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al452

189 karma · joined May 7, 2016

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al452··on Kotlin Features I miss most in Java
AutoValue beats Lombok hands down. Not least because it is pure Java so no extra IDE support is needed.
al452··on Give researchers a lifetime word limit
Yes.
al452··on MasterCard Ending Signature Requirements
Yes it is an America-thing. If you're in the rest of the world move on, nothing to see here,
al452··on MasterCard Ending Signature Requirements
This.
al452··on Half of UK adults are financially vulnerable, City watchdog finds
Note how the Guardian headline has seamlessly converted the report's wording “display one or more characteristics that signal their potential vulnerability” to "are financially vulnerable". I think that's self-evident distortion, just dropping the "potential" bit (let alone "signal").

Then again "vulnerable" is an extremely popular word in the UK media this year, and nobody's ever precise about what it means, so maybe it's all meaningless, I don't know.

al452··on Bitcoin has died 166 times, so far
They could, though then there would be more trust issues about who hosts and controls the database. A database of which every participant keeps a copy, and with strong guarantees about consistency between the copies, has pretty obvious attractions.

I am definitely not saying blockchain is the only or even the best way to achieve that! Just that this helps explain its appeal

al452··on Bitcoin has died 166 times, so far
You miss the point about trust. The trust issue that blockchain addresses for big banks is not "I'm worried you're a scam that will disappear with all my money". It's "I'm worried that you've not got every single number exactly right and there will diaagreements". Hence it takes 2-3 days in the US to settle a simple financial trade, to allow for multiple batch reconciliations to verify that the information that each party holds about the trade matches up. Using a shared, distributed database to store all this information, instead of every party keeping their own copy, has the potential for colossal efficiency gains. That's why big institutions are interested in blockchain.
al452··on Arrested DevOps Live – with Andrew Clay Shafer and Bryan Cantrill [video]
That it works as a sales pitch doesn't mean it's inaccurate. The focus of container work pre-Docker really was all about isolation not packaging.
al452··on A New Way to Learn Economics
The reason people build those models with those assumptions isn't some great conspiracy, it's merely because under those assumptions it's actually feasible to build models. Building working mathematical models with imperfect information and imperfect competition and so on is a hell of a lot harder, mostly we don't know how to do it. Conspiracy theory is intellectually lazy.
al452··on Physicists want to rebuild quantum theory from scratch
Well the original article headline doesn't talk about anyone "wanting" anything at all -- I don't know, why would Wired repost articles from Quanta, changing only the headline?

https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-theory-rebuilt-from-s...

al452··on “Oracle laid off all Solaris tech staff in a classic silent EOL of the product”
True but in fairness NextBSD was only ever a technology demo / proof of concept.
al452··on Latency matters
IntelliJ often shows latency, but it's not "slow", it's doing a stupendous amount of work behind the scenes and building an incredibly rich model of your code and your application.

If you're not getting more out of IntelliJ than vim, then sure, vim will make you happier. But also then you're not getting from IntelliJ what it's trying to provide.

al452··on Show HN: Product Graveyard – Commemorating the most memorable dead products
Excellent site, love it.

I can't provide a funny story or eulogy, but have a scary one... "Microsoft Lync" [item 10 on the list right now] is not dead, it's aaaalllliiiiivvveeeee...

Those of us who work in the nightmare planes, where Microsoft products are mandated, once hoped that Microsoft's "Skype for Business" would bring us a bit of non-corporate real-world better-because-it-had-to-compete-on-its-own-merits product to save us from the eternal pain of Lync.

But no, it turned out that "Skype for Business" REALLY IS just Lync, with only two changes. 1) rebranding 2) somehow, despite changing almost nothing, they managed to break copy-and-paste, it doesn't work reliably any more

It's a zombie horror story!

al452··on Is LIBOR, Benchmark for Trillions of Dollars in Transactions, a Lie?
In some ways agree, except that I do not find Taibbi's rage-driven ignorance-fuelled style in any way "emotionally satisfying".
al452··on The man who wrote the book on password management regrets the error
"The Daily Mail coverage is worse"

It always is.

al452··on The man who wrote the book on password management regrets the error
You mean NIST not NSA, right?
al452··on Unlearning the myth of American innocence
Oh god yes, the Guardian was the last newspaper I read regularly (well that and the FT sometimes) but I gave it up because I just couldn't take the horrible whingey whiny columnists any more.

It's got worse though, now seems like they won't publish a piece unless it has a snide reference to "neoliberalism", or some comment about evil bankers causing financial crises, or some such, no matter how off-topic it is.

al452··on A Tech Lead’s New Project Checklist
Yes absolutely, a good one is invaluable at helping the rest of the team be more productive.
al452··on Some insurers insist that patients forgo generics and buy brand-name drugs
"Under single payer system, it's illegal to purchase medicine or health care."

Total utter FUD. It's legal and normal in each of the 3 countries I've lived&worked in with a single-payer system. You seem very misled.

al452··on 832 TB – ZFS on Linux
> Oracle Solaris is irrelevant.

Amen to that.

al452··on Windows Subsystem for Linux is out of beta
I kind of agree, but feel a need to point out that the "absurd cash piles" are a byproduct of tax rules, not of (alleged) timidity on the part of Cook et al.
al452··on Windows Subsystem for Linux is out of beta
> I find good Windows machines are as reliable as Mac's ones.

Yes. But they are still fugly.

al452··on Ask HN: How do you get a job at a VC firm?
> Maybe I've just watch The Wolf Of Wall Street too many times.

Why do so many HN commenters think that movie is, like, a credible documentary?

(I don't necessarily mean you, obviously.)

al452··on The Map That Popularized the Word ‘Gerrymander’
Not quite... the real point of gerrymandering is to concentrate your political opponents' support, so that they have a small number of large majorities, and to spread out your own, so that you have a large number of small majorities. This will presumably tend to make some areas more homogeneous and some less.
al452··on Do 20 pages of a book gives you 90% of its words?
"incomprehensibility"
al452··on Java for beginners
Google AutoValue is (for my money) a much better alternative to Lombok. Plus it's strongly opinionated towards immutability, big win.
al452··on Trump administration has plan to scrap ‘startup visa’ rule
You lost me at "Trump administration has plan".
al452··on Pirate Joe’s, Maverick Distributor of Trader Joe’s Products, Shuts Down
I'd totally pick the person who has already shown extreme enthusiasm for my products.
al452··on British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash
The UK government (perhaps the relevant one in this case) does not have a stellar track record of figuring out how to make big IT systems and projects successful. This knee-jerk appeal to regulation is unconvincing to say the least.
al452··on The great British Brexit robbery
The intellectual state of the moderate Left in Britain is very sad -- Labour can't win an election and the Guardian spends its ink on conspiracy tripe like this.
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