Hacker News Reader

abeldon Ask HN: Is Kubernetes the only alternative for being cloud agnostic?

A reasonable requirement which leads to "run everything in VMs" is the need to support on-premise deployments. Often data-security and compliance requirements can be handled most reasonably (or at all) by allowing the enterprise client to pick where to deploy a single-tenant copy of the service. For this, I think the most reasonable approach is to only require VMs and do all the configuration yourself (preferably in some scripted / automated manner).

Of course, in this case, (unless you install a private cloud), you forgo all the convenience and advantages of a cloud infrastructure (so one can argue that this wouldn't really count as 'cloud agnostic'), but since such on-premise deployments should only be required by big enterprise clients, they should have deep enough pockets to pay for it.

abeldon Proteus Technology: New Material Is Strong, Light and Non-Cuttable

Link to scientific paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-65976-0

abeldon For cops who kill, special Supreme Court protection

You make the owner responsible. I.e. if the driver can be identified (or the owner identifies the driver) then you can fine the driver, otherwise you fine the owner.

abeldon GM’s CEO Offers to Make Ventilators in WWII-Style Mobilization

The type of ventillators required by the most serious cases are much more complicated: as I understand it, it involves push a tube down to the lungs, and the machine breathing instead of the patient, i.e. it has to carefully monitor and regulate the pressure etc. Already the "push tube down to the lungs" part is quite a challenge: avoiding damage to the vocal cords, or to the lungs, etc.

abeldon The SOC2 Starting Seven

Any suggestions for MDM for Linux laptops? Most device management solutions I have seen are for either Windows or Mac, but is there one that is accepted by auditors and is not utter garbage UX wise for the user on Linux, where the user is most likely going to want and have full admin access to their own laptop? (I.e. since the user in question is a developer, I feel a strong aversion to not trusting them to do system administration on their own laptop.)

abeldon Show HN: Haystack – Visibility into How Software Teams Works

I would assume the "engineers vs accounts" is due to the output not being intended for the coders, but the managers. I.e. you only have accounts for the managers, but you price based on how large a team they are monitoring.

(This is just a guess, I have no connection to haystack)

abeldon US Law Enforcement Traces Bitcoin Transfers to Nab ‘Largest’ Child Porn Site

An easy solution to that is to find a homeless person nearby and use fake IDs -- i.e. bribe someone else do the transaction instead of you

abeldon The age of electric flight is finally upon us

About the accident in Hungary: the police investigation has been apparently closed, and the cause was ruled to be pilot error (If I understand it correctly, they did a too severe turn too low). There was no sign of a fire before the crash, so even though the wreckage burned out, the crash was not due to electrical issues or fire. A hungarian news article: https://hvg.hu/itthon/20190401_magnus_aircraft_elektromos_ki... (Unfortunately I couldn't find an English article, and the accident investigation of the transportation safety organization might not be finished yet, since they only issued a preliminary report for now.)

abeldon Can Foundational Physics Be Saved?

Every experiment will be based on some sort of theory: without that, you can't design the equipment, and you wouldn't be able to interpret the data that is generated.

If by "so far have shown nothing for all their effort" you mean that no new results were found, that isn't due to the current theories being bad: in fact, it is due to them being too good: they describe the results too well and thus there is not enough difference between the current theories and current results that would require a new theory.

abeldon Musk: Falcon lands on droneship, tips over post landing [video]

Someone mentioned before (in a comment on another similar news item) that although the rocket is tall, after landing most of its mass is at the bottom: the engines are heavy, while the rest of the rocket is mostly empty fuel tanks. Hence it is feasible to keep it upright with the relatively small legs.

abeldon Hungary Internet tax cancelled after mass protests

Two aspects one might consider when designing a tax is to make sure that it affects each person slightly, so that it won't be worth it for them to protest against it from a cost-benefit standpoint (which also means spreading the tax over as large a population as possible), and to ensure that it can be collected efficiently, that it is easy to enforce and hard to evade it.

Such an internet tax can be considered actually pretty good from these aspects: assuming it is capped (as was announced after the initial uproar) its fairly small compared to the cost of the subscription, and it is essentially collected by the ISPs, who already have the billing mechanism set up and need either licences for the frequencies they use for mobile internet, or right-of-way for the cables they use for the wired internet service and thus can easily be coerced by the government to collect this tax. (for example, income tax will be collected much less efficiently, due to tax evasion, etc.)

Of course, another aspect is what behaviour the given tax will reward / punish, and from this viewpoint such a tax (in any form) is catastrophic, but these two aspects can a lot of the "artificiality" of certain taxes.

abeldon The Urban Village: Data Viz of How Human Interactions Scale with City Size

Without knowing more about the data, one possible cause might be sim cards that are not used by actual humans, but for example by smart meters, security equipment, etc., which only have to report to one central location and thus have only one contact.

When using mobile phone data, filtering out such "artifacts" can be a big issue and it might not be possible to do accurately

abeldon Microsoft Near Deal to Buy Minecraft Maker Mojang

Consider the difference between income and profit. For the present value calculation, you would need to use the profit, not the revenue. (After all, once you take the payout, you don't have any expenses.)

abeldon Ask HN: Are we using the final numeral system?

I think Knuth's up-arrow notation (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth%27s_up-arrow_notation) can be considered a newer way of representing numbers, and it continues the progression you describe in that each the older notations are usable for small numbers, but the newer notations are better for large ones: Knuth's up-arrow notation is only really required for truly gigantic numbers and as a result I don't think it would be generally useful. (As generally useful numbers aren't that huge.)

abeldon Widgy: Open Source Python/Django CMS Framework

Could you given an example for a CMS that you consider good in this regard? Hierarchies are a very powerful information-organization tool, so although I agree that not everything should be hierarchical, I am wondering whether the alternatives are much better, or would they lead to a disorganized mess.

abeldon Nexus 5

Why would a new OS lower the price of the phones? Its the hardware that is expensive. In addition, in case of Nexus smartphones, it looks more like Google subsidised them, lowering the price.

abeldon Julia, Python and Cython

Being able to call libraries in language A from language B is only half of the solution. Automatic compatibility layers won't be able to convert semantic differences between the languages. What you will end up is writing language A in language B. For example "writing C in python" or "writing Java in python", instead of writing pythonic code. I think most people will agree that Java is a better Java than python is.

abeldon Break Google

How exactly?

Due to django's "we want the templating system be general, to be usable for stuff other than html", it can't provide support for such 'guarantee that the output is well formed / valid / has no injection attack entry points' features.

abeldon Real democracy? Hungary to give mothers an extra vote for each child

This idea was scrapped after some public polling, see:

http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&h...

Some blame the result of the polls on fears that the idea would give extra votes to the roma minority, who, on average, have more kids and larger families than the non-roma.

Some more background info: The population of Hungary is shrinking, which will cause big problems after some decades with regard to funding pensions and such (as you will have a shrinking working population having to finance the pensions of a growing populations of pensioners). Also, the retired pensioners form a large and easily mobilized voting force which means that politicians are forced to pander to their interest by raising pensions and such. The plan to allow children to vote (either directly or by giving extra votes to their parents) would help somewhat with both issues.

abeldon Want a Flat Tax? I Got a Flat Tax for You

What would be the difference between such a flat tax and inflation? If you want to tax everything that is denominated in US dollars, simply print more money and allow a higher rate of inflation.

abeldon What's the right way to handle monetary values in code?

I would use whichever errs in favor of the customer. Its only one cent, after all.

abeldon Cringley: Japan may have just permanently lost 20% of its electricity supply

but that kind of hubristic "we can calculate the probabilities of all failure modes" thinking is one of the reasons I'm not a big fan of nuclear.

Would you be more comfortable with "we can't estimate the probabilities of all failure modes"? I am sure that all engineers involved in planning the failure-handling systems know that those "calculations of probabilities" are only estimates based on some assumptions.

I think nuclear often gets bad press because you can measure and calculate a lot of risks to a much higher precision than in other industries. Like "x amount of radiation released" where x is actually a very small number but the fact that you can measure it and make an estimate as to how many cancer cases will be caused by it makes it scary, while people don't care much about the risks of, say, coal-mining because thats harder to measure/estimate.

abeldon Ask HN: Why most of the HR Departments suck?

Because most employees are not the 'customers' of the HR department. They are the 'product'. (The same way as viewers of a TV channel are not the customers of that channel, they are the product, and the advertisers are the customers, except that it is much easier to switch TV channels, than to switch companies.)

This means that the average HR department cares suprisingly little about pleasing the average employee. They will worry much more about pleasing management, etc.