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golangnewson Who Goes Nazi? (1941)

Genocide comes later. First we get polite nazis, and their apologists.

golangnewson Who Goes Nazi? (1941)

I think the point of the article is not ‘mean people go nazi’, it’s that ordinary people who surround you today would go nazi, for multiple reasons - because it is the easier way, because it leads to monetary success, because they’ve always felt slighted, because they are outsiders in the current system.

The banality of evil does not absolve people from responsibility or mean that anyone will pull the trigger. There are numerous examples of people who refused to participate.

golangnewson Robinhood Crypto – Invest in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies

Don’t confound investment and speculation.

golangnewson [dead]

They’ve been far more reliable than aws for single zone deployments over the last few years IME.

golangnewson [dead]

This is partly how these providers manage to persuade customers to upgrade (which could be to a new machine behind the scenes). Linode does the same.

golangnewson UK's Open Banking to Launch on 13 January

It would let you see the balance of all your accounts in one place, share data with your accountant or IFA, or apply for a mortgage without those tedious forms as well as photocopies of bank statements, offer proof of income easily, use apps that offer a marketplace for mortgages, savings or other financial services, use apps like xero, mint or Emma with any bank account easily, etc.

It’s an API for your bank, and like stripe being an API for payments, I think it’ll shake up the market a bit. It should make a lot of things easier than before, and force large banks to allow customers to control their data more via authorised apps. It’ll take a while to have any impact though.

golangnewson Losing Faith in the State, Some Mexican Towns Quietly Break Away

Sounds very like - ‘All power to the soviets’ - part of the Russian communist program (until the Kronstadt rebellion).

The unfortunate problem with most systems yet devised is that they fail to account for humans actively subverting them and coopting them.

golangnewson Show HN: A simple Go web server with logging, tracing, health check

I wrote a scaffold generator here you may find interesting.

https://github.com/fragmenta/fragmenta

It’s fairly simple to write some simple generator using the built in text/template package if all you want are admin scaffolds.

golangnewson MobileCoin: A New Cryptocurrency from Moxie Marlinspike

No, you don’t ever pay cgt on gains in an isa, that’s the whole point of them. So if you could hold bitcoin (at the moment only an etf is possible), there are no taxes on gains.

https://www.gov.uk/capital-gains-tax/what-you-pay-it-on

golangnewson MobileCoin: A New Cryptocurrency from Moxie Marlinspike

Your argument would be stronger if you didn’t resort to epithets.

Bitcoin was designed to be as decentralised as possible. It turns out this has serious downsides and it’s difficult to pursue the sort of financial revolution it aspires to without social revolution.

This currency chooses different trade-offs which the creators believe will make it more popular because most people don’t need or want trustless transactions. People delegate power for finance, politics and computing not because they are stupid or serfs but because they are willing to sacrifice some autonomy for the speed, ease of use and enforceable contracts which come with a central authority.

golangnewson MobileCoin: A New Cryptocurrency from Moxie Marlinspike

This is correct, gains in ISAs are tax free and have no impact on cgt allowance. So if cryptocurrencies were a good investment an ISA would be an excellent place to hold them and convert gains to currency you can spend, but I don’t think any isa providers support them.

golangnewson Elon Musk: Falcon Heavy's first payload will be my Tesla Roadster to Mars

Space is big

golangnewson Facebook’s New Captcha Test: 'Upload a Clear Photo of Your Face'

There is a much better way to stop it happening.

golangnewson From Markdown to remote code execution in Atom

Yes, it takes some initial effort, but it only needs to be done once.

It needs to be redone for each platform every few years as apis and visual styles change. Cross platform libraries are notoriously hard and usually end up in the uncanny valley (qt, swing etc).

Platform vendors of course any devs to buy into just one platform, they want and need the lock-in. Using web UI is a way to sidestep that.

golangnewson Watsi uses crowdfunding to provide healthcare, but are patients better off?

Not like other ngos, as I already pointed out. Also see the universal scheme - people don’t choose recipients.

People didn’t ask for or need your direction on who to give money to, nor is watsi mutually exclusive with local charity or healthcare. Perhaps find a better target for your self-righteous preening about virtuous giving.

golangnewson Watsi uses crowdfunding to provide healthcare, but are patients better off?

https://watsi.org/monthly

golangnewson Watsi uses crowdfunding to provide healthcare, but are patients better off?

I use watsi to send money to fund healthcare abroad in countries with less equitable systems than the one I live in (where taxes pay for universal healthcare, as they should).

For me they’re a trusted partner who vets healthcare professionals in another country and allows them to allocate funds to fund everyday treatments for people who can’t afford them. I also give to msf but like that watsi is not disaster relief but healthcare. I use the universal fund so rarely choose a specific patient.

The stories and photos I’m ambivalent about and do see why one might object, but also how they drive engagement and build trust. I’d still give money without this - what you call voyeurism.

Cheap cynicism is really easy; making a difference is hard. I think Watsi makes a difference.

golangnewson Eight years of Go

Lack of exceptions (in my code, but more importantly in library code) is one of the main reasons I use go.

golangnewson Eight years of Go

I’ve used go for around 5 years on multiple large deploys without touching the reflect package. It is neither recommended nor necessary.

Go is radically minimalist compared to other languages - it leaves a lot out, most notably inheritance.

golangnewson Show HN: Orange Forum – Web 1.0 style forum written in Go

See also https://golangnews.com - an HN inspired forum written in Go and hosted on a $5 instance, holds up pretty well.

golangnewson Go at Digital Ocean

So now your go stuff and foo stuff lives in different dirs based on which programming language it happens to use, not which project it is for. To you perhaps this is a non-problem, to others it appears to be and it is a recurring cause of grief for newcomers to go.

golangnewson Go at Digital Ocean

Note src vs source in the original comment. Go forces you to change everything else to conform to gopath. I use go a lot and am used to it now but IMO that is a Bad Thing.

golangnewson Go at Digital Ocean

Looks like the output of pprof, so perhaps the slide means all calls to this function (when run 10000 times say during checking dependencies over a very large codebase), take 21 second in total, reduced to 4 seconds by storing the results of comparisons in a map and using that instead. Go strings are immutable so calling ToLower repeateadly would copy them each time.

golangnewson Go at Digital Ocean

Well imagine you use language foo, bar and go. Go insists all code lives in ~/go/src and foo insists it all lives in ~/foo/source. Neither likes symlinks, which one wins?

Also people like to keep other artefacts alongside source code like scripts, resources, templates, tools etc and often have an existing elaborate project structure in order to accommodate that. Go forces them to throw that out and use something under gopath. It's annoying and an unnecessary stumbling block for people starting out in Go.

golangnewson Go at Digital Ocean

I agree venturing is actually good with just a simple folder, though IMO (with the benefit of hindsight), gopath was a mistake, and a per project vendor folder for dependencies would make much more sense for collaborative projects outside large companies.

Go get does have support for tags, but it was intended for they have code in go get to find tags like go1 and go2 which are as yet unused (I wish they'd used it for dependency version tags like v5.2 etc instead, it may never be used):

https://golang.org/src/cmd/go/internal/get/get.go#L524

Really some simple additions to go get would have gone a long way - recognise semantic version tags like v1.2 on go get and put them in vendor with some command like 'go vendor my/dep -v 1.2'.

Not really sure they need diamond dependencies, updating them automatically up to version x, manifest+lock files and all the other intricacies which in theory a package manager should solve - humans can resolve them as they come up and in real life use they're not a huge deal (as the incredibly simple go get we currently have shows).

golangnewson One of the Biggest Bitcoin Exchanges Just Added 100,000 Users in a Single Day

Forever is what you need to worry about since you’ve posted this on the internet, not for now.

golangnewson One of the Biggest Bitcoin Exchanges Just Added 100,000 Users in a Single Day

"I can calculate the movement of stars, but not the madness of men,"

- Newton after he lost everything investing in the south sea bubble for a second time, just before it popped.

This has gained mainstream attention and no-one knows what they’re investing in any more, there is no there there to justify the price. Consider the trajectory of chain - a bitcoin startup that has gone from being about bitcoin to about block chains to about distributed ledgers to being about distributed applications (note these last things don’t care what they’re denominated in).

A founder wrote one of the best write ups of this space I’ve seen, and even he is pretty skeptical:

https://blog.chain.com/a-letter-to-jamie-dimon-de89d417cb80

All it needs now is for ordinary people to get nervous and start trying to realise their gains all at once for prices to plummet once again.

golangnewson What I Learned from Losing $200M (2015)

Please tell us about your big failures as well - statistically you must have had some, and I’m sure you’ve been tracking them with equal rigour?

golangnewson What Everybody Gets Wrong About Jekyll and Hyde (2012)

When you take something apart to understand it, of course you can never quite put it back together again the same way and see it holistically. But there's no other way to gain a good understanding of the component parts, so this is a worthwhile exercise, even if they don't enjoy it in the same way as other reading.

I'd contend very few teenagers are really ready to enjoy Sense and Sensibility or similar texts anyway because of their different and short experience of life, but they are in a position to learn some of the techniques and vocabulary used.