scriptkiddy

RethinkDb: rethinkdb.com

> I don't disagree that people are complacent, but on a factual level, most kids who don't get vaccinations do not get measles.

This is because other children do not contract measles because they have been vaccinated for Measles, as have their parents. It's not because Measles is hard to contract, it's because Measles is uncommon in the modern Western world. It's uncommon in the modern Western world because people have been vaccinated for it.

> In the years before a measles vaccine, there were about 500 deaths per year from measles (in the US). This was when the population was about half of what it is now, so if we returned fully to that rate, there would be about 1,000 deaths per year from measles today.

1000 easily preventable deaths. Just because 1000 people isn't a large, scary number doesn't mean that it's a small number either. A single person dying of a preventable illness is heartbreaking. Each one of those 1000 people who die are someone's son, daughter, wife, husband, brother, sister, aunt, etc. What value do you place on human life?

> There were no deaths from measles in the years 2016 or 2017, per this document from the CDC: https://www.cdc.gov/measles/downloads/measlesdataandstatssli....

Because of Vaccines. It even says right there in the link: "Measles remains a leading cause of vaccine-preventable infant mortality."

> But the amount of actual harm that anti-vaxxers are causing is miniscule, certainly deeply out of proportion with the hate that they're getting.

You say this until your child goes to kindergarten with an un-vaccinated child and contracts a deadly illness.

In addition, anti-vaxxers are doing harm to their own children. A parent's responsibility is to protect their children. I understand that anti-vax parents think hey are protecting their children by refusing vaccines, but it is objectively the opposite. Anti-vax parents are exposing their children to deadly illnesses that used to kill people at an alarming rate before vaccination was common. They are doing this to a child who cannot understand the implications of these decisions.

> And if you do sincerely desire to keep as many people as possible from getting the measles, rather than desire to feel the rush of heaping hate on people, then again, let me suggest that the current tactics are not working, and that de-escalating the rhetoric around this will do much more to let anti-vaxxers relax and start listening to your data.

This I can partially agree with. However, cognitive bias is very real and very powerful. Clearly, hate and spite are not a good way to communicate with anti-vaxxers, but how many children need to die and how may horrible illnesses need to become common before they realize the errors of their ways?

I think this decision had 2 motivators, in order of importance:

1. Business

2. Ethics

The ethics effect the business. GoFundMe does not want to be known as a company that helped an organization allow the resurgence of Polio for instance. From a business standpoint, GoFundMe needs to maintain positive PR if it wants to keep making money. It is none of GoFundMe's concern if these anti-vax individuals or organizations move to a different platform.

Except, this isn't censoring. It's a private company refusing to let an individual or organization use it's service for fundraising for a cause they believe to be harmful.

> and the other is a very easy mistake to make which can go unnoticed for a long time (because you can be attempting to log things completely unrelated to logins).

This is not an excuse. If you're logging all request data, you need to strip or encrypt sensitive information in that request data. Handling Persistence of sensitive data is web development 101. Just because it's not in a database doesn't give you a pass to leave it unprotected.

This level of incompetency is unacceptable.

How do companies keep messing this up. The cardinal rule of web application security is to NEVER store plain text passwords anywhere. The only time your application should have access to plain text passwords is when it is hashing the password or verifying the password against a hash.

If you need to log all request data for some reason, strip the passwords out.

It really isn't difficult.

Where does Erlang/Elixir fit into this in your opinion?

I would highly recommend trying Elixir out. There's a little bit of a hump to get over at first if you're not familiar with functional programming, but after that it's mostly smooth sailing.

The language has it's own built-in process manager capable of running thousands of concurrent processes with a small footprint.

Things like function arity and pattern matching are core concepts and core parts of how the language works. I've found that when comparing 2 simple web applications, one Python 3 and one elixir, that the Elixir codebase ends up being a bit larger because of the required boilerplate. However, as an application becomes larger, the disparity swings the other way and the Elixir codebase will remain smaller over time.

In addition, writing Elixir code just feels clean. Nothing really feels hacky, even if it is.

Why not do all of it? Here's what I do every weekday:

1. Work for ~8 hours 2. Go the gym for an hour 3. Commute home( unless I worked remotely that day ) 4. Work on side project for 1 - 2 hours. 5. Spend time with significant other/video games/both

I do the same thing. Luckily, my desktop is in the living room, so I don't have to work on a laptop.

I live in Los Angeles; The Mecca for the automobile. Back in the early 20th century, the city was trying really hard to invest in public transportation through the use of electric street cars. Unfortunately, car manufacturers were able to weasel their way into the pockets of the city planners and put a stop to that.

We have a problem in Los Angeles. And that problem is that it's almost impossible to live close to where you work. Most white collar jobs here require an hour or longer of commuting time. Sure, it's possible to find jobs closer to your home, but when you are a professional in a specific field, your choices are restricted.

I live in North Hollywood, which is just West of Burbank in the San Fernando Valley. It's actually miles from Hollywood despite what the name may suggest.

I work in El Segundo. Before that, I worked in Culver city.

It would take me 4 or more hours and several metro -> bus -> metro transfers to get to work without driving.

The city is working on several new Metro lines and Bus only lanes, but it doesn't solve the problem of everyone being so spread out.

I was waiting to hear something like this. Generally speaking, Airline pilots who actually flew the plane are one of the best sources to consult when it comes to determining any possible safety malfunction of an aircraft.

One thing to note is the mention of a "Runaway Trim Checklist". When piloting an airliner, there is a checklist for almost everything. Sometimes there are multiple checklists with branching paths. Most emergency/malfunction checklists involve what are called "memory items". These are checklist steps that the pilot must remember in order to react quickly to any possible problem. After the memory items are completed, the pilots will break out the checklist binder and follow the checklist procedure that comes after the memory items.

Every procedure the pilots undergo has passenger safety as it's #1 concern. Pilots are free to make whatever decision they deem necessary to ensure the safety of their passengers, even at the detriment of the airline's bottom line. They are free to make these decisions without question, even if the problem seems small.

I believe it's important to note the above information whenever we look at these horrible accidents and try to reason about them. Often, pilots are the first line of defense against failures. Most aircraft have 2-3 redundant systems for almost every control and feature. Pilots need to understand and know how to work with and around these systems in order to react to emergency situations. That's why I think the MCAS isn't really to blame here as much as Boeing is to blame for not properly documenting it's operation in their manuals.

Any online resources you could recommend to someone looking to learn some higher level math? The highest I ever got in school was the beginnings of Calculus and I'd like to dig a little deeper. However, I keep running into the issue of not really understanding all of the Greek symbology.

Yeah, it was taken over by the Linux Foundation.

I can't really say that RethinkDb NEEDS a new release.It's feature complete in my eyes. All it really needs at this point is maintenance.

I mean, the core had 3 commits just last month. Some of the client libraries are much more active:

https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb-python/commits/master https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb-rs/commits/next

Sure, that's not a ton of development, but at least it's actually, really, open source.

In addition, the software itself doesn't really need much improvement. It does what it's supposed to do very well and the client libraries are fantastic.

I've used for a contract project I worked on. It wasn't bad, but it was difficult to filter when there was a lot of messages.

I've never really thought that elastic search is all that great, to be honest. I use it every day at work for an application that does a ton of aggregations.

That said, I can't shake the feeling that we could get the same level of performance with RethinkDb with the benefit of a better API and less overhead.

Assuming that the use case does not require large quantities of full-text search, is there really any reason to choose ElasticSearch over RethinkDb? ElasticSearch does have a larger ecosystem, but with how good RethinkDb's API is, I'm not entirely sure any 3rd party packages would actually be necessary.

Add to that RethinkDb's ability to do joins and changefeeds and this decision becomes a no-brainer for me.

If you're still interested in this type of tool, I'm sure Mozilla would welcome your contribution: https://github.com/mozilla/send

Along the same lines, a Gmail-esque Thunderbird web service would be amazing. I could finally de-google myself completely if that were the case.

Currently, I need to set up my own email hosting through a service like fastmail and then configure a desktop client(like Thuderbird) to use it.

A Mozilla Gmail-esque service would remove a lot of the friction there and probably bring in a bunch of users who are tired of google running everything.

I mean, if you have even a small amount of experience with programming, you can learn big-O in a couple hours or less.

Now, if we talk about memory optimization or the intricacies of concurrency, that's a much different story. Though, both of those things can't really be taught in the basic sense. They require a lot of experience to really understand.

Agreed. I believe it's the same as owning a car. If you own a car and use it regularly, you should probably understand at least the basics of how it operates. In the modern world, everyone is constantly surrounded by computers and software and most people have absolutely no clue about how any of it works. This will become a problem as time rolls onward.

Judging by the abstract in that linked paper, I think that it is arguing more about semantics than anything else. It basically claims that: "No person is truly self taught as they stand on the shoulders of their predecessors". To which, I would agree. No man is an island and it would be very difficult to teach oneself something without material composed by others. However, I think the colloqual use of the term autodidact is more about the lack of a formal educational system or formal teaching figure and less about a person figuring everything out on their own.

> I do like hyperscript better than JSX... precisely because it's not a syntax for function calls. Because it's just a function.

You should check out Elm: https://elm-lang.org/. It uses a hyperscript like syntax for rendering in a functional style. It's all just functions, and it reads that way too.

You may have heard of it already, but if you haven't, I would recommend taking a look at RethinkDb: https://www.rethinkdb.com/docs/architecture/

It is a NoSQL Db, but has a lot of the features you're talking about. It doesn't have any form of "schema", but does allow for SQL style relational data. It definitely supports your "dynamic relational" data idea as stated above. The only issue is that any sort of data constraints need to be addressed at the outside of the Db itself.

I disagree. The article itself may not have much meat to it, but the discussion it has sparked is definitely worth the time to read.

There is a lot of back and forth in the comments about software design and workflow practices. I think this kind of discourse is extremely valuable.

Isn't this the exact reason people came up with semantic versioning?

This is why I use FF for development(and all other browsing). I get firefox support by default on all my work.

> A close second is some podcasts have started putting reruns into their feed.

"Stuff you should know" and "Stuff to blow your mind" do this. However, they sprinkle these in once a week and still release their normal 2 new episodes per week. It kind of makes sense for these shows since they have a massive back log and the nature of the subject matter is not really time sensitive.

The ads may be annoying, but consider that ad reads in podcasts are a much more ethical and sustainable advertising model than almost any other model out there. In addition, ad read time takes up at most 5% of the total run time of your average podcast.

People who do podcasts as a living or companies where podcasts are their primary revenue source need to make money somehow.

Take How Stuff Works for instance. They have some great informational podcasts like "Stuff you Should Know", "Stuff to Blow your Mind", "Stuff they don't want you to know", and "Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe". These podcasts cover very interesting, and sometimes, very important topics. How stuff works makes their money from selling ad reads in their podcasts and ad space on their blog. They are providing a valuable service and paying people to literally do nothing but research and produce podcasts. These people need to get paid.

My point is, while nobody actually likes ads, the model which podcasts employ is at least tolerable; especially when compared to something like ads on Youtube.

For people with long commutes like myself (1 hour +), audio podcasts are a great way to pass the time in he car. Podcasts are a great way to keep your mind occupied when you're sitting in traffic or doing some other tedious and menial task. Sitting down and actively listening to a podcast while doing nothing else is not very appealing to most people.