mightybyte

Passwords, credit card numbers, social security numbers, etc are old outdated technology that can't go away fast enough. They're unfixably insecure...identifying yourself to someone by giving your secret identifying information to them immediately allows them to impersonate you! We've had the technology to fix this problem for close to 50 years now: public-key cryptography. We can't get to a password-less world fast enough IMO.

I know a lot of HN doesn't have much use for blockchain, but if there's one thing that blockchain has done for the world it's been to substantially spur the use and development of public-key auth systems, especially on the UX front. This is because it had no choice. If you try to use an inherently broken password auth system for completely decentralized digital currency, it will immediately descend into unusable chaos because of the vulnerability. Traditional finance (credit cards), government identification systems (social security), etc have so much existing infrastructure that innovating in this area is hugely costly and slow, but it's absolutely the direction we need to go.

> They have extremely impressive prices, but I've always been hesitant to use them for anything important because they've historically been known for very aggressively shutting down your service if their automated systems detect e.g. suspicious traffic.

I came here to say the same thing. I've had production servers shut down by Hetzner with zero warning. And I believe they also kept the hardware running and continued charging you for it...just without network. As a result of this experience, I now consider Hetzner unusable for production systems.

> Having a web3 startup is just as inane as having a mongodb startup. Those technologies don‘t make anything possible that wasn‘t possible before.

This is not true. The blockchain was/is a genuine technicalogical advance. It makes things possible that weren't before. From Wikipedia:

"The implementation of the blockchain within bitcoin made it the first digital currency to solve the double-spending problem without the need of a trusted authority or central server."

Now it's certainly true that, just like MongoDB before it, overzealous people are trying to capitalize on the fad and insert "blockchain" into places where it doesn't make any sense. But there's a very important distinction between that and your statement.

Yep. I say that because I was very recently looking into the network latency for computers on the other side of the world. I ran the same theoretical calculation of circumference of the earth divided by the speed of light and measured ping times and they lined up quite well. Now, to be clear, OP definitely has one up on me because I didn't notice the 1337, but it stuck in my head that to one significant digit it's ~100 milliseconds to get around the world. Now four significant digits stick in my head. Thanks OP!

That line actually made me think the whole thing was satire for a bit. I actually came back to the HN comments to see if people here were taking the article seriously.

I was contemplating surgery years ago because the first doctor I went to said if I wanted to get back to the way I was before the injury I had to have surgery. Thankfully the second doctor I went to said, "You can get surgery if you want, but I'm not going to do it for you. Surgery is for fixing things that impact your everyday life. This doesn't impact your everyday life." I was able to get back to the activities I was doing before the injury without surgery. So grateful for that doctor's advice.

> I don't say this to be discouraging but personally I've never found that "just do this one thing you're not doing" will make a dramatic difference aside from getting better at doing that thing.

Oh, I definitely agree and do not subscribe to a "just do this one thing" philosophy. I wasn't trying to suggest that this one thing will solve all problems. Only that it is something that a person who is striving to adopt more of a growth mindset might consider trying. It is fairly straightforward to get reliable success if you're a novice here, and having tangible successes is at least useful (and very arguably important) in making a substantial change in mindset. Also, my comment was specifically generalizing to more than just the Starting Strength novice lifter program.

Here's a fantastic talk that describes a way to structure one's approach to this explore/exploit tradeoff that draws on research in areas like search algorithms, cognitive science, etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0XmixCsWjs

Can't Hurt Me by David Goggins (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41721428-can-t-hurt-me)

Also see my sibling comment above.

I heard someone say once that one of the best things that helped them develop a growth mindset was lifting weights. Consistently doing 3x5 heavy squats, deadlifts, and presses just three days per week will make a visible change in most people's body remarkably quickly. And seeing that change in yourself really helps reinforce that you can change your situation.

I thought that was an interesting observation but I'd like to suggest expanding it to physical activity in general rather than specifically powerlifting. There are many different activities (for example HIIT, martial arts, gymnastics, rock climbing just to name a few) that will make a significant physical change in your body. When you stick to one of those activities and document your progress with data, photos, etc there's something about seeing that change happen to the blob of matter that is "you" that really expands what you consider achievable for yourself.

I was home schooled K-7 (skipped 8th grade). The flexibility was great and allowed me to start taking college level computer programming courses when I was 10 years old. I think I came out of it reasonably socially adjusted. I have two recommendations for anyone thinking about doing something similar:

1. Make sure your kids are involved in a decent amount of outside activities during the elementary school years that get them interacting with other kids. Things like team sports, music groups, etc.

2. Do NOT home school your kids through high school. I knew other kids who were and thought that they had socialization issues. You could easily argue that this point is mostly anecdotal and I couldn't really disagree, but I have a gut feeling that the high school years are particularly important when it comes to socialization.

> Using emacs seems to me to be an exercise in remembering, whereas using vim is more an exercise in thinking.

This. This right here is one of the best characterizations of the vim/emacs debate that I have ever heard.

> Now, over ten trillion new titles hit the shelves every month in Young Adult fiction alone.

Say what? Ten trillion? That doesn't strike me as plausible. Which raises the question...what is the correct number? Ten billion new titles per month doesn't sound plausible either. Ten thousand sounds more reasonable. Maybe ten million but that seems like stretching it.

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Kadena is hiring for a number of roles including Haskell Developer, Technical Writer, and Graphic Designer. You can see some of these roles here:

https://angel.co/company/kadena-2/jobs

To apply, send a resume and cover letter to hiring@kadena.io.

One thing about what you wrote jumped out at me. You say "I love building and working - always have, always will." and "I'm forever building my own side projects as I love it." But then later you say "I can't bare the devs that go out of their way to work weekends without being asked." When I work weekends without being asked it's usually because I WANT to. It's because I'm having fun. So that strikes me as an odd thing to say as a part of why you can't bear it.

Now I am keenly aware that there are plenty of workplaces where this isn't the case. Where employees get their life force sucked out by perpetually unreasonable deadlines, expectations of long hours, etc. I've been in those situations. They're miserable. You say you're in a great job. But then you go on to describe something pretty unpleasant. My recommendation would be to engage in a job search for a better environment while you're securely employed at this place. Take your time. Don't be in a rush. You might want to consider branching out to a completely different segment of the industry. Some domains in the software world (things like games and finance are the big ones that come to mind) have a well known reputation for demanding long hours and sucking the life out of you. You should probably make a conscious effort to avoid those. When you're interviewing, ask questions specifically with the goal of figuring out what kind of a culture they have. Use indirect questions that don't make it obvious what kind of answers you're looking for. It's a sellers' market right now. Good engineers are hard to find. It's a good time to be looking.

You might also want to filter the places you interview according to the type of atmosphere you're looking for. I've been in fun healthy workplaces that were pretty high pressure. This could be because it's a small startup company with limited runway that has to deliver or die. This could also be because you're doing things that are inherently high consequence such as, say, a space shuttle launch or ER doctor (to use a non-software example). I've also been in fun healthy workplaces that were pretty low pressure. Research-y work is ofter like this in my experience and it can be at both large and small companies.

There are people who love their jobs and have healthy work environments in both high pressure and low pressure workplaces. So I'd recommend thinking carefully about what kind of an environment you're looking for before you start interviewing and use those characteristics to choose where you're going to look.

There is still some trust hidden away in step 10 that you didn't call out, which is that you're trusting the software wallet. The software wallet that you use to create the transaction could under the hood create a different transaction than what you expect and show you the hash of that transaction. A hardware wallet that signs a raw hash will always be vulnerable to this kind of attack. To really eliminate the need to trust the software wallet, you should send the whole transaction to the hardware wallet so the hardware wallet can calculate the hash. You're still trusting the hardware wallet to some extent but you entered your seed phrase into the hardware wallet so you're implicitly trusting that no matter what.

You can use casino grade dice which are translucent specifically for this reason. And on top of that you can also test them yourself to verify.

As soon as I heard about this formulation back in 2012 or so I concluded that this particular structure was going to be foundational in Haskell and potentially the broader (purely) functional programming world. I agree with your intuition here with respect to that statement, but this case is an exception to that heuristic. I would say that these lenses are the purely functional equivalent to pointers in C. These lenses are type-safe functional pointers that are composable! This lens formulation is much more powerful than the naive lens formulations that came before it and it admits a number of just as powerful related abstractions such as prisms, traversals, etc.

Historically I have been pretty skeptical about adopting flavor-of-the-week flashy abstractions in the Haskell ecosystem for use in production code, usually preferring to lean on ADTs and pure functions for their simplicity and power. But lenses are essential. They are the fundamental building blocks for accessing and modifying ADTs. You don't have to understand the complicated type wizardry to use them. They're particularly useful for drilling deep into arbitrary JSON structures. See a reddit comment of mine for some examples: https://old.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/792nl4/clojure_vs_...

For more on this, see this excellent video "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Lenses for Business Applications": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T88TDS7L5DY&t=1204s

In addition to the FDIC backstop mentioned by some of the other responding comments, there's also another significant factor here which is that the U.S. banking system is ultimately backed by the strength of the U.S. military. I think this serves as something like an inductive base case that is more important than it might seem at first glance.

In my experience with larger applications no matter what CSS framework you use you eventually want to ditch it and move to fully custom CSS. Starting with this kind of a clean HTML base makes that easier IMO.

Completely agree with you. I greatly prefer something like PicoCSS (https://picocss.com/) which tries to use plain HTML5 as much as possible.

Thinking carefully about loss scenarios is really important, so you're thinking about the right things. I used to have my SSH key on a Yubikey for awhile and now I have it in my MacBook's secure enclave guarded by TouchID. In both of these cases I'm not terribly worried about loss because it's almost always the case that loss of SSH access is pretty easy to recover from. In most cases other people on my team also have SSH access and can swap out my key if I lose the Yubikey. In a number of other cases the cloud server doesn't have any/much in the way of irretrievable data. It's just running various software that is usually version controlled with git. So even if no other team member had access it would be pretty easy to spin up another machine to replace the one that I can't log in to, change the domain name to point to the new machine, and terminate the old one.

"A couple digressions. I have multi-dimensional empathy for my students. Is that a thing? It is. It means that I learn more from my students than they learn from me. There are more students than me, and they have so much more stuff going on than I do. Although I don’t condone cheating at all, I can recognize that students sometimes resort to cheating because of other life stuff going on. Plus, it was/is a global pandemic, with stress galore. So, we were all in a major life stuff happening moment."

The world needs more people with multi-dimensional empathy.

I completely agree with this view. However, I think it's worth trying hard to give the students the benefit of the doubt and ask how cheating might be rational. In other words, flip the assumptions and ask why we would require them to study something that they are just going to cheat at.

Now for sure it could potentially be that the students just don't have enough foresight, being younger and having less experience with life on this planet with other human beings. But again, what if we're not so quick to blame them?

The best thing I can come up with using this line of thinking is that a lot of the stuff that students are forced to study just isn't essential...i.e. it's not actually mandatory for life. Now life is very diverse and there's very little that is actually mandatory. But there are still a lot of things that are pretty important. What if the structure of our education system was more customizable, so students would have a clearer ability to choose their own adventure? Or as another commenter here alluded to, what if our system was more customizable about when you choose to get particular bits of education?

1. Regularly (three days per week seems to be about right) lift heavy weights using whole-body movements (three sets of five reps of back squat, bench/shoulder press, and deadlift at near maximal weights for you is the ball park of what you're shooting for).

2. Eat lots of calories with adequate protein (30% seems to be good).

If you're a really hard gainer and that still doesn't work for you, try adding a gallon of whole milk a day. That will definitely do it--whole milk evolved for the purpose of putting a lot of muscle on baby cows quickly. I wouldn't say it's a particularly healthy thing to do long-term but that will almost certainly make you gain significant amounts of muscle.

The biggest thing that helped me lose weight was subscribing to a meal delivery service and sticking to it (drink water if you need to feel more full and avoid the desire to eat more). Outsourcing my food choices to someone else made it substantially easier to avoid consuming more and unhealthier calories because of the enjoyment of putting things in my mouth or the challenge of controlling portion sizes. I grew up in a home where we had to finish all the food on our plate, and that combined with the the absurdly large portion sizes that you get at almost all restaurants in the United States presents a significant obstacle to weight control.

That's the hack that worked best for me, but I wouldn't say its a "weird tip". It really boils down to the following three factors which really all need to be present.

1. Exercise - You have to demand things of your body so it will send energy to rebuilding rather than conservation.

2. Calorie intake - You have to consume fewer calories than your body is demanding.

3. Food quality - Eat mostly whole foods and low glycemic index carbs that are less calorie dense.

Many people tend to focus on just one of those three things, and while that can work, doing all of them is far more effective. I tend to think that the "weird trick" mentality is a significant obstacle to success (in this as well as many other areas of life). The one weird trick is that hard work is the path to accomplishing things.

Research suggests that happiness isn't quite that simple. It's not obvious which direction the causation arrow points. See for example this podcast on the topic:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-happiness-lab-with...

Yep. If you can survive catastrophic loss (for some appropriate definition of survive), then insurance is always a losing proposition.

Assuming you're correct, the parent question is still valid. I think you'd at least want to have some redundant backups to protect against loss (not compromise).

This looks like a simple and elegant solution to a very real problem that affects lots of people's lives. But I can't help but think that in addition to the obvious upside of giving people a lot of autonomy, there's a significant downside here that should not be ignored. The flip side of making basic life activities easier is that if a person gets used to it, it can be pretty easy to slip into the complacency of relying on the device and actually never regain full normal function. I wonder if it would be feasible to augment that system with a leverage/resistance control that could be gradually changed. From my cursory look at the video it looks like there's some kind of mechanical leverage system in place (or at least there could be). Then a rehab schedule could start someone on, say, a 2x force multiplier and then gradually dial that back to 1x, and perhaps eventually < 1x which would then start to function as a strengthening / resistance training regimen.

I imagine this kind of graduated assistance/resistance feature would probably increase cost, complexity, and maintenance a meaningful amount. Question is, how much? Perhaps it might be worth it?