Readit News logoReadit News
dominicr commented on Adding keyboard shortcuts to a 24 year-old government website with userscripts   wcedmisten.fyi/post/keybo... · Posted by u/thunderbong
glaucon · 2 years ago
"... it seems to be built from a 1995 tool called Adobe ColdFusion"

As an old guy I have to say the "here be dragons" tone of this phrase made me laugh. I never used it myself but there was a time when ColdFusion was huge.

dominicr · 2 years ago
I used to code ColdFusion, it was great! Really easy to understand and easy to build custom web sites. I saw it more as a framework than a launguage and it tried to push what a framework could do, making it's own browser widgets. Being Macromedia/Adobe they weren't very good and there were other limitations but you could also make use of it being Java under the hood. It was very popular with the US government and there are still a few (but decreasing) number of developers maintaining these old CF sites.
dominicr commented on Balancing Outdoor Risky Play and Injury Prevention in Childhood Development   cps.ca/en/documents/posit... · Posted by u/pella
dominicr · 2 years ago
One of the many reasons we moved our young children from the UK to Scandinavia was to improve their childhood by reducing hazards & risks whilst also being in an environment that was more acceptable of those risks. (The paper distinguishes risks vs hazards as something the child can perceive & control vs something they can't, like a car or unsafe equipment).

My children had whittling knives from age 5, built their own fires when we went on walks, could explore into the small woodlands on their own soon after and walked home from school at age 7. None of this would have been socially acceptable in a UK city but was pretty much standard in Oslo. Our children still feel safe and also feel confident doing things themselves. Our level of stress about our children seems to be lower than my friends elsewhere, who have a risk avoidance mindset, living in a society that highlights any potential risk as to be totally avoided and bad parenting if a child is exposed to any risk.

Occasionally you hear stories from the US about parents being arrested for letting their children walk down the street alone or play in the local park by themselves and that seems crazy to most of the rest of the world.

Deleted Comment

dominicr commented on Ask HN: What projects are you working on now?    · Posted by u/sakopov
gitgud · 5 years ago
Did you end up building it? I would be interested to see your solution. Also "Api Middleman" would be a great name!

I asked this [1] a few months ago and have wanted to this for a long time now. I was thinking of it kind of like a caching proxy layer for 3rd party API's, to mainly get around rate-limiting.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22362685

dominicr · 5 years ago
Rate-limiting is a real problem for it, and one reason it might not be feasible as a product as some APIs still rate-limit based on IP, so for those there would have to be some randomisation of IPs used.

I'm hesitant to share it as I know it's quite buggy and a bit too simple at the moment. I've not tested it with enough variety of APIs and use cases. Plus the whole UI needs deleting and starting all over again, but built properly! With all those caveats, it's https://apiarchive.com/

dominicr commented on Ask HN: What projects are you working on now?    · Posted by u/sakopov
dominicr · 5 years ago
I had a need for an API middleman, recording and replaying API messages between an application and provider APIs, without setting up a local proxy. So I decided to built something myself instead of another product. As with many side projects, I'm using it to learn new skills and brush up old ones.

With working from home and schools closed, I don't have much extra time, but the restructured day does mean I have pockets of time where I'd usually be out and about but can now be used at home.

dominicr commented on Why So Many Londoners Live in 'Two-Up, Two-Down' Housing   citylab.com/design/2020/0... · Posted by u/pseudolus
barrkel · 6 years ago
Also a common feature is the galley kitchen, an unpleasantly small working space that often doesn't accommodate more than one person at a time.

It's quite different to what I'm used to from Ireland, where the kitchen is the second social space of the home after the sitting room, and often contains the dining table.

dominicr · 6 years ago
In the UK the kitchen was a larger, family space until after WW1, when they started building more apartments in London. The art deco 1920s/30s vision of the kitchen was that is was secondary to the other functions of the house and that family & social areas should be distinct from the messy kitchen. Over the next few decades that spread to houses, whose owners wanted to appear cultured and have a dining room, forcing the kitchen into a smaller space.

The 1960s especially saw a lot of terraced houses put a small kitchen out back so they could knock through the 2 rooms downstairs and remove the old ceilings and fireplaces. In the 2000s those properties that didn't modernise in the 60s now fetch the higher prices.

dominicr commented on Let’s insulate ourselves from the delusional masses by forming coalitions    · Posted by u/dennis_jeeves
aszantu · 6 years ago
Sect leader in the making xD
dominicr · 6 years ago
The worrying possibility is the other way round: an impressionable mind that can be shaped into action by some of the more extreme ideologies of the world.
dominicr commented on Engineer Says Software Firm Cut Her Maternity Leave Short After Her Baby Died   vice.com/en_us/article/59... · Posted by u/elsewhen
egdod · 6 years ago
Imagine if Donald Trump recently started making some new claim about an event that happened decades ago. Imagine CNN dug up the only historical records that exist, and they directly contradicted that claim.

Would you be this credulous then?

dominicr · 6 years ago
This not a theoretical argument. Trump regularly makes stuff up on the fly when there are multiple records proving the opposite. The White House has to make up 'alternate facts' on a pretty much daily basis to keep up.

The results are always the same: his die-hard supports believe him, and reality is altered; his opponents point it out and wonder how anyone can think he's not maniacal; and the Republican party sighs and repeats the mantra "you dance with the one that brought you".

dominicr commented on Sea urchin population soars 100x in five years   theguardian.com/environme... · Posted by u/pseudolus
Entropee · 6 years ago
Seeming as you clicked the down-vote button and not the 'reply' button, I am going to just assume you don't know...

Congratulations. You win the argument, and the internet.

Pointing out the problems without offering solutions isn't a very useful thing to do.

dominicr · 6 years ago
I don’t think I can downvote replies to my own comment on HN. But I’ll take the internet crown anyway, thank you!

Edit: just tried it, I can downvote your original comment but not your replies to mine.

dominicr commented on Sea urchin population soars 100x in five years   theguardian.com/environme... · Posted by u/pseudolus
Entropee · 6 years ago
You come across as somebody who doesn't have an answer to the actual hard question. Yes - it's faster now than 150 years ago.

What should the rate of change be at? What should we be aiming for?

Give me a bounded interval.

dominicr · 6 years ago
There’s nothing to be gained here so I’ll apply the principle of conservation of energy and move on. When two arseholes blow hard all you get is a smelly room.

u/dominicr

KarmaCake day569February 27, 2015View Original