Hacker News: digitxpc

New comment by digitxpc in "Why I'm leaving Elm (2020)"

digitxpc — Sun, 16 Feb 2025 19:13:35 +0000

I'm still trying to wrap my head around the anti-forking sentiment among the community and how tight the governance structure of the project is. Open source is hard, and people will always have unfair expectations of open source, but if I'm to take the article at face on the forking drama, what's so bad about letting people tinker with it and release their own forks of Elm? If you're burned out, what's the harm in letting others step in more?

New comment by digitxpc in "Deno raises $21M"

digitxpc — Tue, 21 Jun 2022 20:00:25 +0000

I've written up an at-scale production backend in Node.js and can very much stand by the decision to use Node over Elixir or Go (which I was considering at the time). I think fundamentally, the power of a JS-based backend is its pragmatism--it's not the best at most things, but it comes very close to it in so many categories that it's a safe option for a lot of use cases.

> It seems like people jumped to node based on some performance promises that didn't really pay off (IMO). And since then, we have newer options like Rust, Go, and Elixir as performant back-end options, and even older choices like Ruby and Python have continued to improve.

I'd agree that Node.js performance is generally not the best reason to be writing a backend in it since a static language will often yield better performance, but for the amount of dynamic power you get, it's extremely performant by default[1]. The next most performant dynamic language for I/O is, like you said, probably Erlang/Elixir, but V8 is generally understood to have better CPU-bound performance than BEAM.

[1]: https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...

> Seems like the standard arguments would be that developers already know JS, and that you can share code with the browser. I don't find these highly compelling.

I've found that developers already knowing JS is a very practical reason, if not ideological. I'm in a team with a lot of generalists who like to work full-stack, and being able to use the same mental models and syntax is a lot of cognitive load lifted off our shoulders. It also doubles the hiring pool of people who can hit the ground running on the backend, because now anyone who has experience with JS on the frontend can jump over to the backend with relatively little training.

The other key reason for a backend in JS is that the community is extremely large, which means that a lot of the troubleshooting I'd have to do in languages with smaller communities is done for me by someone who was kind enough to post a workaround online. This saves me a lot of time and energy, as does the plethora of packages.

New comment by digitxpc in "GraphQL Is a Trap?"

digitxpc — Sat, 07 May 2022 07:27:22 +0000

Designing a solid contract can be useful even when you’re one person, for the same reason that decoupling classes or concerns is useful. I don’t need to consult another person or read the code to understand what it’s expecting (especially true in contexts where documentation may not have been written yet).

Stop Writing Great Runbooks

digitxpc — Fri, 18 Mar 2022 16:54:05 +0000

Article URL: https://staysaasy.com/software/2022/02/12/runbooks.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30724586

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by digitxpc in "Migra: Diff for PostgreSQL schemas"

digitxpc — Sat, 26 Feb 2022 22:04:05 +0000

The main use case I found was that my production database had a bunch of changes we did manually (early stage startup and all), so I used Migra to figure out what changes we needed to make to keep the migrations in sync with what was actually in production.

The more common use case is this idea in development—-experiment with different schemas manually and then use a tool like Migra to figure out what migration to write, without keeping in your head what changes you’ve made.

New comment by digitxpc in "My MacBook Air M1 is dead"

digitxpc — Thu, 06 May 2021 23:32:12 +0000

That would require the computer to be bootable, so it wouldn't allow you to get around a fried motherboard sadly.

Moving OkCupid from REST to GraphQL

digitxpc — Sat, 14 Nov 2020 06:52:03 +0000

Article URL: https://tech.okcupid.com/moving-okcupid-from-rest-to-graphql/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25090718

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

New comment by digitxpc in "Lyft Takes over Ford GoBike"

digitxpc — Tue, 11 Jun 2019 23:50:25 +0000

Throw lots and lots of money funding at a bikeshare system so that the system doesn't need to care about profit. Hire competent, driven people for the system so they feel motivated to make the system better even without any financial incentives.

(Perhaps a little pixie dust would help as well.)

New comment by digitxpc in "Princeton Housing Screwed Up Random Room Draw"

digitxpc — Tue, 30 Apr 2019 21:35:51 +0000

"A room with four feet of water was built to last for several years with the intention of being more generalizable to the general population; but with each new room under its original design the old room is no longer suitable for real life use. So why do we keep asking the older room owners to build a new room with four feet of water?

"It doesn't provide a room with many plots that have no walls in it? They aren't as useful."

Is it that hard to design a house with multiple plots over it?

New comment by digitxpc in "iOS 11.4 to Disable USB Port After 7 Days: What It Means for Mobile Forensics"

digitxpc — Tue, 08 May 2018 18:29:50 +0000

The vulnerability that GrayKey exploits isn't known: https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2018/03/05/apple...

New comment by digitxpc in "Please Stop Using Adblock (But Not Why You Think)"

digitxpc — Sat, 05 May 2018 10:17:35 +0000

I'm fairly sure you can just use uBlock Origin and just disable all the filters.

New comment by digitxpc in "Ask HN: How do you plan your travel?"

digitxpc — Mon, 29 Jan 2018 04:07:47 +0000

Sygic Travel worked great for me and my girlfriend this winter.

New comment by digitxpc in "Show HN: RetroClip – Instant Replay for Your Mac"

digitxpc — Thu, 25 Jan 2018 03:26:48 +0000

There's a service called Smartlook (https://www.smartlook.com/) that does exactly this, at scale, for user analytics.

Homeland Security Looked Past Antigovernment Movement, Ex-Analyst

digitxpc — Sun, 17 Jan 2016 19:24:48 +0000

Article URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/09/us/politics/homeland-security-looked-past-militia-movement-ex-analyst-says.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10920598

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Kirk - First Boot

digitxpc — Mon, 04 Nov 2013 16:12:05 +0000

Article URL: http://ian.roon.io/kirk-first-boot

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6669341

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Bitcoin is a Form of Money, Federal Judge Says

digitxpc — Wed, 07 Aug 2013 13:50:44 +0000

Article URL: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/06/us-court-sec-bitcoin-idUSBRE97517G20130806

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6172777

Points: 9

# Comments: 0