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trebor

1,140 karma · joined September 15, 2009

Zend Certified Engineer (PHP 5.5) Polyglot Programmer Tea Enthusiast
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trebor··on Laravel raised money and now injects ads directly into your agent
I've used Laravel since v3. Taylor's ego has started to tick me off in the last ~5 years. And, I feel like him buying a Ferrari made his priorities apparent. I'm not sure what happened to making a framework that had the nuts and bolts included out of the box. But he's clearly moved from "build a framework" to "build a platform" that drives money to his pockets.

Not okay.

trebor··on Amazon denies tariff pricing plan after White House calls it "hostile/political"
Ignoring tariffs for the moment... No one should be shocked that Amazon would do this.

Remember back when it was controversial to apply sales tax to online shopping? The biggest lobbyist against it was Amazon, which they marketed as fighting for the market against the government. Then they got big enough to survive a reversal ... and swung the other way to weaponize the law against their smaller competitors.

They've done a lot more than this, including creating their own brands to inject into a successful niche product or segment. They did all that off of sales/product data they aggregated from all sales on their platform.

Amazon is a dirty player in the market, and everyone should remember that.

trebor··on Amazon's AI crawler is making my Git server unstable
Upvoted because we’re seeing the same behavior from all AI and Seo bots. They’re BARELY respecting Robots.txt, and hard to block. And when they crawl, they spam and drive up load so high they crash many servers for our clients.

If AI crawlers want access they can either behave, or pay. The consequence will almost universal blocks otherwise!

trebor··on MIT engineers make converting CO2 into useful products more practical
Okay, but why not work on making atmospheric methane more useful/practical? CO2 is less of a warming influence than methane, and there have been huge natural gas leaks (of methane) in the last 10-20 years. Even MIT admits that Methane is more important: https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/what-makes-methane-more-pote...
trebor··on Do you know that soffit and fascia repair will prevent several issues?
So this is just an advertisement for your company's services? Noted...
trebor··on Show HN: AI Image Upscaler and Photo Enhancer with up to 10x resolution boost
Upvoted because your ToS is very clear about the images we scale aren't used to improve training. Thank you for that.

I have some pretty old photos I may have to pull out and upscale. They're from back in the old 1MP camera days.

trebor··on Chinese Researchers Reportedly Crack Encryption with Quantum Computer
So 5,000 qbits to crack a 50 bit prime key. That’s an interesting factor. Assuming a similar scale, 204,800 qbits would crack RSA 2048 keys. I’m curious why it scales to needing “millions” according to those researchers.
trebor··on Biblical plant with medicinal properties resurrected from 1,000-year-old seed
Fruit trees can take a very long time to mature and grow flowers/fruit. Hopefully it can pollinate with itself, and isn’t a kind that has sexes.
trebor··on Microsoft details security/privacy overhaul for Windows Recall ahead of relaunch
I still believe Recall to be a very bad idea, a feature no one wanted, and a risk even as an Opt-In choice. But at least it will be harder to access.

I want to see a security researcher play with it though.

So far, I'm not a fan of Windows 11, Windows+AI, etc.

trebor··on WordPress.org bans WP Engine
Maybe you misunderstand the market my employer serves?

We've built sites for clients both huge and small. Our clients like WordPress because it's well supported, easy to roll out, and easy to find someone to work on. Lots of people have experience with it, from having their own blog.

Even infrequently updated content can go through a logjam of revisions. And this is the failure of WordPress's versioning model: there's no way to "check in" a revision. So you can't mark what's approved/reviewed. Instead of a "check in" that nukes the middle revisions ... now you have 5-7 revisions where someone updated a button text.

Add in ACF fields (which uses approx 2.5 rows in post_meta PER FIELD) and now you've got a complex page with lots of rows that build it up. Now each "revision" is 1 post row + 20 - even 1000 post_meta rows. You see the problem.

Over time the DB bloats, and the index isn't partitioned in any way. That page a cheap dev built to query something? Runs 5x slower after a year, and the client doesn't know why.

The only reason we use WP over other platforms is: support, maintenance, but most importantly to the client COST.

trebor··on WordPress.org bans WP Engine
It’s the excess, unaccessed content. The indexes haven’t been well optimized in MySQL (MariaDB is better).

But still. A lot of small companies only pay $20/mo for hosting …

trebor··on WordPress.org bans WP Engine
I have used and developed in Wordpress since 3.2. Mullenweng is a dictator and maverick, and I’m not convinced that he’s good for the Wordpress ecosystem.

But neither are highly customized WP hosting platforms.

Revisioning, especially since the post_meta table was added, is a huge burden on the DB. I’ve seen clients add 50 revisions, totaling thousands of revisions and 200k post meta entries. Important enough to call disabling it by default a “cancer”? Chill out Matt.

Revisions aren’t relevant past revision 3-5.

trebor··on Zero calorie sweetener linked to blood clots and heart disease, study finds
Wait, so they added 30g of erythritol and observed negative impacts? Most the time I see it around 7g plus other sweeteners. It’s almost never alone now.

I bet they need to look at 30-45g sugar harder now. Maybe uncover some of that (big sugar suppressed) research that it causes heart disease.

trebor··on Elon Musk Is Making His Advertising Crisis a Problem for Sex Workers
I think this flag was added because a lot of these sex workers want to post pictures without flagging their sensitive media. Then they dog pile replies on all the trending tweets, and people find the adult content.

Any time that happens to me, I flag sensitive content. And then I block the user—so I don't need to deal with it.

I see this as punishing people who're not following the terms, not gatekeeping.

trebor··on Core Web Vitals saved users 10k years of waiting for web pages to load
I bet this is less time than my uBlock Origin rules have saved me. <_<
trebor··on Post-truth society is near
Uh... Post-truth has been here awhile. They’ve had the capacity to fake/alter live events for decades now.
trebor··on Hai: AI Dating Assistant
Isn't this just AI-powered cat-fishing? Even if that's not your _intended_ use-case, I anticipate it being >90% of all users being cat-fishers.
trebor··on Bun 1.0 announcement [video]
Bun is a very nice runtime. I played with it for several hours, and was impressed by how snappy it feels.
trebor··on MrBeast – #002|Relentless Podcast
You should check the guidelines:

> Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.

There's an entire "Show HN" part of the site for self-promotion of a project. https://news.ycombinator.com/show

You're simply posting your podcast as self-promotion of each episode, assuming that we're interested. I suggest you try a "Show HN" approach, and let _others_ post links to episodes they're interested in. If you don't, you'll hit a wall for self-promotion and get flagged/banned. (Eventually.)

trebor··on Tailwind is Bad (If you don't know how to use it)
Tailwind is also bad if you do know how to use it. The need for an atomic abstraction off every combination of property and value… is not a sign of skill or good design.
trebor··on Ask HN: Any IDEs or text editor plugins with AST-driven navigation?
I think https://zed.dev might have this?
trebor··on Ask HN: After GPT4 Livestream. Are you inspired or ready to quit dev job?
I think that GPT4 (and all others) are overhyped, and overblown.

ML/LLM does not fundamentally understand the code. It has to be trained based upon contextual information as to what the code is doing. There are already researchers experimenting with "poisoning" ML models.

For the industry, it just means that a lot of people who _cannot_ code (IE, they haven't the skill, training, or experience to do it) will "start coding" and launch products. Then, when it breaks they'll have to rely upon someone who actually understands why the edge-case bug happened.

ML/LLM are awesome foot-cannons. They have their place, but like a firearm — their 90% use-case will be to cause harm to other individuals (directly, or indirectly).

trebor··on Show HN: NPM package for a visual scripting editor
Well, that isn't the use-case I would need. The whole app would be written in PHP, so there would be no node process to execute the function. Invoking the function in node would require launching it, which would take a lot of time.

I'm thinking of various sites that need a "script" condition for domain logic. Like, "this coupon applies when your cart contains 5 items worth at least $5 each". If the client tried to write the logic for that they'd have no clue how. But a graph editor would be make that user-friendly.

There's just not a lot of FBP stuff for PHP, even though it's a popular language.

trebor··on Show HN: NPM package for a visual scripting editor
This is very cool.

However, most our use cases would be in PHP apps. I see that you’re working on a code generation API. Would that be the step necessary for generating the PHP invokable code?

trebor··on Bacteria and Cancer: It's Not Random
Ever since I saw a picture of bacteria found in a tumor I have been fascinated. The more correlations I see uncovered, the more I wonder: did the bacteria colonize a tumor it found, or did the bacteria encourage the body to form a tumor to colonize?
trebor··on Gut epithelial barrier damage caused by dishwasher detergents and rinse aids
Ironically, the summary isn't as good as the "Key Messages" section at the bottom:

> * Professional dishwasher rinse aid causes cellular cytotoxicity and directly impaired barrier integrity of gut epithelial cells by damaging TJ and AJ expressions in daily exposed concentrations. > * The underlying mechanisms of epithelial barrier disruption in response to rinse aid were cell death in 1:10,000 dilutions and epithelial barrier opening in 1:40,000 dilutions. > * The alcohol ethoxylates, an ingredient of the rinse aid that remains on washed dishware, caused the gut epithelial inflammation and barrier damage.

It appears to be the rinse aid when used in professional dishwashers utilized in restaurants, etc, due to high concentration of the rinse aid contaminating the "clean" dishes.

trebor··on Red meat is not a health risk. New study slams years of shoddy research
Compare a hand-made loaf of bread to one from the grocery store. Count the number of ingredients. The hand-made loaf is usually made from flour, with water, oil, and leavening. If you buy unprocessed flour that makes 4 or 5 ingredients as a base. A store bought, whole wheat loaf of bread contains roughly 16 ingredients. The home-made loaf doesn't contain preservatives because it won't need to sit on a shelf for a prolonged period. The home-made loaf can use higher quality/purity ingredients than you will find in the grocery store in the USA. White bread is worse.

Not all bread is made the same. Not all bread ingredients are the same. Those individual ingredients can be processed as well. The more processing on the ingredients and end product, the more "processed" a food is. I'm not even touching "highly processed" or "ultra-processed" foods in this short post.

trebor··on Car Quality Is Slipping
I think that the base claim that "Car quality is slipping" is generally true. But I think that this is a trend that began a decade ago. Comparing the track records of the vehicles I've owned:

2002 Corolla (used) - rock solid reliability, only cosmetic issues with vinyl and a need for break pads.

2013 Elantra (brand new) - reliable, except for an electrical issue caused by an off-brand Rocket Fish (Best Buy in-house brand) car charger for my phone. The charger would send dirty electrical signals back into the car, and the new 1st generation power system would trip up... and I wouldn't have climate controls, defrost, wipers, stereo, etc for a random amount of time. I eventually reproduced it for the dealership, but was told by Hyundai that they wouldn't do anything since it wasn't a "defect". I traded it in ASAP for the next car, while it still had trade-in value.

2013 Civic (used, current daily driver) - so far rock solid, except for a tendency to burn up the brake's rotors. I had to replace calipers, pads, and rotors shortly after purchase of the vehicle (they were brand new at purchase IIRC). Occasional power system (maybe the battery?) issue where the airbag system shuts off randomly at start up.

I'm definitely cautious about buying a newer car now. I always try to review the lists at CarComplaints.com when considering what I might want to look for.

trebor··on Ask HN: Are YouTube Comments Working?
I think this is intentional behavior on Google’s part, to disincentivize use of ad blockers.
trebor··on EpubPress, turn web content into ebooks
I have needed this for years! Thank you for this site/tool!
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