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amarraja

188 karma · joined October 7, 2012

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amarraja··on A New Kind of Hybrid Car Is About to Hit America's Streets
Is this new? A freind's BMW i3 had one of these many years ago. (Defnitely pre covid)

edit: the frist generation was 2013

amarraja··on Teams is killing my Mac every day
Not sure if electron is the issue, I believe vscode is based on it (I may be mistaken). Really wish they would sort Teams out.

I like the concepts and product, but when in a video chat I have to close most apps. I tried opening a JIRA ticket whilst on a video call the other day... my quads still have the scars

amarraja··on Show HN: Infracost (YC W21): Cloud Costs for Terraform in VSCode
I skim most Show HN posts and think "that's cool", but never look at it again.

Seeing this, I thought that's cool and it's something I really want to start using! Thanks!

amarraja··on GitHub Desktop 2.9 includes squashing, reordering, amending, and more
> <edit> I've reconsidered. It's really insulting.

In the most objective way possible, if I was a FOSS author, I'd find this comment insulting

Pour a beer down your sink for every dev who has abandoned a project - mostly in free time - due to demanding and entitled users

amarraja··on Git Branch Naming Conventions
Yep exactly this. We've gotten into messes before when people are working on - or think they are - the same branch. Some os think they are the same, others different.

Also just finished migrating something that ran on IIS to linux, and got the casing pains once again.

If the universe were to be reinvented, I ask please make everything case sensitive by default

amarraja··on Git Branch Naming Conventions
Just want to throw a small one in there: branch names are all lower case.

Prevents strange issues when you use a case insensitive file system like on OSX or Windows

amarraja··on Troubleshooting Systemd with SystemTap
I never had strong feelings about systemd, and the first time I used it I did prefer the service files to sysvinit scripts.

The real wow moment came when discovering socket activation which allowed systemd to take care of zero downtime deployments of web applications - for me that was reason enough to support the project.

Nowadays I'll use a container orchestrator to achieve the same thing, bit it was a good couple of years whilst it lasted.

amarraja··on Linux Bash vs. Windows PowerShell
$ErrorActionPreference = "Stop"

At the top of the script is the closest I fount to `set -e`

amarraja··on Thomas Guenoux, a CEO Helping to See the Funny Side of Life as a Developer
Some of these strips are far too close to home to be funny
amarraja··on Ask HN: Finding tech talent is getting harder. It's not a Bay Area problem only
Not OP, but during a recent hiring process we asked for backend engineers (e.g. java/golang/databases etc). Half of the CVs we received were for Angular/React developers.

I'm unsure how this could happen with any sane vetting process.

amarraja··on PostgreSQL's Explain Analyze Made Readable
I knew the design looked familiar. If anyone uses Solr, this does the same for its debug output

https://explain.solr.pl/

amarraja··on TablePlus – Native GUI tool for relational databases (2018)
I've just compared TablePlus to PGAdmin (the new web one), on a fast query which returns 1000 rows. The responsiveness of TP is really noticable
amarraja··on Red Hat Satellite to standardize on PostgreSQL backend
> There usually is a tradeoff when something is forced into something alien.

Exactly! My thoughts whenever I see people using nosql databases.

amarraja··on Bitcoin’s Biggest Hack in History: 184.4B Bitcoin from Thin Air
That's most of the internet for me (off black text on off white backgrounds). Firefox reader mode is my saviour.
amarraja··on Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces
Hopefully they're learning this lesson.

I can just see it now. A company's app is dying from all the timeouts to a slack webhook, however they can't deploy because slack is down.

amarraja··on Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces
Spare a thought for the chatops crowd who may be blissfully unaware that their own infrastructure is down
amarraja··on Ask HN: Have you found ORMs help more than they hinder?
They are useful if you only use them for simple things. Any queries which are non-trivial or aren't cleanly expressed in your object model can lead to absolutely monstrous queries.

I once saw a 1000 line query - which unsurprisingly timed out - generated for getting a single user record from the database! There were several lookups to rate limit failed login attempts etc, however this should be a couple of lines of efficient sql if hand rolled.

I can tolerate something like Rails' ActiveRecord if used with restraint. E.g.

    user.addresses << Address.new(blah)
Is very useful, it doesn't get in the way and does all the boring stuff for me. People just need to learn this isn't the only way to access the database, and you can drop to sql if you need to.

Fortunately I started developing at a time where there were no ORMs, but I fear there is a new generation of devs who see SQL as some esoteric ASM for databases.

Also, I disagree with database portability as an argument for ORMs. All abstractions are leaky, and trying to unify everything will stop you taking full advantage of your data-store of choice

amarraja··on Hello, GitHub
I remember watching the "screencasts" (they were gifs back in those days), of Nat working on Beagle [1]. Sadly it's a dead project now, however, it shaped my attitude as a developer - how can I write software that _helps_ people.

I am really excited to see what Nat and team bring to the table

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beagle_(software)

amarraja··on Microsoft acquires Github
I for one am quite happy about this. Github innovation seems to have stalled, now with Nat/Scott Gu at the helm there could be exciting times to come.
amarraja··on Ask HN: Name one biggest improvement in your life made possible thanks to AI?
Being able to say "ok google, take me to a gas* station" without having to touch my phone whilst driving.

* I'm English, and we tend to say "petrol station", sadly even Google's AI is not there yet

amarraja··on Ask HN: Are there any tools which can summarize an article?
I've used this in the past

https://github.com/codelucas/newspaper

There is also a wrapper to expose it as a rest api. Looks like it is not maintained, but easy enough to write your own

https://github.com/voidfiles/newspaper-delivery

amarraja··on Ask HN: What are the best programming books you could read in a weekend?
I read Programming Elixir in a weekend(ish) including doing most of the exercises. Was quite eye-opening to the world of functional concurrency.
amarraja··on Ask HN: What is the purpose of Life?
To keep up to date with the latest Javascript frameworks
amarraja··on Ask HN: Huge enterprise customer wants to see our source code
Slightly off topic, but....

> Find a way to say "yes", which satisfies their need to hear you say "yes"

This is the best skill to train if you're going to be working with enterprise clients.

amarraja··on Ask HN: What's your .bashrc?
A mishmash of stuff I have copied from various public "dotfiles" repos.

Quite a few gems in here: https://github.com/mathiasbynens/dotfiles

amarraja··on Ask HN: In what order did you learn your languages?
Pascal, VB, Java, C#, JavaScript, Ruby, Clojure, Golang, Elixir.

I'd put SQL in there somewhere, but it spans the whole time, and I'm also biased since I believe it's the most important language any app developer should know.

amarraja··on A bot that tweets any time devs swear on GitHub
We had a small bespoke customer support system we wrote back in 2000 or so. The system would allow an operator to type the message body, and would automatically generate the mail text e.g. "Dear {customer name}, {body}, Regards {operator name}". Cutting edge stuff back then!

One day, we get a call that an operator couldn't send an email since the third word was classed as "offensive", however the message body was fine. After firing up the debugger, it became obvious... the customer's surname was "Dick".

We never got to the bottom of how to solve it, so hacked something in. I wonder how many times Mr. Dick has issues with false positives in profanity filters.

amarraja··on Ask HN: Are there any drawbacks to using S3 for website assets?
It depends on the global reach of your website, but please remember S3 is not a CDN. If you host your files in the US, clients in Europe will see a significant latency, for example. If possible place a CDN in front of your bucket.
amarraja··on The case of the 500-mile email (2002)
Thanks, first I've read that and it certainly put a smile on my face.

One of the first articles I remember reading on HN was about an SR-71 [1], and it seems it's by the same pilot because Walter is his crewmate.

[1] http://sploid.gizmodo.com/5511236/the-thrill-of-flying-the-s...

amarraja··on Ask HN: What @ sign was used for before the internet?
Clicked through expecting to learn something new, but instead unearthed an old memory - thanks OP!!

When I was about 7 I used to help my dad in his shop. He had a fairly basic till (this was the 80's), which he would let me punch the numbers into. One day, someone brought 10 £1 items to the counter. I remember typing £1 repeatedly when my dad stopped me and showed me what the @ key on the till was for.

My mind was blown for about 6 months before learning I could just type £10 instead.

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