HN user

ExactoKnight

411 karma
Posts5
Comments164
View on HN

It doesn't help that coconut oil legitimately has anti-fungal and anti-microbial properties that probably make it a benefit to foods that its added to, despite its possibly harmful lipid profile.

Perhaps that's the nuance that is missing in this debate that's needed. The shocker that foods can be simultaneously good and bad for you...

It's very possible that coconut oil could have simultaneously good and bad effects on the body. E.g. it has known antibacterial and antifungal properties. Meanwhile, it's a saturated fat of the kind known to be bad for people's hearts.

So its very possible you could be realizing many short term health benefits from coconut oil, while not realizing it, setting yourself up for a heart attack later in life. Such are the things in life: I would assert most things we eat can be best thought of as a balance between good and bad forms of nutrition, both helping and hurting us. E.g. Salmon, lots of great nutrition there but eat too much seafood and you need to start thinking about your exposure to heavy metals and environmental pollutants...

It's what scientists have to say to get into the headlines these days. That doesn't mean his underlying point lacks merit. But it is absolutely frustrating how inconclusive and frequently contradictory science around food and health continue to be.

And perhaps a warning about shouting at the Universe. Although it's probably too late to fret too much about that.

Any civilization sufficiently advanced to threaten us already has the capability to see we exist. For those with a large enough telescope, we have been emitting signs of life to the rest of the galaxy for billions of years.

It's only more recently that we have been showing signs of intelligent life (through radio waves and changes to our environment). These signs have not yet propagated throughout much of the galaxy yet, and there is a good argument we ought to get as advanced as possible as quickly as possible, so we can defend ourselves before others become aware of our intelligent existence.

Very interesting. My only criticism? Perhaps too much of a focus on procedural justice.

Peter Thiel has a great talk on how one of the biggest problems in western societies is that we have moved away from having a determinate view of the future, to an indeterminate one. This has been driven in big part on the idea that process matter more than substance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZM_JmZdqCw

E.g. Lawyers are more concerned with society having a fair process or procedure for doing things, than its advancement.

This statistic is mentioned a lot, but it would be interesting to see a breakdown by amount of traffic on those sites. In these metrics thanks to the big web companies, the reach of Wordpress is much lower and other application frameworks are more predominant.

The thing is, features like Postgres' native UUID column types, JSONB and HStore are killer features that give developers data flexibility they didn't use to have before, meaning with one database I can go between relational or MongoDB-style JSON dumping where needed.

This, plus strong consistency to prevent shooting yourself in the foot, is valuable for 99% of use cases where you don't need insane web scale.

MySQL got reliable enough

MySQL still doesn't support nested DDL's, and this has caused me extreme amounts of pain in old projects where consistency was expected and we did not receive it on crucial payment processing.

But in this case it doesn't work. I don't repeat the name "Chrome" 20 times a day like I will for a Google Home. This is a serious f*cking flaw and it actually makes me worry for Google's stock price that they can't see how obvious of a problem this is and/or are too paralyzed to fix it.

"Computer" should be the wake word, and everyone would be happy with that thanks to global, english interoperability in all places and contexts.

But thanks to the hubris of corporate branding and marketing departments we are unlikely to have this universally understandable command usable. Instead to use any light switch every consumer will need to ask what bloody set up the person has...

The "Hey" gets extremely grating after the fifth time in a row.

Amazon has it right on this with Alexa.

It's utterly astonishing that Google still has the hubris not to give it a personal name.

People want to believe they're talking to a personal assistant, even if that isn't true, and Google is stupidly stripping them of that.

They all do. I have Canadian friends I know from all the parties working on campaigns. They're basically Americans, just looking for career opportunities. They are not foreign agents with a foreign agenda, and this is not the scandal you are making it out to be.

Why would HN penalize tweet links!? Hacker news is a perfect place for stories that intersect technical and journalistic expertise to be explored more in depth with a focus on truth. In journalism tweets are how evidence of a story evolves. Taking away twitter linking from journalistic minded HN users would be like taking away the ability for a coder to link to github...

Peter Thiel has a strong critique of this where he asserts the opposite: that both governments and science research spending today is too indeterminate.

Governments don't believe in the capacity to make big plans any more, and it's made it impossible for us to achieve big goals in the last 40 years on the scale that we used to (like with the moon landing).

Instead... failures are excused with portfolio theory, hundreds of universities end up doing hundreds of different things, with nobody really understanding the meaning or connection between any of it. Grant funding is based more on politics than on merit, and this slows down science, because few people are simultaneously both good scientists and good politicians.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZM_JmZdqCw

To Snapchat's credit they did pull off some amazing features with that surge of investment money. The facial recognition/filters they built was truly innovative and very advanced. The engineers involved in that were undeniably exceptional.

I think a better contrast is Twitter. Thousands of employees and it feels almost nothing in terms of new features to show for it, minus changing a star over to a heart... (which btw, reportedly took two years to implement once the idea came about...)

It's actually very little work to maintain Steam once the core functionality is there.

Valve is actually a good example of a company that's now incapable of doing anything really ambitious that has real demand. You know, like Half Life 3...