d64f396930663ee | 11 years ago | on: The SSD Endurance Experiment: Casualties on the way to a petabyte
d64f396930663ee's comments
d64f396930663ee | 11 years ago | on: What will it take to get people using PGP for email?
You can make a seamless experience so that people don't even realize that their email is encrypted, but then the problem becomes: if their computer crashes and they lose their private key, they have now lost access to every previous email ever written. That's just unacceptable. I closely guard several backups of my private key, but most people aren't going to create an enormous single point of failure like that.
d64f396930663ee | 12 years ago | on: First life with 'alien' DNA
Ugh, that headline.
d64f396930663ee | 12 years ago | on: Slow database test fallacy
> I like testing those things on which my model depends. It gives me much more confidence. Why wouldn't I want to test them?
Those things all need to be tested, but if a single unit test fails, it's nice to know that it failed because the code was wrong, not because the database connection happened to die just then. If I have one test for the logic, and another that verifies that the database can be connected to, and a third that verifies the schema is right, then the specific combination of failing tests tells me a lot more about what's wrong and if my code even needs to be changed.
d64f396930663ee | 12 years ago | on: Slow database test fallacy
I always assumed the point of mocking a database response was to ensure that you were testing just your code, and not also the existence of a database with the right schema, the ability to connect to it, as well as the correctness of the code that rolls back any side effects.
d64f396930663ee | 12 years ago | on: A collection of not so obvious Python stuff
Even after reading this list, I'm comfortable forgetting everything (with maybe one exception) because these surprises really only come up when you use horrible coding practices. But it's nice to know it really takes some serious effort to find these kinds of things in Python.
d64f396930663ee | 12 years ago | on: Ask HN: What's your greatest epiphany?
This sounds less like epiphany and more like things you wish were true.
d64f396930663ee | 12 years ago | on: MariaDB 10
I was using it for a long time, and then after some update I was completely unable to get it to run on any new servers. Not sure what changed, but using the package manager route was no longer viable. Building from source also failed for reasons that are totally ungoogleable. Surely my incompetence plays a role, but I had to abandon it after every single workaround in their troubleshooting section failed to resolve the issue.
d64f396930663ee | 12 years ago | on: How not to write an API
It's a felony in the US to do what the author did here, right? Not that there's any indication where they're from, I'm just curious.
d64f396930663ee | 12 years ago | on: Passwordless Products
OK nevermind. I get it now, it's just emailing you a new token everytime you want to use the site, or something like that. It's just such a terrible idea I couldn't wrap my mind around it. Who would ever want to use a website like this?
d64f396930663ee | 12 years ago | on: Passwordless Products
No, I don't get the idea. If I'm requesting a token for a certain user, how can the server reliably determine if I actually am that user? If it just authenticates every request, what's the point of even having a password?
d64f396930663ee | 12 years ago | on: Passwordless Products
So if the token expires, how do you log back in? What happens if you want to use a different browser? Or buy a new computer?
d64f396930663ee | 12 years ago | on: How to Escape the Community College Trap
At the community college I went to, you took as many or as few classes as you wanted, and could quit and return at any semester as you pleased.
What's with all the bullshit rules and time pressure?
d64f396930663ee | 12 years ago | on: Ask HN: How do you become a morning person?
Start exercising. I found my quality of sleep increased dramatically once I did this, and even though I was still going to bed at 2 or 3 AM at first, it somehow made shifting to a more reasonable hour much easier once I was actually sleeping eight hours a night.
d64f396930663ee | 12 years ago | on: How many people are in space right now?
A few years ago when I was living in China I was told about this, but it never worked.
Then on a hunch I fired up my proxy and discovered that the Chinese government was actively censoring it.
WHY
page 1
That's exactly the issue - you can't have a takeaway if you don't have a reasonable sample size. Are these drives all in the top 5% of quality for their respective brands? We'll never know unless we do a larger study.