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aliasEli

578 karma · joined May 26, 2021

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aliasEli··on Florida breaks manatee death record in first six months of 2021
Unfortunately, there are also other threats for manatees like motorboats:

https://www.thedodo.com/boats-injure-florida-manatees-236881...

aliasEli··on Kinds of Technical Debt
When your system is replacing some existing system, which could well be just paper-based, it is very useful to study it carefully. It will give you a good idea about the data and its internal relations. If you want to show something to a customer, you can also simple mock-ups like static HTML pages.

Only after you have a decent understanding of the system you should start building it. There will be many new requests, but most will just be concerned with the UI. If you have the right data model and architecture, those will not be very difficult to solve.

aliasEli··on Against SQL
With an AOT compiler a lot of work is done at compile time, but with JIT it is done at runtime, which makes these programs slower to start. But for programs that do run for a longer time, like servers or IDE's the performance is quite decent. But Java is a memory safe language which means that it has to do a lot of checks that unsafe languages do not have to do, which means that it will always be slower that unsafe languages. In some cases the JIT can eliminate those safety checks, but that is not always possible.

Java always had (and still has) an AOT that compiled to byte code. Adding JIT was a major improvement.

aliasEli··on Against SQL
We certainly do deserve better, and the author made some good suggestions.

Unfortunately, building a new database is a huge project and there appears to be no party currently willing to sponsor it.

aliasEli··on Against SQL
> An example here is how, sure, in theory, JITs can outpace AOT compilation because they have all the information the AOT compiler has plus runtime insights. But the ability to truly do that always seems to be a decade of compiler development away, with many giving up on the idea entirely.

JIT has been used very successfully for a couple of languages, e.g. Java. But adding it requires a lot of effort. The same thing is unfortunately true for new query languages, building a new database is really expensive, this is probably the main reason that there have been no serious alternatives to SQL.

aliasEli··on A Battle Between a Great City and a Great Lake
My country, the Netherlands, has been struggling with water for its entire existence. A large part of it is below sea level.

In most parts we have two different drainage systems, one for rain water and one for sewage. All sewage is processed in treatment plants before it is released into open water. We don't use open water directly as drinking water. Either we use ground water or use river water that has been infiltrated into our dunes.

There are probably some things that the US could learn from this, but it will probably come with a very high cost.

aliasEli··on Kinds of Technical Debt
One of the big problems with "modern development projects" is that they start coding from day 1. The first step in any good project should be to learn as much as possible about the requirements before making serious decision about its architecture. Designing a model of the data (even if it is only a very rough one) is usually very helpful in the first phase of a project.

It is still true that mistakes that are made during early phases of the project are much harder to fix than recent mistakes.

aliasEli··on Can a hacker prevent access to a form and submit before anyone else?
A better idea would be to choose a random submission from a larger number of submissions. This would prevent most attacks. Any duplicate submissions should be flagged and there should be a penalty for users that submit them.
aliasEli··on Reduce Parking Requirements to Increase Housing
When there is good public transportation the need for cars will decrease. Also when buildings increase in density, public transportation will become more profitable.

South Korea is a fine example where this worked. The cities are very compact but have excellent public transport. It will be difficult to achieve something similar in the US.

aliasEli··on Professor says we could already build a floating space elevator
One problem I see with this approach is that the two endpoints will have different heights, and therefor different orbital periods[0]. This will put a lot of strain on the cable between them. This puts a limit on the length of the elevator.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geocentric_orbit#Tangential_ve...

aliasEli··on Cape Cod’s Waters Are Getting Sharky
This might be good news for some orcas (I don't really like the term killer whale) that feed on sharks.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/great-white-sharks...

aliasEli··on Tooth loss associated with increased cognitive impairment, dementia
This is correlation, but it is very unlikely to be causation.

Having a bad health will certainly cause a person to have all kinds of problems. For example, if your food does not contain enough vitamin C, you are likely to get some form of scurvy[0], which might lead to loss of your teeth, but it will also lead to a lot of other problems.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scurvy

aliasEli··on We Built a C++ Rendering Engine for the Web
You write better than I do.
aliasEli··on The lie of expired food and the disastrous truth of Americas food waste problem
Long but very interesting. I have read multiple articles about the problem, and this is probably the best one.
aliasEli··on White shelled eggs are selling in Tesco for the first time in 40 years (2020)
This white egg thing is nonsense. The color (sorry, colour) of the egg is determined by genetics, it has nothing to do with the way that the chickens are raised.
aliasEli··on The Silences Between: On the Perils and Pitfalls of Translation
This is also very relevant to Hacker News. Many users don't speak some form of English as their native language. Simple misunderstandings are a frequent source of long, non-productive flame wars.
aliasEli··on Recreating the fractal spirals of the Romanesco cauliflower
The fractal shapes are really beautiful, but the other beautiful thing is the species to which it belongs.

We have many vegetables that are really just different forms of the same species Brasica oleracea [0]:

    Brassica oleracea Acephala group – kale
    Brassica oleracea Viridis group – collard greens
    Brassica oleracea Alboglabra group – kai-lan (Chinese broccoli)
    Brassica oleracea Botrytis group – cauliflower, Romanesco broccoli, and broccoflower
    Brassica oleracea Capitata group – cabbage
    Brassica oleracea Gemmifera group – Brussels sprouts
    Brassica oleracea Gongylodes group – kohlrabi
    Brassica oleracea Italica group – broccoli
It's amazing that we can cultivate a single species into so many different types of food.

Some people hate each and every one of these varieties, that is probably due to genetics.

Claims about some of them being "super foods" are nonsense, but they are all pretty good food sources.

You really should not cook them too long. Then they start smelling and tasting pretty bad.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brassica_oleracea

aliasEli··on In Reversal, FDA Calls for Limits on Who Gets Alzheimer’s Drug
The best article I have seen about the drug is by Derek Lowe:

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/06/08/th...

Good HN thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27472107

aliasEli··on Chinese entrants swept all five categories in a Global AI Smart-City Competition
I actually agree with this down-vote. I should have written a far better reply why I think that monitoring all citizens continuously is not a good idea.
aliasEli··on We Built a C++ Rendering Engine for the Web
OK, that got down-voted. I thought the basic idea behind HN is that we can have some interesting discussions. Simply down-voting without adding a reply why you disagree with an opinion does not really help.

I have been interested in security for a long time. The number of security vulnerabilities that have been caused by insecure memory management problems is really huge. Some people will probably claim that this is not a problem with modern C++ because it can remedy this problems. But this assumes that the programmers know all the possible pitfalls. With respect to security, the problem is that when there is only a single weakness in your system it might become a point of attack. With a language like C++ there are many possible weaknesses that simply do not exist in memory safe languages.

aliasEli··on Trump sues Facebook, Twitter and Google, claiming censorship
The register's motto is: Biting the hand that feeds IT. That should tell you something about their articles, although they also frequently have substantial articles.
aliasEli··on Tokyo Olympic venues won't have spectators
This decision should have been taken a long time ago, it is obvious that it will help spread all variants all over the world.
aliasEli··on How did software get so reliable without proof?
Probably because the pdf was produced from scans.
aliasEli··on Juul bought an entire issue of a scholarly journal
Many ex-smokers try tobacco flavors when they start vaping. Many switch to other flavors after a while, because tobacco does not really taste nice.
aliasEli··on Juul bought an entire issue of a scholarly journal
But I really wonder if that happens frequently. Cigarettes really taste and smell awful. I discovered how terrible they really are only after I quit smoking. As long as e-cigarettes remain available, I doubt that many people would switch to real cigarettes.
aliasEli··on We Built a C++ Rendering Engine for the Web
I really don't think it was a good idea to write this in C++ for security reasons. It accepts external inputs in some complex formats, and they also have a web server version. This makes it highly vulnerable to all kind of attacks, such as buffer overflows.
aliasEli··on Ask HN: Which are good LINQ equivalents in other languages?
But this lacks the compact syntax of LINC. I don't think there is a real equivalent in other languages (I don't know F#).
aliasEli··on US-Canada heatwave 'virtually impossible' without warming
> beating the previous national high temperature mark by more than 4C in one go, as happened in Canada last week, is virtually unprecedented.

This event should be a warning call to all people who believe that a global warming of only 2 degrees Celsius will be barely noticeable.

One positive effect is that scientists have collected a lot of data that will help them improve climate models.

aliasEli··on The fiasco of the 1976 ‘swine flu affair’
> And scientists who feared another Spanish flu did not know that the 1918 influenza was avian, not swine

Because swine are really similar to humans, I see more reason to worry especially about their viruses. They are likely to have multiple adaptations to our own bodies.

aliasEli··on The age of autonomous war is already here
Interesting article. I had not read about the use of drones in the war between Azerbaijan and Armenia.
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