HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

orestis

240 karma · joined January 12, 2009

submissionscomments
orestis··on Apache Superset
Can this work to give end-users/customers the ability to create their own reports/charts, respecting data access visibility etc?

I am in need of a "dashboarding" feature in our SaaS, but it seems there's a gap between PowerBI/Tableau/Metabase/Superset and various charting libraries. The former are too much "turn key" and the latter require a ton of work to setup all the chart-building UI and features...

orestis··on Joker is a small interpreted dialect of Clojure written in Go
FYI joker these days is completely replaced by Babashka.
orestis··on How is it even possible to cheat on a musical performance practical exam?
I studied classical guitar for a few years, and let me tell you, scales on the guitar do not involve just moving a finger or a barre or a capo: look up the Segovia scales, that’s what I was learning and it’s physically demanding…
orestis··on Kaffeost
Never heard of this before, but I have fond memories of my grandmother sipping Greek coffee with a piece of Cretan gruyere.
orestis··on XTDB 2.x Early Access
In Clojure-land, we are also using HoneySQL [1] which has similar characteristics. You are still working within SQL semantics so it's a bit more complicated, but we are doing great complicated things with just maps, no API necessary.

[1] https://github.com/seancorfield/honeysql

orestis··on Why do ships use “port” and “starboard” instead of “left” and “right?”
In Greek boating terms, we use just plain left and right. At sailing school we were taught that left means always the left side of the ship as it travels forward, and similarly the right.

We do use different words for the direction of the ship facing towards or away from the wind though.

Not sure if the ancients used other words though. We managed to avoid confusion for a few hundred years though.

orestis··on Show HN: Dak – a Lisp-like language that transpiles to JavaScript
Interesting, in the CLJS space we recently got two new libraries in this space:

https://github.com/squint-cljs/squint Which is a thin layer on top of JS

https://github.com/squint-cljs/cherry Which is closer to CLJS semantics and data structures but compiles to .mjs files without any advanced optimizations etc.

orestis··on Clojure Turns 15 panel discussion video
Obligatory shout out to Babashka [0] which is interpreted Clojure. You just download a simple binary and you can get going. Widely used for quick-running scripts, with a lot of batteries included.

[0]: https://babashka.org/

orestis··on Clojure Turns 15 panel discussion video
HoneySQL allows you to write SQL via data structures so you can compose that. Gives you a lot of power.
orestis··on Clojure Turns 15 panel discussion video
Check out Babashka!
orestis··on Chunking strings in Elixir: how difficult can it be?
In a browser context, the built-in DOMParser (perhaps wrapped in dompurify) is the way to do this. No need to look elsewhere.
orestis··on French startup unveils new residential thermo-acoustic heat pump
I haven’t seen a mention so far, but 30 bar pressure isn’t that big. Scuba diving uses helium (wellC helium and oxygen) at up to 250 bar (in small cylinders, 10-12liters) with no issue whatsoever. The cylinders aren’t even that big or heavy (for a heat pump).
orestis··on The Physics of Scuba Diving
Yes, the point is to keep the airways open, but that’s hard to demonstrate hence the suggestion to “make a stream of small bubbles as you ascend”
orestis··on The Physics of Scuba Diving
For the people who might be tempted to skip scuba and just hold their breath: beware of the so-called free diving blackout, which occurs at the surface AFTER the dive, and is usually lethal if you don’t have surface support.

If you like the water but don’t want to deal with gear, do get free diving certified to be educated about the risks and mitigation strategies.

Personally, I’m hooked to Scuba, I find the focus on being calm, breathing and the feeling of weightlessness and flying are one of the most relaxing experiences in life. I surface after every dive just grinning like an idiot.

orestis··on Life in the slow lane: how the slow cooker changed the world
I’m curious - here in Southern Europe we have been using pressure cookers for ages. They’re meant to be used on the stovetop (usually electric). The newer models (like in the last 20 years) are also quiet (no revolving noise maker). They also double as a plain deep pan.

Isn’t that common in North America? Why do you have to buy an extra appliance?

orestis··on Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?
Well sure, if we were building something towards general audience I’d say yes, let’s bias our UI towards editorial rules that can be enforced, since incentives align.

We’re building enterprise-internal software. There’s ton of jargon that is in play that we can’t really shorten or guide. It’s insane to think that the users, experts with decades of experience in their domain, should editorialize to fit a design goal. Sometimes, the users do know best.

orestis··on Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?
Supposedly there’s a classical version of Apple Music in the works, which should fix this.
orestis··on Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?
The truncated text is a huge peeve of mine with designers. I get that it’s hard to design a nice grid if you have to account for text that wrapped etc, but not everyone is called Tom Smith, and not all titles are 20 characters long.

A designer I know advocated that users should be coaxed into using shorter titles and descriptions so that the UI looks good. It just makes me seethe.

orestis··on Clojure 1.11 is now available
A nitpick: Your code will not run faster in GraalVM vs the JVM, it will start faster. If its small scripts where the startup time dominates, then of course it goes faster. For anything long-lived (even in the range of tens of seconds), the JVM has better performance.
orestis··on AVIF has landed (2020)
What would the best format to convert user-submitted images? We need to update our image pipeline soon, so I'm looking into various options.

It looks like you still have to keep jpg/png around for a few years at least. Even if you drop IE11, there's a few versions of Safari out there that don't support even WebP.

So the pipeline would be:

* png -> resize -> png/lossless webp * jpg/other -> resize -> jpg/webp

Where "other" is whatever format iPhone cameras use.

Is there anything I'm missing if I were to do this today?

orestis··on Understanding UUIDs, ULIDs and string representations
YouTube seems to use 10 characters for their video id, does anyone know what is the tech behind that?
orestis··on Open Source Ticker Tape
Huh, back when we were developing the interactive Timeline at https://www.edmstudio.com/portfolio/moad/ , we did something similar for the artistic effect: various speech bubbles floating across screens.

The way we approached was that each screen was drawing everything, but offset relative to the physical location, and to animate everything synchronously, one machine was continuously broadcasting UDP packets with just IDs and positions, essentially driving everything. There was some fancy code for failover (there was no central server) plus ability to interact with the speech bubbles (can't recall the details).

We did something similar many times and broadcasting positions with UDP always worked out fine, with a big assumption: a reliable wired local network :)

orestis··on Introducing the layer based SVG engine
Huh, we have a Thermomix at home and the UI is not terribly laggy but could certainly stand to be improved. No idea how and why they use SVG for the current UI, perhaps it's for upcoming features?
orestis··on Vinyl records are now outselling CDs
The video was playing music and Vimeo took it down due to copyright infringement :(

If I was to do this again I’d do away with the Mac mini and use a raspberry pi plus a Spotify daemon. I still have all the cards I made but no time to figure out the physical stuff anymore.

orestis··on Vinyl records are now outselling CDs
I did this five years ago:

https://www.edmstudio.com/news/faux-vinyl-experience-spotify...

orestis··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2021)
Nosco | Clojure Web Developer | Remote EU/EEA

NOSCO is a small, successful SaaS company based in Copenhagen, Denmark. We help our clients innovate by offering a well-designed and easy to use web platform for sharing, evaluating and developing ideas, as well as consulting services to help them run successful innovation campaigns.

We are looking for a full stack web developer to join our cross functional team that develops the Nosco Platform. As part of the developer team, you will be working on client-facing features, collaborating with designers, business analysts and customer success representatives.

For more information and how to apply see https://clojureverse.org/t/job-post-nosco-is-hiring-clojure-...

orestis··on Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing
As an AWS user, it bums me out how much vendors don’t integrate better with the marketplace and cloud formation stacks etc.

What I’m after is being able to pay a 3rd-party vendor to do all the work of setting up a cluster of machines, deal with HA, backups, upgrades, support etc - but stay out of my data, so that I don’t have to force all our enterprise clients to sign updates to our DPA.

I would gladly pay elastic.co for such a service. The only vendor that I’m aware that does is Cognitect with Datomic Cloud: https://docs.datomic.com/cloud/index.html

orestis··on The SOC2 Starting Seven (2020)
We have many clients asking for certification. We just say that we don’t have one, but our major vendors (eg aws) have a shit ton of them, and it seems to work fine.

Usually it’s not the certification that will make or break a deal, at least in our case.

orestis··on Our Dumb Security Questionnaire
Ooh, I’ve done that, and I’m doing it with many such questionnaires I receive :) sometimes it makes sense and we do something about it, but many times you just don’t know what you don’t know, or you don’t know where to start, and it’s not a topic that comes up often on the various public fora.

I was looking for books, talks, guides - anything. I just read the latacora soc2 guide and it’s at least a starting point.

orestis··on Our Dumb Security Questionnaire
This is indeed much shorter than what I’ve seen around.

As a developer/team lead that might need to answer these questions to a satisfactory degree, what are resources that would actually help implementing this kind of security infrastructure?

Page 1 of 2Next →