Hacker News: giantDinosaur

New comment by giantDinosaur in "Novel mind-body program outperforms other treatments for chronic back pain"

giantDinosaur — Sat, 27 Nov 2021 05:23:22 +0000

You couldn't have picked a worse example than CFS to include in that list - a syndrome that for decades was dismissed as psychosomatic, and that many people (read: most notably medical professionals) today still dismiss as such, despite the evidence that no, actually there's some kind of physical dysregulation going on (probably triggered in many cases by a viral infection.)

New comment by giantDinosaur in "I test in prod"

giantDinosaur — Tue, 23 Nov 2021 02:05:04 +0000

The most absolute simple form of production testing is simply trying to use the application to make sure all the parts seem to work based on what you'd expect from a glance. This seems quite distinct from randomly terminating a service or injecting random bytes to see what happens.

New comment by giantDinosaur in "Use Cases: The purpose of your code"

giantDinosaur — Tue, 23 Nov 2021 01:21:03 +0000

Use cases tend to fall apart as relevant to guiding developers once the domain model necessarily diverges from the implementation, which is very common. I don't see how they're more useful than general user stories: if someone hasn't thought about what the users actually want, and why they need to achieve something, that's not a software problem.

New comment by giantDinosaur in "Ultima VIII – How to destroy a gaming franchise in one easy step"

giantDinosaur — Sat, 20 Feb 2021 07:22:28 +0000

If they'd created burnt toast (how does one do toast with non-sliced bread?) because the managing company had declared that the pizza must be shipped before the pizza dough was ready, you'd have some sympathy, no?

The jury has been in on EA for a long, long time: they milk franchises ruthlessly and eliminate talent and entire acquisitions the second it fails to meet their terrifyingly all-consuming goal of gigantic profits.

New comment by giantDinosaur in "'Sexual favours were the norm in music industry'"

giantDinosaur — Fri, 19 Feb 2021 06:48:07 +0000

Netherlands - 2001, Belgium - 2003, Spain, Canada - 2005

Taiwan was very recent - 2019.

I'll grant that none of these were before the internet but there's nothing uniquely special about gay marriage that required the internet for organising, a huge amount of activism was done in person, just like in various other civil rights movements in assorted countries pre-internet.

New comment by giantDinosaur in "'Sexual favours were the norm in music industry'"

giantDinosaur — Thu, 18 Feb 2021 01:50:40 +0000

That's a somewhat odd statement. Gay marriage was legalised in several countries before the advent of what we consider social media (Facebook etc.) - and a lot of other social change happened well before computers were even a thing, let alone instantaneous communication. Can you expand on what you mean?

New comment by giantDinosaur in "Many small queries are efficient in SQLite"

giantDinosaur — Tue, 16 Feb 2021 08:50:22 +0000

I mean, you can represent everything under the sun as a string (or a very big int) but that's a level of operating where I find my brain starts to get fatigued for absolutely no real gain at all.

New comment by giantDinosaur in "The Therac-25 Incident"

giantDinosaur — Tue, 16 Feb 2021 05:38:51 +0000

If I limited your choice to answering questions in binary yes/no, do you really think that makes things less complex than a free form & lucid description of an issue/procedure? Perhaps if you are communicating exclusively with a machine..!

New comment by giantDinosaur in "The Therac-25 Incident"

giantDinosaur — Tue, 16 Feb 2021 03:37:26 +0000

Well, an equivalent example is really something more like: the surgeon picking up their scalpel too quickly actually means that what they picked up wasn't a scalpel 10% of the time, even though what they saw with their eyes was a scalpel. That's a rather more terrifying error. It's not really possible in the normal world, but is easily possible in the software one (UI not corresponding to the real program state.)

In other words: tangible objects usually correspond to what we see; in software, you have no way necessarily of knowing if the UI/interface is outright lying to you. It could be doing anything internally, and a single flipped bit deep in some subroutine could cause death.

New comment by giantDinosaur in "Israeli study finds 94% drop in symptomatic Covid-19 cases with Pfizer vaccine"

giantDinosaur — Mon, 15 Feb 2021 10:56:02 +0000

I think it's important to distinguish the 'vaccine' as a complete package, that is, that which encompasses the distribution and regulatory framework (in the same sense that 'shipping' refers to more than just a single ship, but all the associated processes too), and the actual physical molecules that researchers pieced together. The latter wins Nobel prizes, the former wins the end of a pandemic. Both are valuable, but there's a clear difference.

New comment by giantDinosaur in "Why SELECT * is bad for SQL performance (2020)"

giantDinosaur — Mon, 15 Feb 2021 10:43:06 +0000

It selects all columns. Why/when wouldn't this be bad for performance is a more interesting question, no?

(to be clear, I still enjoyed reading this.)

New comment by giantDinosaur in "Israeli study finds 94% drop in symptomatic Covid-19 cases with Pfizer vaccine"

giantDinosaur — Mon, 15 Feb 2021 10:24:14 +0000

They could, but it's clearly the part which can be replaced by anyone else. Without Pfizer we'd still have BionTech's vaccine, without BionTech we would not.

New comment by giantDinosaur in "Israeli study finds 94% drop in symptomatic Covid-19 cases with Pfizer vaccine"

giantDinosaur — Mon, 15 Feb 2021 09:09:21 +0000

It's not that hard to think of reasons why, even as effective vaccinations go up, deaths/cases may not decline in perfect symmetry. For example, certain groups may start caring less once the most vulnerable have been vaccinated, restrictions may be eased as more people are vaccinated, certain groups may be less likely to want vaccinations so a local epidemic occurs... etc.

New comment by giantDinosaur in "Half Doses of Moderna Vaccine Produce Neutralizing Antibodies"

giantDinosaur — Mon, 15 Feb 2021 02:12:56 +0000

So not only do you admit it would never happen, you cannot even provide any actual figures to support your claim. New Zealand and Taiwan have had success because they effectively eliminated the disease at the start of the pandemic, they didn't shut down with 30% of their population infected and millions of current infections, which is why that particular comparison is poor.

It isn't unreasonable to ask for justification of your claim that it'd be so much cheaper to shut down the global economy or take 'severe' action at this time. So, thanks for providing absolutely nothing beyond some vague claims about ideal actions that won't happen?

New comment by giantDinosaur in "Half Doses of Moderna Vaccine Produce Neutralizing Antibodies"

giantDinosaur — Mon, 15 Feb 2021 02:01:24 +0000

You said 'pause the global economy', and now wish for me to substitute in any other effective plan, which kind of begs the question, doesn't it?

New comment by giantDinosaur in "Half Doses of Moderna Vaccine Produce Neutralizing Antibodies"

giantDinosaur — Mon, 15 Feb 2021 01:38:46 +0000

Can you put a figure on 'pausing the global economy for 5 weeks'? How do you know it would be less expensive? The global economy is massive so you'll have to provide some well reasoned figures to support such a claim. Such a pause could easily trigger much larger problems, how do you know it wouldn't? And why did you pick five weeks? The disease won't be eliminated in five weeks of everyone doing nothing; plus a lot of the global economy is essential to human civilisation.

New comment by giantDinosaur in "The worst of the two worlds: Excel meets Outlook"

giantDinosaur — Sun, 14 Feb 2021 01:23:26 +0000

As I always like commenting when I see these kinds of comments: many thanks for (in a general sense) providing consulting/freelancing/general small business work well into my future.

New comment by giantDinosaur in "Show HN: Straw.Page – Extremely simple website builder"

giantDinosaur — Sun, 14 Feb 2021 01:20:41 +0000

I enjoy how one can read your comment for two completely opposed meanings.

New comment by giantDinosaur in "Ask HN: Why aren't you coding?"

giantDinosaur — Sat, 13 Feb 2021 02:35:03 +0000

One would presume that 1x is the baseline for 'competence', which is fine, but being able to do something competently vs. making it worse is really an infinite difference.

New comment by giantDinosaur in "You Shall Not Pass"

giantDinosaur — Fri, 12 Feb 2021 04:27:31 +0000

Finally a set of password requirements that's fun to try and beat. I hope the clients I work for agree!