beal (u/beal) - Readit News

beal commented on Apple Execs on iMessage for Android (2013) twitter.com/techemails/st... · Posted by u/mfiguiere

mmmlinux · 3 years ago

Why is SMS type texting not prevalent outside the US? I keep seeing arguments about how everyone uses whatsapp or wechat or what ever, But why? Is the SMS service not there for some reason? Is it perceived as less safe to give out your phone number? Do many people have data only devices with out a number?

beal · 3 years ago

Outside the us carriers continued to charge for sms

beal commented on The Framework Laptop Chromebook Edition frame.work/at/en/blog/int... · Posted by u/artogahr

kilovoltaire · 3 years ago

sounds like the page should say "at least eight years" then, instead of "up to eight years"

beal · 3 years ago

What's more likely, Google break their commitment or they provide extra patches past their commitment.

beal commented on Pockit: A tiny, powerful, modular computer [video] youtube.com/watch?v=b3F9O... · Posted by u/rayrag

duxup · 3 years ago

I’ve stared playing with an Arduino recently and thought “it would be handy if the various sensors and add ons just snapped on”….

This appears to be that, but with a Pi (and of course a lot of impressive finish / software ).

A Pi for the masses / convince sounds amazing.

beal · 3 years ago

I did a similar thing with the air gradient diy kit. That these are pi based run full Linux and allow changes over time is is really compelling.

beal commented on Django Newbie Mistakes code.djangoproject.com/wi... · Posted by u/tosh

jaffee · 7 years ago

I feel like I just got into a time machine - this is the top post on hacker news? People are learning Django in 2018?

I guess its fine if you have a small project and aren't going to see much traffic, but Python is so slow and difficult to maintian compared to (e.g.) Go. I say this as someone who worked in Python for a long time, and on several large Django projects.

beal · 7 years ago

It is current year and Django is still very relevant in web development.

beal commented on Elon Musk’s Boring Co. Wins Chicago Airport High-Speed Train Bid bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/uptown

claytoneast · 7 years ago

He has revolutionized payload delivery to space w/t significant cost savings, pushed most of the major auto manufacturers into converting their product lines mostly/entirely to electric, and is slowly building out models of what battery storage grid-load-balancing looks like all over the world (which will be essential as we transition to irregular flow clean energy sources). How you can possibly say these are PR stunts is so far beyond me I wonder if we inhabit the same planet.

beal · 7 years ago

Tesla has pushed the needle but the automotive was trending towards electric before Tesla. How much energy have the on grid batteries saved?

It isn't an outlandish thing to say that those companies deliver a disproportionate amount of hype to results as other companies in the same space.

beal commented on Web Framework Benchmarks techempower.com/benchmark... · Posted by u/ksec

beal · 7 years ago

There is a lot of effort being spent measuring what is very rarely a performance bottleneck in web applications.

beal commented on Amazon follows Google and Apple and bans system-wide ad blockers on app store adguard.com/en/blog/goodb... · Posted by u/ameshkov

air7 · 7 years ago

It's obvious that piracy is also theft. But adblocking is worse: The damages of piracy are hard to measure (and are therefor overestimated by it's victims) because many "pirates" would not pay for the pirated, non-rivalrous good if piracy wasn't available.

However blocking ads (especially when done by prevent them being fetched) directly damages the 2nd party at a known price. Each individual pageview has a cost to serve it, and a revenue gained from it (via ads). In that sense what we're stealing is actually pageviews, which have (IMO) more in common with physical real-world objects (rivalrous) than a digital copy of a file.

beal · 7 years ago

Seems analogous to say it's stealing TV when you don't watch the commercials, or clipping out ads before reading a paper? It doesn't make sense. I have control over what code is run on my computer. Allowing one party to show me content and blocking others isn't stealing or even in a grey area.

beal commented on How I trained an AI to detect satire in under an hour towardsdatascience.com/ho... · Posted by u/thetall0ne

turdnagel · 7 years ago

Exactly. A bit of an exaggerated headline, no? The first paragraph basically refutes the headline. What was built was an Onion article detector.

beal · 7 years ago

Article seems like its a thinly veiled ad.

beal commented on Ask HN: What would you have asked Mark Zuckerburg? · Posted by u/notjtrig

angersock · 7 years ago

"How long have you been on this planet called Earth?"

More productively:

"How can you claim to let users delete content when the papers on your own company's storage and file systems explicitly state that data is never deleted but instead marked as unavailable?"

EDIT:

To wit:

https://code.facebook.com/posts/685565858139515/needle-in-a-...

> The delete operation is simple – it marks the needle in the haystack store as deleted by setting a “deleted” bit in the flags field of the needle. However, the associated index record is not modified in any way so an application could end up referencing a deleted needle. A read operation for such a needle will see the “deleted” flag and fail the operation with an appropriate error. The space of a deleted needle is not reclaimed in any way. The only way to reclaim space from deleted needles is to compact the haystack (see below).

beal · 7 years ago

I think it eventually does get deleted.

> Compaction is an online operation which reclaims the space used by the deleted and duplicate needles (needles with the same key). It creates a new haystack by copying needles while skipping any duplicate or deleted entries. Once done it swaps the files and in-memory structures.

Just in an efficient way for FB