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pfarnsworth

3,341 karma · joined January 7, 2016

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pfarnsworth··on World's Best-Run Pension Funds Say It's Time to Start Worrying
Bonds or bond funds? Those are two different beast with two different behaviors when crises hit.
pfarnsworth··on Homebrew removes MongoDB from core formulas
Ubiquiti is one of those companies. They use MongoDB for their controller app, which has been a pain in my side for a couple of years now.
pfarnsworth··on TSV Utilities: Command line tools for large, tabular data files
eBay has an api project that appears to have been half-completed and then abandoned. Trying to understand exactly how to use their APIs is extremely confusing because they don't have anything definitive and basically a frankenstein-like API so I've given up. I frankly wouldn't trust anything coming from eBay at this point, they appear to have extremely poor developer support and no investment in making their APIs better to use.
pfarnsworth··on RSI as a Developer
For my, it was 100% my mouse. I had my mouse off to the side, and I realized after debilitating wrist, elbow and shoulder pain that it was because my wrist was at an awkward angle all the time because of my mouse.

The reason for it is obvious when you look at it. When you write in a notebook as a student, your arms are almost crossed and your hand is bent at an angle relative to the table. You can maintain this position for hours a day, years on end when you're writing notes. When you're using a mouse, your arm is bent outward and your hand is parallel to the table surface, which twists your wrist. That ends up pinching a nerve in your wrist, which causes all these other problems.

I switched to a pen mouse (back in 1997) which immediately fixed the problem. However, the pen mouse broke after a few months, so I went back to my regular mouse, but I first put it in front of my chest, in front of the keyboard, and I cup the mouse so that my hand is at an angle to the table. My arm from the shoulder to the elbow is resting against my chest, just like when I write on paper, and I don't let it get off my body. When I type I move my mouse out of the way, and when I use the mouse I move the keyboard out of the way.

It's been 22 years now without any repeat of the problems, so I know at least for me this fixed the problem.

pfarnsworth··on Keeping Tesla Roadsters Alive Is Serious Work
My wife damaged the skirt at the bottom of the car, driving over a bump. It dented the skirt pretty badly, so we got it replaced.

$10,000 and 4 weeks labor (but waited months to get it fixed), because they had to disassemble the whole damn car. I was livid at what should have been maybe a $200 part required practically the entire car to be disassembled. One front seat and the back seats were both removed as were the entire side panel of the car.

Until Tesla solves the maintenance and replaceability of parts, I'm never getting another Tesla again. It's simply bad design. It's like an iPhone where you can't just replace the battery, you need to disassemble the entire thing just to get to the battery.

With no commitment to their Roadster customers, it makes me wonder how long they will be committed to their Model 3 customers in providing parts? Already the parts market takes months to get parts, how will it be 6 years from now?

pfarnsworth··on VMware Acquires Carbon Black for $2.1B and Pivotal for $2.7B
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pfarnsworth··on Ask HN: Refusing to join meetings that require proprietary programs
Despite their recent issues, Zoom is mostly innocuous and the single best video conferencing software I've ever used. I don't think it's that big of a deal. Skype on the other hand, I'll never use.

If it's part of a job, then if you're not talking about a company-supplied laptop, then get a cheap laptop yourself, or maybe you can install a VM and install the software on there and give it access to a cheap USB camera.

pfarnsworth··on Streaming Cassandra at WePay
Relying on an eventual consistency database sounds like a huge challenge in terms of getting absolute consistency between Cassandra and Kafka. There seems to be many edge cases that could cause the data in Kafka to get out of sync, it doesn't sound very reliable. Especially if you want to rely on Kafka for event sourcing later on, which is sounds like you're planning on in the future. For a payments company that sounds very risky.

What happens if you write a row to Cassandra but that row is invalidated because of failed writes to the other nodes in the cluster (ex. the write was QUORUM and it succeeded on the node that you're reading from but failed on all other nodes). In Cassandra, when an error occurs, there are no rollbacks, and the row gets read-repaired. It sounds like that row will get outputted to Kafka. How do you "disappear" data written into Kafka if it gets read-repaired?

pfarnsworth··on How I Taught My Kid to Read
> Time spent listening to hard books is for most children also more marginally useful than time spent trying to learn to read very simple books independently, especially at the earliest ages.

I disagree about introducing hard books, especially at an early age. Young children will simply ignore things they don't understand, they don't attempt to understand it. If they are inundated with words they don't understand, they will simply move onto another activity. My son started reading at 2, but as his reading improved, it was challenging finding books that weren't too hard for him, with the right word density and vocabulary so that he remained engaged in reading.

Now he's 5 and he's reading at a grade 8 level, and still he will ignore some words but now he's old enough to occasionally ask me what a particular word means.

pfarnsworth··on Show HN: Bvckup 2 – Fast File Replicator for Windows
I'm very interested in this software. Does it do a bit check after copying to make sure that the copy can be read and is the exact same?
pfarnsworth··on Google Gmail purchase history can't be deleted
I have worked at well known tech companies and I personally dealt with some less-valuable-but-still-PII. We didn't store the PII because we cared about exploiting it or because we wanted to somehow sell this data to outsiders, that's not how we made our money. We took and continue to take the security and privacy of our customers very seriously. We made sure we were GDPR compliant as well.

Instead, the small PII we had was used for fraud signals and for logging/debugging. Very frequently we would get complaints about things not working and we would have to go digging through logs to figure out exactly what happened, and without that data it was hard to figure out exactly what happened if something went wrong.

Most of the data was TTLed in our logs between 7 to 90 days so that took care of most of the issues. Other data that got logged into a data warehouse needs to be deleted via Spark jobs, which takes several days to scour all the data.

Like I said, the companies I've worked at don't need user data for its primary product and even then it took time to fully delete a user's data upon request, so I can imagine it taking a lot of time for a company like Google where extensive use of user's data is widespread throughout the company.

pfarnsworth··on An Open Letter to the Go Team About Try
Try is a terrible choice for a name exactly because of try/catch, I don't know why they decided on that.
pfarnsworth··on An Open Letter to the Go Team About Try
I think "try" is a terrible name, because it overloads try/catch which is very common usage these days but it's nothing like that. It's basically a error checking macro, so give it a new name.
pfarnsworth··on KKR has acquired Corel, reportedly for $1B
Private equity's playbook is very, very transparent. They will take massive loans and use the money to try to create fake growth, maybe by buying a high growth unicorn. Then they will turn around and IPO it and sell it to retail suckers like mutual funds, and make a ton of money. They will get out, and then the company will collapse in a few years, taking down all the retail suckers who bought into it.
pfarnsworth··on KKR has acquired Corel, reportedly for $1B
My friend says that WinZip makes $70M per year due to government contracts and inertia. There is zero development or costs, it's just a pure money maker for them.
pfarnsworth··on NASA plans to launch a spacecraft to Titan
Isn't there wind on Titan?
pfarnsworth··on NASA plans to launch a spacecraft to Titan
is there no wind on Titan? What if there's a windstorm and it crashes the drone? At least a vehicle could resist crashing, unlike a drone.
pfarnsworth··on Zuckerberg and Sandberg will defy Canadian subpoena, risking contempt vote
Did they send the leaders of those 10 countries, or just the representatives?
pfarnsworth··on Automakers Are Rethinking the Timetable for Fully Autonomous Cars
After seeing some autonomous cars in action, I believe they are 20 years away. In that sense I mean a fully automated driverless car that you can command to do what you want.

It would be great if you could buy a car, have it bring you to work while you read or slept, then after dropping you off, go earn money while it was ubering people around until it was time to pick you up. But I highly doubt this will happen in less than 20 years at this point. There's just too much lacking. It needs real artificial intelligence, not just machine learning and pattern matching. The car needs to know "that's a paper bag flying in the wind I'm about to hit", or "that truck in front of me is stopped."

pfarnsworth··on Resistance to Noncompete Agreements Is a Win for Workers
I'm sorry you feel this way. You lost out on a good opportunity because of an asymmetrically unfair legal agreement that you had to sign. I'm glad I live in California where it's not enforceable. If you came to California, you would see that your supposedly valuable knowledge isn't as valuable as you think. Certainly it has some value because you learned how to be good at your position, but it wouldn't tank the company, no one is that important.
pfarnsworth··on “A company is copyright-claiming every video I have ever made”
How is this still possible in 2019? These are well-known tactics and yet Youtube still allows this?
pfarnsworth··on Cloud Run beta pricing
Will Google guarantee a minimum number of years to support this platform? I would hate to dedicate time and resources to this (sounds pretty useful) and then have Google shut this down in the near future.
pfarnsworth··on Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks
Enterprise open source is bleak. There aren't very many enterprise open source projects with pure intent anymore, they are all looking for the big payday, which unfortunately companies like Google and Facebook have encouraged.

Look at Confluent/Kafka. The PMC is stuffed with Confluent employees and they behave that way. They aren't acting like an Apache project, they are only acting in their own self interest. Any new ideas get the run around, and only their ideas see the light of day. I don't even know why they bother being open source, except maybe to get the free development and bug fixes.

pfarnsworth··on Facebook won’t let you opt out of its phone number ‘look up’ setting
If they won't stop spamming you, you can sue them under the CAN-SPAM act.
pfarnsworth··on Facebook won’t let you opt out of its phone number ‘look up’ setting
Exactly. It takes just one person who knows your phone number to upload their entire contact list and it's saved. The likelihood that Facebook doesn't have your phone number and name is 0% unless you don't have a phone number.
pfarnsworth··on Facebook won’t let you opt out of its phone number ‘look up’ setting
Request an new password, and then change the password on the Facebook account. I've done that myself.
pfarnsworth··on Stories of Financial Windfalls
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pfarnsworth··on Amazon Caught Selling Counterfeits of Publisher’s Computer Books–Again
Amazon gets away with this because it's practically impossible for small business owners or authors to police their site. It's similar to Google, where they let counterfeits thrive, but real content creators get fake DMCA notices and shut down.

I really hate to say this, but large companies like this need to be regulated via laws. There's simply no other choice. Having Amazon throw their hands up and say "There's nothing we can do, we have algorithms" or hiding behind the safe-harbor laws is not acceptable.

Having their ability to shut off peoples' incomes or being victimized by counterfeiters, with no human contact and no process, is unacceptable and needs to be changed. They aren't changing fast enough and they don't want to change because it's expensive, and the only solution is to force them via laws, which I'm loathe to support but it's the only way.

pfarnsworth··on How to Delete Your Data from 23andMe, Ancestry, and Other Sites
All it takes is for someone in your family tree to submit their data, and your data is partially in there.
pfarnsworth··on Instacart paying 80 cents an hour because worker received a large tip
Uber/UberEats drivers get 100% of every tip, that is completely outside the equation for their pay.
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