ravloony (u/ravloony)

ravloony commented on Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails github.blog/2023-04-06-bu... · Posted by u/Lukas_Skywalker

On the contrary, it is so much easier to upgrade a small app every week or so because you have little to test and probability of breaking changes affecting you is minimal.

You should be upgrading all the time since day one, adding necessary infrastructure gradually as your app grows.

ravloony · 2 years ago

Absolutely. I was leading a team a while ago and I instituted this practice to good effect.

Conversely, I was called by a company that I had built an app for previously. They had not upgraded the framework it was built with (Laravel), and ended up offering me consulting days to jump several versions. The irony is that the job ended up being quick and easy to do.

ravloony commented on A Heisenbug lurking in async Python textual.textualize.io/blo... · Posted by u/willm

quietbritishjim · 3 years ago

I do wish he dwelt on task groups a bit more at the end. Many comments here seemed too have missed that bit. They're not just a handy way of executing a hack. Instead, they're a revolutionary way (ok maybe that's a but string but not much) to structure your async program to avoid a whole host of bugs.

A code snippet would have been nice, or a link to the blog post that introduced them (in trio, another async library): https://vorpus.org/blog/notes-on-structured-concurrency-or-g...

ravloony · 3 years ago

I also came here to say this. Structured concurrency gets rid of these types of problems.

ravloony commented on Why Twitter didn’t go down: From a real Twitter SRE matthewtejo.substack.com/... · Posted by u/mtejo

weinzierl · 3 years ago

No matter if it was or not and for better or worse:

If Twitter survives this without any major harm it will have profound consequences for the whole software industry.

ravloony · 3 years ago

This is exactly why this thread is full of slightly insecure comments making vague predictions. I'd suggest to most of them to get off HN and back to work, now is the time to make yourself useful!

ravloony commented on On Being Broke thomasjbevan.substack.com... · Posted by u/vitabenes

h2odragon · 4 years ago

Toilets are not mystical mechanisms; the flush is simply pouring water into the bowl. When the tank's empty, or (as is common now with "low flow" toilets) insufficient to the job, pouring more water into the bowl from a bucket or jug will work.

I submit that that aint "broke". You're "broke" when you have to decide whether to repair the car so you can get to work, or repair the heater so you can sleep and shower and stuff, or buy food. "Broke" is when you know all the places you can hit for free crackers on your way to somewhere else.

ravloony · 4 years ago

Ah, but that is not what he wrote. He never claimed the toilet was broken because he was broke, but due to bad organisational skills.

He then used the story to illustrate the fact that such things can become fond memories, and related _that_ fact to poverty.

At least, that is how I understand the text.

ravloony commented on Considering Rust [video] youtube.com/watch?v=DnT-L... · Posted by u/Jonhoo

melling · 6 years ago

I'm 20 minutes in and he's spending a lot of time talking about how Rust gets correctness right.

Are there any anecdotal stories about how Rust programs have fewer errors?

Facebook, for example, rewrote Messenger with ReasonML:

https://reasonml.github.io/blog/2017/09/08/messenger-50-reas...

And it had a lot fewer bugs:

"Messenger used to receive bugs reports on a daily basis; since the introduction of Reason, there have been a total of 10 bugs (that's during the whole year, not per week)! *"

ravloony · 6 years ago

anecdote incoming!

In my previous gig, we had a premium website hosting platform, and our incoming clients would usually want their old inbound links to keep working. Over time, this meant a few hundred thousand autogenerated rewrite rules in Nginx. This was causing Nginx to use about 10G of memory, so restarting it, which we had to do every time we added a redirect, was an issue.

I replaced this with a small reverse proxy written in rust that loaded all of the redirects from postgresql into a cuckoo filter. Adding a redirect was an INSERT, followed by a NOTIFY to let the proxy know to add the redirect to the filter.

Putting it all together took about 2 weeks of swearing at the compiler, but it never had an issue in production, and used about 1M of memory, while adding less than 1ms of latency, or about 4ms in case of a filter hit. Cuckoo filters can have false positives, so if a redirect was found, we still had to check in the db table before returning 301.

As far as I know it's still working fine, and I use rust whenever I can.

ravloony commented on Nitrux – Powered by Linux, KDE Plasma 5, Qt and Nomad Desktop nxos.org... · Posted by u/open-source-ux

colechristensen · 7 years ago

It's time for new package management.

One that isn't snapshot images (docker, bundled java/ruby/libraries)

One that takes testing and integration seriously

One that takes security seriously

One that uses c-groups like they were intended

One that allows multiple versions

There are a lot of things that could come together for a new style and generation of package manager, but to do it right you would have to manage a whole lot of things

ravloony · 7 years ago

It seems to me like nix fits all of those criteria.

ravloony commented on The Hitchhiker's Guide to Elm azer.bike/journal/elm/?... · Posted by u/roadbeats

grandinj · 7 years ago

Are the elm overlords still hell bent on "thou shalt program our way or not at all"

Because that kind of dogmatism is a complete show stopper for languages that want to be deployed on even medium term projects.

ravloony · 7 years ago

This is one of the reasons why I chose Purescript for my team's projects. Also it's got a more complete type system, a simpler FFI, and compiles to less javascript.

This is not to say that Elm is bad. O think it's great as a path into FP, and in fact _was_ my path in. But it does limit you in what you can do and learn.

Also, Purescript has this interesting property of being hard to learn (because it is powerful), but dead simple to use (because it compiles to JS). So you only really get stuck on figuring out how to do things in PS, as opposed to how to get PS working, and therefore every time you get unstuck, you have leveled up. So it's hard, but rewarding.

I'm probably off topic by now, but I do think that Purescript in the frontend is a better option for solid application development.

ravloony commented on I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore nymag.com/selectall/2018/... · Posted by u/minimaxir

eitland · 7 years ago

Am I the only one who is totally confused by discourse?

Maybe it's because rhe demo instance was reset way to often or something but I've never really seen a really working discourse instance. (I think both Mozilla and Canonical (has?) run one but they weren't to active either IIRC.

Anyone has examples of a working discourse community?

ravloony · 7 years ago

I think https://purescript-users.ml is running on Discourse. It's quite young though.

ravloony commented on A Billionaire and a Nurse Shouldn't Pay the Same Fine for Speeding nytimes.com/2018/03/15/op... · Posted by u/rafaelc

Osiris · 7 years ago

Why not just do away with fines all together rather than trying to come up with a complex system to try to make them fair. Perhaps instead of fines a more appropriate punishment should be that you're forced to sit in your car for an hour making you late to whatever you were in a rush for.

ravloony · 7 years ago

This is actually a very good idea. Time is the one asset we all have. Community service is also a good idea, but it lacks the immediacy of both fines and your suggestion.

ravloony commented on Britain is, and was, deluded about its negotiating power with the EU blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/20... · Posted by u/merraksh

unchocked · 8 years ago

Delusions are hard to get rid of. Leave campaigned on lies, voters swallowed them, and the government is now bound to try and live by those lies.

Like all delusions, this will continue to entrench itself against reason. When the negotiators fail to reach their delusional goal, the deluded will formulate a conspiracy narrative to protect their delusion.

ravloony · 8 years ago

I don't subscribe to this at all. I think that the better explanation is that the people who are negotiating with the EU are, almost to a man, convinced EU-philes (for want of a better word). And so they favour the EU position in the negociations, instead of just implementing the will of the people.