Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | reillys's comments login

If I or somebody else was the victim of a crime I would 100% support using every available source of information to solve that crime. I think we need adequate controls sure, but mostly we need to increase trust in government and police forces so we know we can trust the relevant people with our data.

There is epic fear in the US about the government. That is the actual problem. Now the US gov is a shady piece of shit, so a lot of that is well founded, but that is the root of the problem. Solve that problem and actually trust the people who are supposed to be responsible and in charge to do the right thing and this data problem stops becoming as much of an issue. And no, building some kind of philosophical zero trust system is not going to solve anything, it is a prison you'll end up living in.

Encourage transparency in Police forces and Government with strong legislation and strong support for whistleblowers and punishment of infractions and you have yourself a system that people can begin to trust.


It's not just the police. How could such a corrupt police exist without corrupt superiors higher up in the government? Fear of governments is justified, they're the most powerful entity in our world. They can get away with murder.

The US is not Iceland, a simple fix that would just make people trust the police is impossible. Also as an aside, the police isn't your only problem. Tesla, Google & co are paving the way normalizing these mobile surveillance units. We'll have millions of them driving around everywhere with HD cameras, microphones, in some cases even LiDAR and radar. Recording constantly. Of course there's a bit of an issue if you are not a fan of mass surveillance. Even if corporations are the only ones in charge of that data. I know for example that the Tesla video feed can be accessed online, because owners can remotely view it with their app. And if they can do this, so can others in theory. All you need is a bug or Tesla servers getting hacked.


Well actually that brings up an interesting piece about how the US is structured. I think the reason your police can be more corrupt is because of the federated nature of policing.

Cops are usually only answerable to the mayor of the city (and sometimes the electorate) rather than higher ups in the government. So there is a lack of authority and control there. If they were answerable to politicians and politicians were actually responsible for their actions you could take very firm political actions against those politicians - but in the states nobody in the Cabinet or Government is responsible for law enforcement.

And I understand why this federated system was originally put in place, but this isn't the 1700s. In communication terms the US might as well be Iceland - you can communicate from one end of the land mass to the other instantly, so we don't need to have localized and federated decision making.


IANAL... The reason you can get a huge settlement in the talc case but not in this case is because people are purchasing the talc and so it is a product liability issue.

In the research case people are basing their care and procedures off another person's research. There is no direct payment from the person receiving the care to the researcher and so it is difficult to draw a direct line from Person A says X to Person B gets injured.


I chatted to Nelson when I was designing brisk (https://github.com/brisktest/brisk) and his insight informed the development of it.

Among other things, Brisk allows you to run tests for your local code changes in the cloud (basically the pay mini test piece but for any test runner)

We also have a sync step much like the one described here and allow users to run one off commands (linters, tsc etc)


> Brisk allows you to run tests for your local code changes in the cloud

how does this work for interactive debugging?

I was going to ask the same about the system in TFA but I might as well ask you :)


Can't you achieve all that just using a build system with reliable remote builds & caching e.g. Bazel, Buck, Please, etc?

That also avoids hacky sync scripts.


No you can’t.

They don’t work from your local development env and also work in your CI env.

Mostly Brisk was designed to run your complete test suite on every codes save (ie local save) but it also works great from your CI.

We can run entire test suites in seconds which is performance you don’t get with those systems you named (which are generally for building/compiling)


I'd suggest you revise your competitor analysis. Bazel definitely has a test command that with remote execution and caching absolutely allows you to run entire test suites in seconds* both locally and in CI eg. https://blog.aspect.build/typescript-with-rbe


This blog post says 2 and a half minutes not seconds.

I know Bazel is a build system which distributes builds among remote machines.

In fact using any computer language you can achieve these goals - you just need to program it.

So yes you could probably do all the things with all the things, but Basel does not solve this problem out of the box.

I wonder why stripe didn’t “just use Bazel”.


> This blog post says 2 and a half minutes not seconds.

It's meaningless to say "we can run tests in seconds". You can't run my tests in seconds because they're single threaded and take 10 minutes. The important thing is the speedup, and they got a pretty good speedup. Arguably the nop build/test time is important too but it doesn't look like they measured that.

> Basel does not solve this problem out of the box.

Yes it does.

> I wonder why stripe didn’t “just use Bazel”.

In my experience it's because setting up Bazel is a) more work than setting up some ad-hoc build system (Make or CMake or whatever) and b) difficult to switch to retrospectively. So it only gets used where you have people who are experienced enough to know that you will wish you had started with it, and can convince the inexperienced people that it's worth the effort.

Usually you get too many inexperienced people saying "it's too difficult; we'll be fine with Make".


Stripe does use Bazel. It just didn't exist before Stripe built some of its own internal systems, but it's gradually replacing ~everything from a build standpoint.

The one thing to know about Bazel is that it's both incredibly impressive, and also one of the least ergonomic pieces of software ever created. It's very clearly an internal project which was cleaned up and open sourced without any attempt to make it more usable outside of Google.

Bazel's kind of like Kubernetes in a way -- you don't actually get enough benefits to adopt it until you're at a certain point in the company lifecycle, and to get to that point you usually have to build other systems first. Then you have to gradually replace those systems with Bazel.



First release of Basel was in 2015 when Stripe was already 5 years old and the progenitor of this tooling was already running with several dozen users.


> They don’t work from your local development env and also work in your CI env.

Err yes they do? Unless you mean something really specific that I'm not getting?


To be clear the sync step is used for the test suite execution not only the one off command running - it’s just something we can also easily do because we have a hot env in the cloud


> They don’t work from your local development env and also work in your CI env.

This is one of the biggest selling points of bazel-like build systems. Like to the extent that, for some changes, bazel can say "even though you changed this source file, I can be 100% certain that that change didn't affect any tests and so I will not run them"


Decaf is simple to pick out by a person who is competent at tasting coffee. As easy as your red/white wine visual test. People in general are very bad at tasting and especially thinking and communicating about tasting. Plus also people may not know what decaf coffee tastes like or may have never thought about it before.


The same decaf coffee is more expensive. The producers decaffeinate their lesser coffees. But you've hit on why the "sugar-cane method" i.e. the solvent based approach produces better coffee. It's possible for it to be done at origin and so the actual coffee producers can choose what coffee to decaffeinate and can absorb some of the additional costs in the "processing" stage while using higher quality coffee in the process.


It's such a small amount of money per person that it is hard to see what effects one would expect. I think for the majority of people reading hacker news $1000 per month would be barely noticeable in their bank account (obviously some people out there would notice it, but for say a lowly software dev making $150k it's not going to change much about their lifestyle). So to think it would fundamentally change someones life is a stretch. I mean it's not enough to not have to earn money (and so have the financial security to start a company or restart education) and it's not enough to purchase accommodation (especially cause it's limited to 3 years). Most I would expect is people could pay down some of their debt - so they can tread water a little easier for a few years.


not sure why this is downvoted? It's basically the exact same comment as the top comment


Well it will definitely help with caching. You only need to update the article every year or so.


That's still more than just using an exact date that never needs to be updated. Also that seems like something you would do client side anyway. ie. you send a timestamp that never changes and then have the client convert it to "X years/days ago."


Most people render the html on the server side and then you can just cache it wholesale.

You could cache the page itself or even the article itself (I'm not talking about browser cache, I'm talking about caching on the web server).

The idea being that you don't have to keep rendering or even hitting your DB for the content you just have a html fragment that you create once and cache and then serve. You'll only need to rebuild the content when the date expires so when "one year ago" becomes "two years ago" .


OP here, happy to answer any questions about Brisk or the process of giving away all of our code :)


Consider applying for YC's W25 batch! Applications are open till Nov 12.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: