I can't say I relate at all (5 years of experience).
They'll have to pry my 1000-line .zshrc from my cold, dead hands.
For example, zsh-autosuggestions improves my quality of life so ridiculously much it's not even funny.
I moved away from 1000 lines .zshrc when I had to do stuff on linux VMs/dockers and I was lost a lot. But you zsh-autosuggestions, and fzf-tab is not going anywhere.
Chess.com is fundamentally a scam operation masquerading as a premium service. They've built an empire by paywalking features that should be free - and ARE free elsewhere. Lichess proves every single day that unlimited puzzles, deep analysis, opening exploration, and even advanced features like studies and cloud analysis don't need to cost a dime. They're open-source, ad-free, and completely transparent about their finances.
So like Windows then? Cause a free alternative exists?
Or farmers markets? Cause you can just grow all those crops for free yourself.
Or carpenters? Just get some tools, do your home renovations for free.
Or sex workers? Cause you can just go to a bar and get it for free.
Oh, they are differences between the free and the pay options? The occupy different niches in the marketplace? You don't say. Maybe they are not scams after all, just cater to different tastes.
(I also prefer lichess over chess.com but that doesn't mean I think this is a reasonable argument.)
A better analogy: imagine if someone built a public water fountain, then chess.com set up next to it selling the exact same water for $100/year while limiting the public fountain to 1 cup per day through lobbying. Then they sponsored all the popular hydration influencers to only drink their bottled water on camera.
> Cause you can just go to a bar and get it for free.
Not at the same convenience, can you ;)
So they are selling convenience. Chess.com isn't selling convenience - both platforms are websites you access identically. They're not offering portability or solving a distribution problem. They're artificially limiting a digital service that costs them essentially nothing to provide unlimited access to.
If you know how to run such a platform for free, then I'm sure you could sell your knowledge for a lot of money. And the company running chess.com would be your highest paying customer.
In other words, I think you are underestimating the effort. Just ask the lichess guys.
"Look how global we are… as long as you have a U.S. address, the correct passport, a bank account in a supported country, a smartphone with the correct OS."
I get that it works, and it's actually pretty cool that you can do this. But honestly, it feels like it would good, readable code into a tangled mess pretty fast.
> it feels like it would good, readable code into a tangled mess pretty fast
It definitively can, no doubt about it. But used sparingly and only when there is no other way, it can help you remove enormous amount of boilerplate and other things, in a relatively simple, fast and safe way. In my codebases, it does lead to a lot less code, even when most projects just have 2 or 3 macros at most.
Just as one basic example that comes to mind just because I had to do it today: imagine you have a testing suite. When some assertion fails, you'd like to display what value was expected, what value it actually got, and what the exact code was. In JavaScript, I think the most you'd be able to get without involving 3rd party compilers, reading source code from disk or whatnot, would be some functions name (`myfn.toString()`), while in Clojure your macro could capture the entire source code within it, and print it, trivially.
Basically, if you want a function that can take the arguments without evaluating them before executing it, you can do so with macros but without macros you cannot do that. Personally, being able to do so leads to me finding simpler solutions, and expressing them in better ways, compared to if I didn't have them available.
Still, 128MB is not enough to even run Debian let alone Apache/NGINX. I’m on my phone, but it doesn’t seem like the author is using Cloudflare or another CDN. I’d like to know what they are doing.
* Thin clients with only 256 MiB RAM and 400 MHz are possible, though more RAM and faster processors are recommended.
* For workstations, diskless workstations and standalone systems, 1500 MHz and 1024 MiB RAM are the absolute minimum requirements. For running modern webbrowsers and LibreOffice at least 2048 MiB RAM is recommended.
That's for some educational distro, which presumably is running some fancy desktop environment with fancy GUI programs. I don't think that is reflective of what a web server needs.
A web server is really only going to be running 3 things: init, sshd, and the web server software. Even if we give init and sshd half of 128 MB, there's still 64 MB left for the web server.
Theoretically, sure. But standard Linux distros are much heavier these days. See my other reply on this thread.
Unless the author is using some very slim distribution or perhaps something more interesting, it’s a challenge to run an up to date HTTP server like Apache or nginx on 128MB alone, even though it shouldn’t.
Moving bytes around doesn't take RAM but CPU. Notice how switches don't advertise how many gigabytes of RAM they have, but can push a few gigabits of content around between all 24 ports at once without even going expensive
Also, the HN homepage is pretty tame so long as you don't run WordPress. You don't get more than a few requests per second, so multiply that with the page size (images etc.) and you probably get a few megabits as bandwidth, no problem even for a Raspberry Pi 1 if the sdcard can read fast enough or the files are mapped to RAM by the kernel
Fascinating! I want to get into this type of stuff. But I have no idea where to start, I just have just a CS degree and 3 years experience as a developer.
I recommend a Brachiograph build. It will introduce you to some fundamentals of PWM and inverse kinematics. It is well documented but not cookie-cutter. Using a Raspberry Pi will give you more direct access to running the servos than the microcontroller experience. All the parts are infinitely reusable afterward if you don't want to keep it around.
Sample Supply List for $80 budget:
Pi Zero with header $20: https://www.adafruit.com/product/6008
Power supply $9: https://www.adafruit.com/product/1995
SD Card $10: https://www.adafruit.com/product/1294
Three hobby servos $18: https://www.adafruit.com/product/169
Breadboard wires $5: https://www.adafruit.com/product/153
Breadboard $5: https://www.adafruit.com/product/64
Glue, popsicle sticks, pen and paper $10
Arduinos and hobby servos. No, neither of them are "industrial grade" and yeah, you'll reach their limits pretty quickly, but building a physical thing that does stuff is (in my experience) a huge motivator.
Or if you're already all over the basics, figure out what kind of stuff you want to build and then try and build it. :)
To begin with you can get a cheap robotic kit from Amazon, there are many of them, and put it together. That's probably the easiest and fastest way. From here you can read more about servos and controllers, modify its mechanics and software.
For tactics I really like chesstempo.com. It has free, unlimited puzzles. It is to my mind superior for tactics training. It also has a comments feature which I really like.
