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smokey_circles

389 karma · joined October 22, 2019

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smokey_circles··on My Day Away from Reddit
Lol, yes, "distributed" means blockchain.

Someone should cancel Torvalds for building git on a blockchain. Clearly a scam!

smokey_circles··on My Day Away from Reddit
...

So every single early computer innovation then?

smokey_circles··on I've been abusing HTTP Status Codes in my APIs for years
Interesting take.

Feels cleaner to me, and while I want to argue about the opinionated payload bit, I suppose that's something that should be clearly defined in the contract anyway.

Maybe I've been abusing status codes too...

smokey_circles··on How to Do Nothing with Nobody All Alone by Yourself (2014)
People are not meant to alone. If the book is advising to do things alone, I advise not reading the book
smokey_circles··on I should have loved biology
> psychology for example

while I'm pretty despondent with the replication crisis in psychology, medicine isn't much better.

but to dismiss it outright is pretty ignorant. curious how you explain the state of America if your assertion is psychology and mental health are "relatively useless" fields

smokey_circles··on I just got access to DALL·E 2 and here are my first few results
I had the weirdest reaction to that last sentence.

As an engineer, the first thing that went through my head was "lots of photos of their faces available, easy filter. My face specifically: hard filter"

But as a person it was "ok wow, f_ck you too then?"

smokey_circles··on Boeing 737 Max mid-air emergencies revealed
I did not know the DC-10 had bit of dodgy record and oh hey, it's McDonnell Douglas. Again! What a coinky dink
smokey_circles··on Notes on structured concurrency, or: Go statement considered harmful (2018)
I've never had an issue with data race conditions in go. Can I ask what you did to lose faith?

The answer, for me, is always channels. What you put around the channels is the challenging part.

Channels are built to pass information between goroutines. If you are doing this via any other signaling, just don't. You can loop over channels for long running sequential reads, you can test them to see if they're ready to read or ready to write.

Honorable mention to context as well, extremely useful structure.

smokey_circles··on Notes on structured concurrency, or: Go statement considered harmful (2018)
This opinion is just gross. Always do your required reading kids.

- nobody uses semi colons, that's a huge red flag because the tooling will literally remove these symbols from your code, did you even run any go code? clearly not

- goroutines are not threads and galloping past that obvious chasm is also telling: you're not really sure what these magical things are but, somehow, you know they're bad. this is a flawed line of reasoning that was never going to convince me

- because you don't know how goroutines and the userspace scheduler work, you skip over all the benefits they provide and thusly nurseries give me nothing than a hand holding experience less effective than the existing tools I have. Thank you for wasting my time because I was genuinely holding out for _any_ kind of empirical reasoning. My mistake.

- As proof of the author's research negligence: Not a single mention of channels. Not one. Homework was clearly not completed

I'm all for debating a language's efficacy and tradeoffs, but not when the opposing side has no idea how anything works. Then it's not a debate, it's just the ignorant proclaiming a need to interfere with others. Go away, please.

smokey_circles··on The PocketReform is a made-in-Berlin Linux handheld
English Grammar is arbitrary and there is really no such thing as a "correct" form, only a formal one. Which is kind of elitist and disparaging imo.

Ain't is my favorite example. It was considered proper English until the lower class started using it [0]

I'm not against formal grammar but to grammar nazi everyday language is to be nothing more than an elitist pedant who presumes form to be more correct than function (which is only true in creative writing imo)

[0] https://www.etymonline.com/word/ain't#etymonline_v_8076

smokey_circles··on Ask HN: GPT-3 reveals my full name – can I do anything?
I need this to be expanded upon.

Presumably you don't mean your own life or data, or that of your friends and family where you can find consent.

So what's left is arguing for a right to remember strangers with high degree of accuracy, which is just fucking creepy no matter how you defend it.

And no, you don't have that right. Clearly trumped by the right to privacy. Unless you wanna defend some dude sitting outside your house (public property) recording you and your family's comings ans goings in a journal (which is already prohibited under most precedents around privacy, btw).

So unless it's some weird exercise in pedantry around accidental collection of background data (should you be forced to delete a photo because it has someone else in the frame? No but you shouldn't be able to make it _generally public_ either, a picture frame in your house is fine. Facebook is not) I've either missed something you or you lack obvious social skills? Help me out here

smokey_circles··on Thank you to our maintainers
I think it's pretty pathetic some of you are focused on copilot (as if youve never ripped code off SO before). I'm willing to bet none of you have contributed anything to open source either. Dunning-Kruger effect on full display.

To the rest, congratulations and thank you from those of us who thanklessly use your hard work. I hope this kind of public appreciation takes off and we see more large names using this as a template.

smokey_circles··on Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics
Very American opinion you have their. It does not hold up the world over though.

Supermarkets are a bad example here because they are a critical link in the distribution economy.

Google? Not so much

smokey_circles··on SMS phishing is way too easy
Phone numbers and email: the primary identifiers that were never meant to be used as such.

No idea what a good alternative is though. Preferably something federated though

smokey_circles··on One centimeter long bacterium discovered
> Euphemism for the Nazis

Which is strange when you consider how the Brittish seemed to start that trend.

https://www2.lib.uct.ac.za/mss/bccd/#:~:text=British%20Conce....

smokey_circles··on Tell HN: Coinbase now requires physical address of recipient in crypto transfers
Coinbase is a representative of crypto as much as China is a representative of the USD.

It exists only to exchange crypto for fiat. That means it _must_ be subject to regulation. Only yourself to blame if you thought otherwise.

Inb4 anonymity in crypto: says who? Monero is an actually private chain, and as a result you can't trust the claims it makes. "Just believe us" nah, I won't.

Bitcoin, on the other hand, is a publicly auditable chain. It's not anonymous or private. You can tie identity to a wallet if you know how (nation states for example, or just knowing your friend's address).

It's really not that hard to wrap your head around, but if all you do is meme trade well then someone thanks you for their Lamborghini.

smokey_circles··on Misplaced Crypto Schadenfreude
ITT: Critics ;)

I think it's disingenuous to call crypto an investment. It would be nice to see some legislation tame the absolutely insane relationship between crypto and fiat.

I like the idea of bitcoin, but until such time as it stops repeating avoidable mistakes tradfi has solved, I'm out.

Distributed, trustless consensus is a wild idea and I hope it finds root in something practical. Dunno if this is a thought about goal or not though. Seems to me that the current interest is building the next big crypto thing.

Also, isn't the idea of making money off of fiat/crypto exchanges kinda anti-thetical to what the cipherpunks were going for? Bitcoin's relationship to the USD is fairly toxic imo

smokey_circles··on Misplaced Crypto Schadenfreude
Aren't new investors the required check for an investment scam like a ponzi scheme? Genuine question
smokey_circles··on Bitcoin mining becomes unprofitable as BTC price falls to average cost of mining
> I've yet to see that from Tether

The wheels of bureaucracy turn slowly, it's no different with any other financial scandal.

smokey_circles··on US TikTok Data Repeated Accessed by China
The US is only angry that they don't have the right to do this.

Ya know, like with all the other tech firms they squeeze

smokey_circles··on SSH Chat
I can't imagine there's much benefit to it or that the goal was to be better than the existing inter-session tools in Linux.

But I built an ssh server in go once, which was a fun way to learn the deeper features and flows of the SSH protocol.

I think it's cool to see someone else doing something similar. Like affirmation that my curiosity (and maybe some stumbling too) is something worth cultivating

smokey_circles··on US moves closer to recalling Tesla’s self-driving software
Well when you wrap your identity around someone else's idea, you get weird outputs at the edge cases
smokey_circles··on Is “acceptably non-dystopian” self-sovereign identity even possible?
I'm not following.

You will not find trust _in people_ anywhere in modern society.

Banks certify transactions, governments certify identity. We can go on and on here. Whole swathes of law around this topic too lol (see: fraud).

Crypto isn't about not trusting people, it's about not needing to trust strangers.

Some of them are scams, ironically, but when there's money involved... well it's pretty stupid to _just_ trust people.

Unless I've missed something?

smokey_circles··on Solving the housing crisis requires fighting monopolies in construction (2020)
The end goal is not the problem.

It's ridiculous to suggest outlawing 50% of a state's living arrangement.

Good solutions consider the current state, they don't skip past it entirely

smokey_circles··on Choice on Units of Measurement: Markings and Sales [pdf]
The brexit comments I find interesting, but pretending the metric system is meaningless or without reason is just daft.

It's called standards. And standards make life easier. Shockingly poor opinion on an IT forum where we get to experience good and poor standards on an extreme scale.

smokey_circles··on Zero-Day Exploitation of Atlassian Confluence
1) why would you not use a vpn or other gateway between confluence server and the internet?

2) presumably for the same reason they ran confluence as root: no idea what they're doing (forgivable) or lazy (unforgivable)

smokey_circles··on You don’t need to be “enterprise-ready” or “scalable”
The title made me expect some argument about endlessly spinning up cloud resources, which I was ready to pull apart.

Instead, I found an argument about not building v1 with unnecessary optimizations.

Which I agree with but I didn't find anything new being said here.

What I've found _is_ worth investing in early on is measurement and metrics. No more blind changes, go look at the data and draw testable theories out of it. Huge quality of life improvement.

smokey_circles··on Ask HN: How do you manage “static” pages on your micro SaaS website?
I have cms content under a subdomain, but even if it was a path it would be fine, nginx is just a proxy. it doesn't care what your CMS is doing, as long as it responds
smokey_circles··on Ask HN: How do you manage “static” pages on your micro SaaS website?
Proxies. It's always proxies :D

My personal favorite pattern with HTTP is using nginx as the DNS endpoint for several hosts (root_domain, api.root_domain, tool.root_domain etc).

Nginx will forward traffic based on the HTTP Host header in any given correctly formed HTTP request. This also works well for a load balancer. I think the hip thing for today's market is itsio? Same basic idea.

Another benefit of an application layer proxy is you can do application layer things, like telling a client to redirect from http to https and serving https using let's encrypt. Privacy for free (state actor caveats apply).

Your applications (then one behind nginx) do not need to use transit layer encryption (unless of course they're connected to nginx via untrusted networks, be sensible) which is a huge boost because nginx do a good job implementing all of that logic for you and it's nice to hand off responsibility to trusted entities that do the job well.

Unless it's log4j, apparently.

smokey_circles··on The Weight I Carry (2019)
Excellent points

> why would I care what others think about

Because you're a social creature and evolution cursed us with self awareness. There are things not worth concerning yourself over, but this is like telling someone to just not be depressed: it doesn't work (generically) like that.

Also, if I may, why must I pick up the medical bill (in any form) because someone can't choose to not eat a double big Mac with extra fries, regardless of the sugar free drink?

I don't think it's as easy as "shame these people until they fall in line" (I did have this view) because there are other, surprising factors involved (poverty being the one that surprised me the most).

But we can, and should, extoll the benefits of a healthy lifestyle. One of them is a greater self satisfaction [0]

0: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7789197/

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