thejerz

Growing up with Mac computers at school in the 90's, teachers referred to ⌘ as the "splat" key. I'm not sure of the etymology or origins, but I inferred it's because the symbol resembles a cartoon animation splat, as might be produced from a character running straight into glass wall and getting flattened like a fly with a swatter.

> There’s no need to change passwords if they're robust, unique and not breached

This assumes you'll know if passwords were exposed in a breach. Some breaches go undetected.

That's an unnecessarily hard route. Take Dewey around to Laguna Honda and turn onto Portola. Then you can coast down Market or Clipper to your heart's content.

> I really wish there was a service that I could test out an office chair for two weeks and return if it doesn't not perform as expected.

It's called Amazon.

This is why I never tip on Prime Now, Instacart, Uber, Lyft, or Postmates: I don't trust them. Show me whatever the price is, and based on that I'll decide whether to use your service today. I'm not interested in voluntarily giving your business money.

I've read all the Oracle v. Google decisions, with a strong command of software and IP, and I side 100% with Oracle. It is not a question of whether the world would be better if API's were open-sourced (in re: EFF amicus brief), or whether Mr. Ellison needs a new yacht (in re: comments on HN), or whether copyrights are a good thing (also re: HN). The question is whether the copyright of the Java API is enforceable.

Here's the bottom line: Google didn't have to call it's resizable array java.util.ArrayList<E> -- it could have made android.data.ResizableArray<E>. But they didn't. Google copied the method signatures, and more importantly their organization into packages, to avoid the "drudgery" of defining their own original API. While a function that finds the minimum of two numbers -- int min(int a, int b) -- can arguably only be written one way and may not be enforcable, the issue isn't any one method's signature. The issue is that the Java API is an original, curated taxonomy of classes, methods, and interfaces, organized by authors. And taxonomies are protected under copyright. In the case of the Java API, the whole API taxonomy is greater than the sum of its method signature parts. Oracle owns that taxonomy.

What were the pro's and con's of using FDB over HBase?

Their architectural choices are puzzling to me:

1) Why use Scala to write (a relatively simple) internal CMS?

2) Why use a clustered database for 2 million records?

3) Why write your own proxy? (in Akka, none the less)

4) Why would you migrate articles from Mongo to Postgres using a script that runs overnight in screen?

The Guardian is, prima facie, a Wordpress blog. A simpler architecture would be:

1) Any CRUD web framework to build the CMS for reporters to draft their articles (Django, Rails, etc). Any basic RDBMS with read replication will do. Or, ditch the webapp entirely and just make a simple Markdown editor that commits to a git repo, a la Prose or Netlify.

2) When a reporter "publishes" an article, generate HTML for it and push to the CDN network. (I can't easily tell by looking at their HTTP headers, but I assume they're doing this already)

Okay, I'm being a little tongue-in-cheek. It's probably not that simple. But, one has to wonder, when you're serving up 100 million static HTML pages a day, if it really has to be this complicated.

America has a 1st amendment which protects free speech. Implicit in that covenant is the responsibility on the recipient, not the transmitter, to determine truthfulness. If you care whether Mike Pence actually paid for that ad, go research it -- and if you can't, don't rely on it being true.

100% agree. No reasonable person browsing the internet has an expectation of truth. When someone says, "But Facebook told me this ad was paid for by Nancy Pelosi," the answer isn't to pass regulations forcing Facebook to verify advertisers, the answer is to reply to that person, "And why did you believe them?"

I've never understood why Go tries so hard to reinvent exceptions. I've read their manifesto, their books, and this new exception syntax, but I'm not convinced the problem they're describing exists; and, even if it does exist, that their implementation solves it.

Exceptions in Ruby, Python, Java, C#, etc. are a tried-and-true paradigm for handling unexpected code paths, with a clear syntax: the only problem with exceptions is that developers don't use them, or don't use them properly, or aren't forced to use them (e.g, checked exceptions, a la Java's throws), all of which can be fixed with compilation rules.

As someone who writes defensive code, and utilizes a lot of exception throwing/handling for 14+ years, Go's lack of a rational exception framework is a big turn off.