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nulagrithom

1,867 karma · joined March 12, 2013

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nulagrithom··on Launch HN: Tandem (YC S19) – A Virtual Office for Remote Teams
Do the chat/call/video call functions rely on Slack or Hangouts? Can it be done standalone?
nulagrithom··on Some items from my “reliability list”
You wouldn't put a card number in the path anyway (for obvious reasons). Far more sensible to put that in the request body.

And who's to say you can't put the reason in the body and still keep the code? What are you hurting by sending back 400? Unless you have lb's taking out nodes because of excessive 4xx's (which sounds like insanity) I don't see a reason _not_ to send 4xx's. At the very least it's a useful heuristic tool.

nulagrithom··on Some items from my “reliability list”
Agreed. What else would you use 400 for? I don't see how sending back 400 is going to hurt.

The payoff of using 400 is you can watch your 400 rates with almost no effort (HTTP is well established and there's many many tools out there.) If you somehow start accidentally munging the card number sometimes or if your card processor starts doing wacky stuff you'll see a spike in 400 rates.

If it was really that troubling that declined cards are expected, I would personally at least want to see 200 come from the internal API and 400 go out to the client.

And if your "intermediate devices" start doing goofy stuff to 400's then you've got bigger problems... 4xx's shouldn't be taking nodes out of prod. That's wack.

nulagrithom··on XSM: State management for Angular, React, and Vue
It's short for set configuration.

Maybe that just escaped you from some reason, but I would think it's perfectly understandable for just about anyone.

Curious if anyone else here had a hard time parsing it...

nulagrithom··on July on course to be hottest month ever, say climate scientists
At one point the planet was nothing but a hot 230 °C ball. How much pedantry do you want to get in to?

"Ever" vs "human history" almost seems like a nitpick. _We_ have never seen it this hot, ever.

nulagrithom··on The F# development home on GitHub is now dotnet/fsharp
While we're hijacked...

Is F# still the red-headed step-child of Core?

Last I fiddled with it F# was looking pretty unloved, but to be fair C# was still having a hard time with Core itself.

nulagrithom··on Falsehoods programmers believe about Unix time
I don't understand this one:

> If I wait exactly one second, Unix time advances by exactly one second

How does UTC jumping around affect this? If a leap second is removed it doesn't mean you've waited 0 seconds.

I feel like this is wrong too:

> If there’s a leap second in a day, Unix time either repeats or omits a second as appropriate to make them match.

It's not Unix time doing that. It's UTC.

nulagrithom··on Classic Minecraft now free online
For one, it's single threaded (last I checked). It also seems to be built on a big heap of messy Java.

Check out Cuberite for comparison. It's a Minecraft server built from the ground up in C++ and it's waaaaaaaay faster than the official server. Advantages of a rewrite I suppose...

nulagrithom··on Up to one million species are on the verge of extinction, U.N. panel says
We're increasingly incapable of surviving on a planet that's perfectly suited to us.

There's no chance we "look towards the stars" if we can't fix the ground.

nulagrithom··on Whitespace killed an enterprise app
> Users absolutely hated the new system.

I feel like this is a universal absolute, doubly so when it comes to enterprise apps (the lone exception being when we switched from Lotus Notes to Gmail -- then only half the company hated the change).

I would've liked to know how long the changes were in place and how it affected productivity metrics, especially the amount of training time spent on new users. As is, the article seems kind of obvious. Enterprise users abhor change; who knew?

> Just like you wouldn’t appreciate a dictionary with only 10 words per page (so many pages to flip through!)

This also makes me question the veracity of the article. It's a really terrible metaphor that makes me wonder if they were _solely_ concerned with pretty design on the outset.

I want a dictionary that shows me 1 word per page, with a search bar. The page flipping functionality is useless and can be removed entirely. It's a bad workflow.

I can definitely say that over the past 20 years, our in-house LoB app has developed some really bad workflows as well (business changes a lot over 20 years). Removing these bad workflows would give us back a ton of screen real estate without losing productivity.

The causality is backwards. I don't want to create whitespace by changing the design and ruining the functionality. I want to change the functionality which will create more whitespace and allow room for beautiful design.

nulagrithom··on Lessons from Failed DocuSign Integration
DocuSign should've recognized this and let them know the flaws in their plan, but in my experience they're _way_ too sales-oriented to ever do this.

I had a similar experience. I explored their API and got stuck on how to implement my use-case and how to ensure it's legally binding. Sales and "technical" resources assured me it was possible, didn't explain how, and everyone balked at any sort of legal questions and basically told me that was all on us to sort out.

I decided I didn't need help creating a box for users to scribble on. E-signature isn't a technical challenge at all.

nulagrithom··on US Surgeon General Declares E-cigarette Epidemic Among Youth [pdf]
Yes, yayana explained my error pretty succinctly before you did...
nulagrithom··on US Surgeon General Declares E-cigarette Epidemic Among Youth [pdf]
Yup! You're right.
nulagrithom··on US Surgeon General Declares E-cigarette Epidemic Among Youth [pdf]
That's not the definition of epidemic.

The dictionary definition is: a widespread occurrence of an infectious disease in a community at a particular time.

"Infectious disease" being the key. If we limit the definition to "took off" then any new and popular software becomes an epidemic.

It's naive to assume that something like this couldn't possibly be politicized simply because it relates to health. His points absolutely could be relevant to how the Surgeon General chooses to describe the uptick in vaping.

Overall tobacco usage is still going down: https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/yout...

nulagrithom··on US Surgeon General Declares E-cigarette Epidemic Among Youth [pdf]
Why are there conflicting reports on the stats from the CDC?

The CDC's website[1] says there's been a 0.6% increase in vaping in middle school and 1.5% increase in high school since 2011. This advisory however says "E-cigarette use among U.S. middle and high school students increased 900% during 2011-2015, before declining for the first time during 2015-2017." Was there a nearly 899% drop in 2015-2017?

https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/yout...

nulagrithom··on Why Sleep Apnea Patients Rely on a CPAP Machine Hacker
Counter-anecdote:

My particular doctor shoots for an AHI around 10, which is still mild sleep apnea (5 is the threshold) and is still high enough to get you diagnosed and provided a CPAP in the first place.

So for 6 months my AHI hovered around 8 or 9, occasionally spiking to 12 (which made me really feel like crap).

My technician won't adjust without doctor's orders (and incidentally also told me I'd fry the entire machine in days if I used non-distilled water in the humidifier, which is just absurd.) The doctor books appointments months out, and is OK with my current results anyway.

So I tried bumping my pressure up by 1 and lowering the exhale comfort feature on my own. Tada! After a month my AHI averages 4, sometimes spiking to 6, and I feel much, much better.

nulagrithom··on Show HN: Cruip – Free landing page templates for startups
Complaining? Sounds more like a feature to me. :)
nulagrithom··on MongoDB switches up its open source license
No, it has nothing to do with "amateurs". Whether the source is open and what the license dictates are two wholly different things. The danger is exactly in conflating the two.

Take for example the NPOSL-3.0:

A variant of the Open Software License 3.0, this license requires that the organization using it is a non-profit and that no revenue is generated from sale of the software, support or services.

https://tldrlegal.com/license/non-profit-open-software-licen...

The source is open, but you can't use it outside of non-profit orgs. It's "Open Source™", it's approved by OSI, and it can still get you in legal trouble.

nulagrithom··on Millennials and Mainframes: How to Bridge the Gap
Thanks for this. Will actually be really useful form me.
nulagrithom··on Millennials and Mainframes: How to Bridge the Gap
> This is very hard to do for mainframes because of access to them.

Bingo. I work in an AS/400 shop. I simply can't invest myself personally in the work because I know my access to that environment is predicated on working for this particular company.

I can hone my Linux skills and even my Windows Server skills any time. I can bring it home. I can use it myself. I can own it.

I can't do that with the AS/400. Just spinning up a "virtual machine" in the office to play around on is a licensing mess, and there's no "cloud" where I can rent one for a reasonable fee (that I've found). I have no sandbox.

Since my continued access to that environment isn't guaranteed or even convenient, I don't really want to dive in. And if I don't want to dive in then learning about it at all feels like a waste of time. Which then means I end up learning the absolute minimum before moving back to familiar territory.

nulagrithom··on Top Open-Source Static Site Generators
If you've got decision fatigue before you even start your project then maybe it's time for a vacation.

On the other hand, now you have to choose between 100 destinations, and your life has become a little bit worse.

nulagrithom··on Statement on Police Activity on the Road to Black Rock City
I couldn't find that comment, but it sounds a lot like this one:

> And do they really think lots burners use opiates?

Opiates vs "illicit substances". I don't think they were arguing that Burning Man is straight edge, just that there isn't a large opiate presence specifically (which wouldn't surprise me).

nulagrithom··on Are SUVs Ruining Retirement Savings?
I feel like it's a bit disingenuous to talk about this in the context of 1) paying MSRP and 2) buying new.

He even mentions the second point, then goes on to completely ignore it:

  - Never buy new.
  - Just buy something 2-3 years old after it comes off someone else’s lease.
A quick look on Kelley Blue Book says that $51,790 Ford Expedition drops to $24,925 after 3 years and 55,000 miles. Using the same parameters for the loan comes out to payments of $418 per month.

That's still a chunk, but it doesn't have quite the same shock value as the brand-new MSRP prices presented...

Now, $418/mo is still a far cry from the $165/mo you can get out of a lowend, 3-year-old Kia Rio, for sure. I drive something similar now. But the article still kind of rubs me the wrong way...

nulagrithom··on Ask HN: Have you ever chosen Postgres over Mongo and regretted it?
> What is wrong with writing a raw SQL for such a simple thing?

Mostly query composition. I run in to this a lot. Say I need to write a less-than-simple query and reuse it with several different WHERE clauses.

Sometimes I think I just want migrations, not so much an ORM. I want to define views and stored procs in my repo and have them move to prod automatically, but I still want to write in straight SQL.

nulagrithom··on I Helped Design the ‘Machine Learning President’ Game
Why not publish?
nulagrithom··on Intel CEO resigns after relationship with employee
Because writing in English requires either gender specific singular pronouns or the awkward sounding use of a gender neutral _plural_ pronoun referring to a singular person.
nulagrithom··on States Can Require Internet Tax Collection, Supreme Court Rules
I wonder if this extends to county/city taxes? That would open up even more ridiculous complexity.

Locally, there's a poorly structured (ie not machine-readable) spreadsheet of municipal taxes that tell you, based on _what side of the street_ you're on, whether you fall under the "mosquito district tax" that requires a small percentage more sales tax to pay for the annual spraying of mosquitoes.

Without simplifying the tax codes, I'm not sure full compliance over the web is even possible...

nulagrithom··on Show HN: Cost of a 51% Attack on Popular Cryptocurrencies
Is the NiceHash-able column the percentage of the attack that could be rented from NiceHash?
nulagrithom··on A pure JavaScript implementation of Git for Node and browsers
What are you babbling about? The web is technology. JavaScript is a language. And WASM is shipping in all major browsers already.

You don't have to wait 10 years. You can start using WASM today.

nulagrithom··on WSJ – The internet faq
The glossary is fantastic: https://www.wsj.com/public/current/articles/SB84963840719945...
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