magic-chicken's comments

magic-chicken | 3 years ago | on: Quebec Sovereignty Movement

The process to remove religions from public institutions started 50-70 years ago. It's a process, and its going to take a long time, as there is 400 years of history to deal with. Saying that the whole process is BS because there was some hesitation, or because there are still streets named after catholic Saints is just a logical fallacy.

magic-chicken | 3 years ago | on: Quebec Sovereignty Movement

I understand how it can be perceived this way. However, did you look at Quebec history? You will find that Quebec was very religious until 50-70 years ago. Education was provided by members of catholic institutions. At that point in time, teachers were wearing their religious uniform. Quebec made the decision to re-take ownership of the education system and to get the religions out of there. In the beginning, religious people were still providing the educuation, but they were asked to stop wearing religious symbols.

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

The point is that the crucifix was removed from the most symbolic place it could be removed from. If thats not a strong, consistent signal that Quebec wants religions out of the public institutions, then what is?

magic-chicken | 3 years ago | on: Quebec Sovereignty Movement

About religon: you are correct, it's not racism, it's a different approach to multi-culturalism. The problem is, the ROC is intolerant and only consider that one valid approach to multi-culturalism exists: their own. Anything else is "racist".

magic-chicken | 5 years ago | on: Microplastics found in the placentas of human fetuses

What? Are you suggesting that left-leaning voters have a lower level of testosterone than right-leaning voters?

> 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: Paradise Lost is one of the most important poems

He asked : why is it important ? You answered : because it is important. His comment has value because he's questionning an ill defined 'authority'. You accused him of a commiting a logical fallacy while committing one yourself. I learned more by reading the answers to his question than by reading your comment.

magic-chicken | 7 years ago | on: Button offers instant gratification for those plagued by airplane noise

I think that for most people in the article, their house was not under a flight path when they bought it :

>>> 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: Yanis Varoufakis: The Euro Has Never Been More Problematic [video]

I did not detect any bashing in the video, except toward the whole Euro. On the contrary, I found he was trying very hard not to point fingers at anybody. Also, he asked many times the audience to challenge future panelists (ex. Steve Bannon) on their ideas, and he did so in a very respectful manner. English is not my first language, so I may have missed some things. Could you expand on what part you think he was bashing on Germany or being condescending ?

magic-chicken | 7 years ago | on: Ask HN: What are your principles of design?

Assuming you are talking about software 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: Ask HN: How do large companies handle access to critical databases?

From my experience, regulated industries use a combination of the following techniques :

- 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.

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