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natoliniak

272 karma · joined December 31, 2015

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natoliniak··on Why the Ocean Cleanup hasn't solved the plastic pollution crisis
it wasn't that long ago that most daily use goods were sold in reusable glass bottles, jars, paper bags. Clothes, shoes, appliances, furniture was durable, lasting multiple years, sometimes even passed on between generations. Then, late stage capitalism decided to optimize the hell out of everything, told us that glass is too heavy for economic distribution of goods, paper not hygienic enough and that we need internet enabled toasters. We now end up drowning in plastics, forced to replace cars, heavy appliances every 2 years but most of all are seeking weird solutions and feel good stories to solve this, well in line with the principle of the orphan crushing machine.
natoliniak··on France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US
> (Poland, Hungary, Slovakia mostly) where they eat most of the EU funds

"Eat" the funds? whaat? Is EU really viewed as some kind of charity to the ungrateful "easterners" in France? does surrendering their market and massively adapting and opening their economies to the dominant western EU economies completely goes unnoticed in this context? The provision of cheap educated workforce to the western companies also never happened?

BTW, Poland probably has the most pro-EU population with a full awareness that soon we will likely become a net payer. I am also starting to be convinced that this patronizing attitude from the "real" Europeans that is starting to drive EU skepticism in the eastern flank. peace.

natoliniak··on This website is hosted on Bluesky
> Twitter became toxic / suppressed speech dramatically

But what kind of speech is supressed nowadays on X? what about Bluesky? does Bluesky not supress any speech?

natoliniak··on Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says
not to mention that gp editor is disabled on non pro windows. i think there is some kind of a funky command line or registry hack to enable it. So yeah, I moved on from windows largely because of this force fed software.
natoliniak··on Are commercial "third places" a dying breed?
But it sounds like in Italy you entered the coffee shop to drink coffee and socialize - which fulfills the mission of a coffee shop. However, I noticed that in post-pandemic Poland and the USA where i spend a lot of time, coffee shops are starting to become more like coworking spaces where the "laptop class" is demanding not only perpetual space but worst of all, silence, since they are busy working and concentrating. It is simply not what it used to be.
natoliniak··on Rents are soaring. Is RealPage to blame?
question: how can a municipality determine if a unit is vacant?
natoliniak··on Your database skills are not 'good to have' (2023)
I'm dealing with a very large partitioned table (several millions of inserts per day) and i solve this by running `vacuum analyze` nightly which somehow solved 99% our read issues

Prior to that, we tried various indexing strategies, de-normalizing some of the data, but ultimately i found that weird plan inconsistency to be solved by the vacuum job

natoliniak··on UnitedHealth Group has paid more than $2B to providers following cyberattack
> We continue to call on Congress and the Administration to take additional actions now to support providers

ah yeah, the old socializing losses and privatizing profits.

natoliniak··on HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 explained
> you can do whatever horrors you want

and i do. i run a personal static website over http. oh the horror.

natoliniak··on Heinz’s sustainable ketchup cap
> best way to get ketchup out of a glass bottle.

i store the ketchup bottle upside down and when i open it, it is immediately ready to pour and is mostly controllable

natoliniak··on Canadian internet bill S-210 is a step closer to becoming law
> any site or service that makes sexually explicit materials available

so basically, the internet.

> Canadian ISPs required to ensure that the sites are rendered inaccessible

At best, this is regulatory capture for the current tech giants, at worst, basically ability to hand pick who gets to see what sites. So yes, censorship under the cloak of "age verification" and "protecting kids". We have heard it all before. I'm surprised they didn't somehow stuff the "terrorism" angle in there as well.

natoliniak··on Bird with GPS flies into typhoon
that is my point - in order to stay up, the bird would need to either flap its wings for 700 miles non-stop (unlikely) in order to maintain velocity difference between it and the ambient air OR glide which basically means he was not traveling at the speed of ambient air, otherwise there would be no lift pressure generated on his wings and he would drop to the ground
natoliniak··on Bird with GPS flies into typhoon
ok, if the bird's natural speed is that of the ambient air, then how does it stay up? the bird is not lighter than air, so where does the upwards pressure on the bird come from? either the bird must flap its wings to stay up or there must be speed difference between the bird and the ambient air to generate lift.
natoliniak··on Bird with GPS flies into typhoon
but wouldn't the wind exert some pressure on the back of the bird? wouldn't it not generate any lift otherwise and just drop back to the ground? like sails on a sailboat, for the sailors it feels like there is no wind, but the sails are carrying massive pressure
natoliniak··on Software disenchantment
in my experience, when it comes to picking two out of: quality, cost, or speed to delivery, businesses always choose speed and cost. I dont' like it, but I just grew to accept that. The reason why physical engineering seems focused on delivering quality is because of strict regulatory oversight, which for better or worse, we lack in software.
natoliniak··on Sweden brings more books and handwriting practice back to its tech-heavy schools
> not once

not even on a white board?

natoliniak··on TikTok Shop
same. it feels like QVC for generation z
natoliniak··on Ask HN: Those with success using GPT-4 for programming – what are you doing?
I use it as a personal tutor. It is really good at it, because it can respond to clarifying follow up questions and it is usually right. For pure development or peer review, it is not there yet. I asked it recently to help me decipher some real life SQL performance issues and it did not really help. Actually, it turned out to be a waste of time. The classic Postgres query analyzer and some 3rd party query visualization tools got the job done.
natoliniak··on Every web search result in Brave Search is now served by our own index
i tried, but I was immediately put off by the inability to search for an exact string. To me, that makes a search engine useless. Am i missing something? I tried using quotes etc, but the results always force up approximate matches.
natoliniak··on The Great Electrician Shortage
In Boston it is illegal. Plumbing as well. I tried to hire a plumber and electrician to do simple bathroom rewire and could not find a willing contractor - job too small. "Call us in a couple of months, maybe we will squeeze you in" was a typical response. So, I did it myself, according to code but without pulling the permit. I had not other choice.
natoliniak··on Conspiracy Theorists Are Coming for the 15-Minute City
My problem with the article is that it builds something of a straw man "conspiracy theorist" to battle against, instead of looking at the actual problem:

"The plan will require local residents to apply for permits to drive on certain streets" and the glossed over "filters"

This immediately creates an economic structure where only the wealthy would be able to freely drive while ushering everyone else into something of a forced utopia.

There are plenty of organic "15-minute neighborhoods" all over Europe (and even in the USA) where people voluntarily surrender cars (I'm one of those people) but forcing people to do this only fuels weird culture wars. Build truly car free infrastructure first and residents will ditch cars freely.

natoliniak··on My class required AI
i agree. I think this is analogous to flying a modern airliner. After all, anyone can set the autopilot. Easy, right? Easy until a situation arises where manual flying or human intervention is required. That is when years of tedious training becomes instantly relevant, when the machine can't handle an edge case that requires a novel solution. Can you imagine a medical doctor or an airline pilot who chatgpted his/her way into a license?
natoliniak··on Airbnb nightly rates shot up 36% in 3 years
the last place i stayed in via Airbnb requested not only to take out the kitchen garbage, but to also deliver it to the city dump. The place itself was nice and worth the money, but after paying the $100 cleaning fee i declined to turn my car into a garbage truck. I have not used it since.
natoliniak··on Cut the Cutesy Errors
On Massachusetts highways it is common to see "funny" electronic messages like "Wicked Stahm Coming" about an impending blizzard etc., and even though I get the "joke" it is enough to confuse me for a moment and I find it a nuisance. I have never seen this phenomenon outside of the USA and I hope this trend stops.
natoliniak··on Is remote work bad for the economy?
> are freed up from fixing roads because of lower traffic, they don't just sit around crying, they find other work to do.

yes, this holds up when there is something else to do, which is not always the case. I remember during the great recession, building contractors in Florida were praying for a hurricane to put them back to work. There was absolutely no other work to be found.

natoliniak··on Ask HN: Do you test in production?
Feature flags.
natoliniak··on I deleted all my social media 3 yrs ago and I hardcore regret it everyday
> nobody asked me directly, so i wasn't aware

this is not meant to be judgmental (of you or your circle of friends), but if nobody asked you directly, would that not send a signal to you that maybe they are not that interested in hanging out? I personally don't have many friends, but among the few that i have, it is unlikely that they would fail to notify me in person if there was an event that we would mutually enjoy (and vice versa). Are you talking here about more distant acquaintances/coworkers than friends?

natoliniak··on Ask HN: Inherited the worst code and tech team I have ever seen. How to fix it?
having seen several rewrite attempts in my career, none of which were fully successful, here are some thoughts:

- The ultimate reason: it will take too long and be over budget. The business will (rightfully) ask why should they invest x amount of capital just to get essentially the same feature set back. Businesses do not care about whats under the hood.

And here is why: - the rewriter team usually does not fully understand edge/corner cases that the current mess handles, but obscures it.

- the rewrite inevitably ends up following the same patters that the original did leading to unusual/weird cases

- rewrite teams get too ambitious and attempt to over abstract and over engineer, eventually creating another mess understood by only them

natoliniak··on Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?
I really hope that this will happen, but I'm skeptical. The push to cluster around big cities is still accelerating and land scarcity around big metro areas is what is driving out affordability. Utilities connection constitutes a small and almost insignificant cost of total urban residential construction. If a global pandemic couldn't stop this trend, then I don't think we will ever live in an affordable distributed civilization.
natoliniak··on Where Expats Should (Not) Move in 2022
I noticed this weird doublespeak as well. I noticed that in Poland (where I live), permanent residents from the "west" refer to themselves as "expats" while working in the same office, same position, side by side with ukrainian "immigrants". Weird.
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