BytesAndGears

Maybe go just isn’t for you? It really doesn’t need every feature of other languages. The error handling is ideal for me, better than any other language. You are always explicit, with every function call, about “what could happen if this fails?”

Maybe passing it up the stack is the best way to handle it, but also maybe it’s better to handle it somewhere in the middle.

The thing that always happens with exceptions in API projects I’ve worked on, is that exceptions can come from any level of the stack, then by default it skips everything in the middle, and the controller has default handlers for what to do in case of an exception.

If there are exceptions you didn’t know existed because of some library or just complex code with dozens of possible exceptions? They still end up being handled in your controller. You need to know exactly what exceptions could happen at every level of the stack, and how to handle it, otherwise everything just short circuits.

With the go errors, you only need to know “did this function call work? If not, then what?”

It also just uses a SQLite db, so you can sync it manually yourself if you want. But their implementation seems pretty secure.

Regardless, I just run it local only on each of my machines, separately. It’s still really helpful!

But an individual human eats a fixed amount of food. So that fact seems pointless, since people will get less nutrition overall- unless we should all only eat ultra-processed snacks and reserve fresh food for the wealthy?

Here’s a decent one:

https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/privacy-nightmare-on-...

I mean I agree that it’s stupid, but my point was that there are protocols in place to handle this already.

If the US government says it’s the name of something, then it’s any map company’s job to display the valid name of the thing to the users in that country. They still show “Gulf of Mexico” to users in other countries.

Why would they? Its name was officially changed. Things are renamed all the time.

For a recent example, Mount Evans in Colorado was changed to Mount Blue Sky

That would be exactly what I need!

Ideally something like 5min bike ride to the grocery store, 15min walk from a train station, and 30min drive to my in-law’s house.

It would be really interesting to do something like “10 minute bike ride to 3 or more grocery stores”. That would help reduce instances of niche specific stores, but also provides a much more useful variety.

I’d love to be able to find places that have 2+ or 3+ grocery stores within somewhat reasonable distance, and same thing goes for restaurants. Really any restaurant.

I’m not actually sure since I never had issues, but I’ve heard it’s not much since they’re basically just an API for transferring money between banks. Each bank app still needs to integrate with the network separately. [1]

I guess you get some security since each party that you transfer to must have their identity verified with a bank, so you could always get the police involved fairly easily

The iDeal website page on security [2] is in Dutch, but it translates to roughly:

> Before you make a purchase, make sure that the webshop or business is a reliable party. For example, you can read experiences of other consumers about webshops on comparison sites. Or you can use a Google search to check what is said (in reviews) about a webshop on the internet. Also check the overview of the police with known rogue trading parties and the page check seller data. Before making a purchase, always use the following rule of thumb: if something is too good to be true, don't do it.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDEAL

[2] https://www.ideal.nl/veiligheid

If it’s the same as mine, it measures your heart rate overnight after you settle in. Then, when you wake up, it tells you your “resting heart rate” number.

It can be an indicator of short-term stress if it is higher than normal, for example. But the interesting part is the trend over time. As you get more fit, the average drops

Something like iDeal, which is a payment processing system in the Netherlands.

It works so well and is very secure. You get to the checkout page on a website, click a link. If you’re on your phone, it hotlinks to open your banking app. If you’re on desktop, it shows a QR code which does the same.

When your bank app opens, it says “would you like to make this €28 payment to Business X?” And you click either yes or no on the app. You never even need to enter a card in the website!

You can also send money to other people instantly the same way, so it’s perfect for something like buying a used item from someone else.

Plus the whole IBAN system which makes it all possible!

Your comment comes off as alarmist, but then I realized the content of the article, and think that you may be right.

I still stand by my point that most of our politicians have done this to us, on all sides of the political spectrum. And that we would be better off empathizing with our neighbors rather than any politician.

But the scale of the jump from previous actions to this one is enormous and shouldn’t be dismissed at all.

Agreed - I think we say similar things. I am mostly suggesting that authoritarians currently live in all sides of the aisle in our government right now. And they’ve all been ratcheting up in intensity, getting us used to “their” version of it. This latest jump being by far the most severe and scary.

They’re not both the same level of bad currently, I agree.

But they have both been consistently working to normalize their authoritarianism. I mentioned the 2020 protests in another sibling comment, which I think is a good example.

This is just the next step in an ongoing escalation, but yeah it is a big jump.

Scary times.

I see your point, however, in this case the democrats and republicans are part of the same entity.

I am suggesting that the politicians’ interests are somewhat aligned, in regard to grabbing power. Their techniques are different, but the outcome is that we become more normalized to the behavior of “being ruled”, bit by bit.

Don’t forget the right-leaning protests in 2020 over democratic governors telling people they had to get vaccinated or fired, and they were not permitted to have their small businesses open or go to the gym. That was also authoritarian, regardless of how necessary some people thought it was at the time. You may not have agreed with them, but they were upset about the same things as you.

Edit: thanks for all of the replies, I’m questioning my framing here now due to some smart people’s thoughts.. I suggest reading the full thread, as there are some interesting comments.

I see the obvious parallels to Trump, and I agree completely (and hate that it is happening). But I feel like I also see a lot of parallels to the democrats. Deciding Kamala would be the candidate without any public vote, for example. They both have aspects that heavily mirror the article.

I normally am not a fan of both-sides’ing an issue, but this seems like a literal case of everyone in the government basically performing that they disagree with the other, while marching down similar paths. They fight on issues that get people excited, while conspiring together to inch towards a “mystery government” which we must just trust.

I believe the path forward is to find things in common with our neighbors rather than politicians. Even if we disagree on some political views with our neighbors, we likely still have a lot more in common with them than any politician.

And, if you disagree, really truly read this with a critical eye, imagining the other side. Listen to their complaints. Because they feel the same way about your side. I’ve literally heard smart people in both political parties call each other authoritarian. So maybe the issues are actually with both sides.

Wouldn’t a headlamp or a flashlight achieve the same purpose?

I think an important note is that regulatory agencies in other countries have cracked down on some of those scary-sounding chemicals, due to them being unnecessary for food with no real benefit for the person eating it, and possible evidence of negative affects.

I mentioned this in another comment, but as someone who has lived for multiple years in the US and Europe, it is a drastic difference in food quality between the two. Much easier to eat foods made of whole ingredients where I lived in Europe - even many prepackaged foods that we’d buy at the grocery store.

I came across this link yesterday[1] on a health-focused HN thread[2]. The study split a group of overweight people up into low-carb and low-fat diets, to see which produced better weight loss. The group that lost the most weight was actually neither - it was just whoever ended up eating less processed foods and more whole foods.

[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/health/to-lose-weight-focus...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42668123

Moderation matters. If you eat mostly whole, nutritious foods, it’s totally fine to eat processed food occasionally.

No food is inherently unhealthy or bad, so I don’t think there’s any issue with him eating McDonalds on a plane. Maybe he was in a hurry, or just wanted to be social and stopped there with someone else who wanted it.

What is unhealthy is when the majority of your food is not nutritious, which is currently the case for most Americans. So why not try to make common American foods more nutritious by default, as they are in most other wealthy countries?

It was awesome living in a European country for a couple of years as an American. You learn that ingredient lists at the grocery store really are shorter in ways you don’t expect. It’s easy to buy a fruit yogurt that is just yogurt and fruit, for example. Not “yogurt, sugar, artificial and natural flavors” as you’ll find in many popular foods in the US. It was noticeable with a lot of different food choices.

Also, whenever we would come back to visit the US, after living there for a year or so, we would always have mild digestion issues and stomach cramps for a week or so. This was common among many expats that we talked to. We visited over a dozen countries while we lived there, and the US was the only one that had that issue.

Yeah probably not the environmental management, but likely they are in favor of the other point I made earlier about leveling the playing field by ensuring American companies are competing with others who value similar working conditions and standards to the US, rather than giving an advantage to countries who exploit their workers even more than the US.

Though, I can’t speak for them, and my opinions on reducing the outsourcing to countries who largely disregard the environment and human rights, are my opinions regardless of their motivations

Yeah, that's fair. I guess I'm ok with raised prices in the short-term if it brings more stability and better working conditions + environmental management in the long-term.

> American companies will never go below whatever the Chinese widget costs

Why not? If there are 3 American companies with similar costs, would all of them just say “well, the price is the price?” Or would there eventually be one who realizes they can take more market share from the Chinese companies by undercutting them?

What about the harder ones that come up? A personal choice like that is easy, but

“I don’t drink when I know I’ll have to drive home because…”

It’s harder to empathize with those who do drink in that situation

The American consumers do have other options — other American companies. Who are all held to a higher standard than foreign companies due to sharing a regulatory environment.

So the price may go up, but it will eventually tend toward the natural floor, even if higher than before, taking into account the externalities that were ignored with foreign widgets such as poor working conditions and environmental disregard that happens in certain other countries.

It depends… do the states share a common set of laws and values? Do the benefits of one state profiting transfer in part to other states? Is there a course for grievances to be settled across state lines with reciprocal legal coverage guaranteed? Are living and working standards reasonably similar, allowing companies to fairly compete across state lines?

Those statements are generally not true across countries, but generally are true across states within a country. Things like working standards across countries mean that another country can employ slaves and have uncompetitive costs due to free labor, causing an unfair environment for those same companies forming in countries without slave labor. That is much less likely within the same country.

So it’s not necessarily the same to frame tariffs across states to be similar to tariffs on other countries. There are meaningful differences that make it harder to ensure similar standards across countries, which can make tariffs be meaningful. It helps to account for externalities inherent to lacking the protections mentioned in the first paragraph.

I listen to a podcast called Crushing Iron. One of the two hosts realized he was in poor shape and his friends were starting to decay. I think he was about 50 when he had that realization.

He decided not to let it happen to him, so he got into triathlon. Now, he’s doing Ironman races every year for the last ~10 years, and he started at around 50 (maybe 49 or 48, don’t remember).

Other host was an alcoholic who bounced back into a very healthy life. Both are inspirational, but I think the other applies to you more.

Point is, you can do it! You don’t have to do a whole Ironman, obviously lol, but making choices to be healthy like you are is an amazing step. And it’s absolutely possible to start at 50.

If you want motivation, the Crushing Iron podcast has some great episodes (and some kinda boring ones). Check out this one, “Out alone in the dark”.. I like their episodes from a couple years ago (and older) the most. Also 667 and 685 are a couple I had saved recently as good ones.

Out alone in the dark: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/crushing-iron-triathlo...

#667 Play like a kid: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/crushing-iron-triathlo...

#685 stop waiting for life: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/crushing-iron-triathlo...

Couple bonus episodes I love:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/crushing-iron-triathlo...

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/crushing-iron-triathlo...

Neovim is basically unusable due to the plugins I use having Unicode characters not supported properly (like telescope), so it does make a huge difference to me. Also, latency is an issue, and of the third-party terminals, only kitty is snappy enough to have nearly zero latency issues while typing. Drives me crazy when I’m chaining commands and there is a ~150ms delay.

Plus, any terminal other than kitty is noticeably laggy when using other terminal programs and typing quickly, and 90%+ of my time is spent in the terminal: using custom commands and aliases, ruby shell, docker, on top of usually using vim for editing. And having great customizable hotkeys for different common functions.

Guess my point is that the terminal app you use can make a big productivity difference

Plus add the fact that — if society collapses so dramatically that we forget about radiation and where we stored it, then humans wouldn’t be capable of finding the waste anyways.

We’ve already extracted just about all of the “easy” energy reserves, in terms of oil and coal. Now, you need major machinery to access it. That means, a future society that is rebuilding itself wouldn’t have energy be able to advance far enough for it to matter.

Based on our current extractions of resources, we’re in too deep and no future society will be able to have an Industrial Revolution again for millions of years, if we fail completely. And by then, the radioactive waste doesn’t matter.

As-is, it works very well in California. I had never experienced the resistance you imagined during the 3-4 years I lived in California, and regularly cancelled subscriptions that were notoriously hard in other states

Actually, very common in some European countries as well.

In the Netherlands, you aren’t taxed on your primary residence, but all other wealth has an approximately 2% annual wealth tax. This makes it challenging to accumulate wealth through any means other than a primary residence, which was many of my coworkers’ primary way of saving.

Granted, they also have mandatory pensions, which can give you a good income in retirement, but that’s different than wealth accumulation

Couldn’t you also require a higher tier license for large and dangerous cars, just like motorcycles require extra privileges?

Allow anyone to own a sedan or compact SUV with up to 200hp. If you want to own something larger, you need an “oversized vehicle” endorsement. And if you want to own something more powerful, you need a power-level endorsement. And maybe you need to pay extra to have those endorsements, and they can be taken away if you are reckless.

It could be a grandfathering system too, so not to disrupt the entire market. Automatically grant partial endorsements to people who already have those vehicles when the law goes into effect, but require testing within 5 years or when registering any new vehicle that meets those criteria.

But cars and trucks are incredibly dangerous and it’s ridiculous society has basically zero restrictions. (I own a “small” truck and would be happy to have it restricted if it means the roads start to become safer for cycling and walking)