alexbecker

My brother had lumbar fusion surgery after he hurt his back on the job. My parents tried to talk him out of it, but the workman's comp lawyer and the doctors convinced him anyway. Three years later, he spent almost all the workman's comp money and his back is worse than before.

Coalition | Front-End Engineer | San Francisco, CA | Onsite, Full-Time

Coalition is working to solve cyber risk. We are a small, well-funded team of security experts, insurance professionals, and intelligence community veterans building a better cyber insurance product. Coalition is automating risk assessment to make purchasing this insurance easy, and using our knowledge to educate clients and mitigate risk where possible.

We are looking to hire our first front-end engineer, who will set the technical direction for our front-end and take ownership of it. We are open to various front-end technologies if you can make an argument for it. Experience with Python is a plus, as you will likely need to touch the back-end at some point (which is in Python 3.6).

Email jobs@thecoalition.com for more information.

Do you really believe there is nothing right or wrong regardless of what your peers say? If so, I find you deeply troubling.

Most things aren't math equations. All distinctions in the real world are messy, seemingly arbitrary at some level. Can you define what it means for something to be alive or dead? I seriously doubt it. Yet we do not dispute the existence of such distinctions. The concept of life improves our understanding of the world despite its slipperyness.

I did something similar to this for redacting HTML pages a while back, although I never fully polished it: https://github.com/alexbecker/redact-js

It's not something I'd use for serious security applications, but fun for interactive fiction.

Coalition | Front-End Engineer | San Francisco, CA | Onsite, Full-Time

Coalition is working to solve cyber risk. We are a small, well-funded team of security experts, insurance professionals, and intelligence community veterans building a better cyber insurance product. Coalition is automating risk assessment to make purchasing this insurance easy, and using our knowledge to educate clients and mitigate risk where possible.

We are looking to hire our first front-end engineer, who will set the technical direction for our front-end and take ownership of it. We are open to various front-end technologies if you can make an argument for it. Experience with Python is a plus, as you will likely need to touch the back-end at some point (which is in Python 3.6).

Email jobs@thecoalition.com for more information.

It didn't used to be. We should be asking why things seem to have regressed, shouldn't we?

I think the fifth is interpreted more broadly than that. You don't need to have a specific law in mind that you believe you have broken (and would reveal) to take the fifth; you merely need to believe that it is possibly that what you say might be incriminating in some way. Which, given the fact that no person could reasonably be expected to know the whole of the law, and given that lying to a federal agent in the performance of their duties is always illegal, is a pretty safe bet.

Almost everyone I know has switched (myself included), and we haven't had any issues. The fares are sometimes higher for long-distance pools, but that's pretty much the only difference I've noticed.

I agree that parsing libraries are probably the strongest part of the Haskell ecosystem for applications. The only time I've chosen Haskell for a serious application was because of its parsing libraries (specifically parsec): https://blogdown.io/.

The high speed is the "overelaboration". High-speed rails in many countries can reach 200mph. A 600mph train may be 3x as fast, but the marginal utility is pretty low to me compared to increased cost and reduced capacity.

Very much this. HN seems not to appreciate that jobs are our only currently accepted mechanism for distributing wealth on the scale necessary for our current society. If automation removes them, sure, it will increase net productivity (at least until the poor masses destroy the machines). But if we lose distribution in the process, it's an enormous loss.

I wonder what bug resulted in the string "government226128147that" being inserted. Clearly something to do with signed integer arithmetic, but where would that be happening?

I couldn't care less about the recipes and tutorials; for me the thing that such a service provided was small portions of ingredients. At the time I ate at work for all of my meals during the week, and so needed to cook maybe 3 meals/week (for one person). There's no other way I've found to get 1tbsp of butter, or flour, or 1 green onion. So for me it eliminated a fair amount of food waste.

That being said now that I don't get free food from work, I'll be buying groceries and cooking often enough to use the larger portions.

I don't see the need for this much snark in response to a relatively innocuous comment.

> Would you risk getting in legal trouble for publishing a way to do bank fraud (for example) - assuming you gave some reasonable timeframe for disclosure?

Of course you would. The bank would call the FBI and tell them you're hacking the bank, and the FBI would then knock down your door, tear up your house and drag you away. The system would then do everything it could to represent what you did as a crime, and if you are lucky you get away with only a year in court, many thousands in debt and your name dragged through the mud.

tl;dr The actual legality of an action is only tangentially related to how the legal system will be used against you in response to it.

Bill Gates makes a similar point in his review of Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century: https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Why-Inequality-Matters-Capi...

This is a great example of an extension I'd love to try out if the security model for extensions wasn't so broken.

Thanks for clarifying--I assumed that you were using a standard browser, and were confused why the size of the file the browser downloads when you use "Save As" was less than Maciej reported.

Is your browser publicly available? Did you create it yourself--and if so, what did you use?

Not sure I understand your comment--I was replying to gwu78's comment, interpreting their comment as a criticism of Maciej's (aka idlewords, the author of the linked talk) measurement of the size of the NPR page as not reflective of a realistic page load. Their subsequent comment makes it clear that they have a very non-standard browser and are criticizing the standard browsers, so I guess my comment is irrelevant.

> If you are a web dev or dev ops then why not comment on the article rather than playing with toys.

Not sure what you mean here, or whether I'm supposed to be offended. I don't think I play with toys--I host my own site, carefully keep each page under 100kB total, and am working on a framework to make it easier for others to do so.

The fade-in, as I understand it, waits until the page has loaded to actually start downloading the image. This means that the image download will not be competing for connections and bandwidth with HTML/CSS/JS files that are required for first paint.

Whether this makes a significant difference is probably highly dependent on the page and the user's connection, and I have no idea without profiling. But it's at least plausible that it would help some users on slow connections.

Of course, it could just be that devs are A/B testing time until the "load" event fires, in which case they've just found a way to cheat the metric.

The browser is definitely in a better position to handle downloading these images on a slow connection without blocking the rest of the page from loading. Unfortunately, it doesn't, at least without extensions that only a very small percentage of users are aware exist. I have long wished for browsers to use more discretion when on slow connections, or failing that, to at least inform websites that they are on a slow connection so that I can optimize my sites for slow connections without sacrificing the experience for fast ones. Alas, this is not the world we live in.

When you save this page it doesn't save every resource downloaded. The correct way to measure is to use the devtools and load the page with cache disabled (to mimic a first load), then check the total content transferred. I get 1.8MB with uBlock origin on, and 2.3MB without. I imagine that the author either got a particularly bad set of ads, or NPR wasn't compressing some large asset at the time.

Yeah, there aren't even two successive dual numbers. What's after 1? If it's 1 + epsilon, then what about 1 + epsilon / 2?

There are no infinitesimals in the reals. You can define a mathematical structure containing infinitesimals [0], but it's not the reals.

[0] Specifically, the dual numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_number

Epsilon is a variable, not a number, so that wouldn't make sense. The probability is less than epsilon for all epsilon > 0. The only non-negative real (and we know the probability must be some non-negative real) satisfying that is 0.

I'm on Ads and Commerce front-end, and I also know a number of people on Android. These of course are mostly constrained by users' devices, so don't have the scale your talking about. But I also think the trend you're talking about of smaller roles has been continuing and has a lot to do with it as well.

In my experience as a Google engineer, this is mostly false. None of the work I or any of the people I know well at Google is on petabyte datasets; most people just aren't on the hot path of indexing/websearch/youtube. In fact almost none of the stuff I was asked about in my interview has been relevant to my work. I have thought about complex algorithms two or three times in the past year.

I use brotli on my personal website, and usually notice 15-20% smaller files than the gzip equivalent. It's a bit of a pain to install a brotli compressor but then very easy to add a single build step to compress all static assets.

The "individual-level information" limitation is a huge weasel. 23andMe can and does share "anonymized" aggregations of its clients' genetic information [0]. Anonymization is not a property of a dataset though; it's a property of a dataset and the state of the world, and even if (and this is a big if) the dataset is truly anonymized right now, it won't always be.

[0] "23andMe says that it is also able to share anonymous and pooled data about their self-reported health traits without asking." - https://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2015/01/06/surpri...

I think making requests more atomic is pretty easy, if a bit painful--just make ATOMIC_REQUESTS=True the default, and rewrite get_or_create to occur in a transaction and perform a second get if it creates a new object, then rollback the transaction if more than one object is returned and use the other object instead (similarly rewrite update_or_create).

I agree intuitive validation is harder. I think it would be a vast improvement to separate the parts of the validation that are form-only from the ones that are actually database constraints, e.g. in a form_validation kwarg, because in my experience half the problem is that developers aren't aware of what's happening on the form vs the database. They could also add some of the validation that is currently on forms to the database via CHECK constraints. And they could also do validation in model setters, not allowing a model attribute to be set to a value it wouldn't accept via forms.

I have used DRF, and I find the serializers and validators quite easy to work with. My complaint only complaint with DRF is that, at least at the time when I used it 1-2 years ago, it was annoyingly easy to accidentally expose more fields for writing than one intended--in fact my first exposure to it was frantically fixing a bunch of security vulnerabilities I discovered in an API written using it.

For other frameworks, I have used Flask+SQLAlchemy (Core) and found it a lot better than Django. Like any good framework grump I am also developing my own, which avoids all of these problems in exchange for what I'm sure are a host of problems I haven't considered.