Hacker News: lbruder

New comment by lbruder in "China reaches energy milestone by "breeding" uranium from thorium"

lbruder — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 10:40:52 +0000

CTRL+F protactinium

Once again, nothing.

New comment by lbruder in "Docker Systems Status: Full Service Disruption"

lbruder — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 12:44:08 +0000

Well, the server was up, it was just returning HTTP 503...

New comment by lbruder in "Using Microsoft's New CLI Text Editor on Ubuntu"

lbruder — Sun, 22 Jun 2025 10:35:22 +0000

have you tried mcedit? It's the editor mc (Midnight Commander, a Norton Commander clone) brings along, looks and feels like the old DOS editor, but has more features

New comment by lbruder in "Thank You Bootstrap 1"

lbruder — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 07:39:17 +0000

Hi fellow yelling old man,

would it be OK for me to steal your analogy? It's great!

In the team I'm currently leading, we have made the same observation, with stuff getting more complicated without anything substantial to show for it. In a way we're having a harder time getting out features than twenty years ago, but somehow that's "progress".

As an experiment, I had one of my juniors rewrite a (admittedly small) frontend with Go templates and HTMX, and not only did they have a blast doing it, they were surprised at how simple everything suddenly was. Give that one a try, it's worth it!

That said, there are frontends with requirements that actually do need all that framework crap. Once you want 3D stuff that a user can move around with the mouse, you pretty much have no other choice. While those special cases are rare, people prefer to learn one framework and use it for every nail they see lying around instead of looking at all the other tools in their shed...

New comment by lbruder in "Arm says it wants all Snapdragon X Elite laptops destroyed"

lbruder — Thu, 13 Jun 2024 15:06:46 +0000

What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away.

New comment by lbruder in "4B If Statements"

lbruder — Fri, 29 Dec 2023 13:17:50 +0000

the idea sounds great, but there would have to be something in place to prevent it from degrading into a Wikipedia-style turf war, with people trying to protect "their" code against changes...

New comment by lbruder in "Influxdb made the switch from Go to Rust"

lbruder — Mon, 02 Oct 2023 08:58:20 +0000

we're storing 120M records a day in influx 1.8, offloading cold data to S3, all on a single m5.xlarge instance that runs other backend services on the side. Less than 400 bucks per month overall aws cost, with lots of other VMs in there. We could use RDS too, but why change it to something more expensive if it already works...

New comment by lbruder in "Someone Got Doom Running in Notepad at 60 FPS, Somehow"

lbruder — Mon, 10 Oct 2022 12:04:19 +0000

If this is "just" sending keystrokes to notepad.exe, as in "ctrl-a, del, lots of keystrokes until one frame is done", then I'm actually more impressed by the speed keystrokes and redrawing are handled in the good ol' Win32 EDIT field.

New comment by lbruder in "Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)"

lbruder — Sat, 06 Aug 2022 07:06:54 +0000

Worse is better. C and Unix were faster to implement new stuff as they were only 'good enough'. Lisp machines wanted to do everything 'right', right from the start, and were slower to implement new features. Unix was already winning by then...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

New comment by lbruder in "Forth BBS 2 (1985)"

lbruder — Fri, 17 Dec 2021 22:58:24 +0000

Seconding "Starting Forth" and "Thinking Forth".

After that, Jonesforth (https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2010/08/07/jonesforth-git-reposit...) is an excellent example of Literal Programming that starts with an Assembly listing and bootstraps into a complete usable Forth system. No better way to learn Forth than to actually implement one...

New comment by lbruder in "Leaving MySQL"

lbruder — Mon, 06 Dec 2021 13:14:37 +0000

Another big open source DB I'd like to hear about more often is Firebird (https://firebirdsql.org/) which was forked from the Interbase code released by Borland (don't remember how they were called at the time). Four choices of connection model (process-by-connection, thread-by-connection, some weird mix, and in-process), full ANSI SQL, runs on all major platforms, and uses single file databases. Seems to be the best of SQLite (inmem, single file), MySQL (lots of connections fast) and Postgres (standard, robust) to me, in a single package. But for whatever reason it seems to be completely off the radar on HN...

New comment by lbruder in "Facebook-owned sites were down"

lbruder — Mon, 04 Oct 2021 19:55:36 +0000

Looks like they misconfigured a web interface that they can't reach anymore now that they're off the net.

"anyone have a Cisco console cable lying around?"

New comment by lbruder in "Heroku's Managed DB's have been down for 2+ hours"

lbruder — Mon, 27 Sep 2021 08:58:15 +0000

Simple dynos can be replicated with Dokku and Ledokku as a GUI. Just get an Ubuntu VM on Digitalocean, Vultr or whatever, install and configure UFW, fail2ban and automatic security updates, install dokku and you're set.

For managed databases with replication however, Dokku still leaves much to be desired...

New comment by lbruder in "Revisiting Java in 2021 – Part II"

lbruder — Mon, 20 Sep 2021 06:21:53 +0000

That's basically how C# came into being in the first place. Microsoft "bought" Anders Hejlsberg of Borland Delphi fame, and had him create a "better Java". And IMHO Visual J++ was a much superior Java, with a visual designer that was much more advanced than anything else available back then. The problem? It was very much Windows Only (tm) if you wanted to use the advanced features. Sun was not happy about this. And the end result of the legal struggle was that Microsoft used Visual J++ as a base for C# and scrapped Java compatibility.

New comment by lbruder in "Microsoft Office 2010: Can’t be activated anymore?"

lbruder — Sun, 01 Aug 2021 14:36:06 +0000

It is. Software doesn't rust. My old copy of Office 2000 still works perfectly fine -- with Wine. Windows 2000 and Office 2000 were the last versions I bought. When M$ switched to activation-based "copy protection", I moved on to Linux and never looked back.

But the thing is: You pay for something, and it works. Then, just 11 years after the sale, the product suddenly stops working, just because someone said so, even though it's still in perfect condition. That's a nope from me. Imagine you buy new shoes, and after a while you suddenly can't put them on anymore. Or an oven doesn't work anymore after just 11 years. With M$ stuff it seems to have become a new "normal"...

New comment by lbruder in "Open Insulin Foundation"

lbruder — Fri, 16 Jul 2021 13:03:34 +0000

As a concrete example, German programmer here. 16% of my income go to taxes, another 12% go to mandatory insurances (excluding healthcare), and about 6% go to health insurance. So about a third of my income goes to mandatory stuff and taxes, but when my son broke his arm in the schoolyard, the treatment was completely free for us. Not sure how those numbers transfer to the US, though.

New comment by lbruder in "SQLite the only database you will ever need in most cases"

lbruder — Thu, 15 Apr 2021 14:47:52 +0000

that's one of the reasons I love Fossil so much. Way better backend than Git.

New comment by lbruder in "Why Jira Sucks"

lbruder — Thu, 31 Dec 2020 09:33:47 +0000

I've made the switch back to Redmine for my personal projects. By now it has full Markdown support for issues and wiki. Faster than Jira, and easier to use.

New comment by lbruder in "Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-out use of Excel"

lbruder — Tue, 06 Oct 2020 07:12:08 +0000

It's the PHP of business software. Powers half the market, but boy do mistakes cost you.

New comment by lbruder in "Ami, a tiny cube on wheels that French 14-year-olds can drive"

lbruder — Mon, 14 Sep 2020 06:11:48 +0000

Not sure about other countries, but in Germany at least an AVAS (acoustic vehicle alerting system) must be installed in new electric cars and hybrids. My Zoe sounds like a spaceship while under 30 kph, the sound becoming quieter the faster you go, as from about 20 kph the sound of the tires would be louder than an engine anyway. Could be used for mopeds too.