There are plenty of hard-working people who wouldn't want to budget $8/month for something nonessential like a social media app. There's no need to disparage them.
3,493 karma · joined May 7, 2010
Our web site: https://www.flumeinternet.com/
Job description: https://flumeinternet.notion.site/Senior-Software-Engineer-3...
Flume is a rapidly growing internet service provider. Our mission is to accelerate fiber to the home deployment in the United States. We have chosen to focus largely on underserved, disadvantaged communities, which the big ISPs have neglected for years. In fact, in our affordable housing deployments, nearly 20% of our customers are getting broadband internet in their homes for the very first time, because of Flume.
Come build cool ISP stuff :) No ISP or networking experience required.
Please contact andrew@ our web site.
My answer would be the jQuery code base, back in the day when that was popular. At the time I didn’t know a whole lot about Javascript or the DOM. I remember it feeling like the kind of code you could just read top to bottom and it was almost like reading a novel. Really well-organized, well-commented, and effective. I don’t know if it’s still like that, but at the time it was transformative for me.
Also they really missed an opportunity to reference “Gbps” (goat bites per second).
Wow! What was the product?
Nobody uses 1Gbps. Nobody. Not download, not upload.
I did work for an ISP that served a lot of video editing shops, and I could see them potentially using >1Gbps at night, when they upload all their video to the cloud. They are one of the few customers that I have seen saturate 1Gbps.
Most people don't realize: your bandwidth is fine. Your latency is bad. Latency has so much to do with the internet experience.
You can have 20-50Mbps in a household with two parents and two kids, and your internet experience will be great if your latency is great.
There are three factors that determine the quality of your internet experience: 1) bandwidth, 2) latency, 3) packet loss. In practice, #3 is not usually an issue. But every ISP only advertises #1.
When you get introduced to fiber, the biggest upgrade you get is in latency.
So you are completely correct: you will never use 5Gbps. You won't even use 1Gbps. But the upgrade to fiber will probably make your internet experience feel a lot faster, due to lower latency.
To me "pavement" would be anything that's paved. I took it to mean streets because of the context of gig workers.
My favorite thing he mentioned is that various tags can have different meanings. Published, updated, description, content, subtitle. To do this at scale you need some configurations for each feed to specify where you can get information. Does <published> mean published, or does it actually mean updated? Everyone does it differently.
And the etag thing. Yeah…
One thing he didn’t mention is media. I think the HN crowd really likes RSS because the mostly-text tech blogs they like to read all support it, and it seems to work fine. But a lot of the population likes to read content that has embedded images and videos. Even slideshows sometimes. There are RSS extensions for this, but they suck for all the same reasons.
At my company we ended up abandoning RSS and writing a customizable web scraper instead (ingesting HTML pages). It was actually a lot easier than dealing with RSS.
Snowflake and anything else relying on domain fronting are quickly becoming non-viable. I wonder what the next stage in the rat race will be?
> ... domain fronting lets the client make a request that looks like an ordinary web request for google.com ... To block Snowflake, a network or country would have to block all of Google
But Google disabled domain fronting in 2018. Amazon did as well[0]. Cloudflare disabled it in 2015.
The article even links to this Wikipedia page[1] on domain fronting, which states that all three of these providers have disabled domain fronting.
So... how does it work?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di...
According to the article, there are 60 agreed-upon long term deaths from Chernobyl. But there is a debate about how to measure long-term deaths, with some claiming figures into the tens of thousands. The nuances of the debate are covered in the article.
So I think GP's point is fair, because even at the highest figure of 60,000, that is far lower than the millions per year from fossil fuels. This article estimates that fossil fuels cause 1 in 5 deaths worldwide:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel#Illness_and_deaths
That doesn't take away from the tragedy that you and your family experienced, which is something that should always be considered in these debates.
My advice is to ask some close friends to go dancing with you. Stand in a group, do whatever you want, your friends aren't going to judge you. Focus on having fun. Make it silly if you want to. If you do that, everyone around you will have fun, too.
That's in addition to explaining to our investors that we ended our launch day at -$1,000 due to all the chargeback fees because some dumb developer doesn't know what a testing environment is. And in addition to the fact that Stripe recommends against you testing in that way.
I did get a full end-to-end experience, in my production environment, with literally one variable changed: using the testing Stripe API key instead of the production one.
I don't know, it didn't seem like a crazy way of testing at the time. When you consider that the testing environment worked perfectly, and there was no indication, whatsoever, anywhere that we would not be able to charge cards, it kind of felt like how you're supposed to do it.
But clearly I was wrong :) The way you find out if your account has any issues is by charging a real card, and if it works, reversing it, and if it doesn't work, waiting a couple weeks with no information on what's going on. Lesson learned!
We hadn't charged a single live customer yet, but we had done plenty of tests using the Stripe testing environment. So we go live with a huge launch event, and we have customers signing up in droves. When they get to the last step -- payment -- they get an error.
Logging in to the dashboard I didn't see any indication that there was anything wrong with our account. No alerts or notices. We had already gone through the approval process you go through when signing up, and been told we were approved.
The thing that surprised me the most was that there was just no indication anywhere that our account would not be able to charge cards. Wouldn't it make sense for there to be an indicator somewhere that just says "Not ready yet"?
Apparently, they had never even begun reviewing/vetting us since the time we signed up for the account months earlier. We reached out to customer support and it took them about two weeks to get us activated. And, similar to OP, they never gave us a shred of information about what was going on. I still don't know to this day what the issue was.
Next time I build something with Stripe I'm going to test it in production before launching, with my own real credit card!
https://minerstat.com/coin/ETC/network-hashrate
And here is the ETHW hashrate:
https://minerstat.com/coin/ETHW/network-hashrate
EDIT: Better links
So, have we observed global energy usage go down by about one Finland?
Shouldn't that be observable somehow? Shouldn't there be some power stations reducing their output as a reaction to reduced demand?
Anyone know how this would be visible, and on what kind of time frame we expect it to become visible?
I'm not claiming it hasn't happened. I just feel surprised to not see more coverage of that in this article, nor here in the comments. Energy efficiency is largely the point of this major change. Shouldn't there be graphs of the power grids everywhere showing a big drop? Maybe my expectations are just off on that.
Yes, I am predicting that trend will reverse. I'll need to remember to check this comment in 10 years!
> We don't need WASM for this, we already have things like Electron, React Native, and Flutter.
Electron: slow. Flutter: uses Dart, which lots of people don't want to learn or don't like. React Native: yeah this one is pretty good, unless you are just not a huge fan of JS/HTML/CSS/JSX/etc. Or if you want frontend/backend to be in the same language, but don't want the backend to be in JS.
I am betting that programmers will prefer making applications in other popular languages the more it becomes possible, and that the impetus for the big shift will be a big company going that direction.
I remember when Gmail first came out, there was a major revolution in how webapps were written. All of a sudden it was all about AJAX! There have been several of those major ebbs and flows, where the whole industry decides that a particular way to do something is the preferred way, and so everybody does it. Entire cottage industries are then developed to train up some programmers on how to do that thing.
And usually, those transitions happened because some big company rewrites a bunch of their stuff. I'd say the most recent one of those is Facebook creating React and doing all their stuff in it. We're still riding that wave.
But, browsers have more or less completed their transition away from being some kind of "document" viewer and into being a fully-fledged execution environment and rendering system. WASM lets you run stuff fast. There are already libraries for languages like Go and Rust that purport to let you compile your app to desktop, mobile, and WASM. Truly one codebase.
I think a big company will come along and do it, and then everyone will do it. Personally, I can't wait for the transition. I never really liked web technologies, despite having worked with them for about 20 years now.
Whether or not this lab leaked the virus and caused the pandemic, I'm wondering why they are interested in engineering new variants of SARS-like viruses in the first place?
Are the detractors of the lab-leak theory saying "Yes, they engineered plenty of coronaviruses in the lab, there's just no evidence that any of them leaked out" or are they saying "No, this lab was never trying to engineer new coronaviruses"?
If so, I suggest reaching out to your local Deaf community and spending some time with them. Maybe take an ASL class. You will find that, indeed, there is a unique culture in the Deaf community. You may not end up agreeing that deafness should never be cured, but it will at least give you some context you seem to be missing.
Since you said cochlear implants "already work in many people who are totally deaf" I think you may be missing the most crucial part of one of the quotes you gave: An implant is not a ‘cure’ and an implanted individual is still deaf.
Cochlear implants don't let you hear very well. Most users still rely heavily on lip reading and sign language.
I will give a personal anecdote. I am not deaf, but I have taken ASL classes and engaged with the Deaf community. I met one person who was born totally deaf but got cochlear implants as a child. She cannot converse with hearing people as normal. She is impressively good at lip reading, but still misses a lot of nuance in conversation, and her speaking voice does not sound like a normal person's. So she has been ostracized from social and professional groups. At the same time, she is also ostracized from the Deaf community, because she can't sign as fluently as a child who grew up signing, and the majority of the community is against implants. So she has the worst of both worlds.
So, if I'm correct and your implication is "Obviously deafness should be cured," then I think you may be missing a lot of cultural context and some facts about how the implants work. Perhaps a 100% effective genetic cure would change the discussion somehow, but I'm not sure it changes the cultural implications.
I work with a lot of unbanked individuals in low-income areas of NYC, so I am familiar with some of their struggles. I can't say I agree with this law, though. There was a store near me robbed at gunpoint not too long ago, and I felt so bad for the worker who had to go through that, not to mention how scary it is to feel like armed robbers are casing my neighborhood. So I feel glad for people like the coffee lady I mentioned, who have chosen to avoid that risk entirely.
I understand the good intentions behind the law, but I think there are other ways to help unbanked individuals that would still allow business owners to chose how they accept payment.
I always understood the cash-only ones. If you can get plenty of customers who are willing to pay in cash, why would you want to pay credit card fees?
The card-only ones were harder for me to understand, until I realized that handling cash costs money, too. Somebody needs to count it all at least once a day, if not more. Employees can steal it. Robbers can steal it. You need a safe. You need cash registers. You need to get the cash deposited in the bank, by paying someone to go do that. You need to maintain an inventory of smaller bills and coins to make change. You need to train people on all of this.
Even just the accounting costs might make up the 2-3 percent in fees. "Your register said you made $150 in cash that day, but the deposit that night was only $135." That's what you pay accountants to deal with, rather than just exporting from your Square account to Quickbooks or whatever.
I had this realization because I went to a new coffee shop that had opened up. It appeared to be owned and operated by just one lady, and she was really nice. So, as I normally do for the nice local business owners in my neighborhood, I got out some cash instead of a card, thinking it would benefit her business. But then she told me they were card-only and it dawned on me: she's just one lady running a store by herself, _of course_ she doesn't want to deal with cash.
So, I'm not sure the 2-3 percent fees are all that bad, though I could be convinced otherwise. Plenty of small business owners seem pretty happy just setting up a Square reader and not dealing with the headache of cash. I think there's a lot of value in that for them.
It is a federal program that provides up to $30/month, paid directly to your ISP so that they can take that amount off your bill. I work for an ISP[1] that offers a $30/month, 200Mbps plan which is free when using ACP (we don't even take your credit card). Most ISPs now have an ACP section of their web site if you search for it.
Having worked extensively on implementing this program at my company, I have seen exactly what this librarian is talking about. The people who need programs like ACP are also disproportionately people who have low tech literacy, and often poor literacy/education in general, and the existing systems don't work for them. I wrote about that recently in another thread[2].
When a customer is locked out of their ACP account, luckily the ACP support line is able to reset their password over the phone. But it's not always an easy process. Often, we need to have multiple, in-person meetings with these customers in order to get pictures of their ID, and often ACP will not do anything to an account unless the customer is physically on the phone or in person with us asking them to.
If our customers could always get access to their Gmail, it wouldn't be nearly as big of an issue. They could reset their password the way you'd expect. But as the article is pointing out, if you're locked out of your Gmail there is absolutely no way in.
It's really striking just how much work it is to be poor. Google needs to fix this, and remove one more barrier to people who need to use email with government services.