thehardsphere

It's arrogant to assume that a new system will be better than the old one merely because it was re-written from scratch. Many companies died because someone said "let's rewrite this bit of software" and the project ended up failing because people vastly underestimated the difficulty of the re-write. Even though they were smart professionals who knew how to write software well.

Considering that software companies frequently fail to succeed at re-writes with something as inconsequential as software, what makes you think society can do it with something as consequential as healthcare? Especially considering that healthcare is in many ways much harder and more poorly understood than software?

> This could just be because I'm a mediocre developer (1X) but:

If you're mediocre as in average, that makes you 4x, not 1x. The 10x developer is 10 times better than the worst performer who is still employed, or 2.5x the median.

I only point this out because lots of people get it wrong and end up unfairly underestimating their own competence.

>Now, onto RPC. RPC, is binary protocol over TCP.

The author specifies two different RPC protocols in their article: XML-RPC and JSON-RPC. Both often do push plain text over HTTP.

> REST, IMO, derives most of it's flexibility from being built over HTTP, and not because REST is some kind of magic sauce that it's touted by many to be

In that case, there is no difference between REST, XML-RPC, JSON-RPC, and SOAP. That could be a valid opinion to have, but I suspect it’s not one most people would agree with.

There is a thing called JSON-RPC: http://www.jsonrpc.org/specification

The author explicitly mentions it as something he prefers over REST (though he spends more time on XML-RPC)

Plus, for any given large organizational customer HTTP/HTTPS are allowed through their firewall/other network security apparatus, wheras other ports require a bunch of special exceptions from the security people to use. Said people often refuse to give exceptions no matter how reasonable the request might be, so everybody ends up doing everything on port 80 or 443.

Really? Was something wrong with the WSDL?

Nah, that was in programming well before politics.

They can have the same root cause though: someone's identity feeling threatened.

The Republican Party was founded in 1854.

Devos is actually a perfect pick if you assume the goal was to pursue her pet agenda at the expense of every other possible agenda that a Secretary of Education could have. Whether the skids were greased because of her rich brother or not, she still could have been picked by some hypothetical other Republican president.

Usually, the completely crooked, bought-their-way-into-the-Cabinet appointment in any given administration is whoever becomes the Commerce Secretary. You don't usually remember who the Commerce Secretary is because they don't typically do anything, but they're almost always a big money donor. There's a bipartisan tradition of that which stretches back to when it was created at the turn of the century.

I only raise chemical addiction as a possible exception because nearly everybody agrees there are ways to become addicted to certain chemicals without somehow choosing to do so first, e.g. you get hurt in an accident that is no fault of your own and the doctors administer medication to you that you become addicted to.

Do you have a source for that?

I find that figure incredibly dubious considering that tobacco requires years of chronic use before it kills you, and it typically doesn't kill you in a way that is entirely attributable to that single cause.

I'm going to play devil's advocate here; I don't actually know what my own opinion about this is, and I never gamble online so I don't even know much about it or how horrible it might be. So I'm going to ask you a bunch of questions that should hopefully help you work out exactly how you got to your opinion and either change it or hold it more firmly.

Why do you say "online casinos are designed in such a way to attract addicts"? Aren't they just designed to attract people who want to use them, which happens to include addicts?

Aren't you assuming that addicts are helpless people with absolutely no agency of their own? Given that this isn't a question of chemical dependency, aren't they morally responsible for exercising better judgement? I mean, many people gamble without any problems. Why should the casino be considered immoral because of someone else's poor choices?

Is online gambling especially heinous for some reason you haven't clearly articulated, or do you apply this thinking to other things people may become addicted to as well with a similar joy/grief tradeoff? It would apply to recreational drugs, I'm certain. Someone else already asked about social media. Do you think this way about other aspects of society?

It's not a fallacy because GP didn't use it to refute an argument, he merely asked a question.

Just a pedantic procedural point: The FCC is not an "agency", but a commission with 5 members. Once a commissioner is named, they cannot be removed by the President for any reason besides misconduct. The two of them besides Mr. Pai who are Republicans have been on for quite a while and their agreement is necessary for this scheme of his to work. He presumably has it, otherwise there would be no vote taking place, so it's not like this is merely a product of Trump’s unique intervention here.

Relevant HN discussion of the Bloomberg article from yesterday regarding Stiglitz's opinion of Bitcoin (not a dupe): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15812247

Yes, typically when testing web applications, you have a second instance of the application running on a different machine than the production server, configured to run against a different database server as well. The exact details of how to do this well depend on how your application is written and its requirements.

If all you want to do is functional testing of the application by yourself, then it is OK to deploy a copy of the software on your desktop along with a test database. I do this for the application I work on, and when I need to test against MSSQL, the Express edition is good enough.

If you need to do load testing or integration testing or other more complicated forms of testing, you usually try to duplicated the expected production environment as well as you can. This may not be possible, so you may have to make decisions about what's most relevant and simply accept those tradeoffs.

EDIT: Don't worry about CI or anything else that fancy and complicated for now. You may not even need it; that depends on your team and how often your application changes. Just for now take the simplest steps you can until you get this basic stuff figured out first.

Here's two ideas:

1. Set up replication, with your test db the replication slave of your production database, such that changes in production are mirrored in testing nearly instantly.

2. Take your production database backups (you do have those, right?) and restore them to the test database. This is less fresh than a replication setup but if you're just doing functional testing it should be enough to say "Well, okay, this little change isn't going to blow everything up."

Don't know why this is downvoted; utility and value are subjective under basically every modern economic theory there is aside from Marxist ones.

I wouldn't go that far, though it's sort of a flawed analogy for comparison.

Economics generally is a field where lots of people hold on to their prior beliefs, and those beliefs are difficult to change, even in the face of new evidence and data. Even though most economists agree with each other about the basic sort of stuff that you learn in undergraduate classes, there's lots of disagreement when it comes to broader, value-judgement type questions. There's also a lot of disagreement about what data means that is difficult to resolve with more studies, and studies are hard because we can't do double-blind control trials of macroeconomic policy.

So, it's not necessarily unusual for economists to express crackpot-sounding opinions on matters of public interest without actually being crackpots within their field. Stiglitz has some weird ideas (I seem to remember he suggested the government should pay people to dig ditches and fill them back in to get out of the recession), and they may even be wrong (I myself don't really agree with him), but he's not a guy who just says stuff out of nowhere to provoke people like Ann Coulter.

Welcome to the HN echo chamber.

Ok, so this is a pretty useful answer that's starting to clear things up a bit for me. Let me see if I’ve got this straight.

Sometime in the 2000s, ISPs were classified as Title I entities. Then in 2010, there was an "open internet order" that tried to enforce Net Neutrality in some new way, which the DC courts shot down when Verizon (represented by Mr. Pai) sued over it, saying that Title I didn’t give FCC the authority to regulate in the way that it was trying to in 2010. So then they reclassified ISPs as common carriers e.g. under Title II, so they could impose the same rules that existed in 2010.

So, what I'm still confused about:

1. Prior to 2015, were ISPs ever actually considered common carriers?

2. Did any regulation or legislation exist prior to the "FCC Open Internet Order 2010" that served the same explicitly stated purpose (FCC chairmen saying similar, nice sounding things without actually having the force of law doesn't count)?

Mr. Pai's personal entanglements with Verizon aside, didn't the previous regulatory scheme only exist from 2010 on? Or was there prior regulation that the "FCC Open Internet Order of 2010" superceded? I'm asking because some comments seem to suggest the answer is "Yes, we already had this in another form before 2010" but there's scant mention of it on Wikipedia.

You mean Title II was a means of imposing rules from pre-2002, right?

I mean, ISPs were never considered "common carriers" before 2015, right? I'm trying to get the details straight.

Really? It was my understanding that this was part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Am I mistaken?

Actually, I am asking that. Several other commentors have asserted that "the world changed" a few years before the rule passed, yet nobody has really explained in detail how. So far I've gotten a hypothetical about Wal-Mart paying ISPs to destroy Amazon, which didn't actually happen. (Though I haven't read other responses yet, so maybe there's something more here I just have missed.)

But, let's take a closer look at what you just said here. You are correct that many laws and regulations are reactive in nature. That doesn’t automatically justify them. As a matter of fact, it is often the case that the most reactive laws and regulations can be some of the worst, as has constantly been demonstrated from September 11, 2001 to the present day. I mean, there is a real problem with terrorism, but that real problem doesn't automatically justify banning travel from 8 majority-Muslim countries, does it?

At least in the terrorism example, I have some understanding of how terrorism exploits people, and that makes it possible to debate how to use the government to protect people from that exploitation (or to protect other people from exploitation by the government, in the name of protecting people from explotation). Individual acts of terrorism have been clearly identified and publicized, so it is possible to have a coherent public policy discussion. But in the net neutrality case, everyone either discusses:

1. Hypotheticals, like Wal-Mart paying Comcast to destroy Amazon 2. Court cases that... actually were resolved in court under anti-trust law 3. Assertions that new censorship will take place like we've never seen before, even though we'd be going back to the pre-2015 status quo.

Despite sounding flippant about it, I don't actually mean to. People here are pretty smart, so if they're all worked up about it, I must be the one missing something. I would just like someone to coherently explain what that is.

Okay, how did it change?

How did they "realize" that, suddenly a couple years ago? I am not doubting you, I am genuinely confused.

I mean, human greed is a constant, and the rules didn’t change from 1996-2015, yet during the same period you said that Wal-Mart would have paid to destroyed Amazon, Amazon became one of the most wealthy and powerful companies in the world. So... it must be something more than the rules, right? Greedy companies were just unimaginative with their greed until a few years ago?

To put it another way: If Wal-Mart simply didn’t realize some trick in those days, what information would the Walton family need to take with them in their time machine to destroy Amazon from 1996-2015?

Did I miss some new proposal that Ajit Pai has put forward?

It is my understanding that "The rules Ajit Pai wants in place" were in place from sometime during the ninties or earlier, until 2015. That is, Ajit Pai merely wishes to undo a rule that was only in force from 2015 to the present.

Am I mistaken? Because I think the world you say you don't want to live in is the one we actually did live in for most of the history of the Internet, unless I'm missing something.

Serious question: does it have still have a significant civilian population? Wikipedia makes it kinda read like anyone who was living there was depopulated to make room for military bases and contractors who are working on military bases.

Oh, so you're just ignoring the Red Terror? Or the murder of the Cossacks before Stalin came to power? Lenin never murdered anybody?

The failings of the Soviet Union are the failings of an ideology whose explictly stated goal was the overthrow of every existing social institution. Stalin merely implemented the Bolshevik vision on a much grander and bloodier scale.

Unless your argument is that the Bolsheviks were wrong (which would include people before Stalin).