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anuraaga

86 karma · joined October 1, 2015

HN is a captive audience stuck in the eco chamber. Enjoy the lattes, if you ever see me elsewhere, don't stop by to say hi. I don't deal with Nazis.
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anuraaga··on Backend of Meta Threads is built with Python 3.10
Threads is a repurposing of Instagram's backends / APIs. Instagram has been based on Python from the start. Therefore Threads happens to use Python. It doesn't mean that Python is the language that one should pick when building this sort of app given alternatives that don't require an in-house fork. The full post makes this reasonably easy to grok but I'm sure the hacker news "title-only" UI is misrepresenting.
anuraaga··on Gear Patrol has acquired DPReview
Almost all of my interaction with DPReview was when I wanted to buy a camera and got a Panasonic micro-4/3 based on their reviews I guess 13 years ago. It was good times but there's no chance of me buying a camera again ever I suspect.

I somehow feel like making good history just that isn't necessarily a bad outcome given there is always a reasonable chance the site will be butchered by new leadership. Camera pros must have a discord channel or something by now and not need a newly managed site?

anuraaga··on Alphabet selling Google Domains assets to Squarespace
I had never heard of this service but indeed, it seems to be a registrar builtin to GCP. I suppose this is not going to be killed, and presumably the reason they aren't migrating domains users to it is awkward mapping to GCP projects? It would be great to at least have a button to copy it over for people that do have a GCP project for it...

Edit: it looks like there may indeed be such a button / command. Really strange they wouldn't communicate the option to keep customers on their services!

https://cloud.google.com/domains/docs/import-domains

anuraaga··on Converting Full Terraform Programs to Pulumi
I have found Terraform or Pulumi to be very convenient even with a single cloud because they offer many cloud-agnostic features as well.

- random provider to generate a db password, cloud provider to provision db and admin user, random and mysql providers to provision additional non-admin users, k8s provider to upload credentials to secrets

- tls provider to create ca, k8s provider to create namespace, create certs for each k8s namespace, upload to k8s secrets

- Cloud provider to issue service account key, GitHub provider to upload to GHA (don't do this anymore since oidc is supported, before it was rather important)

While I haven't used CDK much, I believe it is still basically about provisioning aws resources and would not have such cross cutting configs, though I think they may have had a mechanism for importing tf providers.

Terraform can have its issues but overall being able to provision such diverse resources with a single command has been great for onboarding/reducing human error. I'm sure there are plenty of cases where CDK is easier too, these are just to demonstrate why you may use TF even when locked in.

anuraaga··on A peek into Japan's convenience stores
Underwear is indeed sold but the reason being spending nights at the office is probably mostly joking, hours can get long but not Elon long.

The underwear is for all the "Spend the night at xxx" situations you can probably imagine anywhere in the world (pun intended).

anuraaga··on In Support of Richard Stallman
I don't particularly have any opinion on the person, but do think that a biography written by a journalist known for diving deep, or such, would be far more impactful than a curated list from fans.
anuraaga··on Elizabeth Holmes loses bid to stay out of prison
The most famous recent example if probably Ghosn fleeing Japan to Lebanon. It does make one wonder how likely it will be for the next case. That being said, the coincidence of great wealth and being from a country that treats you as a hero and doesn't have extradition treaties with the west does seem quite low, but obviously not zero.
anuraaga··on DPReview is being shut down by Amazon today
This article seems to not include the update, that it will remain as an archive (content is not lost forever) and there seems to still be some updates still coming (who knows, maybe the close will be reverted).

It's unfortunate that this news seems to be captured only for bashing on Amazon or big tech, when it seems to be more interesting as the end of an era - cameras have been eaten by smartphones for almost all non-professionals, and this seems like a capstone to the camera era. Sad in terms of nostalgia but happy in terms of a reflection that tech advances forward. Pros should still do fine, an alternative will come, and maybe use newer tech like Discord or something. Seems like a great opportunity.

anuraaga··on Go port of SQLite without CGo
JFYI a Wasm approach here

https://github.com/ncruces/go-sqlite3

anuraaga··on Announcing WCGI: WebAssembly and CGI
> Compiling code or "running in a sandbox" does not stop attackers from breaking into your system.

Correct - PHP is a scripting language with managed memory, quite different from C. Probably not all, but most WordPress vulnerabilities have to do with issues like sql injection, bad configuration defaults, etc, all in business logic. All of these will continue to exist when compiled to Wasm.

Assuming you actually have access to a database in the first place, while wasmer may have some vendor locked in solutions for it, generally with Wasm you won't get beyond SQLite for the near term.

anuraaga··on Google to cut down on employee laptops, services and staplers
Aside from iOS development, Google laptops are just a terminal into a dev desktop or cloud VM type of environment. Still, top of the line MacBook pros were the norm seemingly just as a "perk" in the very literal sense - I tried reproducing the remote dev experience on a $500 or so Chinese barebones laptop and was satisfied in general with it. Google Meet for some reason was really laggy though, so maybe that's why MacBook pros are required to get work done.
anuraaga··on Do Kwon faces 100 years in prison in the US and 40 years in South Korea
I think people are missing that this is a money crime. In other words, the ROI from the crime is obvious, as opposed to something like murdering due to mental unhealth.

Then it's just a risk reward calculation - if the possible upside of a crime is $100B with a small chance of eventually being convicted and sentenced to a couple of years in prison, then it's up to each individual to decide whether it's worth taking the chance. I suspect there will be at least one person that does - but once the possible downside is 100 years, then maybe not. A lower value than that may also be fine, but it's all just an expected value calculation in the end.

This is why punitive penalties are needed - both to prevent the same person from recommitting but others from copying. And with money crimes, given the size of the potential upside, it is natural to need a large potential downside to compensate.

It's somewhat unfortunate that the penalty for a mental health crime like murder is actually in comparison meaningless - generally the perpetrators are not going to be making the ROI calculation either way...

anuraaga··on Google over-hired talent to do ‘fake work’, claims Keith Rabois
I would be very surprised if anyone at these companies go to their desk to just do nothing. Less productive than should be, sure, but doing nothing would cause general revolts from people that do something (of course there are people that do something, innovative or not new features come and general uptime is held). It's basically impossible to both have an entitled tech elite but also members that don't work among them unless 100% are not working.
anuraaga··on The AI hype bubble is the new crypto hype bubble
While big companies getting even bigger may not sit well, equating business development with the actual ponzi schemes of crypto, which will result in convictions (FTX members are already admitting guilt) seems like a stretch. There doesn't seem to be any reason to believe users are not in a position to pick experiences that work for them and abandon ones that don't for AI products - a far cry from financial products that require significant literacy and profit the most when ensuring the users never achieve it.
anuraaga··on Boehm-Demers-Weiser Garbage Collector
And it works great with WebAssembly! I was pleasantly surprised to be able to use this mature GC to power garbage collection for Go when compiled to Wasm.

https://github.com/wasilibs/nottinygc

anuraaga··on Feedbase is an Atom/RSS-feed to nntp gateway
Was confused by "news reader" since thought that's what RSS readers are, but then realized it's about Usenet. Never used that for news, only... stuff...
anuraaga··on Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says
FWIW the Japanese translation of the title is

新型コロナの起源、研究所から流出の可能性高い=米エネルギー省

To retranslate back to English as a relatively direct translation

The cause of COVID, there is a high possibility it spread from a lab.

Notably missing are something like 一番, to mean most. This title is in absolute terms. The reason I found this in the first place was because a Japanese colleague was surprised that it did come from a lab! after an initial moment of doubt before accepting it because WSJ is reputable.

I sent the news deck an email pointing it out but do expect it's intentional. Reading as absolute rather than relative is likely "correct" and a great example of misinformation from the WSJ. Presumably reputable news sources just don't exist anymore, or perhaps they never did :(

anuraaga··on Databricks counts being laid off as “red flag”
AFAIK it's rare for a company to actually share reasons for rejecting a candidate. The main reason for this is probably compliance issues. Is there any reason to believe this post is actually true? Startups tend to be more forthcoming in rejection reasons but I would be surprised if Databricks is still in such a laid back mode.
anuraaga··on Analytics: Hacker News v.s. a tweet from Elon Musk
I don't think OP is getting any money from plausible but wish they were - first thing I did was search them to see what it supports. Awesome advertising!
anuraaga··on GitHub staff are required to use Teams by Sep 1, 2023
If Microsoft is serious, this is a great chance for trickle up. Give an org that has been using Outlook Teams and they won't have any suggestions, give it to an org using Slack and the feedback will be immense. I admit to getting caught up in the Microsoft is innovating hype from recent news but would not be surprised if they finally start to really iterate and improve on their cruft going forward. Dogfooding in the GitHub org just makes a lot of sense.
anuraaga··on Working at Google: Maps
This is HN - you MUST question any article painting Google in a good light and SHOULD question articles that portray any other company well but MAY just ignore them.

Any other text such as definitions for the term AI is valid as long as it complies with RFC101HN.

anuraaga··on Improving Rust compile times to enable adoption of memory safety
cargo run is a command you'd generally use to actually get something running I guess. This is not going to be incremental development in many cases which focus on unit tests I guess.

FWIW cold builds (i.e., in docker with no cache) of cargo are much slower than go, hanging for a long time on refreshing cargo.io indexes. I don't know exactly what that is doing but I have a feeling it is implemented in a monolithic way rather than on-demand. Rust has had plenty of time to make this better but it is still very slow for cold cargo builds, often spending minutes refreshing the crates index. But Go misses easy optimizations like creating strings from a byte slice.

So it is what it is - Go makes explicit promises of fast compile times. Thanks to that, build scripts in go are pretty fast. Any language that doesn't make that explicit might be slow to compile and might run fast - that's totally fine and I would rather have two languages optimized to each case than one mediocre language.

anuraaga··on Thoughts on the Python packaging ecosystem
It's unlikely Python would still be a popular language without Conda. As the article says, many Python users are not traditional software engineers - they need a tool that just works and Conda is the closest thing in the ecosystem.

Used to spend much time to optimize Gentoo Linux but eventually switched to Ubuntu to be productive. I feel Conda is similarly useful, especially if not considering Docker i.e. local dev, and am disappointed hackers seem to be dismissing it.

anuraaga··on A mistake that killed Japan’s software industry?
Hi Johnny - considering there is no one answer here, no one, including you, is missing the point right? If weighting I'd generally put the largest on time-based rather than impact-based seniority, but it's just one of many factors and there isn't really a way to pick any one.
anuraaga··on Twitter Sued for Nonpayment of Rent on San Francisco Office
Do these lawsuits usually end with a significant punitive fee? If it's just a small, if any part, on top of rent it's a free loan - which is very scammy but similar to tax optimization, what is possible will be done.
anuraaga··on Promotion of alternative social platforms policy
Anyone find any particularly nice memes or comics regarding free speech absolutionist, only when convenient?
anuraaga··on Ghosn’s daring escape cost his extraction crew their freedom
Assuming I'm not misreading the article it seems they are released and have their freedom. Title seems quite misleading.
anuraaga··on Google pushes emergency Chrome update to fix 8th zero-day in 2022
Rust seems to provide memory safety built-in that is still possible in C++ with appropriate linters / static analysis (e.g., don't ever assign a `new` pointer to anything other than a unique one). I remember Google's codebase generally being good on this, but does Chromium not follow that?

My guess is yes and these are issues that would affect both languages equally, with Rust it just happens to be in an `unsafe` block.

anuraaga··on Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes is denied a bid for new trial
But laws can't apply to behavior, only actions - there's no way to prove behavior. Otherwise Elon would be having a lot more trouble ;)

In a general sense, this is why there will always be the concept of a loophole, and there will always be those that take advantage of it. Going through every trick to reduce tax liability from millions to 0 seems like behavior that is defrauding the government, but no actions are actually provably defrauding the government.

anuraaga··on Ask HN: Is everyone on Hacker News super charismatic?
No
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