Hacker News Reader

colllectorofon PHP in 2021

>For example, why would you write something in PHP when you've got an excellent choice between Ruby/Rails or Elixir/Phoenix/LiveView

You can make a simple website on PHP in ~30 lines of code (routing + boilerplate template) with nothing more than a text editor. It will have no dependencies beyond standard PHP modules, so you could then migrate this website to hundreds of cheap shared hosting providers just by copying files via FTP or SCP. It will run fast even on server with crap hardware. There is nothing remotely similar in any other language. All other solutions are less portable, require way more configuration and more infrastructure on the dev side.

...

~15 years ago I made a website for a certain community using PHP. I still maintain it. On my own time, on my own dime. It doesn't cost much, thanks to properties I described above. So it's still operational. Think about that next time you talk about "maintainability" and "stability".

...

I'd love to have the same ergonomics of deployment with other languages. You can make it work. Jetty + Apache Velocity, for example, can "feel" similar to PHP. But there are no hundreds of providers who will manage this for you with little to no configuration.

colllectorofon My startup failed, then I found out I was unemployable

>My mindset wasn't that they really cared that I could do these obscure programming exercises that I hadn't used once in 20+ years of real-world programming, but rather that I could prove that I could learn and adapt.

This is how bad interviewers always justify asking nonsensical questions.

It's like that old joke:

An interviewer picks up a stack of 50 resumes, takes a glance at them and drops the bottom half into a wastebasket. A coworker asks:

'Why did you discard those candidates?'

The interviewer replies:

'Because I hate losers.'

colllectorofon What happens after a bank closes all of your credit cards?

People who pay attention know that this is already happening due to social media posts.

colllectorofon Spotify continues to remove Joe Rogan episodes

Gotta love the constant movement of goalposts and gaslighting around this. As in many other cases it started with claims that nobody intends to censor any content during the move. Then when deletions actually took place the narrative radically shifted to the claim that content removal was always the obvious, natural and reasonable course and there should be no controversy, because it was inevitable all along.

colllectorofon Twitch will ban users for 'severe misconduct' that occurs away from its site

No.

If you know anything about history, you know that attacks on free speech do not have to start or stop with official government sanction. In Soviet Union it wasn't uncommon for dissidents and their families to be nominally "free", while being unable to find employment, housing or otherwise get basics for operating in the society. It worked through a backstage "reputation" system that begins to look eerily familiar.

And BTW, the driving force behind a lot of free speech suppression in the past wasn't "the government" per se but "the party" that happened to control the government.

colllectorofon Filecoin Foundation Grants 50k FIL to the Internet Archive

This raises a giant red flag for me. Storage is storage. This is not like hash mining, which is based on probabilities. You either have the data or you don't. If you have the data, even partially, this should be useful to the system. I can conceive of no reason why a reasonably designed distributed storage system would have such insane requirements.

colllectorofon Filecoin Foundation Grants 50k FIL to the Internet Archive

I like the concept of incentivizing storage through a self-governing decentralized system. I don't like that it's named "-coin" and that its website clearly trying to ride the wave of blockchain hype without explaining the basic economics of the system.

colllectorofon Why OO Sucks by Joe Armstrong (2000)

Encapsulation has nothing to do with hiding stuff. It is the idea that an object is effectively defined by its externally observable behavior.

colllectorofon Chrome’s address bar will use https:// by default

>And that has significant implications for people's privacy and security online.

We're in a thread about Google making changes to Chrome. The irony of trying to somehow tie this to user privacy is hilarious.

colllectorofon Chrome’s address bar will use https:// by default

>It's worrying how they are improving the case for "70%" scenarios, while crippling it for the other 30%, without recourse. It's not even funny any more.

It's even less funny when you realize that the class of devices that gets effectively crippled includes the wast majority of all IIoT devices. Including ones that run manufacturing and power generation. Yeah, your precious personal website is now secure from MITM attacks. The factory that made your car, however, uses critical infrastructure controlled by web interfaces with no encryption at all. Congrats.

colllectorofon Chrome’s address bar will use https:// by default

>HTTPS adoption is now very high[1]

I posted this in a separate comment and I will post it again.

https://certbot.eff.org/hosting_providers

HTTPS adoption is hard enough that the wast majority of shared hosting providers haven't automated cert provisioning and are delegating this process to their users.

The push towards forced HTTPS has significant costs, which most people in this filter bubble don't want to honestly discuss.

colllectorofon Chrome’s address bar will use https:// by default

Meanwhile, here is the state of certbot support on shared hosting:

https://certbot.eff.org/hosting_providers

Yellow means you have to jump through hoops as a user. Even though the whole point of managed/shared hosting is that you don't.

So either all those companies whose primary business is to provide hosting are incompetent, or "Let's Encrypt is super easy" narrative is false.

colllectorofon Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

Look, dude, leading experts have looked at this claim and said there is nearly zero chance this has was a lab leak:

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/04/23/8417296...

I mean, yeah, five out of 6 cited experts have ties to EcoHealth Alliance, which in turn has funding ties to one of the two virology labs in Wuhan, but that's, like, just a coincidence. If it wasn't, I'm sure NPR would mention it.

And then Peter Daszak himself went to Wuhan with WHO team to investigate and didn't find anything conclusive. Peter fucking Daszak. You're not going to tell me that someone who was interviewed and cited on this subject by NPR, CNN, CBS, Slate, Democracy Now, Washing Post and The Guardian could be full of shit, right?

colllectorofon Out of prison after 30 years and people telling him to find forms on the web

>You're gonna have to live with an increasing digitalization for multiple decades.

Technology exists for people, not the other way around.

colllectorofon Shifting attention to accuracy can reduce misinformation online

"Therefore, shifting attention to the concept of accuracy can cause people to improve the quality of the news that they share."

It will not have a significant enough impact on the overall collapse of sense-making that we're seeing. Neil Postman wrote really well about it in Technopoly, but since the book isn't available online, I can only direct you here:

https://youtu.be/QqxgCoHv_aE?t=928

colllectorofon GitHub, fuck your name change

> Thus it is a useful reminder of the implicit bias that contributes to the lack of diversity in tech.

This is a useful reminder. It's a reminder that associative thinking can invert causal relationships and turn anything into a symbol for anything else. There is no rational limit to things that can be attacked this way. Someone can demand you to change the way you talk or dress, what you read or watch, how you do your job. The changes themselves can be anything and the only limit to their extent is your willingness to say no.

And by the way, don't ever forget who is enforcing this. This is not your coworker individually asking you do something differently to accommodate them. This is coming top-down from one of largest tech corporation in the world.

colllectorofon Moderation in Infrastructure

Why should I care about what these CEOs are saying when recent history shows they a) gladly lie about this subject and b) suffer exactly zero consequences when caught lying about this subject?

colllectorofon Why are most climate models in Fortran?

Engineers are horrified to learn that mathematical modeling is done in a language created in the 50s, but aren't bothered by the fact that the dominant computer interaction model used in the field right now dates back to pre-WW2 teleprinters. Someone is lacking in self- and historic awareness.

What practical problems does Fortran cause when used for numerical computing?

colllectorofon You can't censor away extremism or any other problem

>Every society exerts social pressure in the form of norms and shaming.

HN crowd has a definite knack for packing heaps of erroneous thinking (or perhaps deliberate gaslighting) into compact sentences like these.

Deplatforming is a tactic. One specifically designed to exert pressure in a direction not supported by the societal consensus. And yet in nearly every thread about it here, there are highly upvoted comments that pretend deplatforming is a mechanism for enforcing societal consensus.

colllectorofon Framing 101

>Framing is a tool - it can be used for bad or good.

Propaganda is a tool - it can be used for bad or good. The problem is that "bad" and "good" are subjective value judgements. Simultaneously, the mindset of manipulation is going to have certain predictable effects on communication and society, no matter what the manipulation is used for.

If you haven't caught on, the website uses the techniques it promotes.

colllectorofon Framing 101

Wow, I meant to write a semi-satirical guide to successful propaganda for a while now. Apparently, people professionally doing propaganda published one for real.

https://www.frameworksinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/...

"Celebrating 20 years of social science for social change."

You can't make this stuff up. And I bet 90% of people here don't even understand why this slogan is fucked up. The notion that the purpose of science is to produce social change is straight out of Neil Postman's Technopoly (chapter titled Scientism).

colllectorofon Foundational Distributed Systems Papers

Not sure if "foundational", but I would add these because they have interesting mental models:

Implementing Atomic Actions on Decentralized Data by David Reed

https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Classes/739/Spring2003/Pape...

Virtual Time by David Jefferson

http://cobweb.cs.uga.edu/~maria/pads/papers/p404-jefferson.p...

colllectorofon Sir Kazuo Ishiguro warns of young authors self-censoring out of 'fear'

>We've always had cancel culture.

It seems pretty obvious that you don't understand that any culture has norms and boundaries, but only pathological cultures become entirely reactionary and define themselves purely in terms of opposition to something.

>You can go back further to McCarthyism

That's exactly what we're going back to and you have to be truly blind to think this is a good thing.

colllectorofon Why Learn Haskell? (2018)

It's funny how none of these posts about learning Haskell ever take a working program and demonstrate the benefits of the language by examining useful code.

colllectorofon Intercal, YAML, and Other Horrible Programming Languages

The pool of people who understand any popular scripting language is incomparably larger than the pool of people who understand your clever dialect of YAML, JSON or XML.

colllectorofon The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology

This is fake insight.

Most people I know who are any good at programming had started learning about it by modifying something either on their own computers (pre-2000) or on the web (post 2000). They took things they found interesting or useful and somehow introspected and changed them. Good chunks of skills gained by that were transferable to professional environment.

Today, this is not how people get into tech. There is an ever increasing gap between technologies used for professional computing and things that are observable and modifiable by a normal person out there.

Curiosity and experimentation have been replaced by (appropriately named) coding bootcamps.

colllectorofon Git is my buddy: Effective Git as a solo developer

Modern IDEs often ave basic source control baked in. You don't even need to commit anything. I wonder whether there is any point in using Git for basic version control if those features are already available.

colllectorofon The Fantasy of Opting Out

I would gladly just say "imagination" instead of "mental capacity to imagine", but that word has been ruined by making it sound like something only kids and painters have to exercise. Hard reality: modern world requires imagination to navigate.

For example, most people can imagine living with diabetes, but they have no idea what it would feel like if some entity started using their leaked data against them. It's a much more complex scenario with lots of possible outcomes and variables.

colllectorofon Ask HN: Advice for finding an entry-level remote job?

Somewhat off-topic, but important.

Note how this path wouldn't be possible if all these hosting companies went out of business thanks to competition from big cloud providers. Then think about what this means for the future we (in IT) create for ourselves and for newly minted IT professionals.

I commonly see people on HN deny that there are any major shifts in overall system complexity happening right now. "Everything always seems complex if it wasn't created when you started in IT". Ok. If the complexity of newer tech stacks is an illusion, why don't you hire the OP to manage your containerized micro-services via Kubernetes? He's starting his career in IT right now, so he should have no preconceptions you allude to.

colllectorofon The Fantasy of Opting Out

The wast majority of people out there have no mental capacity to imagine how data they post online and provide to various orgs could be and most likely eventually will be used against them. This is evidenced by the continuing proliferation of dumb comments along the lines of "I am boring", "I am doing nothing wrong", etc.

There is a tremendous cognitive bias in play here. The idea that because most people around you don't weaponize certain types of information means no one anywhere will ever weaponize that information, even if it is globally and indefinitely available.