Hacker News: hot_gril

New comment by hot_gril in "Choosing a Database Schema for Polymorphic Data (2024)"

hot_gril — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 03:29:26 +0000

Definitely don't want to store types as columns in a DB, especially because of the inevitable thing that qualifies as two different types. In this situation, I'd usually take the first one (nullable cols) without much consideration. The DB doesn't need an xor constraint, but it can if you really want. New cols can be added without much impact on existing data.

And if the info is non-scalar, it's either option 2 (nullable FK) or 5 (JSON), depending on whether or not other things join with fields inside it.

New comment by hot_gril in "Serving 200M requests per day with a CGI-bin"

hot_gril — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 07:00:47 +0000

Idk about the internal affairs, I just really don't like Python for web backend kind of things. It's taking them way too long to sort out parallelism and packaging, while NodeJS got both right from the start and gracefully upgraded (no 2->3 mess).

Also I used Python way before JS, and I still like JS's syntax better. Especially not using whitespace for scope, which makes even less sense in a scripting language since it's hard to type that into a REPL.

New comment by hot_gril in "Nvidia won, we all lost"

hot_gril — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 06:35:04 +0000

Aside from iTunes getting gimped, I don't feel like the Mac is neglected at all. Was annoyed about the 2016-2019 MBPs though.

New comment by hot_gril in "Nvidia won, we all lost"

hot_gril — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 06:34:15 +0000

Yeah, going from Intel to M1 was a huge improvement, but not in every way. So now they're closing all the other gaps, and it's getting even better.

New comment by hot_gril in "Nvidia won, we all lost"

hot_gril — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 06:29:50 +0000

Mostly, I trust the card that supports my software with the least issues.

New comment by hot_gril in "Nvidia won, we all lost"

hot_gril — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 06:26:50 +0000

There's nothing annoying about Nvidia cards though, unless of course you're using Linux.

New comment by hot_gril in "Nvidia won, we all lost"

hot_gril — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 06:23:18 +0000

Probably called that because it's smaller than the transaction of buying the game

New comment by hot_gril in "I-cant-believe-its-not-webusb: Hacking around lack of WebUSB support in Firefox"

hot_gril — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 20:13:26 +0000

What's the front door, WebUSB or something else like TLS 1.2?

New comment by hot_gril in "I-cant-believe-its-not-webusb: Hacking around lack of WebUSB support in Firefox"

hot_gril — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 20:11:44 +0000

localhost-only access is a reasonable compromise

New comment by hot_gril in "I-cant-believe-its-not-webusb: Hacking around lack of WebUSB support in Firefox"

hot_gril — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 19:24:32 +0000

In this case, it's probably because the alternatives are good enough, even if it's just that Firefox users open Chrome in specific instances where they want to connect to special hardware.

New comment by hot_gril in "I-cant-believe-its-not-webusb: Hacking around lack of WebUSB support in Firefox"

hot_gril — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 18:11:53 +0000

In a cross-platform way, kinda yeah. Especially on the Mac side where OS updates always break everything.

New comment by hot_gril in "I-cant-believe-its-not-webusb: Hacking around lack of WebUSB support in Firefox"

hot_gril — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 17:45:57 +0000

At least I'm a little relieved that Firefox and Safari don't support that either.

New comment by hot_gril in "I-cant-believe-its-not-webusb: Hacking around lack of WebUSB support in Firefox"

hot_gril — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 17:45:23 +0000

It's supposedly doable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43361159

Maybe hasn't been done, but I agree with some of the other comments around here that if this were truly important, someone would've done it. Or at least if a browser is going to support it, it should only be enabled via some hidden dev setting.

New comment by hot_gril in "I-cant-believe-its-not-webusb: Hacking around lack of WebUSB support in Firefox"

hot_gril — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 17:28:34 +0000

If you even know what an ESP32 is, you can get a browser extension to use WebUSB. Very few users need this feature built-in, let alone enabled by default.

New comment by hot_gril in "I-cant-believe-its-not-webusb: Hacking around lack of WebUSB support in Firefox"

hot_gril — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 17:26:46 +0000

"The need funding from it somewhere" is the concerning part. Don't let desperate people run your browser. They already got caught injecting their own referral codes into links then just said "oh sorry."

New comment by hot_gril in "I-cant-believe-its-not-webusb: Hacking around lack of WebUSB support in Firefox"

hot_gril — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 17:18:13 +0000

Even a lot of reasonably tech-savvy people might not know the difference between the WebUSB consent popup and the security key popup.

New comment by hot_gril in "I-cant-believe-its-not-webusb: Hacking around lack of WebUSB support in Firefox"

hot_gril — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 17:14:41 +0000

Google should've asked me first, cause just seeing the name WebUSB, I said "wtf why is this even a thing, absolutely no."

New comment by hot_gril in "“Normal” engineers are the key to great teams"

hot_gril — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 05:27:00 +0000

// TODO: migrate to UserOAuthLoginProfileAPIService2 by Wednesday

New comment by hot_gril in "“Normal” engineers are the key to great teams"

hot_gril — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 01:52:58 +0000

Even before you hit big scale, there's a lot of boring work that great engineers won't want to do. And what really makes someone a great engineer is the ability to transform a hard problem to something regular engineers can handle the rest of. So I agree that 10x engineers are real and it's often 2 out of 12, but all-star teams don't work, which is why those people often get moved to run new teams/projects instead.

New comment by hot_gril in "“Normal” engineers are the key to great teams"

hot_gril — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 01:48:02 +0000

Save it for myself how, ditch half the work day to go to the gym? I'm going to work 9-5 either way.