nullwasamistake (u/nullwasamistake)

nullwasamistake commented on Dissidents Are Using Shortwave Radio to Broadcast News into China defenseone.com/technology... · Posted by u/jonbaer

dang · 7 years ago

I looked through the account's history. Your statement isn't accurate, and you've violated the site guidelines by posting this. If you're worried about abuse, please email us at hn@ycombinator.com, as they ask. Don't post accusations of astroturfing or shillage in the threads—the poison that adds to the site is much worse than whatever it's trying to combat.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

nullwasamistake · 7 years ago

Thanks for looking Dang. I don't agree with you this time though. Hiding abuse out of the comment chain behind emails is a good way to make things disappear. What kind of community is this if you can't question the motives of someone with a penchant for only replying to policital threads of a certain flavor?

His profile is public, it's not like I made everything up. He posts on articles with "China" in the name about 90% of the time. And basically never replies to his own comment responses or posts that don't relate to China.

> Don't post accusations of astroturfing or shillage in the threads—the poison that adds to the site is much worse than whatever it's trying to combat.

I don't agree at all. If I didn't say anything about the guy's post history would you have checked? I don't think so. And even though you did, it's very clearly biased towards "China" news articles and the CCP party line.

I'm out. Leaving on my own this time. I appreciate the great work you and the moderators do. But if you can't admit the most obvious AstroTurf shill account I've ever seen is real, there's no point sticking around being a thorn in your side.

nullwasamistake commented on The first solar road has turned out to be a disappointing failure sciencealert.com/the-worl... · Posted by u/lxm

pbhjpbhj · 7 years ago

I think you misunderstood the parent, they said "solar covered sidewalks" that shade pedestrians, so roofs.

Solar roofs on car parks seem good to me; better than using pasture land converted to solar farms which I'm seeing more and more in UK.

nullwasamistake · 7 years ago

Somewhat. OP also mentions generating energy from the pavement, which I don't think will ever be reasonable.

Solar car park covers are a great idea. Easier access than roofs, don't need to be water proof. Good cooling airflow underneath. Tend to be close to cities where power is easier to transport.

Solar parking lot covers are the best ROI solar installations I can imagine.

Surprised Telsa isn't doing this with their SuperCharger stations

nullwasamistake commented on Parsing JSON Is a Minefield (2018) seriot.ch/parsing_json.ph... · Posted by u/panic

hu3 · 7 years ago

Off-topic but I'd want to work on a place where half the REST bugs are from JSON parsing.

nullwasamistake · 7 years ago

Just get a boring webapp job in CRUD world :)

nullwasamistake commented on The first solar road has turned out to be a disappointing failure sciencealert.com/the-worl... · Posted by u/lxm

Endy · 7 years ago

You know, I always wondered why they didn't go for solar covered sidewalks, which would provide shade to pedestrians and power to everything that needs it. Roads seem like a better place for pressure-based generation (of anything, frankly).

Still, just for the enthusiasm they garnered and the continued push toward making renewable energy generation interact with the everyday, the idealists should be commended. The engineers... not as such, no.

But, silly question, knowing very little about this field, couldn't it be possible to (co)generate power from the heat and pressure that roads endure on a near-constant basis?

nullwasamistake · 7 years ago

Solar roads and sidewalks are a PR stunt. Abrasion is no joke, nothing optically transparent survives on the ground. You can see this easily in the cellar "pavement lights" common in NYC and other old cities. Light still passes through after a century, but maybe 20% and very diffuse. Bad for solar panels.

Roads don't absorb enough energy to generate power, they're not flexible enough. They're designed to not absorb energy since it hastens breakdown. Potholes are a good example of a road surface energy absorber :) .

Solar roofs are a far better bet. Elon is onto something there, but time will tell if costs can be brought down enough. Besides the good PR, solar roofs substantially reduce heat absorbtion, important in the sunny climates solar works well in. And we have a ton of wasted roof space. Many companies would willingly allow roof panels to be put up for free if the economics for power generation were good enough.

nullwasamistake commented on The first solar road has turned out to be a disappointing failure sciencealert.com/the-worl... · Posted by u/lxm

nullwasamistake · 7 years ago

This was a PR stunt from the beginning.

We can't even make roads last 20 years with the most durable materials we can find. We make them out of rock and they still fall apart.

Car windshields are scratched to hell after a decade. Grocery checkout scanner windows are made of Sapphire, nearly as hard as diamond, and still need to be replaced.

Solar roads will never be a reality. Optically clear material hard and malleable enough seem a physical impossibly. Metals are the only suitable material and they cannot be made transparent due to hard physical constraints.

nullwasamistake commented on Async-std: an async port of the Rust standard library async.rs/blog/announcing-... · Posted by u/JoshTriplett

pcwalton · 7 years ago

In what language?

nullwasamistake · 7 years ago

Java

nullwasamistake commented on Parsing JSON Is a Minefield (2018) seriot.ch/parsing_json.ph... · Posted by u/panic

nullwasamistake · 7 years ago

JSON sucks. Maybe half our REST bugs are directly related to JSON parsing.

Is that a long or an int? Boolean or the string "true"? Does my library include undefined properties in the JSON? How should I encode and decode this binary blob?

We tried using OpenApi specs on the server and generators to build the clients. In general, the generators are buggy as hell. We eventually gave up as about 1/4 of the endpoints generated directly from our server code didn't work. One look at a spec doc will tell you the complexity is just too high.

We are moving to gRPC. It just works, and takes all the fiddling out of HTTP. It saves us from dev slap fights over stupid cruft like whether an endpoint should be PUT or POST. And saves us a massive amount of time making all those decisions.

nullwasamistake commented on Async-std: an async port of the Rust standard library async.rs/blog/announcing-... · Posted by u/JoshTriplett

noncoml · 7 years ago

Nobody is denying that async code is faster. But it’s not as dramatic as presented in the grand parent post.

And IMHO the added code complexity is not worth the trouble.

nullwasamistake · 7 years ago

We have some pretty vanilla file upload code that needs async. S3 latency is fairly high. If you're uploading a few tiny files per user per second, thread usage gets out of hand real fast.

With a simulated load of ~20 users we were running over 1000 threads.

Several posts in the chain say that 20k+ threads is "fine". Not unless you have a ton of cores. The memory and context switching overhead is gigantic. Eventually your server is doing little besides switching between threads.

We had to rewrite our s3 code to use async, now we can do many thousands of concurrent uploads no problem.

Other places we've had to use async is a proxy that intercepts certain HTTP calls and user stats uploader that calls third party analytics service.

Just sayin it's not that unusual to need async code because threading overhead is too high

nullwasamistake commented on Rails 6.0 weblog.rubyonrails.org/20... · Posted by u/vipulam

bdcravens · 7 years ago

> rails will die out

That'll suck. Hope your company doesn't use Github.

nullwasamistake · 7 years ago

Amazon still runs a bunch of Perl in the back. Just because you're stuck with some design choice doesn't mean that framework has a solid future. People still write plenty of COBOL but you don't see any new applications using it