Hacker News Reader

exitheoneon Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

I hope you realize that these are research reactors that are not designed to give you a low interval between cycles or produce power. They are meant so clarify some of the open research questions for the likes of ITER/DEMO that will integrate these findings into things that are actually designed to produce a lot more power quicker.

exitheoneon Self-Hosting Dozens of Web Applications and Services on a Single Server

Same here. It's amazing how many services you can easily host if they are on PHP and low traffic.

The beauty of PHP is that more services consume no additional resources until they are used. This lets you run many many services without worrying about resource usage. In stark contrast to running everything in containers where you have at least a process per idle service.

exitheoneon PHP 8.1.0

An annotation syntax no outside of doc strings. Something PHP desperately needed.

Very similar to Java annotations.

exitheoneon Functorio

Functional programming is everywhere. Many aspects of for example modern Java also move in the direction of functional programming.

Those who never learn it are just stuck writing software in a more complicated and less readable way.

Learning FP and using it where it makes sense can do wonders to the quality of code you write. And over the past years many (even "traditional") languages have recognised and embraced that fact.

exitheoneon Stacked changes: how FB and Google engineers stay unblocked and ship faster

I work for FAANG and making changes to code owned by a team in the US is very common. However I'm from Europe and nobody else around me can review that code.

exitheoneon Stacked changes: how FB and Google engineers stay unblocked and ship faster

That is kind of my point. Review capacity is meaningless if external factors require a certain review _latency_.

Even if the actual review takes 30 seconds, it does not matter if my reviewer is asleep for the next 8 hours.

exitheoneon Stacked changes: how FB and Google engineers stay unblocked and ship faster

None of which works well if your reviewer sits in another timezone and your next business day is their public holiday. Waiting 3 days or more is not an option when I could just comfortably stack my changes and have the whole stack reviewed whenever my reviewer is available.

exitheoneon Stop Making Students Use Eclipse (2020)

What you are describing is quite literally what the intellij "Build Project" button is for.

exitheoneon Encrypting Postgres Data at Rest in Kubernetes

But that is exactly the point. You want to ensure that disks later sold by your cloud provider do not contain your data in plain. That's the whole point with encryption at rest. It's not supposed to protect you against an attacker with root access to your server.

exitheoneon Yet another try for fs-verity (2019)

This could be a great tool to verify that none of the files in a /nix/store have been manipulated offline since they are read only anyways.

exitheoneon Nix-GUI: Make NixOS usable for non-technical users through settings / GUI

I think the important thing that did not come across very well is that "wipe and reinstall" with nix is so incredibly painless that doing it is even an option. The same would be very very painful with other distributions. A clean reinstall of your whole system with nixos takes maybe 30 minutes. Compare with the average "my Ubuntu upgrade failed" debugging session...

exitheoneon Twitch is hacked, and its source code leaked

The salt is usually stored next to the password. The point of a salt is just to make the hash unique to prevent the use of rainbow tables, it's not a separate secret.

exitheoneon Linux Networking: MAC VLANs and Virtual Ethernets

Unrelated hint to the author of this page:

Please enable Https for your Webserver.

exitheoneon From a Single Repo, to Multi-Repos, to Monorepo, to Multi-Monorepo

I think I could not disagree more. Coupling and cohesion are problems you will have, regardless of the repo approach you take. But a mono-repo gives you a host of incredibly beneficial advantages, especially for larger organisations.

Any downstream library team can instantly tell if their change has broken any upstream users because a good CI system will just automatically run all tests of all relevant projects. That way a library developer can either iterate until all projects depending on it are green, or the library developer can even proactively change all dependant projects and roll all fixes out in a single atomic commit.

This has proven incredibly beneficial to our development speed and the number of avoidable code conflicts that crop up.

exitheoneon Apple Reportedly Storing over 8M Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers

This sentiment seems so weird to me. Can you point to a single enterprise offering where Google is collecting data and using it themselves? Or where it would even make sense to do so? Corporate customers pay a lot more per byte than the fleeting value of private data so Google has a strong incentive to never ever touch that data.

exitheoneon Google Compute Engine VM takeover via DHCP flood

I think the real learning here is not to colocate different things in a single GCP project. AFAIK projects don't cost anything so why not create one per service?

exitheoneon HBO Max drops Linux support in all browsers?

Yep, you have no right to HBO, you only have the permission. If you are unsatisfied with your available options, I guess that's your problem not theirs.

The only sad thing here is that most people in the US don't have the possibility of choosing a different ISP/Cable provider because they are all monopolies.

exitheoneon HBO Max drops Linux support in all browsers?

If the loss of revenue through piracy is less than the cost of ongoing Linux support, then this is a sensible business decision.

exitheoneon Google speakers are listening to more than just voice commands

First of all, thanks for linking to the change in policy. I was not aware of the timeline.

To address both links: 1) As a user I'm actually happy about the tight integration into calendar and other apps. These necessarily require reading my mail though. I'm already trusting Google with my mail so using it for better integration into other Google products is fine with me.

2) They are not randomly handing out access to your emails to third parties, they just have an API that lets third parties read your emails _after you gave explicit consent via the regular oAuth flow_. Which is also completely reasonable for me.

exitheoneon Google speakers are listening to more than just voice commands

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603?hl=en

This is most definitely false. Google still states that they do not scan your emails for as targeting.

exitheoneon Kongregate closed to new games, shutting down forums and chat

That is likely a concern not shared by most teenagers. Installing 5 new apps a day to try them out is a complete non-issue for most people.

exitheoneon US accused of ‘piracy’ over mask ‘confiscation’

Only if you consider throwing away the trust of every single partner they have is a good leadership move.

exitheoneon OpenTTD 1.10

OTTD hat UI scaling and font scaling for HiDPI displays. Just need to enable it in the settings.

exitheoneon OpenTTD 1.10

It's actually incredibly easy to print money early on. Take a loan, build 2 airports reasonable far away from each other in the larger initial cities. setup 2-3 planes between them. Wait 15 minutes -> money printer.

Money earned is based on distance and speed. Planes are incredibly lucrative in the early game.

exitheoneon Swedes rebelling against a cashless society (2018)

I have two cards in two separate locations + my phone bound to the same account for mobile payments.

Circumstances would have to become pretty extreme for all of these to disappear at the same time.

exitheoneon Building a more private web: A path towards making third party cookies obsolete

I'm completely fine with paying with my privacy. I feel like the vast majority of users prefers to look at ads compared to paying for content. Which matches reality where most people don't care if their browser blocks cookies or not.

exitheoneon Building a more private web: A path towards making third party cookies obsolete

Given the absolutely ridiculous amount of content that is ad-funded, I very much disagree. All of my preferred youtubers and streamers would immediately be without livelihood. Same is probably true for a whole lot of news websites.

exitheoneon Generating a Java program with 90% less code

yes, intellij for java will also rename all local variables and all mentions of the class in comments.

exitheoneon Source: Google Hangouts for consumers will be shutting down sometime in 2020

At Google, promotion does not change your position, it changes your "Level", which roughly rewards you for having wider-ranging influence as an engineer. You don't get promoted to management or anything like that. You stay an engineer.

Disclaimer: I work at Google.

exitheoneon Source: Google Hangouts for consumers will be shutting down sometime in 2020

You can? When did they promise that? What is stopping them from throwing away history next year?