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graealex

Re:PoE basics and beyond: What every engineer should know on Thursday October 23, 2025 @10:46AM (#45682432)
What's everyone here talking about?

The absolute low-tech solution would be to dedicate a switch for it.

If you have decent infrastructure with a managed switch, you can easily create a VLAN.

Besides the fact that the female RJ45 is usually inside the dwelling. You'd have to unmount the camera, pull out the cables and connect to it, all at typical heights of 6' and above. That's maybe a concern in commercial setups, although then we're circling back to VLAN.

Re:Should I choose Ada, SPARK, or Rust over C/C++? (2024) on Monday October 06, 2025 @03:16PM (#45495142)
As a more general rant - people who have maybe used 5% of the feature set of C++ come along and explain why language X is superior because it has feature Y and Z.

News flash, C++ has every conceivable feature, it's the reason why it is so unwieldy. But you can even plug in a fucking GC if you so desire. Let alone stuff like basic meta programming.

Re:Should I choose Ada, SPARK, or Rust over C/C++? (2024) on Monday October 06, 2025 @02:48PM (#45494812)
These libraries already exist. God how people underestimate C++ all the time.

Of course you can use a unit type that handles conversions AND mathematical operations. Feet to meter cubed and you get m³, and the library will throw a compile error if you try to assign it to anything it doesn't work with (liters would be fine, for example)

Re:Should I choose Ada, SPARK, or Rust over C/C++? (2024) on Monday October 06, 2025 @02:24PM (#45494497)
There's several libraries, including some supporting units and mathematical operations yielding the correct result types.

And as usual, it mostly comes with zero overhead, beyond optional runtime range checking and unit conversions.

But C++ is a meta-programming language. Making up your own types with full operator overloading and implicit and explicit conversions is rather easy.

And the ADA feature of automatically selecting a suitable type under the hood isn't actually that useful, since computers don't really handle that many basic types on a hardware level. (And just to be clear, C++ templates can do the same either way)

Re:It's time for modern CSS to kill the SPA on Saturday July 26, 2025 @07:23AM (#44693209)
SPAs are about APIs, and leaving the rendering entirely to the client.

It's a reimagination of ye Olde three tier approach. Perfect for apps.

Re:It's time for modern CSS to kill the SPA on Saturday July 26, 2025 @07:21AM (#44693200)
Are you aware that nowadays you can write SPAs in dozens of languages?

It's an entirely different concept. It's certainly not the right technology for a news site, but days ago in a different place, there was for example the discussion about how an SPA and minimalistic API services fit a lot better with your average embedded device.

Not being connected to the work VPN already slows down my Windows to a near halt since a few unreachable network drives is all it takes to make Explorer go unresponsive.

Seems like engineers forget to test these things nowadays.

Re:Dear Sam Altman on Monday July 21, 2025 @04:39AM (#44633012)
Hallucinations come from lack of information, or rather training data, in a particular field.

It is NOT a malicious try at feeding you untruthful answers, nor is it a result of getting trained with misinformation.

Look, it's Apple, Google and Microsoft being at their peak of customer hostility. Each of them constantly push their own browser in their own products.
It already doesn't work if you have humans instead of an LLM. They (humans) will leak infos left and right with the right prompts.
Re:Tell HN: I Lost Joy of Programming on Tuesday July 08, 2025 @01:41PM (#44502267)
> managing a barely competent junior developer who's only redeeming skill is the ability to type really, really quickly

Hits the nail on the head. For an actual junior developer, they'd at least learn over time. With LLM, open up a new chat and you start with a new hire.

Re:Ask HN: Has AWS ever surprised you with a bill? on Monday July 07, 2025 @02:23PM (#44493238)
"Not selling anything" is a wild take on "would you pay $15 per month".
Re:I don't think AGI is right around the corner on Monday July 07, 2025 @02:29AM (#44487321)
You are completely missing the argument that was made to underline the claim.

If ChatGPT claims arsenic to be a tasty snack, nothing happens to it.

If I claim the same, and act upon it, I die.

Re:Caching is an Abstraction, not an Optimization on Friday July 04, 2025 @06:25AM (#44463192)
That's because relying on a TTL simplifies the concept of caching, and makes invalidation trivial, and also inflexible.

It's used in DNS, which already was an example here. There is no way to be sure clients see an updated value before end of TTL. As a result, you have to use very conservative TTLs. It's very inefficient.

To avoid the same debacle that already happened once with Video Station?
Re:The AI Backlash Keeps Growing Stronger on Monday June 30, 2025 @11:29AM (#44424515)
One important thing to note is that everyone has an agenda.

Days ago someone wanted to convince me that AI is already outcompeting humans on a broad scale. Yet I go back to ChatGPT and it gives me non-stop hallucinations.

So I can only assume that the person is either incompetent and that's why they personally feel that AI is better. Or they already internalized the AI hype so much because they're the ones selling it.

Re:Why JPEGs Still Rule the Web After 30 Years (2024) on Wednesday June 18, 2025 @10:21AM (#44310157)
It's a constant battle though to keep those browser extensions updated, especially since Google decided that extensions cut into their profits and they essentially made them useless.
Re:Why JPEGs Still Rule the Web After 30 Years (2024) on Wednesday June 18, 2025 @10:19AM (#44310142)
When it's widely adopted.

WebP gets pushed into your series of tubes without your consent, and the browser that you're most likely to use to view them just happens to be made by the same company that invented the codec. It's DivX and Real Media all over again.

Re:Why JPEGs Still Rule the Web After 30 Years (2024) on Wednesday June 18, 2025 @10:16AM (#44310114)
True. I mentioned JPEG2000 because it had a similar fate, in particular no real reason to use it in the first place.
Re:Why JPEGs Still Rule the Web After 30 Years (2024) on Wednesday June 18, 2025 @10:14AM (#44310098)
That's not an argument. HEIC is to HEVC what WebP is to WebM. The lack of support in other products is due to developers not picking up the pace and sticking with "GIF, JPEG and PNG is good enough".
Re:Why JPEGs Still Rule the Web After 30 Years (2024) on Wednesday June 18, 2025 @10:10AM (#44310062)
To my knowledge, not even every Google product supports it, but I have not verified support myself.

I blame Google for pushing it, but I also blame every third-party product for not supporting it, when it is mostly free to do so (I'm sure all of them internally use libraries to decode images instead of rolling their own code).

Re:Resurrecting a dead torrent tracker and finding 3M peers on Wednesday June 18, 2025 @10:02AM (#44309996)
Yes - the solution to run any illegal activity on the internet: just register the domain in "Russia, China, Iran, or similar country".

You should tell the TOR folks about your findings, they can finally shutdown the darknet and just move their stuff to China.

Re:Resurrecting a dead torrent tracker and finding 3M peers on Wednesday June 18, 2025 @10:00AM (#44309966)
I do like the commitment of registering a whole domain for no other purpose as to be able to spam a single picture, though.
Re:Why JPEGs Still Rule the Web After 30 Years (2024) on Wednesday June 18, 2025 @09:42AM (#44309823)
> It's pretty common in the indie game scene

That's such a weak argument. If I was an indie game developer, I would use whatever obscure format would offer me the most benefit, since I control the pipeline from the beginning (raw TIFF/TGA/PNG/... files) to the end (the game that needs to have a decoder and will uncompress it into GPU memory). 20 minutes extra build-time on the dev machine is irrelevant when I can save hundreds of MBs.

However, that is not the benchmark for a format widely used on the internet. Encoding times multiply, as does the need to search for specialized software, and literally everyone else needs to support the format to be able to view those files.

Re:Why JPEGs Still Rule the Web After 30 Years (2024) on Wednesday June 18, 2025 @09:33AM (#44309756)
WebP is basically a single i-frame from the WebM video codec, which literally was developed by Google to avoid paying license cost for H.264. For which they had great incentive.

WebP is to WebM what HEIC is to HEVC.

You can argue that using free codecs is a collateral benefit here, even though Google did it for selfish reasons. It is not detrimental to the public or the internet.

Re:Why JPEGs Still Rule the Web After 30 Years (2024) on Wednesday June 18, 2025 @09:27AM (#44309708)
Although you can do a bit of Ship-of-Theseus philosophy on those COBOL systems. After every software component has been rewritten multiple times and every hardware has died and subsequently got replaced, all that's left is the decision to stick with COBOL, not the fact that it's a legacy system built in the 60s.
Re:Why JPEGs Still Rule the Web After 30 Years (2024) on Wednesday June 18, 2025 @08:53AM (#44309470)
Funnily enough, JPEG2000-support was eventually removed everywhere. I assume the only reason this didn't happen with WebP as well is Google pushing and keeping it in Chrome.
Re:Start your own Internet Resiliency Club on Tuesday June 17, 2025 @05:03AM (#44297079)
> you don't get it just by plugging the board into your computer

Which btw is a rather trivial thing to implement. I've seen devices host a control webserver with Ethernet-over-USB just for convenience.

Re:Migrating to Postgres on Thursday May 15, 2025 @02:39AM (#43992427)
Till about yesterday, MySQL was little more than a CSV file on wheels, and even current popularity is mostly driven by two decades of LAMP.

You can be sure that PostgreSQL will be applicable for any work load that MySQL can handle, but not necessarily the other way round, so if you actually have the freedom to make a choice, go with PostgreSQL.

In particular, because PostgreSQL has a lot more features, people imply that the other one, for the lack of those features and its associated complexity, must automatically be faster. Which isn't true, neither generally, nor in special cases, since the latter one can go either way - your particular query might just run 4x on PostgreSQL. There is also no universal approach to even benchmark performance, since every database and query will have completely different characteristics.

Re:Migrating to Postgres on Thursday May 15, 2025 @02:31AM (#43992382)
Hopefully at 1B records, you have a business model that allows you to spend some money on either hardware or talent to solve this problem.

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