up on a wall.

zapfon MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

One more reason to stay away from corporate OSes

zapfon Role of Vitamin D in the prevention of Coronavirus 2019 infection and mortality

Urgh...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_cau...

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/195024.A_Mathematician_R...

zapfon Colab Pro

There's so much data in this universe, people don't know what to do with it. When people don't know what to do, an industry grows to let them "feel" they are doing something useful.

zapfon Decentralize Messaging

Does Matrix allow for anon communications?

zapfon Sentinel Value

       1. Go to Africa.
       2. Put an elephant in Cairo.
       3. Start at the Cape of Good Hope.
       4. Work northward in an orderly manner, traversing the continent alternately east and west,
       5. During each traverse pass:

               1. Catch each animal seen.
               2. Compare each animal caught to a known elephant.
               3. Stop when a match is detected.

        6. If you are in Cairo, then there are no elephants in Africa (other than the one you placed there).

zapfon Sentinel Value

TIL: A sentinel value is sometimes known as an "Elephant in Cairo", due to a joke where this is used as a physical sentinel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_in_Cairo

zapfon Memory Management Reference (2018)

Thanks for sharing. I am trying to build a in-memory database and need to rapidly pick up some object pool management ideas.

zapfon Technical Report of the Bezos Phone Hack

"Good state-sponsored malware should never show up in a backup"

Fascinates me that state attacks are being normalised quite rapidly.

zapfon VC List

Thanks for sharing

zapfon DuckDuckGo Tests How Much People Care About Privacy

I am just counting on them not personalising my search results based on whatever data about me they have access to.

If they don't personalise then they essentially don't "color my world view".

I know google has a similar option, but I think some of us have stopped trusting them.

zapfon DuckDuckGo Tests How Much People Care About Privacy

Spooooky!

zapfon DuckDuckGo Tests How Much People Care About Privacy

DDG is simply awesome. I like to see the world as it is, not as some corporation thinks I like to see it as.

Also, as comments do point out. No point using DDG on Chrome. One has to switch to FF - which is seriously fast enough for my daily needs, both on ubuntu and android.

Finally, there's still two things we need to break free form tracking services.

1. A non google play store smart phone.

2. Get off gmail.

I am failing on both of the above.

zapfon Pokémon GO and Haunted Planet: A Tale of Two Genres

The power of brand and nostalgia. But the author is right on saying we could see a lot more location based games coming soon.

What do they say? Location, location, location.