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    1. What did you do this weekend?

      As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their weekend. Did you make any plans? Take a trip? Do nothing at...

      As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their weekend. Did you make any plans? Take a trip? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

      7 votes
    2. 2021 Disc Golf World Championships

      The Disc Golf World Championships just finished and they have been fantastic. I have watched a lot of sporting events, and this was one of the most interesting and exciting sports tournaments I've...

      The Disc Golf World Championships just finished and they have been fantastic. I have watched a lot of sporting events, and this was one of the most interesting and exciting sports tournaments I've ever seen. I'm a stereotypical Canadian boy and I am saying this about not-hockey!

      If you are not really into disc golf but perhaps interested enough to watch half an hour or so of the 7ish hours of videos that I've linked here, then here you go: Final Round starting on hole 16. If you have interest in any competitive sports (and you probably do if you're reading this) then I guarantee that you will not regret spending half an hour clicking on this link.

      This is all going to be Men's Lead Card coverage from Jomez Pro but if this sparks interest for you, check out Gatekeeper Media for Men's chase card action, GK Pro for Men's chase-chase cards, and Central Coast Disc Golf for Women's Lead card.

      • Round 1: Ricky Wysocki, Paul Ulibarri, Jeremy Koling, Emmerson Keith. Front 9 - Back 9
      • Round 2: Ricky Wysocki, Nate Sexton, Calvin Heimburg, Kevin Jones. Front 9 - Back 9
      • Round 3: Paul McBeth, James Conrad, Emmerson Keith, Calvin Heimburg. Front 9 - Back 9
      • Round 4: Nate Sexton, Calvin Heimburg, Emmerson Keith, Ezra Aderhold. Front 9 - Back 9
      • Final Round: Paul McBeth, James Conrad, Kevin Jones, Calvin Heimburg. Front 9 - Back 9

      Bonus: Mic'd up Practice Round. Jeremy Koling, Nate Sexton, Paul Ulibarri. Front 9 - Back 9

      12 votes
    3. Whatever happened with UMN vs. Linux Kernel Maintainers?

      Even tech news moves a bit too fast for me to keep up. Did UMN ever get unbanned? I saw a half-hearted apology and then finally this [1], but never heard any update. Most recent article I've seen...

      Even tech news moves a bit too fast for me to keep up. Did UMN ever get unbanned? I saw a half-hearted apology and then finally this [1], but never heard any update. Most recent article I've seen is this ZDNet article [2] from a couple of weeks ago discussing a related issue, but still mentions that UMN is still banned.

      Anyone following this?

      [1] https://cse.umn.edu/cs/statement-computer-science-engineering-confirming-linux-technical-advisory-board-findings-may-9

      [2] https://www.zdnet.com/article/hard-work-and-poor-pay-stresses-out-open-source-maintainers/

      4 votes
    4. Meet the new server, functionally the same as the old server (hopefully)

      Welcome back! Right after making this post, I'm going to update the DNS records to point tildes.net to this server, so everyone should start trickling in as those updates go through. The switch...

      Welcome back!

      Right after making this post, I'm going to update the DNS records to point tildes.net to this server, so everyone should start trickling in as those updates go through.

      The switch and upgrades all seem to have gone fairly well, though there were definitely a few issues here and there that I had to work through. I'm glad I decided to do a longer downtime instead of needing to rush through figuring some of it out.

      A summary of what's changed so far:

      • Running on a different physical server (but in the same datacenter)
      • Operating system is now Debian 10 instead of Ubuntu 16.04
      • Python version is now 3.9 instead of 3.8 (and updated a couple libraries that needed it)
      • PostgreSQL version is now 13 instead of 12
      • Redis version is now 6 instead of 5
      • Everything was deployed and configured using Ansible instead of SaltStack

      There are still a few more changes and updates I want to make soon, but I can just do them normally while the site is running. I'll also update the open-source code soon, once I finalize a few pieces and finish cleaning things up.

      Please let me know if you notice anything that seems to be behaving strangely, it's definitely possible that there are some things broken in subtle (or not-subtle) ways.

      90 votes
    5. TV Tuesdays Free Talk

      Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here. Please just try to provide fair warning of...

      Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

      Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

      8 votes
    6. Tildes will be down for most of this weekend

      I'm going to be taking the site down this weekend to do some upgrades and changes to various systems it runs on. I'm planning to start the downtime somewhere around noon on Saturday, and have it...

      I'm going to be taking the site down this weekend to do some upgrades and changes to various systems it runs on. I'm planning to start the downtime somewhere around noon on Saturday, and have it running again on Sunday evening (vague times, in a vague North American timezone).

      If you're interested in the details, the main reason is to switch operating systems from Ubuntu to Debian. The easiest and safest way to do this is by just setting up a new server and moving the site over, so I'll also be taking the opportunity to switch to a different physical server. Tildes has been running for 3 years now, so I'll be able to rent a new server that's some combination of faster and cheaper (not that we're getting anywhere close to the limits on this server, but I might as well).

      Since I was having to review and adjust the whole server setup as part of switching OSes, I also decided to switch configuration-management systems from SaltStack to Ansible. Salt had a major vulnerability last year that compromised thousands of servers, and Tildes really only avoided being affected through the luck of using it in a non-vulnerable way. I've been intending to switch away from it ever since.

      And since the site will be down anyway, I'll also be doing some upgrades and changes that are difficult to do without downtime, including upgrading PostgreSQL, Redis, and Python to their newest versions and making some changes to their setups.

      So overall, this turned into a large project, and unfortunately it's one of those wonderful development projects where you do a ton of work and if everything goes well, nobody can even notice any difference from the way it was before. It also would have been possible to do all of this with only minimal downtime, but it would have required a lot more prep work and would be more stressful, so I'm just going to do it the easy way and take my time. If you're interested in doing a Screenless Day, maybe this could be a good time to do it!

      123 votes
    7. How should I make my personal website?

      I am not a developer, but I do have interesting in learning. A while ago I asked a question similar to that. I did not take any concrete action since then, and now have some new information to...

      I am not a developer, but I do have interesting in learning.

      A while ago I asked a question similar to that. I did not take any concrete action since then, and now have some new information to add.

      The website shall be called myactualname.com, and will contain about/biography, and a few sections containing articles that I wish to write on different subjects.

      That can probably be done without coding on one of the many free blogging platforms currently available, such as Medium, Wordpress, and Substack, but the lack of control is unfortunate.

      At the same time, I wish for this website to last a long time, and to be reasonably independent of maintenance. With the Brazilian Real valued at less than one-fifth of the US dollar, hosting prices skyrocketed. Besides, I cannot always rely on my own ability to stay on top of that kind of thing, so it would be beneficial for my web presence to be more resilient than my bank account and mental state. I figure that hosting it on Github Pages, Gitlab Pages (or both) would be a good way to avoid ever going down (it looks like duplicate content is bad for search engines, though, so I might keep one of those private, just for backup reasons). And I could reserve the domain for two or three years in advance.


      I really like simple text-focused personal websites like this one. They load fast and are easy to read, but are generally not very pretty or responsive. I have basic notions of HTML and CSS and intend to learn more.

      In the previous post, someone suggested using Hugo, which seems like a good option. On the other hand, for something that simple, I wonder what would be the downside of simply coding it from scratch. One thing I know for sure is that I want this website to be rather permanent: whatever changes I ever do to its design should not impact accessibility to previous content (link rot). How can I achieve that? No idea.

      Since I write in English and Portuguese, the website must be bilingual. I'm not sure how to implement or manage that, especially in regards to search engines.

      I resumed the course on Free Code Camp, which I expect will help in achieving all that.


      With that in mind, I reiterate my question: should I make my personal website? Should I just use a free blogging platform? Should I use Hugo or something similar? Any particular free CMS? Or maybe just use what I learn to code it from scratch?

      Thanks!

      15 votes
    8. (Option to) mark comment reply notifications as read when clicking "link" or "parent"

      When I get comment reply notifications, I normally prefer to read them in context of my own reply, and potentially other replies. However when I do this, the notification doesn't go away on its...

      When I get comment reply notifications, I normally prefer to read them in context of my own reply, and potentially other replies. However when I do this, the notification doesn't go away on its own, so I have to return to the page to click "mark as read".

      I know I can also mark the notification as read by voting on or replying to the reply, but I often don't do that. Yet I always seem to want to view the comment in its context, which requires me to leave the notifications page. In this specific use case there is no convenient way to mark the notification as read without going back.

      To avoid the extra page load, I would like the notification being marked as read when the link to it is opened, to be an option. (Actually, I'd like it to be the default behaviour, but since the current default behaviour is to not mark comments as read until an explicit action is taken on them, I suppose I'm in the minority. An option is just fine.)

      7 votes
    9. Differential privacy code removed from Chromium

      In a discussion on Hacker News, Jonathan Mayer pointed out that the differential privacy code was removed from Chromium. It looks like they finished doing this in February. I haven't seen any...

      In a discussion on Hacker News, Jonathan Mayer pointed out that the differential privacy code was removed from Chromium. It looks like they finished doing this in February.

      I haven't seen any announcement, discussion, or explanation of this based on a brief web search, so I figured I'd note it here.

      At about the time this process finished, there was a Google blog post about how they're still using it in other products.

      We first deployed our world-class differential privacy anonymization technology in Chrome nearly seven years ago and are continually expanding its use across our products including Google Maps and the Assistant.

      (If you read this quickly, you might think it's still used in Chrome.)

      Reading between the lines, I suspect that some folks at Google are still advocating for more usage of differential privacy, but they lost an important customer. Why that happened is a mystery.

      11 votes
    10. Change in the implied meaning of "masked men"

      Has the sentence "the masked men entered the store" changed meaning post the pandemic. I think it feels less ominous than perhaps it used to. Now the words could imply "responsible men that wear...

      Has the sentence "the masked men entered the store" changed meaning post the pandemic. I think it feels less ominous than perhaps it used to. Now the words could imply "responsible men that wear masks in accordance with guidelines entered a store" where it would previously almost certainly imply "robbers entered the store". Since I'm not a native speaker I'm curious if this is just in my head or a more general thing? Are there other similar statements that has change?

      11 votes
    11. What did you do this week?

      As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do...

      As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

      6 votes
    12. Fitness Weekly Discussion

      What have you been doing lately for your own fitness? Try out any new programs or exercises? Have any questions for others about your training? Want to vent about poor behavior in the gym? Started...

      What have you been doing lately for your own fitness? Try out any new programs or exercises? Have any questions for others about your training? Want to vent about poor behavior in the gym? Started a new diet or have a new recipe you want to share? Anything else health and wellness related?

      4 votes
    13. Fortnightly Programming Q&A Thread

      General Programming Q&A thread! Ask any questions about programming, answer the questions of other users, or post suggestions for future threads. Don't forget to format your code using the triple...

      General Programming Q&A thread! Ask any questions about programming, answer the questions of other users, or post suggestions for future threads.

      Don't forget to format your code using the triple backticks or tildes:

      Here is my schema:
      
      ```sql
      CREATE TABLE article_to_warehouse (
        article_id   INTEGER
      , warehouse_id INTEGER
      )
      ;
      ```
      
      How do I add a `UNIQUE` constraint?
      
      7 votes