Hacker News Reader

datatrashfireon 'I grew up with it': readers on the enduring appeal of Microsoft Excel

I think the main feature of excel that makes it the killer app it is, is that it is extremely approachable to non technical people. Making it more like programming erodes the core feature that motivates its use.

datatrashfireon Nuclear reactors a mile underground promise safe, cheap power

It’s a convenient scape goat. The incredible impracticality of nuclear power is easily reducible to its immense cost vs other sources of energy. But that goes against the nerd creed of nukes smart. The marketplace long ago abandoned nuclear in favor of things that actually work.

datatrashfireon How we migrated onto K8s in less than 12 months

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/01/amazon-ec...

This was actually added beginning of the year. Definitely was on my most wanted list for a while. You could technically use EFS, but that’s a very expensive way to run anything IO intensive.

datatrashfireon Why don't we know how antidepressants work yet?

I was recently told by my cardiologist to avoid chronically taking ibuprofen and other NSAIDs for pain and to favor Tylenol. Not as a specific recommendation based on my own health either, just her general recommendation that they are not safe for chronic use.

datatrashfireon Do not factory reset your Pixel until at least 15 minutes after a system update

my final straw with Android was pixel 4a stopping security updates in 2023. that phone was released in 2020. the iphone 12 released in the same year will receive security updates until 2027. from a hardware perspective my pixel 4a has a great screen, great battery, great camera, great 4g speeds, i have 0 desire for a new phone. too bad Google arbitrarily turned into an insecure piece of etrash after 3 years.

datatrashfireon Unexpected anti-patterns for engineering leaders

One thing I have noticed with over zealous testers is to get 100% coverage they mock everything and test implementations. Then you end up writing 2x the code to get anything done. I think it's a net negative. I have more often had to rewrite tests in these environments then have them actually save me from shipping a bug.

datatrashfireon US EPA sets health advisory limits for PFAS from 70 ppt to .02 ppt (2022)

It also accumulates in the environment after you spit it down the drain.

datatrashfireon It's not your age that's slowing your metabolism, new research says (2021)

Best way to stay in shape in my opinion is to play a sport, especially in some sort of league/club.

If you genuinely enjoy playing, it doesn't feel like a chore! Now into my mid 30s, I do not regularly go to the gym, I do not have any special dietary habits, and I weigh the same as 18.

datatrashfireon Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?

Built a PII masking system that demasked PII for all users.

datatrashfireon Man behind viral fake currency shocked by its success

and pay taxes

datatrashfireon On Tech Billionaires: "I Don't Think They Like People" New Yorker Radio Hour

i honestly don't see the point of life without other people

datatrashfireon Apache Superset

love superset, but one thing that I would love to see is to make it easier for dashboards/charts to use a dynamic table that the user can select.

we have multiple tenants + developer instances of our warehouse. to reuse the same dashboard in this setup we need to create at least 3 virtual datasets, plus wrangle a bunch of boiler plate jinja.

datatrashfireon Ask HN: Getting old and boring – What can I do about it?

At least for me, a lot of people don't really care about my hobbies, other than the people you share them with.

I play a sport in a club. When I hang out with those people... yea it's all we talk about almost. Nobody in my family or friends play this sport, nor do they care to talk about it.

So I just would not expect whatever it is you pick up to be broadly interesting to other people either.

datatrashfireon Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

job market for tech workers != broader economy. blue collar wages in percentage terms have been increasing faster than white collar.

i think many orgs overinvested in tech during the pandemic. we've swung too far, so it's time to work out the excesses.

datatrashfireon Sorry. Your car will never drive you around [video]

I think the poster was being ironic. ie let's reinvent the train.

datatrashfireon The diamond world takes radical steps to stop a pricing plunge

> I wouldn't marry anyone whose happiness is dependent on a artificially expensive hard and shiny rock whose prestige was inflated for years by an industry built on slave labor, especially when far less expensive alternatives exist.

One woman's diamond is another engineer's MacBook.

datatrashfireon First planned small nuclear reactor plant in the US has been canceled

What about the energy sector and their political allies' 50 year campaign gaslighting the public about the dangers posed by climate change?

datatrashfireon First planned small nuclear reactor plant in the US has been canceled

The driverless cars require drivers and the AI is a statistical parrot.

datatrashfireon Show HN: ScratchDB – Open-Source Snowflake on ClickHouse

as a huge clickhouse fan, i have to agree json is simply not a great experience even with all the changes in the last year

datatrashfireon The largest dam removal in history stirs hopes of restoring tribes' way of life

Wild Salmon populations in the Pacific Northwest are on track for extinction, in no small part due to the loss of habitat from dams.

datatrashfireon Analysis of the California Delete Act

*Californians will be able to delete personal online data at companies with staff competent enough to remove the data

datatrashfireon The end of the subscription era is coming

> It is an idyllic, almost utopian, perspective. There is an imagined logic at play, entirely divorced from reality. In the world where Substack were an expeditious route to “more people” being able to “make a good and profitable career out of writing”, we would also live in a world where you bought your lamp chops from a butcher, your baguette from a bakery, your stilton from a cheesemonger and your wine from a vintner, rather than just everything from a supermarket.

datatrashfireon jq 1.7

Yea except the python solution is probably going to be several hundred lines, instead of a few.

Python is often not installed in server environments unless it's a runtime environment for Python.

Want to use a non standard library? Now your coworkers are suddenly in Python dependency hell. Better hope anyone else that wants to use this is either familiar with the ecosystem, or just happens to have an identical runtime environment as you.

Or someone could just curl/apt/dnf a jq binary to use your 3 line query, instead of maintaining all of this + 200 lines of Python.

datatrashfireon Tearing down Klamath dams: The largest dam demolition

the salmon population in the Pacific Northwest is pretty much looking at long term extinction.

datatrashfireon Terraform best practices for reliability at any scale

Root module is the official terminology used in Hashicorps own documentation. That's actually the term I'm most familiar with in my own experience.

https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform/language/modules/s...

> Every Terraform configuration has at least one module, known as its root module, which consists of the resources defined in the .tf files in the main working directory.

datatrashfireon HouseWatch: Open-source tool for monitoring and managing ClickHouse clusters

Row based databases are optimized for accessing compete rows and joins. Columnar storage is optimized for accessing all, or many column values across rows. This makes aggregates and applying transformation logic faster with columnar storage than row based storage. Ie they are great for data warehouses and other analytical workloads.

Ps, great and still highly relevant resource covering all the major database system designs, their advantages and drawbacks: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/designing-data-intensiv...

datatrashfireon Apple Vision Pro: Apple’s first spatial computer

Too expensive. It's giant and obtrusive. This will be a niche product for the Apple die hards. It will not reach mainstream acceptance.

datatrashfireon It’s time to embrace slow productivity (2022)

I actually relate to this quite a bit. For years I was a workaholic. I was constantly stressed out over work, was generally pretty miserable person.

A few years back got very intensely into a new hobby that blossomed and it totally changed my quality of life.

At the same time, I wouldn't say I've drastically changed my hours. I work 40-50 hr weeks typically, I just stopped putting in the 60 hour ones that I felt I needed to. No one ever noticed or cared. It was always my own impulse to do that. Even though in my head, I felt like there was pressure to do it.

I really think it was just my brain knowing I didn't have anything else lined up for life, so it just kept lining up more work for me.

If all of a sudden that person was told four day work week had arrived, it wouldn't have made a difference. I'd just be there feeling I needed to work cause I didn't have anything else to do.

Recently, my health has prevented me from participating in the hobby. And unsurprisingly I find myself obsessing over work again...

datatrashfireon Research finds no gender bias in academic science

You measure wealth and income?

datatrashfireon 60M Americans have taxes so simple the IRS could do them automatically

What specifically do you take issue with?

I see a few claims:

On the margins if people believe they are less likely to be caught for tax evasion they are more likely to do it.

Clever people with a culture that encourages skirting or outright breaking the rules such as those involved in tech/VC might be such people.

The incentives to commit tax evasion are larger for such people.

Seems not that far fetched to me. Just curious what you think the irs.gov website has to say about any of that?