"Dear HN -- I was recently assaulted by flight attendants when I tried to open the plane door at 30000 feet to get the required line of sight for my Starlink connection. I was then called a wannabe Nazi by several passengers and arrested upon arrival, although my political connections of course promptly ensured all charges to be dropped. What happened to individual freedom, and would it have helped if I had taken my gun on the flight?"
Ah, yeah, I already wondered why these guys were suddenly back... The tell-tale sign here is admission scam emails from name-alike-domains for (mostly) Indian and (some) US colleges (with the payload being, mostly, crypto harvesters), but these are pretty noisy due to being pretty similar to earlier attempts...
> iPad Air is built for Apple Intelligence, the personal intelligence system that delivers helpful and relevant intelligence
OK, so the predominant opinion of HN seems to be that Apple is really good at marketing. So, which target group are they, brilliantly of course, addressing with this repetitive word salad?
Mentoring really only works if the junior person actively seeks out a trusted colleague, ideally in the context of a formal program (with clear guidance on expectations and such).
What you have here, basically, is a customer abusing an API. This is extremely common: mental models of systems differ greatly, and 'getting things to work from my side' will always take precedence over 'making sure I'm not missing an alternate understanding of the bigger picture'.
But one, possibly easy, thing you can do, is make the API more abuse-resistant. Add rate limits on expensive operations that should only be used seldomly (which may be hard in the case of "a SQL object", but still), just deprecate and/or hide such functionality completely, or add convenience functions that automatically do the right thing, and promote those.
If you do decide to reach out, make sure you very clearly describe the issues you've observed in a strictly technical way ('Hi, I noticed you're creating lots of Customer objects, which is really expensive since there are manual checks by various departments involved with that later on') and clearly outline solutions ('What you might want to do instead is only create Branch objects, which are basically what you want anyway and much cheaper and bore performant').
And be mentally prepared for not getting any response, them turning things around and responding that you are the one who's wrong, or even them running to their manager telling them you're impeding their progress by having way-too-hard-to-use systems. And just shrug that off, after briefly considering whether they may have a point, and making things better, for everyone, just in case they do...
> The Trump administration is instead discussing tearing down NOAA
Nah, they're just straight out going to do that.
States are then free to sign up for the SpaceX-in-proud-cooperation-with-Starlink-and-Tesla Extreme Weather Notification Plan, which is only $420M/state/month, and will be available in, well, 2 years or, eh, so. [Announcer's voice speeds up] Not every state may be eligible for participation, see your DOGE representative for full disclaimers and details.
The premise of the article seems a bit flawed: Nigerians are not replicating hyperscalers, but more like building local Hetzners. And that is a fine idea!
A big problem for people doing this, however, is that peering is pretty much nonexistent in Nigeria (and, for that matter, most of Africa). So, traffic from, say, Airtel (where a lot of consumers are) to Globacom (which hosts a lot of major businesses), will not stay on the continent, but go via London or Marseille instead. And, also worth keeping in mind, from Lagos to those destinations, Joburg or Cape Town are actually double the distance, even though they might 'sound' closer.
So, yeah, I wish everyone involved all the best, but it will be an uphill battle. Convenience and latency make 'big tech' pretty hard to avoid, and 'strong crypto' would be my bet over 'local facilities', but, yeah...
Yes that's crazy. I didn't know there was serious lack of peering in Nigeria and other countries on the continent.
In South Africa however, peering is excellent and has been for decades. I also love using services hosted in-country. I pinged a service now and got 4ms RTT, try that with a London based server.
Indeed Africa has some of the highest wholesale internet prices in the world.
Having said that, there's a couple of new subsea fiber optic cables going live in Africa imminently.
I would expect wholesale prices to drop substantially.
> from Lagos to those destinations, Joburg or Cape Town are actually double the distance
As the crow flies, Lagos is slightly closer to Cape Town than London, though Marseille is indeed closer than virtually any part of South Africa (though not by much).
That's interesting, because for me, being able to read a language comes first, then being able to understand it being spoken, then speaking it in some (but definitely not all) contexts.
So, you spoke German at some point, but these days, you could not decipher a restaurant menu or ticket-vending machine? Not meant disparagingly, just truly curious...
The person you're responding to must have meant as a child, but I can also provide an adult anecdote: I could understand spoken German sooner than written because I, well, never read the language (can't understand it anyway) but was listening to conversation at the dinner table of German family and so picked it up that way
I know someone who learned to understand German spoken on TV and would sometimes speak it themselves (on day trips across the border primarily I imagine), so they've got a good intuition for e.g. word gender (that their native language doesn't have) but they can write most words only phonetically and don't know the grammar. Thankfully German orthography is not like English', but it's also not a 1:1 map (cheese isn't kese; name arbitrarily has no h)
My parents spoke German when I was a baby, but switched fully to English when I could walk so that I would fit in with other neighbourhood children. I learned to read in English.
I can still understand sufficiently simple spoken German and decipher some written German. You could say I read it at the level of the two-year-old I was.
From personal anecdata, I can assure you it's entirely possible to 'lose' a language ability. Native tongue? Not so sure, but a closely-related one, definitely!
I'm a native Dutch speaker and used to be relatively fluent in German (which is not a given: despite being close neighbors, the languages are very different). Then, I lived in Cape Town for a while, and had to learn some Afrikaans (also closely related to Dutch, but yet widely dissimilar).
This somehow 'erased' my ability to speak German! Only after moving back to Europe and after many years, I was able to do basic stuff like ordering in restaurants in German again.
I knew a guy back in the day who grew up in the Netherlands and then South Africa. And somehow the Afrikaans messed up his Dutch, and he basically didn't have a native language. His English was rough as well, I felt sorry for him despite being completely monolingual myself.
PSA: CDs are not, in fact, edible, nor are DVDs or Blu-ray media. Sure, if you click through, you'll see that the CD was not actually damaged and that it was only the printed license key that got mauled, but still: CDs are mostly polycarbonates, and not, in any way shape or form, part of a healthy diet, no matter what your local party liaison tells you.
For the non-native English readers here, "edible" means "can be eaten", vs the obvious typo "editable", ie "can be edited". (OP: Sorry if I killed the humor, it was at least grin-worthy.)
