magic-chicken | 3 years ago | on: The world has reached 8B people but soon we'll hit a decline we'll never reverse
magic-chicken's comments
magic-chicken | 3 years ago | on: Quebec Sovereignty Movement
magic-chicken | 3 years ago | on: Quebec Sovereignty Movement
The current movement is a continuity of the work that was started 50-70 years ago to get religious symbols out of public institutions, and in that sense, it's coherent.
magic-chicken | 3 years ago | on: Quebec Sovereignty Movement
magic-chicken | 3 years ago | on: Quebec Sovereignty Movement
magic-chicken | 3 years ago | on: Quebec Sovereignty Movement
magic-chicken | 5 years ago | on: Microplastics found in the placentas of human fetuses
> After all, lead poisoning was suggested as one of the possible reasons for the decline of the Roman empire.
What are you trying to imply here? Microplastic -> Low Testorone -> Socialist government -> Decline of civilisation?
magic-chicken | 7 years ago | on: They Build Spacecraft and Fight Epidemics; Shutdown May Scare Them Away
magic-chicken | 7 years ago | on: Paradise Lost is one of the most important poems
magic-chicken | 7 years ago | on: Paradise Lost is one of the most important poems
magic-chicken | 7 years ago | on: Button offers instant gratification for those plagued by airplane noise
>>> The multibillion-dollar program is changing the way air traffic is managed, moving it from radar to satellite navigation. Proponents say it makes the air traffic system more efficient because it allows planes to fly more direct routes to their destinations.
But the shift has angered residents, who live in neighborhoods that are below the new flight paths. Residents in Northwest Washington sued the FAA over the changes but lost in court. A suit filed by the state of Maryland is pending.
magic-chicken | 7 years ago | on: Ask HN: Which tool do you use to create beautiful diagrams?
magic-chicken | 7 years ago | on: Yanis Varoufakis: The Euro Has Never Been More Problematic [video]
magic-chicken | 7 years ago | on: Ex-Canadian Diplomat Michael Kovrig Detained in China
magic-chicken | 7 years ago | on: Ask HN: What ergonomic solutions are you using?
magic-chicken | 7 years ago | on: Tesla Autopilot and Euro NCAP
Tesla ADS is the best on the market but it is marketed as an autopilot, which is wrong and caused some overconfident owners to die.
magic-chicken | 7 years ago | on: Ask HN: What are your principles of design?
- Make it work, then make it simple, then make it fast. In that order.
- Don't do at runtime what you can do at compile time.
- You are not going to need it.
- Encapsulate your dependencies.
- Push code complexity / logic to the edges (aka Tell, don't ask)
- Build only your core business software components. Use 3rd party software or open source for the rest.
- If at least one part of your system is not redundant, your system is not redundant.
- The persistance mechanism of your application is an implementation detail.
- Stateful systems are harder to debug than stateless systems.
- Almost always develop a business logic core for your application that is independant from it's distribution mechanism.
- When you make an API public, make everything you can to make the changes to it backward compatible. Also, use semantic versioning.
- If you are developing a distributed system, accept from the start that the other services on which you rely won't be availaible 100% of the time.
- Fail fast, fail often.
- Caching is hard to get right. Use it as a last resort.
If you were talking about visual design :
- Design for mobile first. Porting it to desktop will be easy afterwards.
- Prefer text over images. The more explicit the better.
- Read about typography to choose a good combination of font, line height, line width and letter spacing.
- Don't use colors to give meaning to something. Use shapes and colors instead to help people with color blindess.
- On a page, show all the information the user needs to make a decision or an action. No more, no less.
- Optimize actions that are performed often or that needs to happen fast. The less input the user needs to provide the better.
- Make navigating between popular sections of the site easy. It should not take more than one or 2 actions to go anywhere on your site / application.
- Learn about reading "hot spots" to decide how to arrange your content.
- Read about colors and how people of different cultures perceive them.
- Be consistent.
magic-chicken | 7 years ago | on: What songs or kind of music you like to listen to when you are coding?
magic-chicken | 7 years ago | on: Ask HN: How do large companies handle access to critical databases?
- Dont use passwords for databases. Make services use integrated authentication to interact with the database.
- Developers / operations dont have read / write access to production tables. It can be obtained momentarily for ad-hocs operations.
- When the database needs to be modified, the script goes through a change management system and it is executed at a planned time, ideally by another person.
- If you use private keys, ex for symmetric encryption, don't store them with the data it's used to encrypt.
- Use database level encryption on sensitive data to prevent anyone with read access to snoop on PII.
- Enable database level audit and change tracking.
- Developers don't push their own changes to production.
magic-chicken | 7 years ago | on: Sennheiser Headset Software Could Allow Man-In-the-Middle SSL Attacks