Hacker News Reader

weddproson China’s $4k electric cars tap huge market Tesla can’t reach

only 5 full page reloads before I could finally accept that f*ing cookie dialog... gg bloomberg and europe

weddproson Building Webhooks into Your Application: Guidelines and Best Practices (2020)

I can never understand why enforcing (sane and secure) TLS and adding a (shared) secret request header isn't the usual simple answer.

As far as I know, TLS prevents all these security issues, except authentication of the webhook caller, hence the shared secret which your webhooks should check.

I've verified in the TLS specs that every issue I've seen raised by people is actually covered, yet people still think (and write) that TLS doesn't sign traffic (it does), or TLS doesn't prevent replay attacks (it does), etc.

Usually I give them pointers to the specs, and they say "it doesn't hurt to add even more security" but they're really rolling out their own encryption, which you shouldn't do.

I'd say enforce TLS and authenticate the webhook caller...

weddproson Is soy a key driver of deforestation?

I have the impression something is making the numbers not comparable: we humans eat soy beans but the rest of the plant is fed to animals. So I don't see how we can conclude anything about surface (deforestation). Maybe soy demand is driven by beans, and we're left with the rest of the plant which we feed to animals. But if we don't feed animals with the rest of the plant, what are we going to make with it?

weddproson Non-Blocking Parallelism for Services in Go

I would start n goroutines select'ing on the same bounded channel, which I find much simpler... or did I miss something?

weddproson France Hits Record 19.2% EV Share in December – Up Almost 6× Year on Year

Because of the weight of the state in France, I'd like to know how many EVs are purchased by individuals vs. the state. Any idea?

weddproson A palm oil alternative could help save rainforests

According to [1], small farmers represent 40% of Indonesia's palm oil industry.

[1] - https://snv.org/update/smallholder-palm-oil-farmers-can-farm...

weddproson A palm oil alternative could help save rainforests

An important part of palm oil is burnt in western cars to provide a "green alternative" to oil. How ironic? Plantations have grown as a consequence...

Also palm oil feeds many families in SE Asia. Boycott is not a solution.

weddproson Kafka Is Not a Database

is that another definition for confirmation bias?

I can name so many use cases a relational database is incapable of...

weddproson First person receives Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine in UK

How can the vaccine prevent entry of the virus in cells, yet the virus can still replicate? I can’t understand why they state we don’t know, because of how I image viruses and vaccination works. Can someone help me understand this paradox?

weddproson AWS Proton

digital ocean apps may fit the bill?

weddproson Show HN: Slyde – A new social network, private by design

Yeah I'm always worried how poorly people understand this kind of legal stuff... I used to be a pro photographer, and even other pros didn't understand this kind of verbiage

weddproson Electrified wingsuit from BMW reaches 186MPH on first flight

I guess extrados is much more important than intrados in terms of aerodynamics (planes "never" carry anything above their wings, only below them)

weddproson Tell HN: Never search for domains on Godaddy.com

Can I recommend gandi.net as a way to check your domains? It's just what I'm using, and their whois interface is really nice imho

weddproson Pieter Levels Makes $600k a Year from Nomad List and Remote OK

I agree not every website needs high availability... but I wouldn't bet my $600k/yr business on a single VM's availability and reliability. One day, his server is going to die and be replaced by his host, or his disks will need replacing or a RAID array will fry...

It seems like his business could at least afford an HA setup on a cloud provider. Moving to any hosted db with backups, updates and redundancy could be worth it.

As for HA failing, it's still less likely than not-HA failing.

Also an HA setup allows for maintenance and upgrades without downtime, which is way better than the very common "we don't upgrade if it's working, because it could break".

weddproson Pieter Levels Makes $600k a Year from Nomad List and Remote OK

HN: "A single server with SQLite is perfect for typical production workloads, it's so robust"

Also HN: "Database X can fail in Jepsen tests during partitions, it's unusable"

I see HA as a mandatory part of what makes a system production ready...

weddproson Etcd, or, why modern software makes me sad

The Kubernetes podcast explained just last week how moving etcd from HTTP to gRPC allowed a large gain in scalability

weddproson Discovery of oldest bow and arrow technology in Eurasia

Why use "Eurasia" instead of Asia? Sri Lanka is nowhere near Europe...

weddproson Cambridge research team estimates 12% of England has been infected already

Herd immunity is backwards... You can say "hey, look, the epidemic has died because of herd immunity", but you can't reasonably desire herd immunity if you can avoid it.

Think of Ebola and herd immunity for more that a second, and you'll understand what it means: herd immunity is not the only way. Korea proves it too. SARS 2003 died without herd immunity either. What about HIV? Fancy trying herd immunity?

Herd immunity shouldn't be a goal.

weddproson France had Covid-19 on November 16, hospital says after analysis of chest scans

A case from Dec 27 in Paris was confirmed after samples were re-tested when we knew about the virus...

weddproson Which epidemiologist do you believe?

and diversity in politics... don't forget politics

Korea "should" be comparable to western countries if it wasn't for politics. But they have 100x fewer deaths. They're not trying to reach herd immunity, it's a political choice.

weddproson Amazon to add 75,000 more jobs amid coronavirus pandemic

I'll be glad if we get a vaccine. If we don't, we must fight it nonetheless. In 2003, we stopped the SRAS epidemic, another coronavirus. We stopped it. There's no vaccine yet. The 2015 MERS isn't completely extinct but it's under control. Also I think Korea and a few other Asian countries will be virus free soon (those who thought the 2003/2015 epidemics)

weddproson Amazon to add 75,000 more jobs amid coronavirus pandemic

The plague was stopped before vaccines existed... Same with many other pandemics. A pandemic is an epidemic that affects a larger area, not an unstoppable monster

weddproson N26 will be leaving the UK

"If they go bankrupt, you will lose all your money " is not entirely true, according to Monese's FAQ:

https://support.monese.com/hc/en-gb/articles/115002002229-Is...

"Unlike banks we do not re-invest customer funds and have to keep all customer money separate to our own company finances. We are required by Regulation to Safeguard all funds received from Monese customers. This guarantees that even in the unlikely event that Monese is no longer in business, all of our customers would receive 100% of their balance back"

weddproson Ask HN: How did you fix your narcissism?

I'll second the recommendation for Schema Therapy, it's likely to help understand yourself and others (don't forget others...)

weddproson Show HN: Simple JavaScript VPN detection using timezones

Same here (Tenerife Spain), false positive

(fellow developer, please do not ban VPNs if you can't guarantee 0 false positive)

weddproson Microsoft Teams outage due to expired certificate

https://sslping.com

if free, simple and it checks your TLS settings too

weddproson Microsoft Teams outage due to expired certificate

https://sslping.com

is totally free, superfast and checks your TLS settings too (it's my baby)

weddproson France and Germany Agree to Block Facebook's Libra

If the Internet was invented today, it would probably be banned in Europe too

weddproson The Menace of Eco-Fascism (2018)

I did not have kids, I won't have kids. If you want to have a lasting impact on earth, refrain from having kids. Problem solved.

In the meantime, I'll keep eating beef in an effort to get rid of the 1.4B cows you want dead.

weddproson The Case Against Octopus Farming

or "first attempts at farming octopus - why we should stop"