Recent submissions

Comment · 1 year ago
Excel files can work surprisingly well in B2B scenarios where there's a high degree of trust. At a retailer I used to work at, we ran an impromptu Christmas gifts team in December each year, where corporate clients could put in a large order of gifts to be sent to their employees. Rather than build a website for it, we just sent them over an Excel file they could fill in with the name and address of each employee, the gift they wanted to receive and a message for the label. They'd send the file back to us and we had a process to validate the data and load it into our system. It sounds primitive, but it was much more time- and cost-efficient than faffing around with a custom application that we would only use for one month per year and which the clients probably wouldn't enjoy using anyway.
Comment · 1 year ago
A malicious user who had the knowledge and ability to craft expensive GraphQL queries could just as easily use that knowledge to tie your REST API in knots by flooding it with fake requests. Some kind of per-user quota system is going to be required either way.
Comment · 1 year ago
The Cradle adaptation is only an animatic, sadly. Best case scenario is that it generates enough buzz for a Netflix or an Amazon to pick it up for a full series, but then I'd be worried it would get butchered like Rings of Power or Wheel of Time have been.
Comment · 2 years ago
I've just ordered the first three, thanks.
Comment · 2 years ago
Don't forget deploying updates by either (a) stopping your Python application and then restarting it, hoping your users are not too badly inconvenienced in the interim, or (b) rigging together some kind of blue-green deployment setup. Meanwhile, the PHP developer runs rsync and the deployment is done.
Comment · 2 years ago
In 10+ years of professional PHP development, the only time I've ever had to fix a codebase while updating the PHP version was when mcrypt was deprecated, and it was only around half an hour of work to replace it with a modern equivalent, including the time to re-encrypt the data.

Meanwhile, I've had the misfortune of inheriting a React application that would no longer build a mere six months after the original developer left the company. I've come to loath working on React projects due to the insane amount of library and tooling churn in that ecosystem.

Comment · 2 years ago
Re: Lightyear, a $226.4M box office return on a $200M production budget isn't even close to being in profit, tiny or otherwise. For one thing, a film's marketing budget isn't included in the production budget figure and in this case was probably $100M+ itself. Secondly, Disney do not receive 100% of the box office take. After the distributor's cut, it's probably closer to 50%. Films of this type need to make maybe 3 times their budget at the box office to break even, making Lightyear a spectacular flop.
Comment · 3 years ago
It looks like this service is intended to replace the kind of random "notify us of a missing manhole cover" type forms that are found in their thousands on government websites. For those types of applications, emailing the form to a relevant mailbox is probably the correct thing to do, and in many cases it's the way the existing forms already work. Only a small fraction of government services will have their own custom backend application supporting them.
Comment · 3 years ago
> performance

Ironically, this website loads significantly faster than most modern websites, even under HN-induced load.

> I'm going to support users with accessibility needs

I'm not sure visually-impaired individuals are the intended beneficiaries of this site...

Comment · 3 years ago
I'm not a gamer myself, but my wife is and she frequently points out the creaky door sound effect when we watch movies. It's amazing how often such a small set of effects is reused.
Comment · 3 years ago
Apart from the person who has "fullstack" in his username.
Comment · 3 years ago
Nevertheless, the headline is 100% accurate. Perhaps the problem here is that the catered event rule shouldn't apply when the venue is inside a stadium.
Comment · 3 years ago
Generally, when you see a package asking you to install it globally with `npm -g i`, you can install it locally with `npm i` and then run it with `npx`. Requesting global installation is either an expression of ego or the author is a Python refugee.
Comment · 3 years ago
> Why does it matter if a program is a self-contained binary? It seems like such an odd requirement.

Because sometimes I just want to write `my_program | your_program` without learning how to install and set up a program in a language I don't personally use, particularly when that language has the worst packaging ecosystem of any mainstream language.

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