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yes_man

430 karma · joined September 22, 2018

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yes_man··on Bittersweet Symfony: Devs accidentally turn off CSRF protection in PHP framework
1. Not all servers serve web pages. As for how big percentage of Flask users thus don’t need CSRF is hard to guess

2. WTForms is not the only way to do CSRF tokens with Flask

My point is that it’s not plausible to infer with certainty that some large part of Flask users would not have CSRF tokens just because Flask has more downloads than Flask-WTF

yes_man··on Nobel Peace laureates blast tech giants and warn against rising authoritarianism
Democracy has always faced the problem that come elections, every living soul has one vote, but not every soul is equally equipped to be critical about information they are exposed to.

The solution is not to inhibit freedom of thought and speech, it is to teach new generations of people to be more critical.

Ultimately in the long run democracy and free societies are always more likely to triumph against authoritarian societies, because the will of the people prevents the governments from endlessly doing moronic or corruptive actions. If they do, they will get voted out in the next election cycle. Authoritarian governments don’t have that luxury, if the glorious leader decides to run against a wall year after year in full speed because they think they are right, they will and nobody dares to stop the train.

So the enemy is not disinformation, it is the gullible mind. We need to educate critical thinking, without going too deep into values. Then our societies will sort this shit out.

On a tangent, when a political entity is dismantling education of critical thought and science in school systems, you should know it’s because they know their political rule depends on people not thinking critically.

yes_man··on Finland joins Sweden and Denmark in limiting Moderna Covid-19 vaccine
https://thl.fi/en/web/thlfi-en/-/thl-monitoring-myocarditis-...

According to Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare, an additional 4 cases per 100k men under the age of 30.

They also note that having covid is a risk factor for myocarditis. So perhaps still worth it to take the shot.

Possibly they are doing this to put out the antivax wildfires in social media by reacting to statistical information about risks. So as to show that when there are scientifically established risks, there will be reaction to that as well.

yes_man··on Ask HN: Is anyone monitoring popular apps to check if they're listening?
> If hundreds of millions of people are spending hours on social media each week, some number of them will see ads related to some conversation they had recently by pure random chance

Another, probably more common reason that people often don’t think about is that a participant of such conversation may have searched for said product, or be otherwise profiled for it, and you might get the ad because Big Ad knows you are related to them. For example FB doesn’t need to know the contents of your Whatsapp or FB messenger messages to know how close you are to someone: how often you message, how many messages, when etc

yes_man··on The 3x+1 Problem [video]
Key is early on in the video with the ”mathematics isn’t ripe enough yet”. Since brute forcing the problem seems unlikely, could be that a solution to this problem takes mathematics a step to a new direction. Many useful things like modern cryptography are ultimately based on mathematical research eons ago that were once ridiculed to be useless and unnecessary by some
yes_man··on The Science of the Squeezable, Poppable Vegan Egg Yolk
One clearly established specific reason for harmfulness of processed food is that it is more likely to contain microplastics and forever-chemicals, because the more you process food the more it is in contact with plastics and chemicals. See for example https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041201...
yes_man··on First known gene transfer from plant to insect identified
From evolutionary point of view it is semantical why genome changed. Also I’ve never heard of any biology textbook or journal claiming mutations would only happen during reproduction or birth. Mutations happen all the time, that’s one reason we have diseases like cancer. Your reproductive cells can mutate any time throughout your life passing out differences to offspring. There is also genetic recombination bringing out traits that didn’t exist, or suppressing ones that do.
yes_man··on Is Spacetime Real?
We have devices that register electromagnetic radiation spectrum emitted (by ”atoms”) which can be visualized as an image. But this is at the heart of the parent comment: does the atom exist, or is it just a concept that describes the end result when strong interaction, electromagnetic force and gravity make particles stick together in a (usually) consistent way? If we call the atom real, we can call other aggregations like the economy or game theory real as well. But they are just concepts
yes_man··on Forever chemicals are widespread in U.S. drinking water
> We should consider ourselves lucky that it was “only” a moderately-deadly disease, and not something worse.

A lot of people think that the governmental reactions are slow and lame because covid isn’t a disease morbid enough to threaten civilization, as something like a full blown ebola pandemic for example could be. Which is probably true to extent.

But I agree 100% with you and people are crazy to think that governments would somehow suddenly be competent in handling a worse disaster than covid, given the complete (almost) worldwide failure to curb this plague. From initial downplaying and silencing scientists and doctors in China, to rise of anti-mask and anti-vaccine crowds and even voices in governments, to our incapability as a global world to handle the production and logistics of the vaccinations... when a disaster worse than covid strikes in the future, it will be the same shitshow, only with higher stakes

yes_man··on You might not need machine learning
Generally it is easy to agree with the sentiment that machine learning is being used to solve problems where it isn't really needed. But on the other hand, the same argument could have been used when computers initially came along: "you don't need a supercomputer to calculate this function, I can do it with pen and paper faster". So the real value in projects like this is not that you can now drive 2d car game with a neural network, but that neural networks just took another tiny step forward and demonstrate that their capability to minimize error functions is in principle transferrable to real life problems no matter how stupid, and one day those small steps will have accumulated and neural nets will (and already have) supercede many limits that humans have.
yes_man··on macOS unable to open any non-Apple application
The tragedy here is that likely the retrospective on this at Apple internally will not be "why do we even need our customers MacBooks to send all this data to us", but "how can we keep on doing this without something similar happening again"
yes_man··on A Coronavirus Vaccine Could Kill Half a Million Sharks, Conservationists Warn
Tangential, but related to the surprise of finding out how shitty humans are to other species:

We slaughter 80 billion animals each year for food. On a planet of 7 billion humans, each year. Those animals only purpose is to be born, get fat, and get eaten by humans. Mostly in horrible conditions because it's cheap. We need to look into the mirror for more than just cosmetics industry.

https://ourworldindata.org/meat-production#number-of-animals...

yes_man··on Algorithm discovers how six molecules could evolve into life’s building blocks
Conway's game of life shows how small building blocks randomly create giant crazy complicated formations that have the capability to do astonishing things, like replicate themselves in an organized way. Kind of implying that logically functional structures arise from randomness given enough time. The rules in Conway's game of life are simpler than real world physics, but it is enough to convince me that in a reasonable time frame (Earth's timeline), given enough building blocks and iterations, there's not really any reason to not assume the chemical building blocks of life happened to create all sorts of complicated structures that constantly failed to replicate or survive.

On Earth, there was a lot of primordial soup, and there were a lot of chemical reactions. On a span of millions of years, complex data structures (such as RNA) may have occurred constantly somewhere on the planet. Every now and then, a cell randomly formed. Sometimes prokaryotes with RNA formed, like weird things in Conway's game of life. And then maybe once upon a time, a cell with just the right RNA to make it be able to reproduce in the ooze formed.

That or life on Earth is panspermic and we have skipped the pre-prokaryotic evolution altogether

yes_man··on New Hubble data suggests an ingredient missing from current dark matter theories
I am just another armchair physicist but saying there is no detection of dark matter sounds a bit like circular reasoning. You detect matter like your phone in your hand through electromagnetic interaction. We have detected that there is something in space that completely disregards electromagnetic force, but exerts gravitational force. Hence the idea that we have not detected it is simultaneously false in 2 ways:

- it cannot be detected the way you detect your phone in your hand or see light so your definition of detection seems to escape the basic premise of dark matter: its ability to avoid electromagnetic force, and also,

- we have detected it through gravitational anomalies

yes_man··on Show HN: Linux sysadmin course, eight years on
You are 33 years old. Consider how long your whole life has lasted since you were born. If you retire at 66, you still have another 33 years of career left. If you enjoy computers you don't need to stop at retirement age either. Plenty time for a career change, go for it :)
yes_man··on Reddit app got 50M downloads by making mobile web experience miserable
Can you back that up with some research or are you just basing that assumption on your emotions? What even is "emotional charge"? I bet that emotional capability of people isn't tied to their interest in startups and tech
yes_man··on Reddit app got 50M downloads by making mobile web experience miserable
Being interested in tech and startups probably doesn't mean you are less emotional than people who aren't
yes_man··on Stopping deepfake news with an AI algorithm that can tell when a face doesnt fit
The problem will increasingly be "whose algorithm do we believe". Internet has revealed that people believe mostly what they want to. We have seen that a large subset of people are believing Bill Gates is behind the pandemic. Why would masses somehow be more rational in picking the most rigorous and objective neural network to recognize deepfakes, than they are in making sense of the world in general? In the end we will have multiple competing entities claiming to have the best deepfake recognition, all with their own agenda
yes_man··on I graduated into the dot com bust as a programmer and made it – you will too
Teaching/academia being a job has nothing to do with the comment you replied to, and even if it were, I'm curious how would you replace academical research "with the internet"?
yes_man··on Consciousness Isn’t Self-Centered
If anyone is interested in a framework that tries to put rigor into this otherwise very open-ended problem of defining consciousness, the integrated information theory (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theor...) is one approach. Problem with a "traditional" philosophical approach to consciousness is that it's hard to prove and equally hard to disprove. And although integrated information theory starts with the assumption that "consciousness exists", and builds on top of that assumption, at least it's a step in a direction where the problem of consciousness is turned into a measurable property. After all, even the most rigorous of natural sciences rest on some axioms. And I am not claiming that integrated information theory is in any way correct (although it may be). But theorizing about consciousness without a tangible logical framework always feels like it's not going anywhere, so I welcome the pursuit for scientific advancement in said theory
yes_man··on Li Wenliang
Well this is off-topic but Soviet Union was an expansionist superpower whose elite ultimately seized control of production and capital. Whatever you mean by "pure socialism", it at least should aim for ownership of production capital to be distributed among the people. Soviet Union was not for the people as much as the elite that was leeching off the working class.
yes_man··on Li Wenliang
Although we all get what you mean and respect your experience, let us not confuse corrupted, oppressive, authoritarian single-party regimes with "socialism" just because they call themselves "socialist" or "communist" states. Especially in case of China, whose economy these days is de facto capitalism with strong rule of government
yes_man··on Monoliths Are the Future
I don't want advocate one way or another (micro vs. monoliths) because tomato tomato. However here are a few arguments in defense of microservices regarding these three signs you commented:

1. Microservices do not have some inherent property of having to duplicate data. You can have data in single source and deliver that data to anyone who needs it through an API. There are infinitely many caching solutions if you are worried about this becoming a bottleneck

2 and 2.5. There are tools for microservice architectures that counter these problems to a degree, mainstream example being containers and container orchestration (e.g. Docker and Kubernetes). One can even make an argument that microservices force you to build your systems so they are more robust than your monolith would be. If the argument for monoliths is that it's easier to maintain reliability when every egg is in one basket then you are putting all your bets into that basket and it becomes a black hole for developer and operations resources, as well as making operations evolution very slow

3. There are again tools for handling data and "syncing" (although I don't like the idea of having to "sync") the services, for example message queues / streaming processing platforms (e.g. Kafka). If some data or information might be of interest to multiple services, you should then push such data to a message queue and consume it from services that need it. The "syncing" problem sounds like something that arises when you start duplicating your data across services which shouldn't happen (see my argument on 1.)

Again not to say microservices are somehow universally better. Just coming into defense of their core concepts when they get unfairly accused

yes_man··on Warren Buffett throws in the towel on newspaper empire
I think the original comment meant that a 9% interest for a loan is quite steep and might be signaling Buffett's lack of confidence in media as an industry and its ability to generate value in the long term. However in a deal like this 9% might not be unusually high since the article mentions it is mostly being used to "refinance existing debts" so the high interest is probably a premium on that part
yes_man··on What Will Happen in the 2020s
The animals eat a lot more plants for a pound of meat they gain than humans would need if we only ate the plants. We are in the first day of this year and already over 120 million animals have been killed in the US for food. Approximations on amount of animals killed each year for food in the USA vary, but it is in tens of billions. Can you imagine the strain natural ecosystem would need to sustain to support tens of billions of new animals every year? We are already on the edge when feeding those animals with industrial crops.
yes_man··on What Will Happen in the 2020s
There are indeed people who have medical conditions that make their life dangerous with a plant-based diet. For people without such conditions (the majority of people), science on negative effects of plant-based diet seems to focus on certain deficiencies (such as deficiency of zinc and iron, or omega-3 EPA and DHA fatty acids). These deficiencies can be avoided by consuming specific plant-based sources, such as certain seaweeds for EPA and DHA.

For most people plant-based diet is probably completely safe and when debating this issue, the bottom argument of opposition to plant-based diets usually boils down to one thing: the god-given right or even necessity for man to eat other animals (be it because of it being natural to eat other beings in nature, because "plants have feelings too", or because of traditions or humans dying if they don't eat meat). This rests on ignorance of science, self-centered attitude and violence. Industrial-scale animal production for food is an abhorrent machine by any humane moral standards and most people use these counter-arguments because they like how meat or cheese tastes and they want to close their eyes.

Hunting or fishing or growing your own meat is much less evil than the animals-for-food industry but the nature ecosystem could never sustain current amounts of meat consumption. Also it has to be understood that in developing countries masses of people cannot afford to be fancy about what to eat and what not. In developed countries however... I think we should not consider ourselves "developed" if we kill 10x our own human populations amounts of animals each year for food based mostly on the fact that we are used to it and that meat tastes good. As more and more people realize this, the demand for plant-based diets goes up.

yes_man··on Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram Restricted in Southern Turkey
Big social media companies could offer an API that offers a list of IPs that serve the app and any data it needs from an unblocked source. Then if you're under oppression by a malevolent leadership that blocks a social media, it could be so that you only need to hook your Twitter or Facebook app to internet via Starlink for the millisecond it takes to fetch the unblocked IPs, and the app would be configured to automatically use those in blocked countries. Those new IPs got blocked? Just hit the API again with Starlink and get back to using normal internet. It could be default behavior for the apps in countries where they are blocked to do that if a Starlink connection is up.

If a couple of bytes of information every now and then is too expensive to fetch with Starlink in poorer countries, it is too expensive to use for normal internet use for normal people anywhere on the planet.

Since you are using normal internet except for fetching the IPs, you are not subject to government snooping or sabotage any more than you would be normally. It also would require normal people at maximum the same level of tech-savvyness as a VPN to just connect to Starlink for a second.

Another key difference would be that a VPN requires you to reach the VPN server somehow, and the country can arbitrarily block cable traffic if they have the resources and will. Whether it's technically feasible for most VPNs is another question. But anyway, for Starlink... You would really need to wreck their satellite off the orbit or mess with their radiosignals to block it.

Not that social media companies would do anything to piss off authoritarian leaders / oppressing governments. But they could if they thought it's right

yes_man··on Uber and Lyft Investors Are Looking for Signs of a Détente
https://abcnews.go.com/Business/uber-fires-400-people-market...

At least they seem to have had a lot of marketing folk that were laid off shortly after the IPO

yes_man··on The case against plant consciousness
A thing being alive (collection of cells being "not dead") and sentient are two different things. If we assume sentience is some kind of concentration of information, then I would assume regular plants' synapses are not complex enough to create a relevant feedback loop of consciousness. Mushrooms and their networks (interconnected myceliums) on the other hand may be a different case.
yes_man··on Pictures show cracks in Ayrshire nuclear reactor
Mining, refining and delivering uranium rests on fossil fuel powered operations. Building new nuclear plants is not carbon free either. Nuclear energy industry probably nets less carbon emissions per unit of energy than coal or natural gas industries. Yet it's factually incorrect to call it CO2 free. Solar energy industry is often criticised of similar greenwashing, when the initial CO2 cost of creating a solar panel and delivering it from Asia to Europe or North America can have great CO2 burden
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