Hacker News: danrl

New comment by danrl in "Blocking Internet Archive Won't Stop AI, but Will Erase Web's Historical Record"

danrl — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 14:25:13 +0000

> they would likely obey robots.txt

If only... Despite providing a useful service, they are not as nice towards site owners as one would hope.

Internet Archive says:

> We see the future of web archiving relying less on robots.txt file declarations geared toward search engines

https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-sea...

They are not alone in that. The "Archiveteam", a different organization, not to be confused with archive.org, also doesn't respect robots.txt according to their wiki: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Robots.txt

I think it is safe to say that there is little consideration for site owners from the largest archiving organizations today. Whether there should be is a different debate.

New comment by danrl in "Docs Deserve More Respect"

danrl — Thu, 28 Dec 2023 15:25:58 +0000

As and engineer, sometimes getting started is the hardest part. But there are high quality, open source templates for almost anything in the documentation process available. I wish initiatives like The Good Docs Project would be more popular with engineers.

https://thegooddocsproject.dev

New comment by danrl in "After a brutal stretch, cryptocurrencies are surging"

danrl — Tue, 26 Dec 2023 15:28:21 +0000

I really tried to be open minded and clicked your link. You lost me at:

> By combining Web2 (community interfaces) and Web3 (smart economies), we can launch the next generation of applications — which we refer to as Web5.

This is not how versioning works. It looks more like marketing coming up with the highest number possible without a meaningful increase in value delivered. (Remember the old PC magazines with 999+ games on a CD Rom?)

New comment by danrl in "Waymo outperforms comparable human benchmarks over 7M+ miles"

danrl — Thu, 21 Dec 2023 15:56:32 +0000

Have driven in Waymo and Cruise quite a hit. Don’t wanna beat a dead horse, so let’s talk about Waymo only: It improved every time from when I first got access to today, where a lot of people can use it now. I even had my visiting parents riding in Waymo cars a couple of times and they felt saved and loved it, and they are not really early adopters of anything :) When in SF I always prefer Waymo over any other form of ride service or ride share.

Disclaimer: Google LLC employee. No relations to Waymo, just a fan of self driving in general.

New comment by danrl in "How to Escape a Container"

danrl — Thu, 21 Dec 2023 14:39:45 +0000

I genuinely thought this link was about escaping a standardized steel shipping container, something I recently had to seriously consider. In that regard a disappointing click.

I also wrote my own docker-like containerization code for educational purposes a while ago, so container has both these meanings for me. Yet, me brain was expecting a physical escape story. Brains are funny!

New comment by danrl in "Ancient redwoods recover from fire by sprouting 1000-year-old buds"

danrl — Sat, 02 Dec 2023 14:58:33 +0000

Here in the U.S. west coast mountains some land owners started controlled fires on their property to get rid of the stacking fuel naturally while preserving the bound minerals and helping the large redwoods and sequoias to fend of contenders. I have no idea how they managed to get a permit in this area where officials and population ate crazily scared of these natural processes given that uncontrolled fires make the news every year.

Also, a second generation redwood forest looks very different from an undisturbed one I recently learned from a forest guy who walked with me. He was reading the forest like a book. Very impressive. Turns out, my forest is a second generation and I should maybe take down a few redwoods, something I considered morally wrong before the walkthrough.

New comment by danrl in "Ask HN: What are you passionate about at the moment?"

danrl — Tue, 07 Nov 2023 14:32:20 +0000

http://youtube.com/@danrl/videos

Thanks for your interest!

New comment by danrl in "Ask HN: What are you passionate about at the moment?"

danrl — Tue, 07 Nov 2023 02:56:52 +0000

Building an off-grid home on a piece of land me and my wife bought. We are documenting our progress on YT.

New comment by danrl in "Penn and Teller's Lab Scam [video] (1990)"

danrl — Tue, 31 Oct 2023 17:56:01 +0000

I can second that. I published a Copperfield illusion analysis and got approached to take it down from other magicians (not Copperfield himself). I left it out there in the open. For me, trying to crack the puzzle is part of the fun and why I spend money seeing magic shows multiple times.

My blog post which they asked me to take down: https://danrl.com/magic-mail

New comment by danrl in "Memories from old LAN parties"

danrl — Sun, 10 Sep 2023 03:51:47 +0000

this!

New comment by danrl in "Distributed Consensus"

danrl — Fri, 25 Aug 2023 04:27:18 +0000

Shameless plug for my educational focused Paxos implementation: https://github.com/danrl/skinny

Easy to follow talk teaching Paxos: https://youtu.be/nyNCSM4vGF4

New comment by danrl in "Jira can’t stop people from using it incorrectly"

danrl — Wed, 16 Aug 2023 01:04:43 +0000

No, I really do not like Jira. My manager great.

New comment by danrl in "Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?"

danrl — Wed, 05 Jul 2023 22:41:58 +0000

https://danrl.com - the occasional essay

New comment by danrl in "Show HN: SpaceBadgers – Free and Libre SVG Badges"

danrl — Sun, 21 May 2023 14:57:16 +0000

Great project!

Nit: Personally would prefer rounded corners.

New comment by danrl in "What I want from the internet"

danrl — Fri, 12 May 2023 15:50:53 +0000

Agree on the lack of style. I think it would be nice to give the user agent at least a hint in the form of a color map.

Images can be inlined by the user agent.

New comment by danrl in "How to do distributed locking (2016)"

danrl — Fri, 12 May 2023 13:27:53 +0000

Did a simple Paxos implementation a while ago which I turned into educational code, well documented and coming with a talk and a workshop. May it be useful for anyone wanting to learn about distributed locking from first principles.

Code: https://github.com/danrl/skinny

Talks: https://youtu.be/nyNCSM4vGF4 and https://youtu.be/gAGGPaFDfwE

New comment by danrl in "What I want from the internet"

danrl — Mon, 08 May 2023 19:02:52 +0000

Gemini:// is a protocol that currently feels a lot like the geocities-era web. It is not yet September there. You’ll find how to get in if you try hard enough.

New comment by danrl in "Sensenmann: Code Deletion at Scale"

danrl — Sun, 30 Apr 2023 14:44:00 +0000

You seem to assume Sensenmann is the only code deletion tool used at Google and/or that it is fully described in the blog post.

New comment by danrl in "Not Forgotten: ChatGPT isn’t the only important trend in technology"

danrl — Tue, 11 Apr 2023 13:45:14 +0000

"but projects like the State of California’s effort to put auto registration on a blockchain are likely to simplify the painful process of dealing with the Department of Motor Vehicles."

A surprising number of tasks can be performed online already at the CA DMV w/o any crypto or blockchain involvement. The few painful bits include an in-person driving test (“behind the wheel”) which is unlikely to be blockchained away. Then there is photo taking and vision test and some admittedly annoying paperwork if one goes for verification (RealID). How exactly is blockchain helping here?

New comment by danrl in "Xylazine, a dangerous new drug fuelling Canada’s opioid crisis"

danrl — Mon, 10 Apr 2023 13:48:36 +0000

I doubt most addicts would have the means to buy high quality substances. And of those who had, some may still chose the cheaper street stuff. And this is where society often is asked to pick up the bill. With guaranteed payment out of tax dollars the pharmacy company producing the substitute now has an incentive to get people on it. The problem will never be solved but now it is even more expensive. This is a misallocation of tax money in my opinion.

Singapore doesn’t seem to have a huge drug problem, and they went all in on what you call “the war on drugs”. So maybe there is a winning strategy there, at least for Singapore?