HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

cat199

1,610 karma · joined January 29, 2017

submissionscomments
cat199··on On the Decline of Perl – external factors
So, picking a few religious-themed keywords out of a hat, and using this + non programming interests as a strawman basis to attack the whole language as designed by 'religious fanaticism' ? If I have to pick the 'superstitious' side, it would be the side of this argument.

This isn't 'Temple OS'. By this line of reasoning we should all only use strongly-typed FP since it's the only 'rational enough' language family.

cat199··on USB 3.0* Radio Frequency Interference on 2.4 GHz Devices (2012)
Thank you intel. Had to wrap the cable for my my iogear 3 port USB-C hub in a electrostatic bag to keep it from breaking wifi on my butterfly macbook pro for just this reason.
cat199··on VPN over SSH? The Socks Proxy
> unlike OS or non-browsing internet traffic.

Not nearly everything else, but alot of things use PROXY/HTTP_PROXY for HTTP things which works here too.

cat199··on Gallup: U.S. church membership dips below 50% for first time
> If this is correct, it means modern Christianity, is not based on Jesus stated future direction of his church.

One view is that this was resolved at the council described in acts, and all agreed. The view that there was some paul-led split that is covered up by the selection of the NT canon is often used by detractors of christianity, who typically try to frame Jesus as purely a jewish reformer, and that Paul was some 'kook' that invented his own religion (despite the texts that he was working with, rather than against, the rest of the apostles).

YMMV, but probably useful to be just as skeptical to sources on both sides when trying to ascertain what might have actually happened historically

cat199··on Gallup: U.S. church membership dips below 50% for first time
Ah yes, the old 'ephesians is mysogyny' out-of-context quote, which always manages to completely omit the lines which follow:

Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, 26 that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, 27 so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.1 28 In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29 For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, 30 because we are members of his body. 31 o“Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” 32 This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.

won't get into the others, i'm quite sure there are cohesive rebukes / contextualization elsewhere

cat199··on How to price your SaaS product
On the flipside, i once experienced a 'fun' renegotiation with oracle (surprise) when we were migrating to core-dense architectures and they changed their licensing model -

We could either move from 40k/instance to 40k/cpu (so in this case - pay 8x more), or, they would be willing to work with us on a low 'per client' fee.

Unfortunately, the system in question was a network management system for many 1000s of devices, and they were attempting to treat each device & each person in the organization touching any software connected to the system as a 'client' ...

management quickly started to investigate the viability of postgres/enterprisedb ... though I think in the end we were able to renegotiate oracle back down to this planet.

cat199··on The Raspberry Pi can boot off NVMe SSDs now
would be good to see a real fs benchmark too - os boot & chromium launch have tons of other stuff going on which obscures the actual io speed.
cat199··on Plan 9 from Bell Labs in Cyberspace
indeed. http://fqa.9front.org/

9front is peppered with extremely dry sarcasm, to the point of controversy (http://fqa.9front.org/fqa1.html#1.3.0.1)

cat199··on Lost in Thought: Psychological Risks of Meditation
Sure - Don't have a good example of a work specifically focused on this - some excellent texts with significant portions dealing with this topic interspersed:

(very dense theologically, and intended for actual practicing monks, fitting the topic, beware )

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ladder_of_Divine_Ascent

"18–26: Avoidance of the traps of asceticism (laziness, pride, mental stagnation"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophthegmata_Patrum

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philokalia

"On the Signs of Grace and Delusion, Written for the Confessor Longinos: Ten Texts"

less familiar with western christian works, though i'm sure there are some.

cat199··on “When it comes to broadband, America is the original shithole country”
Arguably social media, etc. could be home appliances much like anything else.

Some people might not actually need high speed internet - but this doesn't change the possibility (I would say fact) that the market of available goods and services, and in turn, the entire 'culture' around internet usage, has been distorted by industry interests.

cat199··on Backblaze Privacy Update: Third-Party Tracking
Wouldn't this also be a GPDR violation by Facebook as well?
cat199··on “When it comes to broadband, America is the original shithole country”
Yes, it is. But it's still a problem.
cat199··on “When it comes to broadband, America is the original shithole country”
> And very few consumers need (or want to pay for) FTP

Consumer 'needs' have been formed by gatekeepers to shape their profit motives, so this is a bit of a red herring.

cat199··on SF poop-testing startup, once compared to Theranos, charged in $60M fraud scheme
Much of humanities these days is indoctrination into 'official' critical thinking blindspots, so I'm not sure if I'd agree.
cat199··on What’s up with these new not-open source licenses?
In terms of 'freeing the source' AGPL without source attribution is just as 'libre' as with it - but with it, the effects I mention are possible - therefore it's radically different when used this way than with the license alone, and so has a 'different spirit'.

You are right though, that 'libre' software is not about economic freedom but keeping the software 'free'. One of the reasons I'm in the BSD/MIT camp - software doesn't exist in a vacuum.

cat199··on Was German unification inevitable?
Neither German nor historian, but -

The Austro-Hungarian empire was considered to be a successor state and claimed the title for a time, and basically the German Empire and Austro-Hungarian empire were somewhat viewed as successors along protestant and catholic lines - unifying the division of the two under a 'new' ideology was a big part of third reich ideology (irrespective of how bad naziism was, this is a huge part of the history of the broader topic of 'german unification') .

This article mentions neither historical austria-hungary, the reformation, the anschluss, or modern day austria, so it seems more than a bit lacking from my perspective. But again, not a German nor a Historian so I could be missing something..

cat199··on What’s up with these new not-open source licenses?
I often see not 'just' AGPL, but AGPL+Source Attribution Policy (if you contribute to the main repo, you must assign copyright to the owner), and specifically around network/web oriented software.

This combination is pretty antithetical to the 'spirit' of open source (and especially 'libre software', which AGPL is supposed to be) since it basically ensures hegemony on any commercialization ecosystem to the original developer, unless one manages to create a 'leading fork' where contributions land, since only the original rights owner (who also gets the rights to the sum of all other contributions) has the legal means to commercialize (i.e: provide commercial hosting around) any extensions above and beyond what the community develops.

cat199··on Interview with CEO of rsync.net: “no firewalls and no routers”
DIY is way cheaper, true. but for comparison, aws is ~$100/tb/month
cat199··on The mainframe is alive and thriving
> I wonder if b-school/management types put serious thought into managing complexity they don't understand.

Think this is highly dependent on the school/student; In my experience (data point size=1), MBA teaching hasn't really caught up to the fact that basically everything is technology these days, so it shouldn't be treated as something 'separate' to the 'real' business, which it often still is - i'd wager that the resulting compartmentalization in thinking around how to manage tech is the main driver behind allowing poor systems to capture IT value from the financial perspective...

cat199··on Lost in Thought: Psychological Risks of Meditation
Not a buddhist, but 100% agree that this article is very lacking in depth in covering the hard fact that 'meditation' is not some singular practice - philosophical/spiritual/psychological context of the practitioner and intent will absolutely have a massive impact on how meditation 'experiences' will be internalized - is the 'insight' I had actually spiritually beneficial, or simply my own attachments/preconceived notions playing tricks on me?

Christian monastics have written tomes about the dangers of spiritual delusion arising in the course of practice (prelest); Without getting into theological debate about core teachings between various religions, I'm quite sure the same is true for any serious spiritual/religious ascetic discipline; The tendency in our culture to divorce the practices from their philosophical underpinnings to make them more 'consumable' by the uninitiated as seems to have happened here is likely a big contributing factor in cases such as this one, and the article completely sidesteps the point by falling victim to the same thinking ..

In a similar vein I also find it quite ironic that the article attempts to reconcile 'meditation' as one monolithic topic that is either 'good' or 'bad' within scientific literature, while at the same time ignoring that 'scientific literature' itself has many studies of differing results from differing psychological treatment modalities, many of which could be viewed as 'meditative' in some casual sense (e.g. CBT, so called 'mindfulness meditation', schema therapy, etc)

cat199··on Sky Global CEO indicted over encrypted chat drug trafficking
does anyone else see this title as a bit clickbaity?

I initially read this as if the CEO was actually drug trafficking, rather than the selling of encrypted chat being used to claim 'facilitation' of trafficking, which appears to be the actual charge..

cat199··on Woman created deepfake videos to force rivals off daughter’s cheerleading squad
'downtown areas' have been on camera for decades, certainly by the time google glass was released, so i don't think this is really a useful data point.
cat199··on Self-supervised learning: The dark matter of intelligence
i'm not as scared of real AGI as I am of some pseudo-AGI convincing enough to fool everyone into following what it comes up with and ascribing it magical powers - we have enough problems with personality cults and herd mentality as it is..
cat199··on The mainframe is alive and thriving
> The mainframe apps were a cost center the company sought to minimize.

a bit off topic, but this is a huge thing that I at least didn't pick up on across jobs for many years - for accounting reasons, many firms will always see what your team is doing as an 'expense' to be 'minimized', no matter what you do, and in many cases, there is nothing you, or your manager, or even your managers manager can do to change this, since it is often decided at the highest levels of the firm based on broad-stroke accounting policies that have a direct impact to how the firms entire books (and therefore revenue/profit/etc) are calculated.

IT/tech related? goes in a cost center.

What's a cost center? an optional expense which can and should be minimized, with manager compensation often tied to how effectively costs are controlled.

If anyone working in tech is not aware of the various accounting models used in business, it is well worth your time to get familiar with the basics - assignment of 'cost center' to technology groups in firms that use cost/revenue center models has a huge impact on how teams are likely run, decisions are made, and potential for career advancement for employees in those groups.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_centre_(business)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profit_center

this is not the only costing model (job costing, activity based costing, etc) , but one in my view that is often hugely detrimental to technology teams in non-tech companies unfortunate enough to find themselves pre-categorised as a 'cost center'.

cat199··on Debian Running on Rust Coreutils
> I've long wanted to make something similar to Make but simply with better syntax...

If you haven't, I'd suggest having a look at pmake (sometimes packaged as 'bmake' since it is the base 'make' implementation on BSDs) - the core 'make' portions are still the same (like gmake extends core 'make' as well), but the more script-like 'dynamic' parts are much nicer than gnumake in my opinion. It also supports the notion of 'makefile libraries' which are directories containing make snippets which can be #include's into other client projects.

freebsd examples:

manual: https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=make&apropos=0&sek...

makefile library used by the system to build itself (good examples): https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/tree/share/mk

cat199··on We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US
> That's not even remotely true.

I beg to differ - when's the last time you heard of a famine or major war in the 1st world? (same cannot be said of elsewhere, it is true)

cat199··on Consciousness Is Just a Feeling
“Since the cerebral cortex is the seat of intelligence, almost everybody thinks that it is also the seat of consciousness, Solms writes. “I disagree; consciousness is far more primitive than that. It arises from a part of the brain that humans share with fishes. This is the ‘hidden spring’ of the title.””

This is a very cerebral approach (pun intended) not at all shared with many or even the vast majority of non-western philosophical schools. Until science begins to integrate (or reject) these models, we are a long way off from even approaching if mechanisms of consciousness can actually be 'known', let alone making affirmative assertions about it

cat199··on Consciousness Is Just a Feeling
> Consciousness is your brain's logging facility.

this doesn't explain anything at all about the will, active choices, and introspection, all of which are a huge part of one's consciousness, and can even further extend it (for example by integrating the concepts discussed in threads like this to one's own self reflection and experiences)

cat199··on Woice.me – async voice communication for teams: work, at your own pace
one could just as simply make the inverse statement without qualifying it: "Why don't more gamers simply use slack? Discord is slack for zoomers" - although having used both, the feature set is not identical, so ignoring the obvious generation predjudice, both statements are equally invalid.
cat199··on Woice.me – async voice communication for teams: work, at your own pace
this reminds me of the phones that had the 'chirp' / push-to-talk feature that were popular in the early 2000's - which were hugely popular with people in various trades, service industries, etc - think telecom repair crews, construction crews, live event staff, etc - jobs where permanence of the information is not so important but realtime/async/hands-free was. could be a good fit.
← PreviousPage 5 of 34Next →