Hacker News Reader

cs02rm0on How long does a freezer stay frozen when the power goes out?

My three year olds can trivially turn the burners up, or pull the pans down.

cs02rm0on Germany plans to dim lights at night to save insects

My wife seems to think all boxes with pictures of lawns on are the same.

About three years in a row now she's tried to get lawn seed and poured a load of cheap weed and feed on instead. Completely going overboard on the quantities for good measure. At this point I'm amazed we have anything left to grow.

cs02rm0on Do NLP Beyond English

Nonetheless I don't think English can function as an universal language because it is specialized in some regards. It is better for thinking about and capturing some things and ideas, but not for everything. Other languages, it seems to me, are optimized better for certain use cases.

Curious as to what you had in mind (assuming it was broader than Eskimos and snow!)?

cs02rm0on Remote First at Quora

You lose the one huge opportunity in adult life for making new relationships - and that's at work, in the office.

I think the usual expression here is don't shit where you eat.

In other words it might serve you well to forge social relationships separately from working relationships.

It's tended to work for me, I'm married, work from home and I haven't had any unfortunate episodes at a work Christmas party. But whatever works for you, I don't think we have to, or even should, all go the same way on this.

cs02rm0on Zoom Security Exploit: Cracking private meeting passwords

Bug bounties seem to be a complete wild west.

I've reached the point of assuming the odds are stacked so heavily that, from a purely financial perspective, it's not worth the investment just to report an issue let alone find it.

cs02rm0on Are we in an AI Overhang?

I fear Betteridge's law of headlines applies here.

A CS lecturer of mine told us that when he was a student he had a lecturer who advised him to be sceptical of AI revolutions. That was nearly 20 years ago. I've no doubt we'll see further steps but I'm not going to hold my breath for something transformative.

cs02rm0on 62% of Americans Say They Have Political Views They’re Afraid to Share

And the more moderate your views the more likely it is that the flack will come from both sides.

cs02rm0on New KDE Slimbook launched with Ryzan-4000 series processor

They're issues, but I think they're fairly minor issues. I paid comfortably more than twice as much for a MBP and I only use one of the USB-C ports, admittedly for charging too. And it's pretty permanently plugged in for power - once in a blue moon I need to be mobile with it.

I'd probably have bought two if they were out when I was looking last year. Wish them plenty of success, because there aren't many competitors out there with Linux as a first class OS.

cs02rm0on With oil cheap, Arab states cannot balance their books

Pretty sure half the reason SA and friends promote violent, reactionary interpretations of Islam...

Is that a common abbreviation for Saudi? We used to use KSA when I lived there, but I don't trust South Africans not to be violent either. ;)

cs02rm0on All of us test in production all the time (2019)

I don't disagree, probably.

I keep finding myself working on internal projects that are driven by a UI and have little business logic but lots of I/O to other systems. With no hard requirements, no guarantee of shipping and no direct access to end users. Which I find less suited to unit tests than (automated) integration testing. As soon as you put unit testing in all anyone can ask is what your test coverage percentage is and why it's some value less than 100.

Unit testing is a dev tool, if a dev sees value in writing and maintaining a given test, great, otherwise it could just be that it's not a panacea. Let them strike a balance but ensure the team ask the question of any production issues - could a unit test have prevented this?

cs02rm0on Microsoft Analyzed Data on Its Newly Remote Workforce

Not Microsoft, but my network's expanded significantly including to associates at Microsoft.

Mostly helped by the people I'd normally struggle to contact because they hide away in different buildings, behind different physical and digital security rules, now being much more available for video calls. Appreciate your mileage may vary but it does square with my lived experience.

I've lost some connections with people I only spoke to because we were physically situated together, but that's way outnumbered for me by those I now find more accessible.

cs02rm0on Why companies lose their best innovators (2019)

Innovation is an awful word because it means different things to different people.

Doesn't it just.

I approached someone in charge of innovation for a part of the UK's National Health Service. I offered some software (at no cost to them until they were content it met a need) based on a project I'd worked on in a different part of the public sector where the same idea had been successful. I was turned away, not because it wasn't actually innovative, but because to the NHS innovation meant funding deployment of commercially successful, mature software with existing customers and I didn't own the software from the previous project so I'd written a new (and improved) version.

It still puzzles me. I occasionally wonder how much time he must spend turning away people who have innovation ideas wondering why companies with mature products aren't calling his innovation department.

cs02rm0on AWS Copilot

It's nice that AWS services tend to do one thing.

But it does sometimes mean that there's always just one more AWS service you need. One more service with a different web console UI, varied support in the different infrastructure tools... and now we have another one of those.

All I seem to do these days is AWS infrastructure, sometimes as code. I'm not sure one more new tool is going to improve that.

cs02rm0on The Future of Online Identity Is Decentralized

Feels like you'd have to lean significantly away from anonymisation to want to leave public proofs of cross account identities lying around. Maybe that's a more common use case for businesses and high profile people though than wanting to link, say, a pseudo-anonymous forum account with a payment account.

cs02rm0on Red Hat to remove contentious terms like master and slave from its source code

Block has multiple meanings in English. You don't need historical context, but you'll always need context.

cs02rm0on Red Hat to remove contentious terms like master and slave from its source code

How do you do that when you have an established word an entire industry understands?

Words only have the meaning we convey to them and as soon as you put more words in the mix that dilutes any clarity. We're back to the xkcd on standards.

cs02rm0on Red Hat to remove contentious terms like master and slave from its source code

Probably, eventually.

Just today I've caught myself talking about black boxes, no skin off my nose and Chinese whispers, wondering if those are on a list somewhere or if they will be.

I'd say it all feels like papering over the cracks, but the paper isn't even covering the cracks.

cs02rm0on De-escalating social media conflict

My first instinct was that I like the approach.

I certainly agree there's an issue here.

But I would worry about the creep of this as a feature. Some could argue the mistake was only the timing, or that the mistake was that it was posted where the mob could read it. It seems a natural continuation to move to more specific language. This post was unacceptable. This post was insufficiently researched. This post was bullying. This post was racist.

An analogy is probably a bad idea, but in the same way F1 drivers who don't speak out in favour of BLM as a political movement, rather than just a sentiment, are being criticised I wonder if people who don't use this feature would be further targeted. Whether mobs would feel further validated by it.

We could certainly do with something. I fear the answer isn't technical.

cs02rm0on Does saying “Fuck You AWS” constitute offensive content?

The standard solution for any issue on AWS is to add another service.

cs02rm0on Ask HN: Has anyone fixed their own bruxism?

I've been doing mouth taping for maybe six months to a year.

I think it's helping.

cs02rm0on Show HN: Hacker News front page in the style of a print newspaper

Now I just need a 32" eink display.

cs02rm0on How we got our AWS bill to around 2% of revenue

One of my many AWS pet hates is that they have a service called Amazon WorkSpaces, i.e. AWS.

cs02rm0on GitHub to replace “master” with alternative term to avoid slavery references

White magic?

cs02rm0on GitHub to replace “master” with alternative term to avoid slavery references

I'm not sure this is incremental progress.

If we rename the branches beyond Github's UI lots of things will break. And will it really affect racist attitudes even marginally? I can't see it myself. In which case, rather than progress, it's a distraction from anything that otherwise could afford real progress.

cs02rm0on GitHub to replace “master” with alternative term to avoid slavery references

In git? Master.

This is about Github.

cs02rm0on GitHub to replace “master” with alternative term to avoid slavery references

That'd be a horrendous breaking change.

I'm assuming github are just going to alias it in the UI. I'd hate to have used both a master and a main branch before this.

cs02rm0on GitHub to replace “master” with alternative term to avoid slavery references

Master isn't a swear word. This isn't hard to understand.

cs02rm0on Flow browser passes the Acid tests

I used to write STB apps for an SVG ekioh browser, probably over a decade ago now. We were in the UK but had no UK customers.

These guys are obviously immensely impressive, but they're only one part of the chain. It frustrates me to this day that the UK market doesn't allow you to pick the DVB+IPTV STB you want and just expect it to work with any and all services.

cs02rm0on The GUI should be a lot better [video]

Chill out Geoffrey, it's not that big a deal.

cs02rm0on How to write good Git commit messages

It's simply cost-benefit.

I mostly work on relatively short term projects these days rather than long lived products and so my commit messages tend to be single sentences, with an extra paragraph if it was particularly involved. It takes little time and once in a while will be useful.

I probably lean more towards them not mattering that much relative to what anyone who talks about "best practice" would like to see. That said, I picked up a codebase from another team the other day where one commit message was simply a ";)" and the rest not much more in depth. That did make me wince a bit.