Hacker News Reader

procrastitronon House passes bill to enact year-round Daylight Saving Time across the country

Passing the senate back then was because of shenanigans; not popularity.

They played tricks with the “unanimous consent” procedure where senators didn’t know it was happening until after it was too late to object. Multiple senators said afterwards that they were opposed to it.

procrastitronon Garfield's proof of the Pythagorean Theorem

This was exactly what I thought of as well.

Garfield’s version seems more complicated since you have to calculate the area of a trapezoid instead of the area of a square, but conceptually they are the same.

procrastitronon Why GitHub won

> code.google going away, without the excuse that google itself was going away, after I had started to rely on it and link to it in docs and scripts all over the place

It didn't go away, though. It got archived and that archive is still up and running today. Those links you put all over the place should still be working.

> If google had said "The purpose of this service is an academic goal of Googles, not to serve users needs. This service will be shut off as soon as Googles academic purpose is met." I would not have used it.

That's not an accurate representation of what DannyBee said. Moreover, what DannyBee did say is in line with what Google itself said was its goal when the service launched: https://support.google.com/code/answer/56511

"One of our goals is to encourage healthy, productive open source communities. Developers can always benefit from more choices in project hosting."

> Effectively, Google harnessed users for it's own purposes without their consent by means of deception.

This does not appear to be a good faith argument.

None of what DannyBee said in their comment aligns with that interpretation. Neither does that interpretation line up with Google's publicly stated goals when they launched Google Code.

procrastitronon Navy again lowers requirements as it struggles to meet recruitment goals

That’s already been a thing for several decades: https://www.uscis.gov/military/naturalization-through-milita...

procrastitronon Disney, Warner, Comcast, and Paramount are contemplating cuts, possible mergers

Any argument of the form “if you knew that all along you’d be rich by now from playing the stock market” is fundamentally flawed because it overlooks one of the most well known dangers of the stock market:

    “The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent”

It absolutely was obvious ahead of time that most of the competing streaming services would fail because they couldn’t possibly recreate the infrastructure of Netflix, but it was not possible to predict when they would fail.

For a concrete example, before Paramount+ launched I predicted that it would be dead in less than a year.

Clearly I was wrong because it’s still going 2 years later. I still think it will die relatively soon, but predicting exactly when is virtually impossible.

procrastitronon Canada to require registration of podcasters and streaming services

No it doesn’t.

They would have to earn $10 million dollars or more in annual revenue to be affected.

procrastitronon Tell HN: JPMorgan Chase forcing arbitration agreement to log in

https://explore.zoom.us/en/terms/

I misremembered; it’s 16, not 15

procrastitronon Tell HN: JPMorgan Chase forcing arbitration agreement to log in

The Zoom arbitration agreement includes a specific clause for that which lets them combine separate claims together and only arbitrate 15 of them.

From a consumer perspective it really is a no-win situation. The agreements are specifically designed to make the process as one sided as possible.

procrastitronon Git-appraise – Distributed Code Review for Git

Rebases are supported; you have to do the rebases through git-appraise in order for it to know that the original and rewritten commits are related.

procrastitronon Git-appraise – Distributed Code Review for Git

This one does. You can comment on any line in any file.

procrastitronon Google’s Wire: Automated Dependency Injection in Go

Perhaps this wasn’t clear enough, but I was making an explicit distinction between dependency injection and dependency injection frameworks.

Dependency injection makes code easier to test, and I’m a big fan of dependency injection.

What I’m opposed to is the frameworks that automate (and often hide) the construction of the dependencies.

As someone else said in this thread “explicit is better than implicit”.

procrastitronon Google’s Wire: Automated Dependency Injection in Go

Dependency injection frameworks are a horrible idea.

They optimize for the wrong thing; making code easier to write but harder to read and edit.

Writing code is a one time cost whereas reading and editing it is an ongoing effort, so dependency injection frameworks are optimizing for the uncommon case at the expense of the common case.

Compile-time dependency injection frameworks are a big improvement over runtime dependency injection frameworks because you can at least read the generated code, but they are still a lot worse than manual dependency injection when it comes to editing code.

procrastitronon Show HN: Enc – A modern and friendly CLI alternative to GnuPG

How does this compare to age: https://github.com/FiloSottile/age ?

procrastitronon Nostr is a stupid simple P2P protocol that works, built by builders

“Is there a way to do what you're suggesting with identities”

There are certainly solutions, but I don’t know what the best solution is, hence why I called it an open problem.

An example solution would be something like having your identity be a hash of your initial public keyset, making each key have a set expiration date, adding new keys by signing them with one of the existing keys, and then storing all of the rotation operations in a transparency log.

“the only way to solve this without centralized providers is with blockchains”

That’s not true; you probably want a transparency log, but that doesn’t require blockchains.

procrastitronon Nostr is a stupid simple P2P protocol that works, built by builders

“All of the core decisions here are solid (pub key identities…”

I agree, except for the bit about public keys as identities.

I think public key identities are a step in the right direction, but there’s still a gap between that and what the ultimate solution is going to wind up being.

We need to have some layer of indirection between user identities and public keys so that users can do things like rotate keys, have multiple keys, and recover their identities.

I don’t know what the right solution to that is; I think it’s an open problem and probably one of the most important ones to solve. Keybase probably came closest to a good solution, but it wasn’t decentralized.

procrastitronon Commit comments no longer appear in the pull request timeline

You can do that with git-appraise: https://github.com/google/git-appraise

procrastitronon Likely cause of mystery child hepatitis outbreak found

Indeed, ~1000 worldwide had any sort of hepatitis at all, whereas over 400 have died from Covid in the U.S. alone.

Even if their theory is right about isolation being the cause of the hepatitis cases, then it was still the right thing to do in terms of risk vs. reward.

procrastitronon Folding bicycle small enough to fit in hand luggage

Overall that looks really nice, so thanks for sharing.

A bit of unsolicited feedback; listing the seat post options based on rider height (regular for shorter than 6’3”, and extra long for taller than 6’3”) is wrong.

Seat post height is based on how long your legs are, not how tall you are. If anything, you should list that by inseam.

As it is, I would have no idea which option is the most appropriate.

procrastitronon Dura is a background process that watches your Git repositories

Thanks for the pointer; I had never heard of sparkleshare before.

It sounds like it addresses roughly the same use case, but I couldn’t find any technical details about it in its docs in order to see how it compares.

procrastitronon Dura is a background process that watches your Git repositories

I built a similar tool a couple of years ago here: https://github.com/google/git-sync-changes

Both save uncommitted changes in a hidden ref.

Based on the README, the differences seem to be:

1. dura runs as a daemon while git-sync-changes is a one shot execution.

2. dura saves locally, while git-sync-changes syncs with a remote repo.

3. dura only does the save and the restore is manual, whereas git-sync-changes does both steps automatically.

I’m glad to see more people exploring this space. I think there’s a lot of untapped potential in tracking pending changes similarly to how we track committed changes.

procrastitronon T-Mobile Actively Censoring Certain URLs [video]

You copy the message and then send it to 7726.

You’ll get an automated response back saying something like “Thank you for reporting spam”

procrastitronon Tesla Ordered to Pay Worker $137M for Racism at Plant

The article indicated it was a federal trial. California laws would not be a factor.

procrastitronon Tesla Ordered to Pay Worker $137M for Racism at Plant

It was a federal trial.

procrastitronon Tetris-OS: An operating system that only plays Tetris

There is a similar project for Space Invaders here: http://www.erikyyy.de/invaders/

procrastitronon Ask HN: What was your favorite website from the 1990s?

Slashdot and Fark were good and still exist

procrastitronon Data do not back cloth masks to limit Covid-19, experts say

This title seems misleading to me.

The title implies that we have data showing cloth masks don’t work, but what the article actually says is just that we don’t have data.

procrastitronon Show HN: WhatFreeWords: Open-Source Geocoding for What3Words

I wholeheartedly agree with your assessment.

In contrast, Google’s plus codes(https://plus.codes/) provide the same functionality but avoid the most of the pitfalls you mention.

If you wanted to encode the same data using words instead of alphanumeric characters (which is a debatable goal), then you could just combine it with WCodes (https://wcodes.org/)

procrastitronon EC2 Instance Connect

It’s not just the browser based SSH that GCE has had for years.

The way they describe tying SSH keys to IAM roles very closely matches the SSH key management that GCE had when it launched back in 2012.

procrastitronon What it's like to be a white woman named LaKiesha

It’s just a terrible article.

It’s incoherent at times (that was the most egregious example) and seems to reflect the author’s bizarre misconceptions about the world (e.g. claiming “Jace” is a non traditional name).

procrastitronon Today’s Version Control Tools Are Still Primitive

This resonated with me except the part about integration.

The article seems to assume tight coupling between tools as a prerequisite for seamless integration between them.

I am the maintainer of git-appraise, and its founding precept is that tools can be loosely coupled and still seamlessly integrate together. All they have to do is store their data in the git repository in a common format.

The result works well. For example, a commit can be built by both Travis and Jenkins, and other tools can show both results without caring which tools produced them.

The rest of the suggestions seemed reasonable, though.