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olifante

355 karma · joined February 28, 2007

Lisbon-based full-stack developer and DevOps guy. Current stack: Postgres, Django, Wagtail, DRF, React, next.js
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olifante··on Steve Wozniak suffers minor stroke
This constant vilification of one of the great figures of tech history is tiresome. Yeah, maybe Steve Jobs was not a great person, but why should constantly overshadow his tremendous successes?

Steve Jobs was a forceful and perhaps disagreeable character, but he is one of the clearest examples of how having relentless drive and taste can change the world. Focus less on the feet of clay and more on the giant.

And not to diminish Wozniak’s tremendous achievements, but Steve Jobs continuously innovated over the course of decades and had a much greater impact on the world.

olifante··on Omegle 2009-2023
That’s whitewashing it. The War on Iraq was a crime, not a mistake.
olifante··on Universal cancer vaccine trial shows significant improvement in overall survival
> the immune system can’t forget a target

This recent study has developed an “inverse vaccine” for multiple sclerosis that apparently can make the immune system forget stuff:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37528816

olifante··on Adam? ... is there a reason your laptop is in the fridge? (2006)
Leverpostej is the most disgusting thing in Danish cuisine. Just the smell of it heating up in the oven gives me nausea, while Danes start drooling in anticipation.
olifante··on September was the most anomalously hot month ever
Putting the burden on invididuals for averting the climate crisis is a form victim-blaming. It’s long been clear that only concerted collective action will be effective in producing real change.

This is why so many free-market, minimal-state absolutists are so prone to putting their fingers in their ears and pretending climate change is not a problem, or if it is, that individuals as free agents are responsible for creating it and therefore fixing it. They cannot accept the logical conclusion of the necessity of state action, as it contradicts their core beliefs.

olifante··on Brave Browser introduces vertical tabs
Yet here you are, alive and commenting on HN.
olifante··on Octopuses are building small “cities” off the coast of Australia (2017)
On the internet, nobody knows you’re an octopus.
olifante··on Builder's Remedy goes into effect in many California cities tomorrow
If houses were no longer an investment but rather just poaces to live, the result might be that more and better housing would be constantly being built. This is one of the points of this article that was posted here the other day: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/actually-japan-has-changed...
olifante··on Stadia died because no one trusts Google
The day they killed Google Reader was the day they publicly renounced their “Don’t Be Evil” motto.

From TFA:

> the turning point was the assassination of Google Reader — for which I will never forgive them, and try to regularly exert a small vengeance by mentioning it

olifante··on Bikes, not self driving cars, are the technological gateway to urban progress
Copenhagen is not super-dense, not even very dense. Berlin is even less dense than Copenhagen, yet both cities are very pleasurable for using the bike as your sole means of transportation.
olifante··on SSH tips and tricks
How about SSH straight into screen?

Here's how to define a shell function for quickly attaching to an existing screen session after connecting via ssh (or creating a new one if none exists):

  sshcreen () {
      ssh -t "$@" screen -xRR
  }
Works with bash and zsh. Usage is pretty simple:

  $ sshcreen user@example.com
You can use normal ssh arguments, such as the port:

  $ sshcreen root@localhost -p 2222
Detach the session with CTRL-A + D, reattach by re-running the sshcreen command you previously used.

PS: repurposed my comment from a recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32486892

olifante··on Ask HN: Can I see your scripts?
My favorite utility is a shell function for quickly attaching to an existing screen session after connecting via ssh (or creating a new one if none exists). It's pretty handy for treating a single ssh connection to a server as if it was a long-lived multi-tab terminal:

  sshcreen () {
      ssh -t "$@" screen -xRR
  }
Works with bash and zsh. Usage is pretty simple:

  $ sshcreen user@example.com
Or for local Docker instances mapped to port 2222:

  $ sshcreen root@localhost -p 2222
Detach the session with CTRL-A + D, reattach by rerunning the sshcreen command you previously used.
olifante··on Quirky computing books
A little Java, a few patterns, by Matthias Felleisen. Delightful book.
olifante··on “Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”
I found this to be the most insightful comment in the whole thread.
olifante··on How Uber Uses Zig
Great post. It's shocking to discover that the lead developer of Zig only earns 1500$ a month, and still manages to donate 10% to the musl project: https://andrewkelley.me/post/why-donating-to-musl-libc-proje...
olifante··on The Supreme Court just made a US-EU Privacy Shield agreement even harder
This is not a helpful comment. The Trumpian Republican party is here to stay, and it's very easy to imagine it being quite damaging to European interests and security once it's back in power. If there's one thing that the Trumpian right has shown is an appetite for the exercise of naked power, without any mask of moral pretences.
olifante··on Ask HN: Who operates at scale without containers?
I just tried Nix yesterday for the first time in order to play with reactivated. Was surprised by how simple it was to get it running. Made me think that perhaps containers are not as indispensable as I thought.

And reactivated is awesome, by the way. I just worry about how brittle it will be as both Django and React evolve.

olifante··on State of the Web: Static Site Generators
Templates are the ugliest part of Django. They are completely unaware of the target syntax, so very often the template itself cannot be validated as HTML, which makes it difficult to lint or reformat.

The only tool I'm aware of that can (mostly) correctly reformat Django templates is the PyCharm/IntelliJ family of IDEs, but their reformatting often introduces subtle breakage (such as adding new lines inside tag attributes) and requires careful review.

olifante··on On Immersion
I would definitely add reading to the list as well.
olifante··on How Much Does Education Improve Intelligence? A Meta-Analysis [pdf]
Read the article, that’s one of the first possible issues they address.
olifante··on How Much Does Education Improve Intelligence? A Meta-Analysis [pdf]
TL;DR:

“we found highly consistent evidence that longer educational duration is associated with increased intelligence test scores. […] the results support the hypothesis that education has a causal effect on intelligence test scores. The effect of 1 additional year of education […] was estimated at approximately 1 to 5 standardized IQ points.”

olifante··on Command palettes: how typing commands became the norm again
No need for copy-pasting, just doing "Command+L, Command+Return" will duplicate your current tab. Works on Chrome and Safari.
olifante··on iPhone Sales Drop, and Apple’s 13-Year Surge Ebbs
But it's a somewhat unnatural gesture to make. I often find I have to repeat it a couple of times until it works. Ditto for the five-finger pinch.
olifante··on Almost Nothing About the ‘Apple Harvests Gold from iPhones’ Story Is True
The Economist, unbiased? I let my one-year subscription expire due to their patronising tone and their not-so-hidden agenda of teaching the world to accept the gift of anglo-saxon supremacy.
olifante··on What if the problem of poverty is that it’s profitable to other people?
You must live in a different Portugal than the one I know. While I admit perceptions of corruption are quite high among Portuguese, actual corruption is not that high, at least according to the international metrics I've seen. We're certainly not a mafia state or anything close to that.
olifante··on Apple’s approach to privacy
It doesn't matter whether it's open source or closed source, non-profit or for-profit. If it's made by a company headquartered in the US, there's no escaping a national security letter with a gag order. Anything within Five Eyes (AUS/CAN/NZ/UK/US) jurisdiction (such as Ubuntu) is probably not much safer. We really need a new Linux distribution headquartered in a safe jurisdiction.
olifante··on Paris city centre goes car-free for a day
Yeah, it's really strange. All other medium to large German cities have sizeable commercial pedestrian zones, but Berlin has very few. The only ones I know inside Berlin are the shopping street Wilmersdorferstraße in Charlottenburg and the area from Alexanderplatz to Rathausstraße. There's also the Alt Spandau pedestrian zone as well as parts of Alt Tegel, but I don't think those belong to Berlin proper.
olifante··on Iran Nuclear Deal Reached
As someone who admittedly knows very little about Belize, why would it not count as part Latin America?
olifante··on Greeks Reject Bailout Terms
I'm Portuguese and I completely disapprove this message. We are deluding ourselves if we think that our situation is qualitatively much different from the Greek one. Were it not for Greece, Portugal would be the scapegoat for the Euro crisis.

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I see that no one from the financial sector went to jail for recklessly causing the biggest worldwide financial crisis since 1929, yet everybody is happily demonizing the Greeks, who in spite of having a made several errors were in no way responsible for the global crisis.

This shows how much journalism has been captured by financial interests, working hard to deflect attention from the true perpetrators.

olifante··on 1/999999999999999999999998999999999999999999999999
yeah, let's not become like those damn proles from reddit. /sarcasm
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