HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

rozza

170 karma · joined July 27, 2011

submissionscomments
rozza··on Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming
citation needed
rozza··on Modern Java/JVM Build Practices
I'm a fan of Gradle, it is super powerful and ultimately flexible and I can code my way into and out of trouble with it.

I like maven for its simplicity, although I do dislike XML for the build configuration language, seems to verbose and outdated. Mavens plugins are elsewhere (eg published jars), but with gradle I can also specialize and have local plugins kept with the code as well as use published plugins. I like that flexibility.

All said, Gradle has changed a lot of over the years and with that its best practices, so many of my projects are way behind the new standard way of doing things. But with either tool once its all up and running maintaining it is relatively simple.

Perhaps the new Amper project by Jetbrains (Gradle configuration via YAML) will simplify things for the 95% of cases and still allow users to extend and fall back to kotlin / groovy configuration where specialization is needed.

rozza··on Minecraft content creator Technoblade has died
What a fantastic video and introduction :) thanks for sharing.
rozza··on Serious Bug in MongoDB Geospatial distance calculation
Confirmed not a bug in MongoDB or the Go Driver.
rozza··on Serious Bug in MongoDB Geospatial distance calculation
The post got updated:

> Final Edit: False Alarm

>

> It’s not MongoDB, It’s not the MongoDB Go driver, it’s something I did.

> I was especially careful to double and triple check Long and Lat and still something went wrong.

rozza··on Serious Bug in MongoDB Geospatial distance calculation
The world is used to x,y for coordinates which sets the convention.
rozza··on The Spoon Theory (2003)
My wife has chronic cancer* and one day when talking to the doctor at the hospice after a period of grueling treatment she talked about only having so many "spoons" in a day. The doctor liked the analogy as it was a fun way at looking at a real issue.

I'm pleased I now know where it comes from! This analogy helped us both come to terms with managing her lower energy levels.

* I use the term chronic cancer as she has Stage 4 cancer. The term terminal cancer to describe her cancer has been so incredibly unhelpful, its taken me years to frame where we as a family fit into it and how we can live. Essentially, the term has caused more fear than was warranted at the time. So until she needs end of life care, I won't call it terminal even though that is the expected outcome. That maybe 6 months from now or 6 years from now.

rozza··on Show HN: Pronto – Java, Proto, Mongo Connector
Congrats gravypod!

The codec system in the Java driver is pretty low level and its great to see it could be adapted to this usecase. Thats pretty cool.

rozza··on One whole-body MRI could replace multiple cancer scans
Breast Cancer HER2+ Currently being treated with Trastuzumab and Pertuzumab every 3 weeks. Seems to be doing its job keeping down the cancer growth rate. She also used to have Zoledronic acid at the same time but that caused osteonecrosis of the jaw, so has been stopped.

Strangely, we're relatively happy with the bone mets. The two times the cancer hit soft tissue it grew alarmingly quickly. First in the breast, then when it came back and broke out the L2 vertebrae and wrapped the nerve. At least in the bone it grows slowly. When it eventually starts to break out, the next treatment is Trastuzumab emtansine, which is a chemo drug, so will have many more side effects to manage.

rozza··on One whole-body MRI could replace multiple cancer scans
My wife has had full body scans every 3 months for the past 3 years. She currently has multiple active sites of bone mets, from the spine to shoulders and hips. A single scan is much more convenient and keeps the oncologist up to date with the state of her cancer.

In our experience sometimes a new cancer site isn't diagnosed quickly, especially if it's asymptomatic and slow growing. Having past scans and reviewing them overtime has found multiple tumors so far.

Seems the radiographers err on the side of caution when feeding back to the Oncologist. Her last cancer in her neck (c2) had been tracked over 3 scans (because it was small and slow growing), before it was reported back to us and subsequently treated with cyberknife.

rozza··on Minimum salary required in London: £500k?
Amazing, really tells more about keeping up with the Joneses and the societal pressure to conform to their expectations.

As you earn more money, your social circles change and there is a cost to moving into that circle. You have to live in the right area, dress in the right clothes and drive the right car. So the costs increase to levels that seem exorbitant to people on "average" salaries but really they are just as much slaves to the system as anyone else.

The trick is to earn good money and not spend it on frivolities, but marketeers and advertisers work hard to get people to spend their hard earned cash to great effect.

rozza··on Reactive Streams for the JVM hits 1.0.0
Looks like theres strong interest for a similar improvements coming in C#7 (Async streams and disposal https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn/issues/2136)
rozza··on Reactive Streams for the JVM hits 1.0.0
For evidence of people in production now, you will find more users of RxJava which has been providing similar functionality for a while (including backpressure support).

I think this convention is one for the future and this release marks the start of adoption. I think the hope is that more implementations will come in the future and one goal is to allow the simple connection of reactive streams and allow the building complex distributed systems.

Also interestingly it looks like this concept might make it into jdk9 as Flow - https://github.com/reactive-streams/reactive-streams-jvm/iss...

rozza··on Keeping Your Hair in Chemo
My wife was offered it by insurance in the UK and she refused it. She hates being cold, so when she read that its not always effective she decided against it. Some hospitals also offer cold gloves, to save your nails.

Everyone is different and for some people the losing your hair is a huge loss on top of an already shitty situation, so anything that helps people through it is a good thing.

My wife ended up bald and for once in our marriage we shared the same hair cut! Gutsy lady, I remember the tears when the clumps started to fall out but she stoically put it behind her, whilst chemo wreaked its chaos. Time passed and now she has "chemo hair" and its still full of curls a year after the weekly chemo finished.

rozza··on The Anti-Facebook
For folks in the UK theres http://streetlife.com which also is a local social network.

You can verify your address to prove you are local and subscribe to local area conversations and news etc... Just like in life the communities are mixed - some more involved than others but I've found it a great resource so far.

rozza··on Introducing MongoMallard: A fast ORM based on MongoEngine
MongoEngine prefers ODM but documents often have relationships.

That comes at some cost in MongoDB and document databases in general. Often it is best to start with the opposite of modelling a relational db - start denormalised and normalise where it makes sense to.

The catch with MongoEngine is know that ReferenceFields are dereferenced in the application layer and design your Documents accordingly.

rozza··on Introducing MongoMallard: A fast ORM based on MongoEngine
Schematics was an early fork of MongoEngine - focusing on data modelling and validation of various data formats, dicts, json & bson documents.
rozza··on Introducing MongoMallard: A fast ORM based on MongoEngine
Really pleased to have these improvements and look forward to getting them into MongoEngine 0.9 :)
rozza··on With $42M more, 10gen wants to take MongoDB mainstream
I ended up sharding my mug :(
rozza··on MongoDB Monitoring Service (MMS) released to the public
Any more screenshots available?
rozza··on MongoEngine 0.5 Released
Yes me, we use it to formalise documents and explicitly declare what data we store.

For total flexibility dictionary fields are best, they will handle any complex type eg: embedded dictionaries, lists or even other documents (automatically converting to a DBRef), however, you dont get validation, which may or may not be an issue based on your circumstances.