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pdenton

764 karma · joined October 4, 2020

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pdenton··on DNS SRV Records for HTTP (2009)
Does this deprecate TTLS records? I've only just begun to generate those
pdenton··on “Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”
Instead of saying you're autistic, say you have autism. What you are is a human being, most likely. Having autism is just one of your traits.

TL;DR Autism is what you've got, not who you are.

pdenton··on Diagnosing Mental Health Disorders Through AI Facial Expression Evaluation
"Disorders"?!

What's this, "person of color" instead of "black" or N*, that's all cool and agreeable, but then how on earth is "disorder" still okay? Bull.

pdenton··on This week in KDE: Tons of UI improvements and bugfixes
Having used KDE 2, 3, skipped 4, and now 5, it's the most polished desktop environment I can think of. OSX is too weird and Windows is a hodgepodge of "GUI trend of the day". Not that either of those matter, since they're not FLOSS.
pdenton··on Show HN: If VS Code had a data-centric IDE sibling, what would that look like?
Excel
pdenton··on Postgres 15 improves UNIQUE and NULL
The way I'd do this, is by separating concerns into separate tables. If you have a table with (id, name) and a table with (id, parent_id), any doc with a parent will have a corresponding record in the second table.
pdenton··on Open source body quits GitHub, urges you to do the same
What's a good alternative? Preferably not in the US, preferably not biased towards (or against) any political agenda.
pdenton··on The SQLite Code of Ethics
Why is it a list and not a table?

Seems like a pretty simple case of CREATE TABLE ethics ( id INT PRIMARY KEY, rule TEXT );

pdenton··on Need some advice, feeling depressed about the direction of our industry
Software tends to get thrown away after a few years. Nothing I've written as a professional programmer has survived the test of time. No regrets, though. Why would I carry the burden of self importance to even be bothered about this? Do we really need to cast our work in stone? It's just work and you probably got paid a bunch. Nothing wrong with that.

My advice would be to find whatever motivates you in your life. What makes you happy? Challenge yourself and everything you've got.

pdenton··on Orkut
This won't be a thing in Holland. Not that it matters much, but just saying.

https://translate.google.com/?sl=nl&tl=en&text=kut&op=transl...

pdenton··on Oldschool PC Fonts
Thanks but I prefer this one: https://sciops.net/downloads/vga/ ("The only font you'll ever need")
pdenton··on Windows 11 update accidentally brings the OS to older machines
Linux always boots perfectly fine with TPM hardware support disabled, even when there actually is such a chip built in.

The real showstopper would be if "SecureBoot" would be enforced. I hope it never actually happens for personal computers. Everything else in the consumer electronics business is pretty much a lost cause already.

pdenton··on Ask HN: Which programming games helped you become a better programmer?
Kids these days...

Go read a book!

pdenton··on Ask HN: Web frameworks – which less popular frameworks are you using and why?
PHP: My own, so not known by anyone else ;)

I made it because I don't like all the existing frameworks. That said, it uses Laminas Diactoros because not using that would be to reinvent the wheel.

pdenton··on Show HN: Firefox extension to obfuscate web page text
This extension is pretty cool and I already found a bug. It doesn't work for elements whose font-family has been set with a !important flag.

It would be crude to set font-family to "Flow Circular" !important on every element (in the style attribute), but it would probably be much more effective.

pdenton··on NixOS on Btrfs+tmpfs
IIRC, noatime is useful everywhere except /var/spool or /var/mail where certain daemons may depend on access time correctness.
pdenton··on Can I PHP? – caniuse.com but for PHP features
This site provides a nice overview, cool. It makes me wonder though, because IMHO PHP is adding too much new features that are often somewhat half-baked. What would be better is to have an actual specification to improve the core language. IIRC, Python gradually adds features where they are opt-in first (from __future__ import foo).

I'd gladly take a language which offers stability and gradual improvement over a language that just keeps adding new toys to play with. The software development cycle can take many years and from my experience, changes in the language or runtime are a burden.

But my biggest gripe isn't with PHP, it's that cheap web hosting still comes with PHP and MySQL. And I honestly can't blame them.

/rant

pdenton··on Testing my system code in /usr/ without modifying /usr/
It's pretty cool actually that this is possible and I also can't help but think that this is a solution to a problem that need not exist in the first place. Systemd has this problem and the solution is to use a feature in systemd, right?

IMHO systemd has amassed too many features, both documented and undocumented. Having worked with GNU+Linux for over 2 decades, I still find Devuan and Void easier to manage than Fedora and Ubuntu. The latter is fine for basic desktop needs though.

pdenton··on Ask HN: I whant to Learn C++ not Rust!!
http://programming-motherfucker.com/
pdenton··on Patching dependencies is easier than forking
The way I deal with dependencies lately is I place them in a separate directory (called lib) right next to the project source itself (called src). So the project and its dependencies are the same repository and I can have peace of mind. Also, I've got a few patches for those dependencies and those commits consist of only the patch and a clear log message. This helps when the time comes to update the patched dependencies.

Would I recommend this method to everyone? No. Is it useful in certain cases? Definitely yes.

pdenton··on The New Homophobia
I wonder why this article got flagged. It's insightful and well written.
pdenton··on I want to give Oracle money but I can't
It's strange though, the best software (including RDBMS) is free.
pdenton··on Explaining the LGBT Explosion
> hanging out with Group X causally raises the chance that you become an X

There are genetic traits and environmental traits. Hanging out with monkeys may make one act and behave as such, but if the genetic code doesn't include fur, you don't get fur.

In my case, it was pretty darn difficult to realize the fact that I'm bi in the first place. Despite all the evidence, I could've just as well never come to the moment it all became clear to me. I suppose not everyone has the level of self reflection required to accurately discern ones sexual interest from whatever was taught to be "normal". Also, I wish I knew this when I was younger.

pdenton··on NotepadNext: A cross-platform reimplementation of Notepad++
Related project: https://github.com/notepadqq/notepadqq
pdenton··on Boopkit: eBPF backdoor (TCP) for spawning reverse shells
How exactly is this a backdoor if it requires root access?
pdenton··on Poll: How Old Are You?
What the heck. 13-18 and 18-25. 25-35 and 35-45. 35-45 and 45-60. Those who are 18, 35, 45 or 60 years old cannot participate in this poll as the options are ambiguous.
pdenton··on The Delusions of Debian
I'm happy with void for 7 years now, and used to contribute. You're right, xbps is much easier than other package managers (looking at you, dpkg!). The templates are even a tiny bit simpler than the equivalents of Arch.
pdenton··on What data do the Google Dialer and Messages apps on Android send to Google? [pdf]
I recently tcpdump'd an Android 11 device going through the initial setup. About 60MiB was downloaded just to get to the launcher. It contacts not only Google, but the manufacturer and Microsoft, as well as a few domains I couldn't recognize.

It's impossible to install privacy tools (like AFWall) before being subjected to built-in spyware. The bootloader was locked by default and could only be unlocked after creating a Google account (which involves accepting their terms and conditions). It was also impossible to go through initial setup using a proxy server. It did use the proxy server I had setup to contact Google, but it wouldn't accept the connection as having internet connectivity (and refuse to go any further) until traffic was routed through the default gateway.

I think it would be reasonable to add warnings to so-called "smart" devices the same way as packs of cigarettes. It'll never happen, sadly. If anything, the Powers That Be would rather make it illegal to "circumvent" or "tamper" with the locked-down computers that we used to own.

pdenton··on PHP Streaming Audio
I really love the fact that there's no framework, no composer, no autoloading, just plain PHP. That's how you get the job done!
pdenton··on Incident with GitHub Actions, API requests, Codespaces, Git operations, Issues
As someone with diagnosed PTSD, I never thought I'd psychologically level with an entire state ;)
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