Hacker News: narrowtux

New comment by narrowtux in "GitHub appears to be struggling with measly three nines availability"

narrowtux — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 13:18:48 +0000

When will they introduce GitHub for Business?

New comment by narrowtux in "Oban Comes to Python"

narrowtux — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 14:42:28 +0000

Truly a great library. I have become so reliant on it, because I can basically have a guarantee that some complex process will run eventually, instead of manually catching and handling every error that might happen and write the 50th retry logic manually.

New comment by narrowtux in "AI generated music barred from Bandcamp"

narrowtux — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 09:11:45 +0000

Everybody who cares about music will immediately turn off recommended music with AI. Of course they're not transparent about it.

New comment by narrowtux in "Features I wish PostgreSQL had as a developer"

narrowtux — Fri, 05 Apr 2024 09:55:10 +0000

> The typical way to do schema migration is to compose a list of ALTER TABLE statements. This becomes hard to track the latest schema state as the migration accumulates. It's more intuitive for the developers to specify the desired state. Ideally, PostgreSQL could allow developers to specify the desired CREATE TABLE schema, the engine then reconcile it with the latest schema, figure out the diff, and plan the migration path internally.

This is a terrible idea. The behaviour of engines that do this is unpredictable and suddenly you lose data because the engine deleted a column.

New comment by narrowtux in "IKEA sensors for doors and windows, motion, water leaks"

narrowtux — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 17:31:13 +0000

I agree that this is the ideal solution, but you can't exactly retrofit a place you rent with completely new plumbing.

New comment by narrowtux in "I Hacked the Magic Mouse"

narrowtux — Sat, 18 Nov 2023 10:46:43 +0000

Think about having one plane (the entire glass) pressing 2 microswitches. Debouncing one switch is hard enough, now you've got to debounce 2, and detect if the user was doing a really fast double click, or just pressed in the center of the mouse.

New comment by narrowtux in "Chonky Menu Re-Creation"

narrowtux — Wed, 20 Sep 2023 08:55:50 +0000

macOS has both. if you keep dragging after opening the menu, the mouseup will activate the menu item.

New comment by narrowtux in "Organic Maps"

narrowtux — Fri, 01 Sep 2023 10:28:20 +0000

I still want some app that makes the awesome brouter algorithm usable on iOS. They have an android app which is "easy" to do since the routing module is written in Java, but alas, iOS doesn't support Java.

IMO, brouter generates the best routes for bicycling with lots of options to customize for what kind of riding you want to do (road, trekking, gravel, recreational, commuting, safe and quiet vs. quick, etc.).

Right now I use brouter-web on my iPhone but it's really hard to use since the UI is really small and it's very simple to accidentally place a waypoint. After that, I send the GPX file to my bike computer.

New comment by narrowtux in "Major Reddit communities will go dark to protest threat to third-party apps"

narrowtux — Mon, 05 Jun 2023 15:06:48 +0000

Inspecting the app's content or the network traffic.

New comment by narrowtux in "Ask Wirecutter: Can you recommend a not-smart TV for me?"

narrowtux — Sat, 08 Apr 2023 09:43:07 +0000

Then I'm afraid it's not possible. The reason the input switch takes so long is because of the HDID negotiation.

A video mixer acts as the source and sink for the output and the inputs respectively, where a HDMI switch will just physically disconnect and connect the output port to a different input port, meaning the HDID negotiation has to be re-done every time.

New comment by narrowtux in "Ask Wirecutter: Can you recommend a not-smart TV for me?"

narrowtux — Sat, 08 Apr 2023 08:29:12 +0000

A video mixer a-la Blackmagic ATEM Mini will do this. Maybe there are cheaper options if it's just being used for input switching.

New comment by narrowtux in "Experian is a pile of dark pattern garbage"

narrowtux — Mon, 13 Mar 2023 22:35:38 +0000

You can't tell me they are on the same level. I'm infuriated just reading all the issues people have with this experian service.

New comment by narrowtux in "Serverless maps at 1/700 the cost of Google Maps API"

narrowtux — Fri, 10 Mar 2023 14:15:51 +0000

Thanks, but I'm really happy with our vector tileset solution, and don't want to downgrade to raster tiles. They are pretty slow compared to vector tiles with mapbox/maplibre gl.

New comment by narrowtux in "Serverless maps at 1/700 the cost of Google Maps API"

narrowtux — Fri, 10 Mar 2023 13:38:29 +0000

That is usually out of the question, because raster tiles don't allow you to customize the map (colors, which features to display at which zoom levels, etc). I find openstreetmap way too busy as a backdrop for data.

As I've said, the solutions are there, and there is an actual demand for cheap vector tile hosting without all of the other cruft that is bundled in the commercial solutions but isn't actually needed.

New comment by narrowtux in "Serverless maps at 1/700 the cost of Google Maps API"

narrowtux — Fri, 10 Mar 2023 13:20:33 +0000

There are lots of usecases for apps that don't need these advanced features, and just want a nice backdrop for their geo data.

The current offerings of google, mapbox, bing, etc are prohibitively expensive when you just need a small subset of their features.

The company I work for is a happy customer of maptiler.com which even offers routing and reverse geocoding. It might not be as great and up to date as google's, but it's more than enough for our apps.

New comment by narrowtux in "Throughout the rich world, the young are falling out of love with cars"

narrowtux — Fri, 17 Feb 2023 14:25:31 +0000

Open your eyes and look at the "one size fits all" solution that we have today. Cars upon cars upon cars.

Alternatives such as public transport, walking and cycling have always been gimped in favour of car traffic, lest the car driving populace complain.

New comment by narrowtux in "Throughout the rich world, the young are falling out of love with cars"

narrowtux — Fri, 17 Feb 2023 13:06:02 +0000

Nobody is talking about taking away cars from people who live outside of cities. Yet this argument always comes up when problems with cars in densely populated areas are discussed.

New comment by narrowtux in "History of Video Games (1940's – 2010's) – list of firsts"

narrowtux — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 13:56:42 +0000

Don't click [view source]

New comment by narrowtux in "ChatAI Unavailable? Try Poe"

narrowtux — Mon, 06 Feb 2023 17:41:28 +0000

No web version?

New comment by narrowtux in "EU chat control law will ban open source operating systems"

narrowtux — Wed, 01 Feb 2023 12:14:41 +0000

Yea, I wouldn't have a problem with that regulation if it would be applied to only these critical areas. But it seems that they want to apply this directive to all software that's sold in the EU.

To be fair, I haven't read the actual draft, just read some reporting about the implications for open source software.