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misterbowfingeron YouTube Stars Being Paid to Sell Academic Cheating

I don't think the two are comparable. Cheating on a test doesn't "take" anything of intrinsic value from another person, stealing does. Cheating hurts no one.

You can argue that cheating puts you ahead of students that work in good faith, systemically, though it's still a bit different. Stealing has implied intent of taking something away from someone, cheating doesn't. You're just trying to get better grades.

misterbowfingeron YouTube Stars Being Paid to Sell Academic Cheating

This reminds me of a story from my AI professor in college. Not exactly his words, but it was something like...

"You have to do all of your work on your own. But let's say you decided to copy someone else's homework. Well, to make sure you don't just plagiarize it, you're going to start changing variables and function names, and maybe alter the structure of the code altogether. As it turns out, the more you alter the copy, the more it actually becomes your own work and eventually you would have, in a sense, done the work yourself."

misterbowfingeron How long does it take to linear search 200MB in memory?

The Ruby implementation looks wrong. He's shoving the file into an array:

  contents = contents.read.each_byte.to_a

When really he should be streaming each byte from the file. I suppose he should do that for all of the implementations (or just use grep & cat?), but Ruby objects are annoyingly expensive since there's so much bloat.

misterbowfingeron Scaling a High-Traffic Rate Limiting Stack with Redis Cluster

A lot of people also make a mistake of benchmarking Redis on multi-core machines. Redis is single-threaded, so it'll never be faster if you have multiple cores. To properly benchmark Redis on a multi-core machine, you have to run more instances of Redis on the same machine (1 instance/core).

misterbowfingeron Impersonators who are paid to flirt on dating apps

Oh my lord, these comments are really surfacing the number of incels and MRA's on hacker news. Wow.

When I hear criticisms of the tech community being so bro-y and full of insecure dudes, I tend to rebuff them because I don't personally see it as much. But man, that behavior is coming out in full force on this post.

misterbowfingeron Go's New Brand

yeah neither does a cockroach for a database.

misterbowfingeron One Giant Leap for SQL: MySQL 8.0 Released

Makes sense, thanks for the thorough answer! The popularity of the LAMP stack predates me a bit, so I didn't know as much about the history.

misterbowfingeron One Giant Leap for SQL: MySQL 8.0 Released

The reason I think a single database release has a dramatic effect on the entire SQL ecosystem is simple: MySQL is the weakest link in the chain.

That's a heckuva deep cut.

I wonder why/how MySQL got so popular, when in my head the go-to is Postgres (perhaps because I worked on Django/Rails stuff early on). Is it because of Oracle and their marketing/sales work?

misterbowfingeron A more privacy-friendly blog

There has to be a simpler, privacy focused way to figure out pageviews, right? As long as I don't know _who_ looked at my site, I should be able to find out _how many_.

Similar thing goes for "how many people clicked this button"

Or am I way off here....

misterbowfingeron A more privacy-friendly blog

I opted for a simpler solution: no analytics. It also enables me to think that my blog attracts thousands of visitors every day.

I lol'd

misterbowfingeron Geolocating requests with Google Load Balancer for free

Using this:

https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/load-balancing/http/ba...

The load balancer expands variables to empty strings when it cannot determine their values, for example for geographic location variables when the IP address’s location is unknown, or for TLS parameters when TLS is not in use.

Geographic values (regions, subdivisions, and cities) are estimates based on the client’s IP address. From time to time, we update the data that provides these values in order to improve accuracy and to reflect geographic and political changes.

misterbowfingeron The “unpatchable” exploit that makes every current Nintendo Switch hackable

> By sending a bad "length" argument to an improperly coded USB control procedure at the right point, the user can force the system to "request up to 65,535 bytes per control request." That data easily overflows a crucial direct memory access (DMA) buffer in the bootROM, in turn allowing data to be copied into the protected application stack and giving the attacker the ability to run arbitrary code.

Classic.

misterbowfingeron Apple open-sources FoundationDB

I hate to be that person, but when I hear "ACID transactions in a distributed database", I hear Citus/Spanner/CockroachDB.

I'm positive that Citus & Spanner are quite different from FoundationDB, but I have no idea how. Googling didn't help much.

Can someone provide an overview of the differences?

misterbowfingeron Jeff Bezos' annual shareholders letter

We do "architecture docs" where I work. Although there really isn't as much of a narrative in them. It's mainly a summary, why we should do it, and a bunch of graphs/charts.

Honestly, I find it a bit arduous, although it's definitely necessary. I really just wish people just whiteboarded it all out and it was recorded.

misterbowfingeron Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL now generally available

what's the benefit of using them vs. AWS or GCP directly?

misterbowfingeron Why New York City Stopped Building Subways

Apologies for the strong tone, but how many articles do we need to actually get something done? It's exhausting to see article after article without action.

misterbowfingeron Go gets preliminary WebAssembly support

Hey so question - WebAssembly can't access the DOM right? What's the whole point then, avoid Javascript? If we can't just swap out all the gnarly JS garbage whole-hog, I don't see where the business value is, given that there's plenty of language-to-js libraries.

misterbowfingeron Publisher Gets Carte Blanche to Seize New Sci-Hub Domains

So confused. DNS registrars can be mandated to reject domain ownership? What about DNS registrars outside of the US?

Also..... at some point we could just publish a list of IP's if we care enough, right? Although that's less than ideal.

misterbowfingeron The Encryption Debate Isn't About Stopping Terrorists, It's About Solving Crime

I'm not sure I agree with what I'm about to say myself, but wanted to see how others feel....

The advent of the internet has caused us to question a lot of our rights as a people. We originally felt strongly around our right to free speech and our social networks embodied that to its logical conclusion, and now we're here at a dire state of hate speech and vitriol that threatens the (perceived) stability of our democracy. While the printing press and television have contributed to our partisanship, it's almost undeniable that the internet - and the ability for anyone anywhere to publish anything - has pushed us over the edge.

There have been serious considerations about what we can do about this. One of the issues is that, as a people, we might not be ready to have all this power ourselves.

I'm wondering if that extends to encryption and privacy. Can we, as a people, be trusted with this level of autonomy, power, and security?

misterbowfingeron Instagram ranked worst social network for young people's mental health

Link to report cited in the article:

https://www.rsph.org.uk/uploads/assets/uploaded/62be270a-a55...

misterbowfingeron CockroachDB 2.0 released

Reposting this to see if anyone could comment (last time i promise):

So. For me, personally, I don't care about the name. I generally care that it's great tech, and it clearly has a great team behind it. However....

If I worked at CockroachDB, and I saw the negative feedback around the name, I'd take it to heart. At the end of the day, the name is marketing for the hard work of their engineers, and marketing for the engineers that want to use this DB (remember, they need to sell it to their managers who may not be technical).

This issue can show up in unexpected ways. For example, for cloud providers like Compose (IBM company), would they be comfortable with putting "CockroachDB" on the front page? They might if it's good enough, but it's at least a consideration (i.e. another meeting, another stakeholder to convince).

Or how about an enterprise company that's going through due diligence, and when their client asks them about their tech stack do they say "CockroachDB" or do they obfuscate the name by saying "It's a high-performance distributed database". That's a crucial moment to market CockroachDB, and it could get lost. As sad as it is, saying that you're using MySQL "because Oracle" is a point of leverage for some sales people.

Is the name worth it? Asking honestly.

misterbowfingeron How Shyp Sunk: The Rise and Fall of an On-Demand Startup

All I remember about Shyp is when TJ Miller called a Shyp employee a "bitch" at the Crunchies:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZ1qcD6isI8

Sorry for the gossip.....

misterbowfingeron Poor Grades Tied to Class Times That Don’t Match Our Biological Clocks

original paper:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-23044-8

abstract:

Misalignments between endogenous circadian rhythms and the built environment (i.e., social jet lag, SJL) result in learning and attention deficits. Currently, there is no way to assess the impact of SJL on learning outcomes of large populations as a response to schedule choices, let alone to assess which individuals are most negatively impacted by these choices. We analyzed two years of learning management system login events for 14,894 Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU) students to investigate the capacity of such systems as tools for mapping the impact of SJL over large populations while maintaining the ability to generate insights about individuals. Personal daily activity profiles were validated against known biological timing effects, and revealed a majority of students experience more than 30 minutes of SJL on average, with greater amplitude correlating strongly with a significant decrease in academic performance, especially in people with later apparent chronotypes. Our findings demonstrate that online records can be used to map individual- and population-level SJL, allow deep mining for patterns across demographics, and could guide schedule choices in an effort to minimize SJL’s negative impact on learning outcomes.

misterbowfingeron How React Increased Animation Performance Using Fiber

Awesome post!

Related - Lin Clark has an amazing talk on explaining React Fiber:

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

misterbowfingeron CockroachDB 2.0 Performance Makes Significant Strides

So. For me, personally, I don't care about the name. I generally care that it's great tech, and it clearly has a great team behind it.

However....

Is the name worth it? Asking honestly.

misterbowfingeron Uber Is Ripping Off Frequent Riders and Here’s How to Avoid It

I've definitely noticed that if use Uber infrequently, I consistently get marketing promotions for "40% off" of your rides.

This might be specific to my market, but it happens really consistently.

Honestly, I just think about it like a marketing analyst. Who would you try to entice back onto your platform? High value users, who show interest (i.e. opening the app but not taking rides). It really becomes easy to game most marketing promos this way, but Uber's is particularly gullible.

misterbowfingeron IBM Plex – A new typeface

I love the general design. But as others noted, the scrolling behavior is WAY terrible.

Do "normal people" enjoy this type of scrolling behavior?

misterbowfingeron Au Revoir

As a founder, of course, I have mixed emotions. When you create a company, your job is to make sure it can one day succeed without you. Then eventually that one day comes and the celebration can be bittersweet.

I've seen this before firsthand and it always looks painful. It's easy to look at something from afar and think, "why not just let it go?" But seeing the pain of letting go time and time again makes it seem far more difficult....

misterbowfingeron Elon Musk Deletes Own, SpaceX and Tesla Facebook Pages After #deletefacebook

> Previously I would check my FB feed a dozen times a day

Wow. Is this still common these days? I rarely check FB. Honestly, I end up checking Twitter and HN way more.

misterbowfingeron How we should pay for newspapers

Suuuuuuuuuure, although this will undoubtedly result in newspapers being paid less, not more. Given the currently bleak situations for newspapers, I'd doubt this would work.

There's also the issue of unions that have been popping up since DNAInfo got shut down. I don't think they'd support a "Spotify" for news.