Hacker News: scraplab

New comment by scraplab in "An Update on Heroku"

scraplab — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 23:17:42 +0000

Crunchy Bridge will help you migrate. They did a great job for us. We had a minute or so of downtime to let the read replica catch up and cut across. The team knows Heroku well, and some of them built it. (No affiliation, just a happy customer.)

New comment by scraplab in "Take the pedals off the bike"

scraplab — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 07:42:41 +0000

All three of my kids were riding full bikes around 3 years old, having used a balance bike for 12-18 months previous. I don’t think my kids are exceptional - balance bikes work wonders!

New comment by scraplab in "Guten: A Tiny Newspaper Printer"

scraplab — Sun, 05 Jan 2025 11:18:02 +0000

Yes: https://www.newspaperclub.com/

Disclaimer: I was one of the founders of the business, but left a long time ago. It’s still a great service! We print a newspaper for our friends and family each year.

New comment by scraplab in "We need to liberate the Postcode Address File"

scraplab — Fri, 23 Aug 2024 07:26:19 +0000

I don’t believe it’s ever been accessible for free. It’s just that ownership has moved from the state to a private company and now it’s difficult to make it open.

New comment by scraplab in "We need to liberate the Postcode Address File"

scraplab — Fri, 23 Aug 2024 07:25:14 +0000

OS does release a large volume of open data, but yes, the vast majority of the good stuff is not open.

https://osdatahub.os.uk/downloads/open

New comment by scraplab in "How to make a great government website"

scraplab — Tue, 04 Jun 2024 07:02:45 +0000

I know Dave personally, and I can assure you he’s read Seeing Like a State! In fact, if you spend more than 30 seconds in his presence he’ll probably give you a copy.

New comment by scraplab in "Heroku Postgres is now based on AWS Aurora"

scraplab — Sat, 01 Jun 2024 07:58:19 +0000

Our experience of moving from Heroku to CrunchyBridge has been very similar - excellent help with the migration including jumping on a call with us during the switchover to resolve a broken index.

Would strongly recommend them to anyone looking to move off Heroku.

New comment by scraplab in "Common DB schema change mistakes in Postgres"

scraplab — Mon, 29 Apr 2024 05:48:35 +0000

I refer to Fly.io’s guide to Safe Migrations in Ecto (Elixir’s DB adapter) multiple times a week. It’s a very useful quick reference to check whether you can get away with a basic migration or if something more involved is required.

https://fly.io/phoenix-files/safe-ecto-migrations/

New comment by scraplab in "Enhance WASM: Back End Agnostic SSR for Web Components"

scraplab — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 11:53:42 +0000

By using client side rendering you’re effectively playing SEO on hard mode. It’s all possible, but you’re making life very difficult for yourself.

Google will crawl and render client side only sites, but the crawl budget will be reduced.

The bigger factor is that Google cares a lot about long clicks - clicks on results which don’t immediately produce another search or a return to the results page. Client side rendered sites almost always perform worse from the POV of the user and therefore convert at a lower rate.

And now Web Vitals includes things like Largest Contentful Paint and Interaction to Next Paint, you’re going to find it much harder to bring these metrics under the target thresholds.

If you want to perform well in search, make things easy for yourself: use mostly SSR HTML and CSS and some sprinkles of JS on top.

New comment by scraplab in "SPQR 1.3.0: a production-ready system for horizontal scaling of PostgreSQL"

scraplab — Mon, 25 Mar 2024 18:41:15 +0000

CrunchyBridge will run you a Citus cluster on any of the major cloud providers.

New comment by scraplab in "U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly"

scraplab — Thu, 21 Mar 2024 19:54:41 +0000

Chromium is open source and both Google and Microsoft do whatever they want to it as part of developing their browsers. WebKit on iOS is a closed source blob of rendering engine and assorted bits that it is not possible to deeply extend or alter.

New comment by scraplab in "The Oregon Outback International Dark Sky Sanctuary"

scraplab — Fri, 15 Mar 2024 06:42:27 +0000

Kielder Forest in the north of England is another spot that’s got Dark Sky status[1].

We stayed in a place with an A frame roof that opens into a V shape so you can lie in bed and watch the stars, which was pretty great[2].

[1]: https://www.visitkielder.com/play/discover/dark-skies

[2]: https://www.visitkielder.com/play/discover/skyden

New comment by scraplab in "Children need risk, fear, and excitement in play"

scraplab — Thu, 29 Feb 2024 06:32:44 +0000

Did you read the article? It specially argues for unstructured play and freedom, and against structured play, such as organised sports.

New comment by scraplab in "A custom Zigbee doorbell (2023)"

scraplab — Thu, 15 Feb 2024 08:51:27 +0000

I bought an ESPHome smart doorbell board and put it in the existing 8V AC loop with the existing button and bell. It connects to Home Assistant over MQTT and works a treat, including the ability to silence the bell circuit.

https://www.zuidwijk.com/product/smart-doorbell/

Poem/1: an AI rhyming clock

scraplab — Thu, 15 Feb 2024 08:18:41 +0000

Article URL: https://poem.town/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39380287

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by scraplab in "Proposed top-level domain string for private use: ".internal""

scraplab — Sat, 27 Jan 2024 07:56:40 +0000

I use this, mostly for the .arpa vibes.

New comment by scraplab in "Choose Postgres queue technology"

scraplab — Sun, 24 Sep 2023 21:52:53 +0000

Yep, we process hundreds of thousands and sometimes a few million jobs daily inside Postgres, using Oban in Elixir.

Having transactional semantics around background jobs is incredibly convenient for things like scheduling email only if the transaction is successful, and so on.

You do need to do a little bit of autovacuum tuning, but once sorted it’s been great for us.

New comment by scraplab in "How to sell Elixir again"

scraplab — Sat, 13 May 2023 15:28:30 +0000

We use Elixir. Everyone we’ve hired, from junior to principal, has had no previous Elixir experience. They’ve mostly come from Ruby/Rails or JavaScript backgrounds. They’ve become productive in Elixir quickly and once they’ve understood some of the unique patterns and concepts, all thoroughly enjoyed working in it.

Of course, those with more experience tend to have heard of Elixir and be keen to work in it.

People with less experience are more concerned about whether investing in this language is a good career move, so we emphasise how learning something like Elixir will ultimately make you a more valuable developer.

If you’re considering adopting Elixir for your new project/startup and worried about finding talented developers, I don’t think Elixir will make it harder and might even make it easier.

1-Bit Hokusai’s ”The Great Wave”

scraplab — Mon, 08 May 2023 19:56:50 +0000

Article URL: https://www.hypertalking.com/2023/05/08/1-bit-pixel-art-of-hokusais-the-great-wave-off-kanagawa/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35866283

Points: 391

# Comments: 72

New comment by scraplab in "I test the best smartwatches – so why am I wearing a $15 Casio?"

scraplab — Sun, 09 Apr 2023 21:52:07 +0000

I have a Sensor Watch, which is an ARM cortex processor and SDK which retrofits into an F91W. It’s really nicely put together and offers a lot of flexibility. https://www.sensorwatch.net/