Hacker News: drewpc

New comment by drewpc in "Creating a search engine with PostgreSQL"

drewpc — Thu, 13 Jul 2023 04:24:44 +0000

I went a similar route (Postgres for CRUD and Elastic for searching) and also underestimated the effort of keeping the two datastore in sync as well as underestimated the effort in maintaining a reliable Elastic cluster with limited manpower/experience. After moving to Postgres full text search with indexes and query boosting, I accomplished everything I needed inside Postgres with update triggers and search queries that were incredibly performant.

New comment by drewpc in "Clocks and Causality – Ordering Events in Distributed Systems (2022)"

drewpc — Sun, 02 Apr 2023 00:07:00 +0000

The documentation that Microsoft puts out regarding its "multi-master" features basically advises against using "multi-master" mode and leveraging the Flexible Single Master Operation (FSMO) Roles to ensure consistency across the domain and forest because its conflict resolution is not comprehensive [1]. FSMO roles were created decades ago as a transition from Windows NT's Primary Domain Controller (PDC) model to avoid some of these complexities around changes in a large distributed system. Its a decent solution that has its own pros/cons, but AD is not something I would use as a good example of a multi-master distributed database.

1. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-serve...

New comment by drewpc in "A meta-analysis of the effects of trigger warnings and content notes"

drewpc — Fri, 25 Nov 2022 19:14:35 +0000

Does NSFL mean "Not Safe For Life"? I wasn't familiar with this term before and have never seen content labeled with it.

New comment by drewpc in "Launch HN: Shimmer (YC S21) – ADHD coaching for adults"

drewpc — Fri, 04 Nov 2022 20:54:31 +0000

Do you think this article describing a better name for ADHD as Variable Attention Stimulus Trait or VAST [1] addresses the concerns you bring up?

[1] https://www.additudemag.com/attention-deficit-disorder-vast/

New comment by drewpc in "NYC to require salary ranges be included in job postings"

drewpc — Mon, 31 Oct 2022 18:29:10 +0000

Can you please expand on this a bit more? I live in Colorado and saw virtually no change when looking for a new job inside and outside of the state last year. I did run across a few "no job applications from CO" as was mentioned in other comment threads, but most job postings I saw did not post salary information.

New comment by drewpc in "Dear JetBrains, Don't mess with your UI"

drewpc — Tue, 18 Oct 2022 13:32:11 +0000

I see your points and understand the frustration. The minor changes over the years haven't bothered me too much. What really messed with me was when the commit pop-up (with diffs) was changed to a tab, nestled in the same space as my files. Nooooooooo! I want the pop-up. I want to know that this is different from what I was doing before.

New comment by drewpc in "U.S. Army Chooses Google Workspace"

drewpc — Tue, 11 Oct 2022 13:53:56 +0000

I have had similar experiences, however, it's important to be specific: the NMCI contract ended in 2010 and DoN moved to the Continuity of Services Contract where we bought services piecemeal until we could fully take it over. The Navy and Marine Corps tried to transition to NGEN during this time but mostly failed and each service ended up taking different paths. Now, the two services operate their networks differently: the Marine Corps, for example, runs it as a government owned and "shared operations" model where it's mixed government and contractor.

I imagine that the laptop you were given in 2018 was not an NMCI laptop, but instead a laptop from either the Navy or Marine Corps' new ownership/operations model which is incredibly flawed. Also, HBSS was poorly implemented in the 2010 time frame and Tanium was introduced (at least in the Marine Corps networks) around 2017. Both are major contributing factors to the issue you're describing.

In short: the current state is that computers are barely usable and that is not NMCI from yester-year.

New comment by drewpc in "U.S. Army Chooses Google Workspace"

drewpc — Tue, 11 Oct 2022 05:12:07 +0000

I agree that military IT has been atrocious. I disagree that NMCI was "damn near treasonous levels of awful." NMCI was a large, Department of the Navy (DoN) -wide contract that had incredibly challenging tasks it needed to complete to be successful. The first few years were bad but it got better over time and, by the time the next transition was set to happen, it was running pretty smoothly.

When people complained about not getting the things they wanted, what they were really railing against was the fact that they didn't get what they wanted all the time anymore; the military grew accustomed to telling someone "I want X" and it happened, regardless of cost, lifecycle sustainment, security, etc. NMCI forced the DoN to develop and articulate requirements properly, write good contracts, budget for software and hardware sustainment, and generally operate professionally.

In short, I would take an NMCI computer and enterprise services from 2010 versus a Marine Corps Enterprise Network computer and enterprise services from 2022 any day of the week.

Disclosure: I have been a Marine Corps Communications Officer for almost 20 years; starting before NMCI. I worked at the regional and enterprise levels to transition ownership back from the NMCI program/contractor to government owned.

New comment by drewpc in "1998 Washington Post Article Untouched by New HTML"

drewpc — Sun, 06 Mar 2022 15:52:34 +0000

OP here. This find was a tiny joy in my day. The article was from 1998 and the page appears to be untouched by all the "upgrades" in HTML. I love this...image maps, light HTML, tables...oh my!

1998 Washington Post Article Untouched by New HTML

drewpc — Sun, 06 Mar 2022 15:51:42 +0000

Article URL: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/local/longterm/library/dc/barry/barry.htm

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30578338

Points: 29

# Comments: 7

New comment by drewpc in "The impact of sexual abuse on female development: a longitudinal study"

drewpc — Thu, 13 Jan 2022 17:35:02 +0000

The ways the research team engaged the study participants over 23 years is admirable, creative, and fascinating to understand.

New comment by drewpc in "Inflation rises to 6.8% year over year"

drewpc — Fri, 10 Dec 2021 18:59:48 +0000

Can you elaborate? Does this mean that your landlord reduces your rent each year?

New comment by drewpc in "How to Save a Ski Town"

drewpc — Wed, 01 Dec 2021 19:13:39 +0000

Many of the ski resort companies do offer housing, which is great. There are two primary issues with that at the moment: not enough housing and, the bigger one, when your housing is directly tied to your job what happens if you are fired? Colorado, for example, is an "at will" state--that means someone can be let go for any or no reason with no notice. If the company is providing housing, then the person is forced to up and move...but where do they move to?

New comment by drewpc in "How to Save a Ski Town"

drewpc — Mon, 29 Nov 2021 04:45:41 +0000

My partner has lived in Crested Butte for 18 years and I just came back from a weekend there. Restaurant prices are already high and each one has "help wanted" signs out front because nobody can work for minimum wage and not even afford to live there. Raising prices of a $20 cocktail to $25 does not allow the restaurant to pay hourly, local workers enough money to afford a house that's over $800k or rent that's over $2k/mo. The numbers just plain don't add up.

New comment by drewpc in "Apple M1 Max Geekbench Score"

drewpc — Thu, 21 Oct 2021 13:48:39 +0000

It would be very interesting to see a consumer-oriented ARM SoC from one of the other main manufacturers. I doubt that will happen, however. Their entire business is based on being a component in a chain of components, not being the entire thing. Although, for example, Intel makes some motherboards, some GPUs, etc...their business isn't based on putting it all together in one fabric for their end-clients. They'd have to control/influence more of the OS for that. Apple has it all: full hardware control, full software control, and it's all designed for the mass market consumer.

New comment by drewpc in "Apple M1 Max Geekbench Score"

drewpc — Thu, 21 Oct 2021 02:29:59 +0000

I disagree with this perspective. I think it's important to recognize that the M1 is a System on a Chip (SoC), not simply a CPU. Comparing the Apple M1 to "mid-range 8-core AMD desktop CPUs from 2020" is not comparing apples to apples. The M1 Max in the Geek Bench score has 10 cores whereas the AMD desktop CPUs you mention have 8-cores. That would be more of an apples to apples comparison.

Where the M1 architecture really shines is the collaboration between CPU, GPU, memory, SSD, and other components on the SoC. The components all work together within the same 5nm silicon fabric, without ever having to go out to electrical interconnects on a motherboard. Thereby saving power, heat, etc.

What you lose in repairability/upgradability, you gain in performance on every front. That tradeoff is no different than what we chose in our mobile devices. If repairability and upgradability are more important to you, then definitely don't buy a device with an Apple M1; absolutely buy a Framework laptop (https://frame.work).

New comment by drewpc in "OpenBSD 7.0"

drewpc — Thu, 14 Oct 2021 13:58:26 +0000

Be curious; learn it. Figure out pros/cons for yourself. You'll have more breadth of knowledge, more depth in specific areas, and will likely make better architecture choices in the future because of it.

New comment by drewpc in "Practical Front-End Architecture"

drewpc — Wed, 22 Sep 2021 07:57:05 +0000

Read @leerob's answer first. Additionally, the notion of "forcing" CSR might be a misnomer. The way I understand it, NextJS always prefers CSR; the server renders HTML on first page load and the NextJS framework attaches JS stuff to the page on render to handle the client-side interactivity. So, if you turn off JS on your browser and load the page, everything works out of the box (page renders HTML, links work, etc). There are ways to specify server-only data requirements.

Once the client-side JS has taken over, the `next/link` component [1] is used to render and listen to events when a user clicks on a link. That component tells `next/router` to render the page that was clicked on. All of this happens on the client by default. If JS is disabled on the client, then the HTML rendered by the `next/link` component on the server is a simple `` tag and a normal browser page load occurs.

[1] https://nextjs.org/docs/api-reference/next/link

New comment by drewpc in "Practical Front-End Architecture"

drewpc — Wed, 22 Sep 2021 07:45:18 +0000

That'll be nice!!

New comment by drewpc in "Practical Front-End Architecture"

drewpc — Wed, 22 Sep 2021 07:43:49 +0000

Yes, NextJS does the same. After re-reading my comment, I don't think I was clear: our reasons for moving to NextJS were the two mentioned, not because it was less complicated than our Webpack config from 7 years ago. It's not less complicated, it's different. NextJS does some weird things under the hood to make it seamless (like CRA does) but it can make things even more complicated to go with nonstandard Webpack rules or Babel presets/plugins. Overall, I think any JS application written in this day and age is going to be a tooling nightmare--NextJS included. In our case, it's not bad enough to force us away from JS (or TypeScript) yet.