wvh (u/wvh) - Readit News

wvh commented on Scientists may have found a way to eliminate chromosome linked to Down syndrome academic.oup.com/pnasnexu... · Posted by u/MattSayar

exe34 · a month ago

Unfortunately I think lesbians are only "far more accepted" in the sense that they turn on straight cunts rather than repulse them. The objectification and othering is the same.

wvh · a month ago

Maybe, but we can't blame people for what they are/are not attracted to on either side of the fence, just their rational responses to "the other".

And I'm not sure lesbians are "far more accepted", perhaps as long as they fit a traditional heterosexual idea of beauty and femininity and associated behaviour.

wvh commented on Many lung cancers are now in nonsmokers nytimes.com/2025/07/22/we... · Posted by u/alexcos

Waterluvian · a month ago

The difficult thing for me is that while I believe radon can cause lung cancer, I think products are often sold based on fear. “Second leading cause” doesn’t really mean anything in isolation, does it?

What slice of my mortality pie was radon before and after spending $5000? Could I spend $5000 to cut a bigger slice out of it in another way, like eating better or hiring a grizzly bear to make me exercise more often?

I think action is better than decision paralysis, but I wish I could make much more informed decisions.

wvh · a month ago

I reckon grizzly bears have negative health side effects too... It's all a fine balancing act.

wvh commented on Font Comparison: Atkinson Hyperlegible Mono vs. JetBrains Mono and Fira Code anthes.is/font-comparison... · Posted by u/maybebyte

tiffanyh · a month ago

The difficulty I have with many so-called legible fonts is that they’re often not very readable.

Legibility refers to how easily individual characters can be identified. But good readability depends on how easily your brain can recognize whole words—through pattern recognition of word shapes.

When characters are too similar in shape and size, it becomes harder to distinguish the unique shape of each word, which reduces readability (which often happens with these highly legible fonts) — even if each individual letter is technically more clear.

wvh · a month ago

I agree, and can imagine using a different font depending on the (programming) language or purpose, yet each font being quite objectively better at that purpose. Some languages are a lot more similar to natural language, and some are more mathematical, technical or really need fixed width blocks to be readable.

And then there are fonts that I don't like aesthetically and generally avoid, but come to the rescue in the wee hours of the morning when you really have to get something done and your eyes have gone blurry.

wvh commented on Signs of autism could be encoded in the way you walk sciencealert.com/signs-of... · Posted by u/amichail

ghushn3 · a month ago

I tend to agree, as an autistic person. And a lot of autistic people hold the belief that, "My autism is not a problem, your expectations that I behave like you do are the problem."

If I need to move a little differently, or not hold eye contact when I speak, the fact that I get made fun of is the problem. If we just accepted, "hey, some people are like that" more, I think we'd have a lot fewer problems.

wvh · a month ago

I suppose, beyond making fun of which is unacceptable, that some behaviour is considered "bad behaviour" if it would come from a "non-particular" person. People are highly sensitive to eye contact, voice tone and other subtleties to gage how the other person is feeling and how much of a threat they are. Similarly, overtaking conversations or appearing disinterested are also faux-pas in normal conversation and may indicate bad will or even a personality disorder.

As somebody who occasionally struggles to fit in socially, I have come to understand that I might come across in ways that do not reflect my inner feelings and that I need to add a bit more context and explanation, and just be more careful in general. You sort of have to help people to see where you're coming from to help them tune their social barometer somewhat sort of speaking.

At the extreme, you'd just start any conversation with "hey, I'm autistic, so if I appear a bit weird..." to hard-reset people's expectations and sooth their inner alarms. That is assuming they're decent folks acting in good faith.

wvh commented on Intel's retreat is unlike anything it's done before in Oregon oregonlive.com/silicon-fo... · Posted by u/cbzbc

UncleOxidant · a month ago

Hillsboro is pretty much a company town (well, there are some datacenters now, but those don't need a lot of employees). Actually the whole of Washington County is heavily dependent on Intel. There's also Nike, but it's also heading for significantly lower headcount than it's had in a while. So it's kind of a double-whammy here (Triple if you count federal government funding cuts hitting places like OHSU (Oregon Health Sciences University)).

I was contracting out at Intel Jones Farm campus in Hillsboro in 2004 and I'd walk around the (then) new neighborhood there by the campus and I distinctly recall thinking "What if something were to happen to Intel in, say 25 or 30 years? What would happen to these neighborhoods?" It was just kind of a thought experiment at the time, but now it seems like we're going to find out.

wvh · a month ago

Not unlike what happened to Finland when Nokia went down. That took a long time to recover from, and some would say we're still trying to overcome, though it's hard to say what could have been post-Coved with the current state of the world economy.

wvh commented on Show HN: Ten years of running every day, visualized nodaysoff.run... · Posted by u/friggeri

wvh · a month ago

I admire your dedication. I also like the spartan look of your site.

I'm a trail runner and I've been running over 18 years or so, not every day, but two or three times a week. Sickness or health, injury, birthdays, holidays, rain, snow, -30C. My last big run was around Christmas. After that I had about three months medical off-time. Now it's very hard to get back on track. I just had to cancel some summer running events. It's not just motivation, but general stiffness and musculoskeletal pains like shin splints and knee and ankle soreness. My guess is that at my (middle) age, you either do it or lose it.

I advise anybody to find something they like and stick with it. Vary it according to how your body feels, but always do something. Keep the body (and the brain) working.

wvh commented on Most RESTful APIs aren't really RESTful florian-kraemer.net//soft... · Posted by u/BerislavLopac

salmonellaeater · 2 months ago

Where this kind of API design is useful is when there is a user with an agent (e.g. a browser or similar) who can navigate the API and interact with the different responses based on their media types and what the links are called.

Most web APIs are not designed with this use-case in mind. They're designed to facilitate web apps that are much more specific in what they're trying to present to the user. This is both deliberate and valuable; app creators need to be able to control the presentation to achieve their apps' goals.

REST API design is for use-cases where the users should have control over how they interact with the resources provided by the API. Some examples that should be using REST API design:

  - Government portals for publicly accessible information, like legal codes, weather reports, or property records

  - Government portals for filing forms and other interactions

  - Open data initiatives like Wikipedia and OpenStreetmap

Considering these examples, it makes sense that policing of what "REST" means comes from the more academically-minded, while the detractors of the definition are typically app developers trying to create a very specific user experience. The solution is easy: just don't call it REST unless it actually is.

wvh · 2 months ago

You're right, pure REST is very academic. I've worked with open/big data, and there's always a struggle to get realistic performance and app architecture design; for anything non-obvious, I'd say there are shades of REST rather than a simple boolean yes/no. Even academics have to produce a working solution or "application", i.e. that which can be actually applied, at some point.

wvh commented on Proton joins suit against Apple for practices that harm developers and consumers proton.me/blog/apple-laws... · Posted by u/moose44

andrewinardeer · 2 months ago

I'm not an Apple enthusiast—my rarely used iPad mini is my only Apple device—but let me play devil’s advocate.

If a company invests billions in R&D to create hardware and its integrated software, shouldn’t it have the right to control who or what interacts with it? Why should I be forced to open up the carefully designed ecosystem I’ve built?

If my pitch is premium, high-speed hardware and intuitive software so user-friendly that a monkey can use it, the trade-off is that you agree to my Terms of Service. There are other options out there.

wvh · 2 months ago

It doesn't stop at Apple's ecosystem. It also allows Apple to regulate the choices and privacy of the people and companies using their products. There's hardware, software, and there is data. Trying to control other people's data and taking away their freedom of choice regarding their data and services used is the issue.

I don't own any Apple product, but I do admire occasionally how Apple tries to uphold the quality and security of their ecosystem, even as I principally disagree with the walled garden approach. I certainly hope Apple aspires to keep the quality of their hardware and software high. They should however never control user data or choice of third party services.

wvh commented on What would a Kubernetes 2.0 look like matduggan.com/what-would-... · Posted by u/Bogdanp

NathanFlurry · 2 months ago

The #1 problem with Kubernetes is it's not something that "Just Works." There's a very small subset of engineers who can stand up services on Kubernetes without having it fall over in production – not to mention actually running & maintaining a Kubernetes cluster on your own VMs.

In response, there's been a wave of "serverless" startups because the idea of running anything yourself has become understood as (a) a time sink, (b) incredibly error prone, and (c) very likely to fail in production.

I think a Kubernetes 2.0 should consider what it would look like to have a deployment platform that engineers can easily adopt and feel confident running themselves – while still maintaining itself as a small-ish core orchestrator with strong primitives.

I've been spending a lot of time building Rivet to itch my own itch of an orchestrator & deployment platform that I can self-host and scale trivially: https://github.com/rivet-gg/rivet

We currently advertise as the "open-source serverless platform," but I often think of the problem as "what does Kubernetes 2.0 look like." People are already adopting it to push the limits into things that Kubernetes would traditionally be good at. We've found the biggest strong point is that you're able to build roughly the equivalent of a Kubernetes controller trivially. This unlocks features more complex workload orchestration (game servers, per-tenant deploys), multitenancy (vibe coding per-tenant backends, LLM code interpreters), metered billing per-tenant, more powerful operators, etc.

wvh · 2 months ago

My take is that Kubernetes is too simple. It leaves too much open and tries to keep everything pluggable, in an attempt to be all things to all people and, more importantly, to all companies so it can be the de facto standard. So typically when you set up Kubernetes, you are left with figuring out how to get metrics, logging, alerting and whatever else on top of the core you have. There are a lot of extra decisions to make, and none of this stuff is as interoperable and fool-proof as it should be.

Maybe the problem (and strength) of Kubernetes is that it's design by committee or at least common-denominator agreement so everybody stays on board.

Any more clearly defined project would likely not become a de facto industry standard.

wvh commented on WhatsApp introduces ads in its app nytimes.com/2025/06/16/te... · Posted by u/greenburger

sigotirandolas · 2 months ago

To be devil's advocate, this is the kind of all-talk argument the parent was referring to. Once the paid option is available, people will demand it to be [cheaper / better / someone else] and still not pay.

While I don't love my money going to Google, I find YouTube's overall quality astronomically higher than Instagram/Twitter/TikTok/etc. and the amount of censorship/"moderation"/controversy has been relatively limited. When I find something I really want to keep I have always been able to download it without much trouble.

wvh · 2 months ago

I got divorced last year, had a rough period, watched some self-help videos, Youtube found out and started increasingly serving unwanted content. I did not appreciate the attempt at pushing my proverbial buttons. I do not need gender war content when I look for a guitar review. Youtube is excellent and has replaced television for me the last 10 years. But I just don't trust or want an algorithm trying to hook me, and I'm generally already old and wise enough to unplug when I need to. To me, this goes a bit beyond being choosy. I don't want to be profiled.