insensible

One of my favorite career moments was the time I tossed up a Varnish instance in a different data center than the site it cached, then used grace mode plus DNS Made Easy's failover to get a significant degree of georedundancy.

There have been multiple outages that nobody noticed, some of them hours long. Usually the backend is the one to fail, so more than 90% of end user page loads are straight from RAM nearly all the time. And it costs $20/month or so.

I spot two assumptions in your comment: 1) that families plan the number of children they have, and 2) that this planned number is some number lower than 16.

Yours is not the only worldview.

And with birth rates plunging worldwide, many now trending below sustainable levels, who will provide you with healthcare and other services in old age?

It can be done that way, but there are alternatives. One family I know, the kids actually sometimes quarrel to be allowed to take care of the youngers. In our family, we have "chore points" that are mutually negotiated, and babysitting is a favorite way to get one's points racked up easily.

Ask any member of a large, poor family whether they would trade (life improvement costing $XX,XXX) for having fewer children in the family. Life is beautiful and easily beats filthy lucre. It's worth the struggle. People lose sight of this.

You might enjoy reading Greg Young's https://leanpub.com/esversioning, which covers this topic.

It covers several strategies, three of which are:

* Encrypt it and then throw away the key to forget it

* Store private data outside the event with the event just pointing to it

* Delete events (on systems that support this)

Can we get the word Chinese capitalized in the HN title?

Genuinely curious: how do you manage commitments etc. without a todo list?

This being Hacker News, we can talk about it in terms of graphs, right? Let's look at the sociogram when one parent is present.

The transition from zero to one is of course world-changing. But at one child, 100% of the connections in the sociogram connect to a given parent: zero economy of scale.

At two children they have each other, but that is only 1/3 of the children's connections when one parent is present.

At three, we're up to 50% of the connections that are child-to-child. At this point the sociogram is rich enough to become interesting.

Four => 60%. Eight => 77.8%.

Yes, that first restaurant reservation would have taken me several times as long to complete.

I want to hear a Duplex voice giving verbal AT commands.

Yes. On a smaller scale, iOS predictive text is helping me learn a new language. Unexpected suggestions become new things to learn about.

Economies of scale. The kids work together, play together, teach each other, and parents facilitate (often leading to interesting conversations like the one in the article). It's actually probably a little easier than having 5.

It's the former!

Dad of 8 here. It makes life so sweet when we acknowledge the child's capacities. Notice it didn't take that much patience...it's almost just a matter of creatively overcoming a language barrier.

Asimov's zeroth Law of Robotics:

> A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.

Causing data loss from a poorly-trained robot's incorrect call is unacceptable. Fix your bits, Twitter.

What I think is brilliant here is that that sort of work can take place separately and provide feedback to these checklists when problems or deficiencies are found. Basically the security checklists are a deliverable that can be iterated on independently while they still benefit from the existing one.

I love the distinction between self-sovereign and administrative identity. Administrative identity is a leaky abstraction of a type that is too precise and binding.

We must assume the worst.

In this case the naivete is in taking press reports at their word.

When Telegram sued, the court proceedings were published by zona.media: https://zona.media/online/2018/03/20/tlgrmvs . I have read them in full (in translation, but it was specifically addressed and crystal clear with regard to this matter). The transcript firmly establishes that it is factually incorrect that this matter is "over handing them everything". That was reported by some outlets, but the zona.media reporter covering the court proceedings complained that it was immediately misreported. There was a bombing that claimed fatalities, it was established that Telegram was able to provide the decrypted chats of the suspects, the FSB got a lawful order for those conversations, and I believe the relevant keys. (If Telegram really doesn't key its users' conversations using separate derived keys, their crypto is even worse than we thought!) Russia has a law specifically protecting the privacy of private conversations, and the FSB specifically acknowledged this right in court and specified that their order was lawful and narrow.

The hugely broad blocking is precisely because they are not getting into wholesale deep packet inspection. These episodes are embarrassing for them, as confirmed by recent statements by two of Putin's advisers, but they do it to pursue the rule of law. I am a fan of less government intervention in general, but if the government intervenes, I want it to be transparent and follow due process. At least in this case, Russia is doing that...it's just ridiculously heavy-handed.

You might consider documenting all this and going to small claims court.

I have looked into the Russia/Telegram war thoroughly due to personal interest, and to my knowledge that situation hasn't involved domain fronting. Rather, Russia is blocking by IP and Telegram is hopping to IPs all over the cloud.

Russia is on record as wishing to go a different path than the Great Firewall of China. From statements I read including Putin, they're saying they want to avoid a deep packet inspection regime à la NSA or China except when they've got a court order to go after someone in particular.

I thought it was 100% objective, straight across. I don't see any barbs or negativity toward Amazon whatsoever, just the facts about that situation and an honest discussion of the facts looking forward.

To focus the attention on the role rather than the person, who is clearly just representing the company. It softens it.

You're probably citing Joel Salatin (he's the grass farmer in Omnivore's Dilemma). If you enjoy this topic, recommended reading:

* Stockman Grass Farmer, a publication for smart graziers who get complexity that Joel now edits

* Acres USA, similar but for the broader topic of holistic/ecological farming

* Permaculture-oriented farmers such as Mark Shepard

Archaea can remediate soil from glyphosate and many other pollutants. It is difficult to produce at scale, but a man named Oppenheimer, a relative of the man who worked on the Manhattan Project, figured out how to package it and transport it. BioZome is a trade name for it.

edit: whoops, I missed that by "pick up" you meant "detect", not "munch through"!

You are demonstrating your ignorance of the Precautionary Principle. Hint: it's about tail risks.

The permaculture slogan for handling water is "stop, spread, and soak". A contour is at a right angle to runoff, so by digging a swale with a downhill berm you bring it to a halt. And yes, you can deliver water elsewhere by putting it on a 1-2% grade.

You can get some more context on what I'm describing from this article, though it sounds like your swale might be shallower. https://permaculturenews.org/2015/07/24/how-to-build-a-swale...

If you do it, you might consider filling yours with wood chips for appearance, easy maintenance, extra filtration, and to encourage soil building.

I said "poison" to refer to something that is sold for the purpose of being devastating to many forms of biological life. I and many very smart and well-educated people I know prefer to avoid exposing ourselves to industrial poisons if we can avoid it, even if they target different species.

Speaking of LD50 values: I know some people who ingest borax as a mineral supplement, and its LD50 is higher than table salt, roughly double if I recall correctly. I bet I can't get you to try it as a dietary supplement! The point is that there is more to consider than that one specific measurement.

This is one of many reasons why permaculturalists dig swales on contour. You can catch water, erosion, and pollutants uphill, plan a garden just beyond, and your garden benefits from the water catchment soaking the soil without much if any detriment from the pollutants.

In my locality the legal definition of "weed" is literally anything that isn't a tree, shrub, or cultivated garden. You just have to keep the "weeds", which include grass, below 10 inches. So I planted dutch white clover, which doesn't grow above 10 inches tall, absolutely everywhere I could. It fixes nitrogen and is generally great stuff. And it is hard to kill with RoundUp...my neighbor applies quite a bit at his fence line.