Hacker News Reader

rvr_on XFS File-System with Linux 5.10 Punts Year 2038 Problem to the Year 2486

I really wish people (and redhat) just stop using XFS altogether. I have seen it break multiple times with two different scenarios: 1) Backup system with external media (usb3) on XFS. The USB link goes down, the kernel panics inside some XFS code. Hard reset needed. 2) Production system with <1M files being actively read by apache http. Hot updating this folder via rsync randomly panics the system.

After a couple of times you just migrate to something sane, like ext4, and everything works flawlessly.

rvr_on A 20-year-old CRT monitor can be better than a 4K LCD (2019)

I miss 4:3

rvr_on Ask HN: Essential skill needed to be a programmer?

English, for those of us not born into it.

rvr_on Ask HN: What is your trick to do deep work or study?

For me, it's all about doing less. Remove all the cruft and see what happens. You will find out if it's working if you start missing the flow of time. When you are in the flow, there is no past and no future. You are just into "now" but not in a stressed way. You just keep doing what you're doing until your body says otherwise.

rvr_on Ask HN: Has anyone migrated off containerized infrastructure?

"If I need quick hot fix RIGHT NOW, I can't just log in, change couple of lines and restart, must go through full deploy cycle."

If you have CI/CD, and you must have CI/CD, this should never be done. As soon as it is allowed, you will eventually have changes applied to production that are not in your VCS.

rvr_on Brazil Bolsonaro: Facebook told to block accounts of president’s supporters

Brazilian here. Our law is incompatible with the Internet as we know it.

Below is a brief excerpt from our 1989 Constitution, translated by myself:

Art. 5º Todos são iguais perante a lei, sem distinção de qualquer natureza, garantindo-se aos brasileiros e aos estrangeiros residentes no País a inviolabilidade do direito à vida, à liberdade, à igualdade, à segurança e à propriedade, nos termos seguintes:

(All men are equal by the law, without any distinction, guaranteed to Brazilians and foreigners living on the Country the inviolable right to life, freedom, equality, safety, property, on the following terms:)

(...)

IV - é livre a manifestação do pensamento, sendo vedado o anonimato;

(The freedom of speech/thinking is allowed, but anonymity is not)

(...)

rvr_on Ask HN: I have $450K cash, what should I do to maximize my return?

In your position I would save 90% on the safest type of account you can get (big bank, insured). The remaining 10% I would spend trying to bootstrap some business. There's a big chance of failing, but if you fail you will still have a nice amount to reboot.

rvr_on Australia to make Facebook, Google pay for news

Sooner or later Google will just "AI-parse" the same news story from many sources and generate a new headline plus snippet.

rvr_on Emacs: The most successful malleable system

what about minecraft? seems way more successful and malleable

rvr_on Rewriting m4vgalib in Rust

I dislike nitpicking, but the following is wrong:

    "In C, bodies[i] is exactly the same as *(bodies + i) — it performs pointer arithmetic and a dereference and nothing else. In particular, it assumes that you have some reason to know that i is a valid index for the array. This is the common case in C and gets a shorthand using square brackets."

In C, bodies[i] is not (bodies + i), with the exception being char arrays. The general rule is:
bodies[i] = *(bodies + i * sizeof(bodies[0]))

rvr_on TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans from Filing Taxes for Free

Its simple if your are an employee and complex if you are an employer. For the self employed there is a super simple filling up to a certain threshold. Companies also have additional requirements based on revenue brackets, number of employees and type of economic activities they do. Anything sligth complex eill require multiple agencies fees and byzanthine laws.

rvr_on Day Trading for a Living?

The article is very good, but there is another dimension to be evaluated: There are two futures contracts that attract a lot of trading volume in Brazil: ibovespa futures and dollar/real futures. Both contracts have two tickers each, the "full" and the "mini". So we have: INDFUT, DOLFUT, WINFUT and WDOFUT (those two last are the "minis").
The common lore (or myth) goes as follow: The average trader starts trading paper money in a demo account, then goes to the mini to "learn to feel the pain" and if successful migrates to the full contract.
So, to really have the bigger picture, the study must be expanded to include the four tickers. Them we can really now if the "pros" playing on the full contract are really making any money.

rvr_on Cisco Fixes RV320/RV325 Vulnerability by Banning “curl” in User-Agent

Don't blame the manager, the PO, the CEO. This is ABSURD engineering incompetence. The fellow that did that _fix_ probably had no idea how to properly solve the issue.

rvr_on Brazil sets new record for homicides

I live in Florianopolis, the capital of one of the best state to live in Brazil (Santa Catarina). I have been robbed three times. Even people who have never been a victim will have the same feeling. Burglars are seen (and effectively are) potential murders. Every now and then someone is catch by security cameras being shot during an armed assault for meaningless reasons, such as the criminal not liking your face, not liking your possessions or discovering that you work for/is a policemen.

rvr_on Brazil sets new record for homicides

Well remembered. We have a whole ATM-exploding business in Brazil. Haven't heard of anything similar elsewhere in the world.

rvr_on Brazil sets new record for homicides

Brazilian here. Our criminality numbers are _probably_ higher than the official numbers. The country is huge and diverse, but even the most pacific states and cities are in a bad shape if compared to almost any other country. More than 70% of the deaths are related to gang conflicts.
Drugs are not the only problem. We also have a lot of cargo/truck stealing, street-level robbery, an enormous black market of stolen mobile phones, etc.
We have some affluent startup hubs, there are innovation in e-commerce, payments, banking, HR and many more, but our tech elite is complete out-of-sync with our major problem: violence. Maybe a fresh HN discussion can put some light on the issue.

rvr_on Goodbye Microservices: From 100s of problem children to 1 superstar

A 3-person team cannot manage 100+ repos with 100+ micro services. Sounds like a big impedance mismatch.

rvr_on WhatsApp Cofounder on How It Reached 1.3B Users Without Losing Its Focus

Brazil has a fair new "Internet law" [1] that states, among other things that:
1) Internet providers must not log any information about users traffic, except information related to the network access itself (like the IPv4 dynamic address attributed to the user's modem)
2) Application providers must log all actions performed by its users and retain for at least 6 months.
3) Any judge can request to an application owner the complete access log of anybody.
4) If the company does not comply to the request it can be fined up to 10% of its local revenue; face temporary or permanent shutdown.
WhatsApp ignored the law for two times and a 1st instance judge ordered the temporary ban to be performed by the major network providers. In both cases the order was latter revoked by 2nd instance judges.
Keep in mind that our "Internet law" was praised by everybody, including the international community, for its explicit creation of rules for internet neutrality. Turns out that the price for internet neutrality was mandatory massive surveillance
[1]: PT-BR source: http://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/_ato2011-2014/2014/lei/...

rvr_on WhatsApp Cofounder on How It Reached 1.3B Users Without Losing Its Focus

WhatsApp's success here in Brazil can be attributed to very few reasons: 1) Worked in every single smartphone (I started using it on a very resource constrained 2010's Nokia running s60) 2) SMS was and still is very expensive here. 3) Zero friction to use: it uses your phone number as your ID and your catalog list as its own.
It was a killer combination, almost everybody here in Brazil uses it, no matter how young or how old, no matter if it is a rich kid with the latest IPhone or the poor with the cheapest phone. Even the telcos had to bend to WhatsApp strength by offering "unlimited WhatsApp usage" on very limited data plans.

rvr_on Ask HN: What is the best test for statistical randomness?

Lossless compression algorithms. True randomness should yield near 0% compression ratios.

rvr_on As Coding Boot Camps Close, the Field Faces a Reality Check

Many of us like to compare software development with other engineering disciplines. I like to compare it to playing music. Sure you can learn to play some simple songs in a couple of months, but it takes lots of effort to master an instrument. Like musicians and sports players, there is no easy way to become really good as a software developer if you don't start as early as possible and dedicates your life to it.
Coding bootcamps are just trying to sell a short path where it is not possible to have one.

rvr_on Ask HN: At what point does it stop being a program and start being AI?

AI algorithms try to mimic some aspects of human biology or human behavior to solve problems that cannot be solved quickly using polynomial time algorithms. If the program's core is based on AI h, then you can loosely call 'em "AI programs".
You can think of AI as "imprecise computation". If you can improve precision over time, it becomes "machine learning" (this being the current buzzword of the field).
Note that I don't agree with simple rule-based systems being classified as AI, even with that naming being heavily used on games.