Hacker News Reader

artpepperon Billions of Messages a Day – Yelp's Real-Time Data Pipeline

I think it's saying that a single iteration over the entire set, would translate to 1000 requests per second for a day (if done naively as one request per object). It's really talking about the N+1 problem.

artpepperon How to Raise Brilliant Children

Collaboration is important -- especially in their expansive definition of "collaboration", which includes "getting along with others" and not kicking people.

But why is collaboration THE core, such that "Everything we do, in the classroom or at home, has to be built on that foundation." ... I could argue that good collaboration is built on a solid foundation of being able to think and act for yourself.

artpepperon Peter Doig sued for disavowing 40-year-old painting

But can he prove he wasn't? /s

artpepperon How to Raise Brilliant Children

> The first, basic, most core is collaboration.

I spent a huge amount of time as a kid reading and drawing and writing and just day-dreaming by myself. Probably not good training for the modern workplace with "open office" plans and whatnot, but it seemed pretty good at the time.

artpepperon Facebook to Change News Feed to Focus on Friends and Family

Yeah, at some point my FB feed became dominated by links to other sites, essentially not much different than Upworthy.

Like you, I found myself doing the "quick scroll through" until I finally deactivated my account.

artpepperon We built voice modulation to mask gender in technical interviews

But something is driving women out of CS programs (unless you buy the argument that women just aren't interested in programming).

Steps that make the profession as a whole less biased against women, might also help to encourage more women to major in CS.

artpepperon ReStructuredText vs. Markdown for documentation

At a minimum, I want support for:

- Key bindings

- Syntax coloring

- Toggle preview within the editor

I found Markdown generally had much wider support than RST.

artpepperon Over-scheduling children during the summer is unnecessary

^ This. I love the idea of spending this summer at home with my kid, reminding her to look at her list of interesting activities ... but realistically that's not going to happen.

artpepperon Dear Mommy Blogger

I remember when blogs were just people writing about things they cared about. This sounds more like using your kids to shill products?

artpepperon The FBI faked an entire field of forensic science (2015)

Because the goal of the justice system is to convict people.

artpepperon Ask HN: API Key vs. OAUTH, which to choose?

This may be pedantic but OAuth is an authorization protocol, not an authentication protocol.

artpepperon Facebook is worried about users sharing less – but it only has itself to blame

- I don't trust their privacy settings.

- Most of my feed is links to stuff elsewhere on the Internet.

- If I post, I have no idea whether their algorithm will actually show it to my friends.

- I get the feeling their algorithm prioritizes posts with images or video over pure text.

- Hard to post to subsets of friends. I know you can manage lists, but the UI is clunky. (And I don't trust their privacy settings.)

artpepperon Facebook is worried about users sharing less – but it only has itself to blame

And because your employer can fire you, that means your identity has to be the least common denominator.

artpepperon For Female Astronomers, Sexual Harassment Is a Constant Nightmare

This is why any talk about women being "naturally" less gifted at hard science, or naturally drawn to other fields, is B.S. You'd have to get to a level playing field first, before you could even evaluate that type of claim. (Neil deGrasse Tyson has made this same point.)

artpepperon When Dungeons and Dragons Set Off a Moral Panic

> "laws are the leading cause of crime"

But that's an interesting analogy. Why are people who take certain drugs "criminals"? Because we passed laws against it.

Some laws have a legitimate moral basis, others don't -- and I guess the same is true about moral panics.

artpepperon Do you live in a bubble? A quiz

The quiz is basically asking whether you know any white suburban Evangelical Christians.

artpepperon Does technical debt lead to the rejection of pull requests?

Based on the title, I was thinking it meant: Technical debt leads to project maintainers being less willing to incorporate code changes (perhaps because the code base is harder to understand?) ... which sounded plausible!

artpepperon With No Inkling of the Contents: Viewing Narnia Through a Hindu Lens

I grew up in a non-religious household. I loved the Narnia books as a fantasy, and completely missed the religious subtext. I think it shows the strength of the books ... they are more than just a simplistic allegory. (Except for the last book, as you say.)

artpepperon People with names that break computers

My wife has to deal with this. Then it causes problems because your airline ticket (or whatever) is supposed to exactly match a valid government ID, but one allows the space and the other doesn't.

artpepperon Microsoft chatbot is taught to swear on Twitter

False dichotomy.

artpepperon The text/markdown media type

I found RST quite brittle (single underscore vs double underscore?) and hard to remember/type.

Markdown is generally less expressive (I would love if MD had RST's "include" directive) but I find it much easier to format a doc in MD.

artpepperon Let’s ban elementary homework

Some schools in the Seattle area are experimenting with later start times. Hopefully it will catch on?

artpepperon Microservices with Go, go-microservice-template and Minke

Even in a microservice I'd expect DI to be useful for injecting stuff like logging, caching, data backend. For mocking, if nothing else.

DI + properly defined interfaces shouldn't make code harder to reason about.

artpepperon For gifted children, being intelligent can have dark implications (2015)

Yep - I wasn't "gifted" in any technical sense, just reasonably smart / good at school, at that was no picnic socially, until I figured out how to play dumb. It's a weird thing. (This was NYC school system in the early 80s. Maybe schools have gotten better?)

artpepperon Twitter, to Save Itself, Must Scale Back World-Swallowing Ambitions

look at the headlines in every morning’s newspaper and the obsessions of every evening’s cable news broadcast

That may say a lot more about the media than it does about Twitter...

artpepperon How to Raise a Creative Child. Step One: Back Off

Exactly - that's been our approach too, at least once she reached ~3. "Brush your teeth because otherwise you get cavities." I'd still call that a rule but the article was vague.

artpepperon How to Raise a Creative Child. Step One: Back Off

I wondered about the "average of fewer than one rule" cited in the article. Some parents have zero rules? I consider myself a pretty liberal parent and we definitely have more than one rule. e.g., Don't be mean, brush your teeth, be careful crossing the street, take your shoes off inside the house. Even if you generalize those to "be good to others and to yourself," that's still a rule!

artpepperon How to Raise a Creative Child. Step One: Back Off

Also, the article segues to fostering creativity without ever coming back to the question of whether those kids are more successful as adults.

So having fewer rules supposedly leads to more creative children, but do those kids do well later in life? Article doesn't say.

I'm basically sympathetic to the more "hands off" parenting style being discussed. But the article really doesn't make its case.

artpepperon Facebook and its news feed algorithm

> “Sometimes” isn’t the success rate you might expect for such a vaunted and feared bit of code.

... only if you don't understand machine learning.

artpepperon Flexible working can make you ill, experts say

You really do need to set boundaries, so the article's not wrong. On the other hand, I couldn't juggle my child's preschool and my spouse's teaching schedule, if I didn't have flex time.