andrewvc

Indeed, we worked hard as an industry to move beyond "blame the author" to "blame the process/team".

Unfortunately this article is just bait, may as well say "People seem to think dinner is about eating food, but it's not about eating at all, actually it's about connecting with family and friends!". It's a specific type of poorly constructed reductionist argument that plays well on HN.

There are many people who have the diagnosis and don’t agree with the mainstream perspective on medication etc. Don’t claim to speak everyone.

Exactly! My point was that despite the precision of calories we should really think of them as ballpark estimates .

One of the biggest gaps is that people don't understand that food labels are allowed by the FDA to be off by up to 20% in terms of the number of actual calories!

In the real world you need to calibrate your behavior with the results. Are you gaining weight? You'll need to eat less if you want to lose any. You can do all the math with nutrition labels and macros you want but that's all theoretical.

See this study below for the 20% figure, as well as their experimental results on real food items (some even exceeded this threshold though most were within it). https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3605747/?st_source=...

It’s a great article on something that’s useful, but a bit overconfident in its universality. Better at what? There are many dimensions to being a guitar player. Is it technique? Theory? Ability to pickup a song by ear (this article)? Better at playing in a group? Better at playing solo? Better at reading music? Better at accurate bends? Better at fingerpicking?

One of the nice things about music is you can’t get good at ALL of it. You have to pick where to focus. I’ll also say, you might need to ask yourself if you want to get better. I love relaxing by reading through the chords on a new song and playing it. I already have a job, and the time I truly have for intentional practice is like once a month. Most people are not studying to become guitar pros but to enjoy their time with the instrument. If that is your goal let joy be your guide. Perhaps some short term pain is part of that journey but really weigh out what you want out of the experience.

They say an ideal container system would download portions of layers on demand, however is seems far from ideal for many production workloads. What if your service starts, works fine for an hour, then needs to read one file that is only available over the network, but that endpoint is unreachable? What if it is reachable but it is very very slow?

The current system has issues with network stuff, but in a deploy process you can delineate that all to a new container deployment. Perhaps you try to deploy a new container and it fails because the network is slow or broken. Rollback is simpler there. Spreading network issues over time makes debugging much harder.

The current system is simple and resilient but clearly not fast. Trading speed for more complex failure modes for such a widely distributed technology is hardly a clear win.

The de-duplication seems like a neat win however.

I mean this idea of defiance is absurd. People here are 99.9% exercising their constitutional rights. The majority of crimes happening at this moment are ICE infringing on people’s constitutional rights. I appreciate you sharing your perspective but that logic exists in isolation from the reality. ICE are so bad at policing they are creating more crimes than they are solving.

Of course with the Trump FBI the message is loud and clear, those crimes will not be investigated

Can you describe at what point someone would “have blood on their hands” in your view?

The problem in my mind is that these systems are exclusively in service of dishonesty. ICE is clearly being used to further political ends. If it were actually trying to stem immigration it wouldn’t concentrate its officers in a state with one of the lowest rates of illegal immigrants.

Are you saying you agree with that cause or that you bear no responsibility?

I’m here in the ground, I’ve seen them detain people for no cause. Masked agents grabbing guys out of a Home Depot parking lot and throwing them in a van only to drop them off later after scaring them. No charges.

Maybe you’ll be lucky enough to get picked up so you can get your proof.

For an idea as to how this gets translated into the reality on the ground here in Minneapolis this is an article on what’s going on from the main newspaper in the state.

In the past week alone, ICE boxed in a Woodbury real estate agent recording their movements from his car, slammed him to the ground and detained him at the Whipple Federal Building near Fort Snelling for 10 hours. A 51-year-old teacher patrolling the Nokomis East community told the Star Tribune she was run off the road into a snowbank by ICE for laying on her horn. Officers shattered the car window of a woman attempting to drive past a raid in south Minneapolis to get to a doctor’s appointment nearby, then carried her through the street. Feds pushed an unidentified motorist through a red light into a busy intersection, reportedly fired projectiles at a pedestrian walking “too slowly” in a crosswalk and shoved Minneapolis City Council President Elliott Payne while he was observing their actions from a public sidewalk.

You can read the full thing here: https://www.startribune.com/have-yall-not-learned-federal-ag...

You are misquoting me. I wrote:

to decorate intentionally in the way we do today

Most people not so long ago did not have the luxury of saying “that shirt is so last last year” , or “that living room set is a relic of the 90s!”.

Of course people always find ways to decorate and show off, but that’s different than what OP talked about WRT quality furniture. In the past that stuff was so expensive you bought it and lived with it, possibly across multiple generations. If the style changed you probably couldn’t afford to just swap it out.

Maybe, but really consumerism wasn’t a thing for most of history because almost no one had the money to decorate intentionally in the way we do today. The very wealthy did to varying extents. When we look at the past we always imagine ourselves to be the ones in Downton Abbey, but most people were lucky to inherit some furniture.

I would argue that the reverence for real wood and craft you espoused (and I share) is in part possible due to living in a consumerist society. For what it’s worth it is still possible to buy those same quality goods today, and certainly at lower cost . However, I would balk at paying the historical fraction of my income (or multiple if we go back to the 1700s), for a new bed.

In short cheap dishonest crap is what we ultimately want. It lets us focus our time and resources elsewhere

The HN SQLite worship posts have gotten out of hand. What’s next a post on how appending to files is faster than Kafka?

It’s great that some people have workloads that this is a fit for. What’s more common is the use case managed databases like RDS etc solves for. You have some quantity of data you want to always be there, be available over a network for whatever app(s) need it and want backups, upgrades, access control etc solved for you.

I love SQLite and reach for it for hobby projects, but as a product for general business apps it is quite niche. It has the qualities that make for any popular product on HN, a great getting started experience and a complex maintenance and operational experience.

One other challenge is for existing homes a water heater may only have a gas line running to it. Want a heat pump hot water heater? Hiring the electrician alone, not to mention potentially ripping up walls will ruin any economic advantage.

It’s a fun trip down memory lane, but the real story today, the sadder story, is that there is no longer any use for simple little programs like this that scratch an itch.

They’ve all been solved 100x over by founders who’ve been funded on this site. It used to make sense to have a directory or cgi-bin of helpful scripts. Now it only makes sense as a bit of nostalgia.

I miss the days when we had less, could get less done in a day… but felt more ownership over it. Those days are gone.

I can’t tell you how many professors I’ve had this exact conversation with.

It’s also clear that kids whose parents restrict phone use seem to have superpowers compared to those that don’t.

A good starting point would be fully banning all phones for the entirety of the school day in K-12.

The oldest are maybe old 5-6 years, but they still look great!

That said depending on how you store it ymmv. If you keep it in the same pocket as your keys you’ll have a different outcome from keeping it in a separate pocket of a bag or just even in its own pocket in your pants.

A few years ago I got into the hobby of handmade leather goods, like wallets.

One thing that struck me as I learned more about the process was that I could with little training, make a higher quality, hand sewn wallet than even most luxury brands for less money by simply buying more expensive material. Indeed, the wallets I've made are still going strong.

What was also apparent was that I certainly had far less skill than the people constructing those mass market wallets. To be able to operate an industrial sewing machine at speed takes far more skill than learning to saddle stitch by hand. When you stitch by hand you can go quite slowly, and taking the time is the point of a hobby anyway. A sewing machine is slightly worse in quality (but not by a lot) but also scales way better.

If you watch videos of skilled folks sewing together shoes on youtube it's insanely impressive how precise and practiced those folks are!

Back to wallets, most hobbyists will take a very high end and thick piece of leather, cut out the pattern with an exacto knife, skive the parts that need it, hand stitch it with a saddle stitch, then finish the edges. Whereas a mass-produced wallet will often use a blend of leather, synthetic fabric for pocket liners, and be machine stitched, with some other machines used along the way. The hobbyist design is simple and robust, it's just layers of leather thicker than you'd find in a normal wallet.

A mass manufactured wallet, even many luxury ones use thinner pieces of leather and synthetic material and construction methods that are less robust. It's not all about cheapness though, some of these things require extra work. I think a lot of it is about producing a product that looks a specific way, even if it is less durable. For instance some luxury products will use a delicate finish (like a paint) that will look awesome, but just won't last as long as a thick piece of vegetable tan. A thin turned edge can certainly be a failure point as well, and that takes more effort to make! I also have to wonder if these brands intentionally want their items to wear out to encourage people to buy more. I imagine the sort of person who buys a Gucci wallet sees it more as a seasonal status symbol than as an investment.

But while some readers might not subscribe to outlets that give away some of their best journalism for free, it’s just as possible that readers will recognize this sacrifice and reward these outlets with more traffic and subscriptions in the long run.

In other words we have a wild guess this will be sustainable for news organizations.

Stories like this are always popular on HN but I’m convinced get upvoted because people agree with the idea of more free stuff. I’m skeptical that this will improve the quality of reporting in an already under resourced journalistic environment. Maybe it’s a good idea, but it’s hardly obvious.

That’s natural, I think the same way, but in person try to stick with the here and now. Anyone who’s ever been sick with anything knows that other people often probe with questions and advice that is often unwanted and takes the focus off the sick person.

Whether we want that to be true or not it is. If every school were to close the immediate emergency would be that people would have no one to watch their kids.

One challenge with the term over-engineering is that it implies that the over-engineered solution would be generally superior to the under-engineered one were it not for the extra cost. The article rightly points out that this is not true, but it's something that really isn't discussed as much as it should be.

A good example of this would be avg's teardown of the Juicero, in which IIRC he described it as under-engineered despite it's expensive ultra durable components. The rationale being that rather than build a design suitable for the purpose of squeezing juice out of bags they built a machine that was specced for a much more demanding task, thus driving up costs and wasting materials. The implication being if they'd spent more time or care engineering it they wouldn't have poorly engineered over-specced components.

Perhaps a preferred term should be "well engineered" or "poorly engineered". A well engineered thing is something that is well suited in a number of different dimensions, including product capability, business needs, cost (and its impact to end users in terms of price), etc. That sometimes means ugly code, it sometimes means technical debt, but it always implies elegance at a higher level than just the code or components, but an elegance that encompasses a wholistic understanding of the context in which that code exists.

In the software world some examples of poor engineering might be using kubernetes for a small internal app that could run well on a single VM or container. Or, in a different context NOT using kubernetes for the exact same app, but in an organization where k8s is standardized, thus creating more inconsistency and driving up organizational complexity in order to reduce local complexity.

How do you know that he wasn’t capable of understanding those requirements? It seems just as possible that he consciously chose to ignore prudence in favor of easy profits.

In fact, it seems that he completely did understand the importance of things like separating customer funds between businesses given that FTX claimed to have rigorous procedures around this prior to their collapse. From the outside, it appears that he is trying to save his skin by pleading ignorance.

What? Stadia worked great (I say this as a user). What didn’t work was the business model, the lack of games, and the lack of trust in google to invest to fix those other things.

It worked flawlessly for me for years over Wi-Fi. GeForce now which I currently use is rockier due to being more bandwidth sensitive and not as controller friendly since you’re really using a PC, not a console as stadia was.

For what it’s worth I know git fairly well and have used more git strategies than most. I just happen to have found that simple usage actually works better for me personally and most teams I’ve been on.

Knowing a tool also means knowing what not to use:

I think you misunderstood my post, if you squash merge as I suggested your main branch is linear as with a rebase. Your PRs and the the working branches behind them should just use merged however. Come merge time the diff is turned into a single commit

Rebase should never be used. Or, if it is used, it should be treated as a dangerous thing to do that’s well outside the norm.

Most of the arguments in favor of rebase are by people fanatical about having a git history organized just so. It’s not worth the headache and effort. PRs are a better unit of work than commits in practice.

Configure GitHub or whatever you use to squash merge only and you’ll be good.

Since moving to this workflow I’ve had zero issues losing data due to a confusing git situation.

They are orthogonal, plenty of people are happy with themselves despite being abusive or toxic. It’s a poor heuristic for one’s ability to socialize with others or be a parent. Also, unhappiness can be something people are in denial about.

I think what people are trying to say is that if you want to become a parent you should be capable of providing the child with a good childhood. That’s an admirable goal but answering that question is exceedingly tricky.

There’s some truth here, but the fact is we are all lost or deluded to some extent.

The idea that we must perfect ourselves before we enter a relationship with others is common in internet advice and frankly wrong. One of the main ways we heal and grow as people is through relationships. Relationships test us and can be a vital mirror, showing us things that would be otherwise invisible. They are also an incentive to do better for the good of others in our lives. Finally, they give us the chance to heal others similarly, our partners are never perfect either.

Does that mean that having kids will solve your problems? Of course not. The idea that you should be ok with or without kids is also fraught. It’s a question of degree, perhaps being obsessed with having kids is bad, but wanting them and being disappointed in not having them is fine.

What’s the point of loading a page in 500ms if the real problem people are dealing with is a glut of content and fierce competition for our attention.

I wonder if a slower web might be a better web in many ways.

Reduced page load speeds increase engagement. What if I want to decrease engagement with the internet?