Hacker News: derekzhouzhen

New comment by derekzhouzhen in "Build Personal Web Applications"

derekzhouzhen — Thu, 28 May 2026 18:33:45 +0000

A personal web application is one that is written by me, hosted by me, and have a grand total of one user, me.

Build Personal Web Applications

derekzhouzhen — Thu, 28 May 2026 18:33:45 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.roastidio.us/posts/personal_web_application/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48313419

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

New comment by derekzhouzhen in "Run Linux containers on Android, no root required"

derekzhouzhen — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 19:35:26 +0000

This is exactly Termux's point, to subvert Android into linux cheaply. Same for MinGW or MSYS2. I want to invest as few as possible on Andriod or Windows, while still able to use them in the way that I prefer.

New comment by derekzhouzhen in "Emailing a one-time code is worse than passwords"

derekzhouzhen — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 17:56:56 +0000

How is it different from plain old password?

1) User goes to BAD website and enter credentials

2) BAD website use GOOD website to check if credential is valid

3) Pwned

It is just MITM attack. The moment you go to BAD and enter credential (password or one time code) you are done.

New comment by derekzhouzhen in "The HTML Hobbyist (2022)"

derekzhouzhen — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 22:43:54 +0000

My blog is essentially my journal; no one else reads it. However, knowing someone else _might_ read it is making me spend the effort to write in better style, to watch my language, so I would not be embarrassed by myself. That's the value of blog over journal for me.

New comment by derekzhouzhen in "Making TRAMP faster"

derekzhouzhen — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 18:53:10 +0000

I used to use TRAMP but now I just run terminal emacs through mosh. Everything just work and snappy, if you can live without the emacs GUI.

New comment by derekzhouzhen in "Plain Vanilla Web"

derekzhouzhen — Mon, 12 May 2025 21:05:25 +0000

Yes, you can kiss reactivity good-bye and just render the whole page on any state change.

No, generating HTML string and setting innerHTML is unsafe and slower than necessary. It is better to create DOM elements programmatically. HTML is for serialization of the DOM tree; if everything is done in javascript then you don't need HTML as an intermediate step.

New comment by derekzhouzhen in "Plain Vanilla Web"

derekzhouzhen — Mon, 12 May 2025 13:48:38 +0000

You can use shadow-dom without using web-component. web-component and shadow-dom are orthogonal to eachother:

* web-component is a way to attache javascript to certain elements. There are other ways to do it, but sometime this way feel cleaner, like when you do server-side rendering and not using any javascript framework.

* shadow-dom is a way to organize your styles. As you said there are other ways to do it, but I find it useful because it offers full isolation, and is compatible with browsers 3 years back.

New comment by derekzhouzhen in "But what if I want a faster horse?"

derekzhouzhen — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 20:00:38 +0000

Me too, but you and I cannot afford a faster horse, or even the same horse we once had. The horse they use to offer was an illusion, a bait for the new Tiktok thing. Sooner or later, people will forget that horses once exist.

New comment by derekzhouzhen in "The Frontend Treadmill"

derekzhouzhen — Sat, 22 Mar 2025 00:20:30 +0000

The frontend world gave you many fancy toys; but they all come with hidden cost. It is your choice: do you want to stay on or get off this treadmill? My need is modest, so I got off. I rewrote my simple SPA from Svelte to SolidJS to no framework at all. Now I have ~1000 LOC javascript, ~500 LOC CSS, all written by myself. No framework, no package, no build step. If you want to see it in action:

https://airss.roastidio.us

It is a fully functional RSS reader. You are welcome to poke under the hood. The key insight is that I don't need reactivity, if re-rendering everything at every event is fast enough.

I believe this style of barebone SPA programming can scale up to at least 10,000 LOC javascript.

New comment by derekzhouzhen in "Ask HN: Which RSS reader do you use?"

derekzhouzhen — Sat, 18 Jan 2025 14:30:37 +0000

If you are this picky, then write your own. That's what I did:

https://airss.roastidio.us/

You are welcome to use but don't complain the lack of functionality. I wrote it to suit my own need.

New comment by derekzhouzhen in "The Static Site Paradox"

derekzhouzhen — Tue, 08 Oct 2024 19:57:18 +0000

_realized_ utility.

Also, the article is about fully managed Wordpress vs self-hosted (or PaaS hosted) SSG. If the choice is between self-hosted Wordpress vs self-hosted SSG, I bet the outcome will be very different.

Now, you may wonder why the OP was not make an apple to apple comparison, like fully managed Wordpress vs fully managed SSG. Well, fully managed SSG does not exists, because it won't sell!

New comment by derekzhouzhen in "The Static Site Paradox"

derekzhouzhen — Tue, 08 Oct 2024 19:13:18 +0000

There is no paradox at all: simplicity is beautiful but complexity sells. The author thinks that value come from realized utility. However, in most market segments, value came from perception. With complexity (even useless ones), you can boost perceived value. How do you impress people when all the greatness is under the hood?

I use several SSGs and wrote one myself. I still can't recommend any SSG to people willing to pay.

New comment by derekzhouzhen in "Why Gumroad Didn't Choose Htmx"

derekzhouzhen — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 14:58:05 +0000

I wish more people publish negative testimony like you do. It shows guts.

New comment by derekzhouzhen in "We accidentally burned through 200GB of proxy bandwidth in 6 hours"

derekzhouzhen — Thu, 19 Sep 2024 21:17:09 +0000

I feel your pain, but I refuse to cave. Say, 10% of the links fail to load, so what? It is their loss, not mine.

New comment by derekzhouzhen in "Cohost to shut down at end of 2024"

derekzhouzhen — Mon, 09 Sep 2024 22:27:59 +0000

I think "ethical" in the context of social media means not doing surveillance capitalism. ie: don't cash on user data. Moderation is a orthogonal topic.

New comment by derekzhouzhen in "Cohost to shut down at end of 2024"

derekzhouzhen — Mon, 09 Sep 2024 20:47:54 +0000

I doubt an ethical social media will ever work. It is either irrelevant or a money black hole.

New comment by derekzhouzhen in "Google Is Keeping Cookies in Chrome After All"

derekzhouzhen — Mon, 22 Jul 2024 21:23:56 +0000

Name is misleading. It is not about cookies in general, but 3rd party cookies. Google's own tech doc is here:

https://developers.google.com/privacy-sandbox/3pcd/chips

you can still enable CHIPS in chrome but it won't happen for the mass after all.

New comment by derekzhouzhen in "Show HN: OpenOrb, a curated search engine for Atom and RSS feeds"

derekzhouzhen — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 21:52:14 +0000

No. but you can try the search here:

https://roastidio.us/search

New comment by derekzhouzhen in "Show HN: OpenOrb, a curated search engine for Atom and RSS feeds"

derekzhouzhen — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 17:00:14 +0000

> If you put your 10 favourite blogs in there, it'll search just those blogs...

10 feeds will not give you much recall. I have 50K+ feeds, 1M+ posts, and it just starts to give somewhat respectable results.