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tauchunfall

217 karma · joined May 6, 2015

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tauchunfall··on Linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky dies at age 95
>I wonder why exactly this is posted as a google translation of a portuguese article.

He was/is hospitalized in Brazil.

tauchunfall··on A forged Apple employee badge
Also "Rechnung #" instead of "Rechnung Nr." or "Rechnungsnr.".
tauchunfall··on HTML Ruby Markup Extensions Working Draft Published
Yeah, but it's probably unavoidable, the term "ruby" used in British typography is 200 years old [1].

*Update:* Oh and it's interesting, "rubi" was used but the W3C recommendation from 2001 made "ruby" more common as spelling.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agate_(typography)

tauchunfall··on HTML Ruby Markup Extensions Working Draft Published
Very nice to see some progress here. I think "CSS Ruby Annotation Layout Module Level 1" saw most work around 2013/2014, there are also specifications for ruby that are part of XHTML and HTML 5 standards.

Even when ruby markup is popular with south-east asian scripts I mostly want to use it for interlinear text or textspan-level inline annotations for a software to learn languages.

I remember with the ruby specified in XHTML standard there were ergonomic issues when ruby is written, i.e. it's nice for interlinear text markup to not have to close HTML tags. Also there were issues where people did not understand what the differences between mono ruby, group ruby and jukugo ruby is (correct me if I remember it wrong).

Ruby seems to be not implemented well in browsers, some ruby-related tags were deprecated, the specification posted is part of the restoration of these tags [1]. But last time I checked there was interest of all major browser manufactors to implement ruby standard properly.

[1] https://github.com/whatwg/html/pull/6478

tauchunfall··on Network visualization of 50k blogs and links
Also edge bundling can help. See the papers by Benjamin Bach et al.

https://aviz.fr/~bbach/confluentgraphs/

tauchunfall··on Francisco Varela
Radical constructivism is related to the work of the neurobiologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela (they are not called constructivists but attributed as main proponents), and the biophysicist Heinz von Foerster.

A deep rabbit hole which started for me when I read Paul Watzlawick in the late 90s.

(the German Wikipedia article about it is much more detailed than the English one; I guess it's good to read using machine translation)

tauchunfall··on Guy Callendar, the engineer who discovered human-caused global warming
I know that last names are capitalized in french writing convention, but I never saw it in english.

*Edit:* Ahh I see, capitalized not uppercased.

tauchunfall··on Rotz: Cross platform dotfile manager written in Rust
Also repository owner seems to be from Austria.
tauchunfall··on VSCode + WSL makes Windows awesome for web development
Windows 11 taskbar reminds me of macOS dockbar.

I've been using Windows for two decades and before that I loved the Amiga Workbench.

When I had the choice between a Dell Windows notebook and a macBook I went to the Apple store and some enthusiastic person showed me the new 2017 models with larger touchpad and gestures to move between workspaces. I thought "these apple people. who needs that".

Then we ordered the macBook and because of my keyboard layout choice it took a week to arrive. I got a used Dell notebook for week, worked and then switched to the macBook.

When I had to give the Dell back I wanted to transfer some files to the macBook, and I used the touchpad and made some macOS gestures and wondered why the touchpad is so small and why the gestures don't work. This was the moment I understood why the person told me about these things.

I'm using macOS for 7 years now. Also had to deal with some bugs and stupid UX here and there. But overall my OS of choice for sure. Oh and the touchbar on the top of the keyboard was not even a good idea, I think. My last Windows was Windows 7 and I liked it a lot. Windows 10 I never liked, even when I only used it in a VM.

tauchunfall··on Ask HN: Which full stack framework (NextJS, Remix, SvelteKit) would you use?
I would even say type checking is a must. We use Zod to define data schemas and have type completion and runtime checking. We even define request and response schemas in Zod for our APIs (inspired by protobuf/GRPC schemas, but without the code generation step).

I'd say you almost never need file-based routing, I'd even go that far to say you don't need routing DSLs for backend (just use if statements, performance will be fine without compiled regular expression to match all routes). The fetch API has request and response objects, and URL and URLSearchParams. But in frontend I find react-router-dom very practical. I think they introduced file-based routing in NextJS and co, because it's easier to generate frontend code bundles per route by listing files at build time. Other than that it's just a gimmick.

And as already mentioned ORMs (object-relational mappers) will give you headaches really soon, it's probably not worth it.

You can use Vite for the frontend part which is more lightweight than NextJS and co. I'd say if you have or your team has already build a web application with such full stack framework once you probably know what is needed and what is not needed in frontend with Vite.

tauchunfall··on CSS Is Logical
>It's not straightforward.

Yeah, it's a bit implicit. Or you have to learn the rules by heart.

I also saw people struggle with two elements aligned to bottom with different line heights. Turned out they did not know that there is a default line height. And of course the "correct" line height to use is either "1" or "1.15" (not the browser default).

tauchunfall··on CSS Is Logical
It looks like putting a list of utility CSS classes into one line is an intimidating thing of simplicity.

The written Tailwind code might not be beautiful (still it tends to be simpler than well-constructed CSS), but it does not stop the resulting website from being beautiful.

Well-constructed CSS does not stop one from building non-beautiful websites with beautiful code.

tauchunfall··on React has grown beyond its original promise and it's causing more harm than good
>JSX is a mediocre templating language

You can also complain about JSON being a mediocre data format. But I think it's minimalism and compatibility with JS made it successful.

tauchunfall··on React has grown beyond its original promise and it's causing more harm than good
>don't know a single gotcha except for the renamed attributes/props that are otherwise reserved keywords (htmlFor, className).

This is related to `React.createElement`, I think. Preact does not have this problem. For client-heavy web applications I prefer React over Preact (not all libraries work well with Preact), but server-heavy web applications are fine with Preact.

tauchunfall··on React has grown beyond its original promise and it's causing more harm than good
That's true. It's missing "a ton of features" but the question is, if these missing features in the template language stop us from building correct and maintainable web applications. Having that said: We are fine with JSX.

Using Razor obviously did not stop Microsoft from building buggy web applications.

tauchunfall··on React has grown beyond its original promise and it's causing more harm than good
>I suspect they want better condition handling. Because JavaScript lacks a useful conditional expression beyond ternary expressions, condition handling in JSX generally uses boolean operators or ternary expressions.

If a condition in JSX gets too complex I normally extract a component-level function and call it from the JSX part of the component.

tauchunfall··on React has grown beyond its original promise and it's causing more harm than good
>For a static page it doesn't make sense to use React, obviously

JSX is a nice templating language. And when you use Deno or Bun you can use it directly on server-side. My server-side components have no hooks and use preact-render-to-string or `renderToString()` from `react-dom/server`.

Also there is Gatsby which is a popular content management system which also allow non-interactive statically rendered pages (as far as I remember).

tauchunfall··on React has grown beyond its original promise and it's causing more harm than good
>React is just as fast as anything else

React rendering can get very very slow. A classical example are inputs that update very slowly when you type something. "Best practices" lead us many times to this when we round-trip the whole state from input change event, to global store object, immutable changes and back to the input. You can fight it with React.memo and by just mutating the state in-place.

Recently, I found valtio helpful as it allows to hook React components to rendering for parts of the global state.

Also all this useEffect(), useLayoutEffect(), and when it's not enough useEffectEvent() [1] and useEvent().

[1] https://react.dev/reference/react/experimental_useEffectEven...

tauchunfall··on Microsoft's Fast
>What's fast offering that other don't?

When you go to the page:

- first line: "Adaptive..."

- second line: "The adaptive..."

- third line: "...adapt..."

Then the next block:

- "flexible and adaptable"

>FAST provides an innovative theming system called Adaptive UI, which builds design system properties that designers use every day directly into every component.

Then the next block is an example where you can change neutral color, accent color, saturation, border radius, stroke width and density of all components in a frame on the fly.

>like bootstrap, tailwind, chakra, material, semanticui,

In order to adapt all components you have to

- in bootstrap edit SCSS variables

- in tailwind edit tailwind.config.js and probably use CSS variables for the utility classes you use

- in chakra override global CSS styles in the style object

- in material v3 define your own baseline and dynamic color schemes

- in semantic UI override CSS in your theme.config.

But it seems only tailwind with CSS variables allows to change styles on-the-fly, i.e. more than just toggle between light and dark mode.

*edit:* formatting

tauchunfall··on Microsoft's Fast
I really enjoy using GitHub, TypeScript, and VS Code. These are some my most favorite tools.

But Azure DevOps and Microsoft Teams make me think that the Microsoft engineers working on these products absolutely don't care and they probably don't need to care, and the companies using these products also don't care.

Popularity and dominance are criteria for success. Their success, but not necessarily your success. If the product is by Microsoft you have to look more than twice if it's a good product or if it's close to self-sabotage when you use it.

tauchunfall··on Microsoft's Fast
They "acquired" Erich Gamma and let him build Visual Studio Code with his team in Switzerland.
tauchunfall··on Three million malware-infected smart toothbrushes used in Swiss DDoS attacks
>It's not Dutch, it's German, so trying to translate it as if it were Dutch would give strange results

Anecdote: One of my coworkers once thought that Dutch means German. I guess it was because the words "dutch" and "deutsch" look so similar.

tauchunfall··on Full $71M breakdown for The Village by M. Night Shyamalan (2003) [pdf]
looks like "fringes" are what we call in German TV and ad productions "markup".

>Fringes can track the value of benefits or fees that are required above and beyond the raw cost of labor or materials. Fringe benefits could include employment taxes, fees for pension & welfare programs, or daily charges for a given resource. They might also include allowances for holiday or sick leave funds. >Fringes can also be used to track things like sales tax on materials. >Many employment benefits have a limit or cap for how much total compensation an employee can make before the Fringe benefit is cut off in a given project.

via: https://mmb-docs.ep.com/Setup/fringes.html

tauchunfall··on German train company are looking for a Windows 3.11 Administrator
>Recreate the black box in a modern tool that’s easier to maintain.

I assume in the newer trains they already recreated new systems. For the old trains it's just not worth it to modernize, as it's incompatible with the newer trains and thrown away eventually.

And who knows, maybe they gave it a try in the past, and it did not work out.

What you wrote reminds me a bit of a friend who asked me 15 years ago when he installed Java: "Who uses Java anyway?". You just have to change your perspective from an end-user. Same for Windows 3.11.

tauchunfall··on German train company are looking for a Windows 3.11 Administrator
>But running something as unreliable as Windows 3.11 in a production environment does not seem to make sense anyway.

They used and still use MS-DOS, Windows 3.11, Windows 95, and Windows NT for different systems over the years in the older trains starting from 1989 to estimated 2030.

tauchunfall··on German train company are looking for a Windows 3.11 Administrator
It's the first word in the title.

>Remote: Windows 3.11 Administrator (m/f/d).

tauchunfall··on German train company are looking for a Windows 3.11 Administrator
>It’s a remote job offering so it must be networked somehow.

Why do you assume that? The Siemens SIBAS 32 system can be used at home, and an old PC system with Windows 3.11 should be the smallest problem to use at home. The question is, if that's enough to simulate an environment similar to the train.

tauchunfall··on German train company are looking for a Windows 3.11 Administrator
I have the feeling that's how information technology in general is seen in Germany.
tauchunfall··on German train company are looking for a Windows 3.11 Administrator
That's true, but unrelated to software.

When you look at the software and AI, the German car manufactors are ahead of say Tesla.

tauchunfall··on German train company are looking for a Windows 3.11 Administrator
>Windows 3.11 had any built in networking anyway

*Update:* Yes, looks like it uses the networking stuff provides by MS-DOS.

MS-DOS has NETSTART.BAT and PROTOCOL.INI that initializes TCP/IP with IP address and subnet mask.

When you look how a passenger information system in the trains boots up you can see how it shows BIOS information (floppy drive connected, serial and parallel port available, no harddisks) then it boots MS-DOS, initializes a XMS RAM disk, initializes parallel port, loads Crystal ENDS2ISA ethernet drivers, microsoft DOS TCP/IP protocol driver, and TCP/P MEMM driver, and calls NETBIND.COM.

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