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zmw

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Yes, it's a scraper extracting results from HTML. Which is very different from a screen scraper...

This dubious 78% statistic has been discussed to death in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28510520.

The submitted title is badly editorialized and leaves out the actual point of the article: only "1% on PHP 8" despite a whopping 78% total, if we take the dubious statistic at face value.

For the record, the submitted title is "78% of the Web Powered by PHP" at the time of this comment.

I'm a maintainer of googler (though I haven't put in much work for quite a while) and the author of the linked document. No, it doesn't use a screen scraper, and I don't know how you even got that idea.

People who own a Linux workstation at home and just want to play a few games is vastly outnumbered by people who own a Windows desktop at hone and just want to play a few games. Probably at least 100 to 1. And the former group, with the “almost works” compatibility, will be a much bigger maintenance burden per customer.

Heck, I’d bet money that the Linux casual gaming crowd you described is also heavily outnumbered by people who have a dedicated Windows gaming PC (e.g. me, Mac user otherwise).

gp: Europeans feel guilty about the colonial past, so they try very hard to make the Chinese look worse.

me: How can it be worse?

Neither gp nor me mentioned anything being "okay", or blamed any party for completely irrelevant crimes (lynching or whatever). Might need to brush up on reading comprehension.

Unlike the fallacy you linked, which is comparing apples to oranges, I made a direct comparison of "colonialism" to colonialism, in response to a direct comparison of "colonialism" to colonialism. Not every comparison is whataboutism, you know.

This lets them say "See! the Chinese are worse!"

Seriously? Even if one believes in this Chinese colonialism thing, there's no way in hell partial economic control is worse than genocides and slavery that accompanied European colonialism in the past.

Have you ever had the (dis)pleasure of porting to Windows? It’s a pile of hot garbage that keeps on accumulating because of so precious backwards compatibility; every single idiosyncrasy from thirty years ago lives on for ever.

You mean typically “available” in pre-compiled form, right? Because Rust doesn’t have a binary distribution system per se, it is at the mercy of package managers to build and distribute binaries, or maintainers need to upload build artifacts to, say, GitHub releases (and installation process would be nonstandard as a result).

I get most of my Rust binaries through cargo when on Ubuntu, except in a few cases when I really want rg (still not available in Ubuntu 18.04) but don’t want to waste 25% storage on the Rust tool chain.

Yeah, "proudly" is probably too harsh, but I do find a general attitude of willful disregard of math and (hard) scientific education in the U.S. I don't think the disregard from policy makers is an accident. Mathematical or scientific reasoning capability is almost nonexistent in the average Joe, and if you look Ph.D. programs in math or hard sciences in any prestigious university, or maybe any university, you see a very international community of students — a marked shift from undergraduate programs. Not saying everyone needs to hold a Ph.D. in math or science, but the overall ignorance means any quantitative argument among a general audience usually meets indifference, confusion or blind acceptance/rejection (at least in my experience). I find this rather frustrating. You know, one can usually pick up humanities and social sciences stuff any time in their life (which usually only involves reading), but there are relatively few examples of self-teaching math and hard sciences later in life, and a good chunk of that subculture seems to end up in the crackpot bucket.

"Math taught in high schools is pretty laughable" is somewhat subjective but a general observation and evaluation (this is actually easily observable even as an outsider, by looking at SAT Math, AP Math, etc.); "physics isn't even required in many places" is a fact. Neither is a bunch of anecdotes.

My degrees are in mathematics and physics, and I've tutored students in elite colleges, so I know a thing or two.

I'm not sure about geography, but the vast majority of U.S. population is proudly uneducated in mathematics and many hard sciences. Math taught in high schools is pretty laughable and physics isn't even required in many places.

Source: Lived in the U.S. for many years.

I once had an ISP (non-U.S., won't name it here) that injects ads into plain HTTP. Didn't realize it was the ISP until I once accidentally loaded my personal website over plain HTTP.

Turns out to get rid of that, I just had to call them and complain about it; they pretended to be surprised and asked me for details, but after the phone call the injection stopped. Worked for other people too.

The technician license exam is extremely easy, you just have to memorize a few hundred questions. Passing the exam and getting the license doesn't actually prepare you for real world operation at all... I think I spent a total of less than four hours going over the questions, and got full marks on the exam (which amazed everyone there... But I'm a physicist to begin with — just not very much into electronics).

By the way, back when I took the exam, I made a tiny web app to help me with the question pool: https://hamradio.zhimingwang.org/. It basically lets you quickly go over the questions, hide the ones you're confident with, then go over the rest again, rinse and repeat. The question pool might have been updated though.

You can't even drag and drop files (images, html files, pdf) to it.

Worse, you can’t even save from it. IIRC my first interaction with Edge was trying to grab one of my scripts or config files off GitHub. Opened the raw text file and couldn’t save it. Searched frantically for “how to save from Edge”, got joke answers like “you can print it”. What a disaster.

Android dominates iOS in terms of market share, sure. And testing for Android is a much worse nightmare.

When I test my site in Safari in an iPhone and an iPad, I’m fairly sure it works on every other reasonably recent (think three years old or maybe even older) iPhone or iPad. Android? Well, there are so many browsers on so many different Android versions, am I supposed to own a fleet of devices, each with a fleet of browsers? (Plus the fact that I can’t really justify purchasing a flagship Android phone for testing, so I only have a crappy one and I hate every second with it; that’s more of a personal thing.) So in the end my attitude with testing on Android is don’t even bother.

That sounds mighty weird, and honestly the statement has certain characteritics that trigger my crackpot alarm (don’t take it personally)... If what you say is true, it’s not like you don’t have recourse — you can write to the publication’s editorial board, or report to your department or institution’s academic disciplinary body (of course, that’s after you have contacted whomever you’re in dispute with; it’s okay, and I’ve had people cold emailing me about my preprint, asking me to mention their only somewhat related and by no means appropriated work...) Also, if you produced whatever result when you were working for a professor, they can publish it under their name (it’s nice to at least have you on the author list, of course), you don’t revoke their right just by publishing it on your own website. Anyway, whining on HN is the about least useful thing you can do.

I only spent about an hour on the rust + wasm app for fun, so I treated wasm-bindgen and wasm-pack as black boxes and didn't really try to understand the inner workings. You're probably right about serialization, but I'm not sure it has to copy huge buffers around.

Look, the supported types in wasm-bindgen are somewhat restricted. The full list is here [1]. Other than "atomic" types like numbers and pointers (I assume the opaque types are treated as pointers too), the interesting one are str/String (basically &[u8] under the hood) and number slices. It's apparently not great if you have to copy these around, but since these are well-aligned, why can't you just pass the starting address and length? Again, I don't know enough about wasm or its current state to say if this is doable. Maybe it doesn't like "someone else's memory" at the moment.

(By the way, wasm-bindgen allows you to access pub fields of structs from JS, but they have to be Copy. That is to say, the opaque types are not completely opaque, but I'm not sure if the pub field access is achieved through implicit getter methods or serialized in the first place.)

Anyway, the frictions might be a big problem if you're doing React-style DOM re-renders all the time, but in my app, I'm only running the computation heavy and memory sensitive tasks in wasm, and communications are few and far between, making it a non-issue.

[1] https://rustwasm.github.io/wasm-bindgen/reference/types.html

You can access web APIs and access DOM in wasm today (from your comment you seem to be unware of that?). I just wrote a tiny web app in Rust with wasm-bindgen, and it’s pretty good already. With wasm-bindgen interfacing is pretty manual at the moment — you need to declare the APIs you need in Rust by hand, but an app without dependencies that modify the DOM generates a wasm file that’s only a few KB. My app pulls in quite a few libs and ended up with a ~700KB wasm build — a bit larger than satisfactory, but definitely in the tolerable range.

As someone who ran a channel with a few thousand subscribers for a year or two, I’ve seen my fair share of 500 error pages on YouTube. Granted, it was always isolated and may recover after a few refreshes (IIRC), but still.

IMO developers who work in scripted or higher level languages and never inspected a call stack have a serious problem (unless they write perfect code that works on the first attempt 100% of the time and never have to debug). I mean, printf debugging is okay, but at some point, preferably early on, you’re expected to graduate out of that (not throwing it out completely, but rather, learn a better way for more complex situations). Plus the fact that most scripting languages throw stack traces all the time.

Wayback Machine isn’t Googlebot, it doesn’t crawl the web, so there’s no such thing as “hadn’t bother to index”... Someone, be it a human or a bot, needs to submit a page for archival.

Programmatically submitting to Wayback Machine is trivial enough, so I have cron jobs backing up most of my static sites (in their entirety) periodically.

Mmm, Pi-hole 8 years ago

I’m only at 7.5%, probably because I use uMatrix in the first place, and have gone out of my way to kill a few applications that phone home like crazy.

Sorry, if that was your thought, I’m afraid all design is probably lost on you. Which might be a blessing, since you can use whatever and can’t tell the difference anyway.

I have a self-hosted domain too, with docker-mailserver, but only for less important email. For important communications I really worry about ending up on a spam list somewhere and landing directly in people's spam box, plus there are potential downtime concerns, so I stick to GSuite for that.