jwoglom

While the manufacturer-provided ecosystems function okay, they give you limited data mobility in case you switched to a different diabetes-related product like a CGM or insulin pump. They also introduce a dependency on on a cloud SaaS platform managed by said manufacturer, which can impose limitations, such as not allowing for real-time access to your data (Dexcom requires an approval process to get real-time data from their API: https://www.dexcom.com/webapi) and can have uncertain reliability (Dexcom had a notable outage in 2019, for instance: https://www.wsj.com/articles/diabetes-blood-sugar-data-outag...).

Conversely, you can run a Nightscout server on a Raspberry Pi in your home, or on a cloud server, for yourself and have full access to your data.

Full press release: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230124006085/en/Tid...

While technically URLs have no formal length limit, various sources suggest that URLs with more than around 2,048 characters start causing issues in browsers, and around 8,196 start causing issues in CDNs (https://stackoverflow.com/a/417184). You can work around this partially by not storing this state information in the query string (path/to?<state>) and instead using a hash string (path/to#<state>), and then extract that data in JavaScript such that it's not sent to the server at all.

IMO, the canonical way to solve this problem is using protocol buffers, which you can then serialize into a much smaller number of bytes, which is then base64 encoded. For example, as mentioned in another comment in this thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34314578), Yahoo Finance has a 1,616 character-long URL with 1,572 characters of base64-encoded JSON state:

> {"interval":"week","periodicity":1,"timeUnit":null,"candleWidth":4.3486590038314175,"flipped":false,"volumeUnderlay":true,"adj":true,"crosshair":true,"chartType":"line","extended":false,"marketSessions":{},"aggregationType":"ohlc","chartScale":"linear","studies":{" vol undr ":{"type":"vol undr","inputs":{"id":" vol undr ","display":" vol undr "},"outputs":{"Up Volume":"#00b061","Down Volume":"#ff333a"},"panel":"chart","parameters":{"widthFactor":0.45,"chartName":"chart"}}},"panels":{"chart":{"percent":1,"display":"F","chartName":"chart","index":0,"yAxis":{"name":"chart","position":null},"yaxisLHS":[],"yaxisRHS":["chart"," vol undr "]}},"setSpan":{"multiplier":5,"base":"year","periodicity":{"period":1,"interval":"week"}},"lineWidth":2,"stripedBackground":true,"events":true,"color":"#0081f2","stripedBackgroud":true,"eventMap":{"corporate":{"divs":true,"splits":true},"sigDev":{}},"customRange":null,"symbols":[{"symbol":"F","symbolObject":{"symbol":"F","quoteType":"EQUITY","exchangeTimeZone":"America/New_York"},"periodicity":1,"interval":"week","timeUnit":null,"setSpan":{"multiplier":5,"base":"year","periodicity":{"period":1,"interval":"week"}}}]}

The un-base64'd JSON dictionary is 1,162 characters long, 569 of which is composed of just the key names (48 percent!), and most of the remaining fields likely contain their default value. If this was instead encoded in protobuf, the key names wouldn't need to be included, since fields are referenced by their field ID, and default field values would take up little-to-no space since when the default value is present it isn't encoded into the structure. I presume that, if done efficiently, you could likely make an equivalent representation in protobuf that is 1/4th or even 1/8th the size. You also get, for better or for worse, what is essentially obfuscation for free (yes, you can read out the packed format, but without an equivalent protobuf struct definition it's still hard to tell what field is which, and the entire operation becomes much more labor-intensive).