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utternerdon The Facebook bubble just popped

Completely agree this was a ridiculous article, but it's also what I'd expect from TC.

utternerdon Show HN: Mest – Place to talk with those you disagree with

How about other topics to debate?

utternerdon We’re Scientists, Moms, And We Avoid Non-GMO Products

All of the above reasons are why I stopped engaging with the aforementioned "natural fallacy" folks long ago. It's painful, and seems to get nowhere regardless of how many facts are throw at them.

utternerdon Women rise through the ranks of IT more rapidly than men

Please don't take this as flippant, it's a legitimate query. I keep seeing the call for "more women in technology", however I don't see a similar rally for say, "more men in early education". Most teachers in early to middle school tend to be females by a wide margin[0], men comprise less than 20%, yet I don't see people screaming there should be more men teaching in those roles? Why is that?

[0] http://www.menteach.org/resources/data_about_men_teachers

utternerdon Farm grows vegetables in a desert using sun and seawater

How would one even make genetically modified salt? The most you could do is to add additional genetically modified compounds to the salt, but salt in and of itself cannot be genetically modified.

utternerdon House Passes Employee Stock Options Bill Aimed at Startups

And thus, death by a thousand cuts. If an entity is getting 20k in tax breaks or "handouts" it's in their best interest to defend that. To the taxpayer however, the $1.78 you're paying (or whatever the minuscule number is) to cover that annually is nothing to you, and certainly not worth your time to fight against.

utternerdon Show HN: Lemonade – the world's first P2P insurance company

I don't follow how this is P2P, and unfortunately it seems only available for New York zip codes?

utternerdon Municipal ISP forced to shut off fiber-to-the-home Internet after court ruling

I love your logic, highly persuasive and I tend to agree. My only concern has been and will remain until proven otherwise, that like many things "Government", Net Neutrality while having the best of intentions will slowly be eroded by corporate interests and lobbyists. Eventually destroying it's original intent, and leaving us in a worse, or much more complicated position than when we started. Hopefully not.

utternerdon FDA Orders Antibacterials Removed from Consumer Soaps

You mean to say the scientific consensus at this point, which is that they are indeed safe. It's silly to refer to people who believe in scientific rigor as "religious".

utternerdon Canadian surgeons urge people to throw out bristle BBQ brushes

I did this a few months back and replaced it with a "cool cleaning" nylon-based one after I started noticing the extremely tiny metal bristles falling onto my grill. My wife said I was crazy -- today I feel vindicated.

utternerdon Free as in Health Care

It's not a "present" if you're forced to pay for it via coercion as we do when it comes to a public park. It is however a "present" when one spends their time and energy making, and then giving away something to others as was the example. Very different scenarios; one is a gift, one is coerced.

utternerdon Why prisons continue to grow, even when crime declines

Stop throwing people in jail for "moral crimes" such as drug use, and we'd see a massive decline. Victimless crimes, such as contempt of court for not being "respectful" enough of a sitting judge, or the like should never send you to a cage either. One could make a massive list of the ridiculous uses of our criminal justice system, and sadly many don't see it as a problem.

utternerdon Are women exiting engineering because men get the challenging assignments?

I question the method of this "study". I don't think it's a leap to say 40 undergrads writing in their journals is anecdote.

utternerdon How I Ended Up in Tech by Chance

"Reverse racism", or whatever term you prefer has widely been accepted as a means to level the playing field. I think your comment is dead on; if this were a firm dedicated to hiring Whites and Asians, it would be lamented and thoroughly castigated, as it and this start-up should be.

It's a dangerous path, and sadly somehow you're seen as a racist if you speak out against it - I'm willing to accept down votes to speak the truth, as we all should.

Singling out specific ethnic groups to hire is wrong, it's that simple.

utternerdon Rsnapshot: filesystem snapshot utility based on rsync

I've used http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/ for going on 16 years now, it's great and still maintained, albeit by one guy. It just works. Not sure how it stacks up to this.

utternerdon A Two Month Debugging Story

I agree it'd be a nice option for them to provide, but I don't believe making it the default for every customer is a laudable goal.

If vacuums are hanging/causing locks and these truly are just test tables, it might be beneficial to use temporary tables instead as the autovacuum daemon ignores them. Additionally, unlogged tables that reside on a memory disk can be insanely fast - might cut some additional time down depending on your data.

utternerdon A Two Month Debugging Story

disabled autovacuum by default

I realize this wasn't their solution, but it's worth noting that generally speaking, disabling auto-vacuum isn't recommended. Even if you do, it will still force vacuum jobs to prevent transaction ID wraparound.

* https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.5/static/routine-vacuuming...

utternerdon Ask HN: Sites that you visit daily?

Wow, pocket is rad, love finding new things of use, thanks!

utternerdon PostgreSQL 9.6 Beta 1 Released

This is excellent, the read-balancing consistency is a huge feature, and one we've been waiting for as trying to do read balancing without it is jumping through way too many hoops (unless data consistency just isn't your thing).

utternerdon After ‘The Biggest Loser,’ Their Bodies Fought to Regain Weight

I came here to say very similar to what you're saying. I'm down 50 pounds in a little over a year after being obese my entire life, with very minimal exercise (I walk to and from work, about 3 miles a day, but only walking) but weight-loss and slimming has accelerated greatly after cutting out carbs and sugars, which wasn't as painful as it seemed - replacing carb-rich noodles with Zucchini or Spaghetti Squash is amazing.

Lots of fats, proteins, and veggies, staying away from carbs and sugar, and I feel better than any other time in my entire life (at 34). I'm no longer eating simply to eat, and at this point I'm not craving the crap I used to. The sickness that now ensues after ingesting processed sugars or carbs, does make it easy to skip. While this story is anecdotal, it seemed worth a try because I kept stumbling on research supporting it.

utternerdon Unmasking the Men Behind Zero Hedge

I appreciate the link, this was a good read even though I ultimately disagree with his overall assertion. This issue isn't going to be settled here, or anytime soon, it's been going on since before many of us were born, and will probably continue after we're gone.

utternerdon FOUT is back in Chrome 50

A good example of FOUT: http://recordit.co/vsAZQc5ihD

utternerdon The Suicide of Venezuela

Actually, reading his other posts, he sounds much more like a libertarian (lower-case L specifically).

utternerdon The Suicide of Venezuela

Sadly, the concept that capital controls are deleterious is foreign to entirely too many people, and not just in Venezuela.

utternerdon Everyone in California wants to be the last new resident in their neighborhood

As a resident of Irvine there are many aspects at play here, and this is an over-simplification. Though I do agree with the underlying author's feeling; NIMBYs are annoying, and illogical.

I do however take great offense to being referred to as a xenophobe simply because of where I live, that's asinine.

utternerdon India orders ‘panic button’ for mobile phones in bid to protect women

Most if not all phones have the ability to dial emergency numbers without unlocking them. How many false-positives will this physical "emergency button" result in?

I'd much rather see the market address these concerns without being coerced into doing so. If consumers want a big "emergency" button on their phone, by all means offer a product with one, but forcing said "feature" on every single person who purchases a phone should be frowned upon.

utternerdon India orders ‘panic button’ for mobile phones in bid to protect women

You're absolutely right, this is a ridiculous solution to a very grave issue.

utternerdon Master-Less Distributed Queue with PG Paxos

From their own documentation the use case is reliable replication, and even reads would be horribly slow:

"The drawbacks are high latency in both reads and writes and low throughput. Pg_paxos cannot be used for high performance transactional systems. But it can serve very well for low-bandwith, reliable replication use cases."

utternerdon Drones Are the New Threat to Airline Safety

I looked at the list of sightings they published, and within a few entries (specifically entry #10) found one purporting to have sighted a drone at 19,200 feet. (while the plane was at 19,500) This seems like an absurdly high altitude for even a commercial drone, let alone the stuff people are buying for personal use. Is it even possible for commercially available drones to fly at this altitude, or could these be false-positives?