Fun fact. In Sweden it's available to anyone. Anyone can also find out find out where you're living, whom you're living with and what vehicle you're driving (among other things). It's a part of offentlighetprincipen[1].
Yes. America’s problem is that they use the SSN as a secret. Knowing it means you can impersonate someone.
Whereas in Sweden the “person number” is public information and identity is authenticated and authorized in other ways (by showing a driving license or using a “bank id” app etc).
In the nordics how much tax you pay (meaning for most people you can just divide by twelve to determine salary) is also public info. As is how much houses sell for etc.
The public library probably have the local "Tax-calendar" (taxeringskalendern). Like an old fashioned phone book except instead of phone numbers it has the taxed income for everyone in your town for the last year (there is of course web sites with this info too but no free service that I know of). Spent an hour at the library looking up my coworkers salaries when prepping for my first pay negotiation many years ago.
I wonder if the publicity works well against work via tax evasion. Anyone can combine whatever you do with your ID. If you earn a lot of money black on the side (e.g. via drugs dealing), while your income is public and you got this expensive car, then its not just suspicious. Anyone can look you up, figure out you're a sham, and report you.
True, people with low income and flashy spending habits regularly attracts the attention of the tax authorities. So a little bit more savvy criminals funnels their black money through a legit company, in effect paying taxes on a little bit of it. Restaurants was/is popular for this (mostly cash). Used car businesses too.
SSN isn’t even a well-kept secret, considering you have to give it out for banking, medical, or anywhere else that needs to identify you.
We should have a kind of username / password system instead, where everyone has a unique ID and a separate private ID. We could even use something like RSA so you never have to give out your private ID to anyone.
According to this article, if you get accidentally declared dead in the US, companies and institutions make their own copies of the death records and they aren't kept in sync with the governments. So even after you become alive again, at any moment, someone might switch the bit on their database, and you become dead to few companies again.
Kind of interesting how this HN post shows that transparency is important, because fixing an error like erroneous death in other countries isn't as bad as it is in the US.
Anyway I ended up writing about it as a use case for crypto, because the blockchain part of a transparent ledger is important for being a companion to the public memory: your birth, your marriage, your relationships with relatives, and your death.
I believe Offentlighetsprincipen is one of the main foundations of the success of Sweden as a democracy. It acts like a filter on corruption. Dumb politicians are regularly exposed early in their careers. Only really smart, subtly corrupt politicians make it to the top level of government.
Does that not lead to the potential sticky situations that my mind immediately jumps to?
Edit: I read through your link and did some light browsing of my own (later stonewalled by the fact that I don't speak any of the Scandinavian languages). I don't see anywhere that a citizen can re-assert their right to privacy but that would seem to be necessary in some cases (e.g. Twitch streamers wanting to remain incognito to avoid getting SWATted or otherwise frequently visited by police).
> I don't see anywhere that a citizen can re-assert their right to privacy
Rights depend on jurisdiction. I’m not aware of any right to privacy regarding place of residence or tax returns in Sweden.
A resident is entitled to file for a “protected identity” which would obscure their address, phone number and person number on these types of services. Even celebrities tend to avoid doing that unless they have a persistent stalker, because it leads to all sorts of practical problems when dealing with everyday administration.
"Most critics focused on the absence of forensic evidence, charging that Petersson's case was made up of speculation and circumstantial evidence."
But if the case is officially resolved, well that's all good then. Nobody followed the Prime Minister to the theater and waited for him to leave in the dark of night. No stalking to see here, because Sweden. Move along.
The official conclusion was that the murderer did probably spot the Palmes as they entered the cinema, giving him time to go and borrow a revolver and get back in time to kill him once the movie was over. I don’t know any definition of stalking that would include that sequence of events. But the topic was data privacy - I strongly doubt that the facts that Palme’s person number and address were public contributed to his death.
This is actually pretty commonplace in the LA area. I mean, you can take a tour bus that points out dozens of celebrity’s homes. It’s why many actors and influencers hire private security.
For an even clearer example. There's this list of the 25 most searched for people last year: https://www.ratsit.se/info/omtalade/mest-eftersokta-forra-ar... . I can recognize several celebrities there, most of them artists, and even our prime minister.
You can see addresses, if they own dogs, which cars they own, what salary they have (the site I linked needs payment for that, but there's other ways to get it for free), the companies they own or own a part of.
I’m sure they get direct mailings from purveyors of exclusive consumer products. Just like I’m already getting mail about buying a house because I bought an apartment last year. What’s the harm?
> the sites have publishing certificates, which gives them the same constitutional protection as the media. They are not covered by the GDPR and the Data Inspectorate can therefore not examine them. It is also written that the authority has been critical of the fact that the sites can receive constitutional protection through the publication certificate. [1]
Very topical. Agneta used to have a pretty persistent stalker. I believe she eventually married him for a while. Pretty sad story but no stabbing involved.
Sure there is. In Sweden, no one locks their doors at night. They don't lock their cars, even in the densest cities. It's well known that in Sweden, the only significant category of crime is petty theft, most often pickpocketing, where the thief will remove a small "finder's fee" and return the rest of the wallet, contents intact. (https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-rise-of-sweden-democr...)
I live in Rural TN and we too neglect to lock our doors (and our cars, I might add). In fact, my in-laws leave the keys to their cars IN THE CAR, and unlocked.
I'd argue this has a lot more to do with high trust local communities, rather than high trust "societies". Maybe I'm nitpicking, but the implication seems to be that somehow "American society" (whatever that means) is inherently low-trust. But the fact is America is so diverse, trying to create a useful comparative analysis there is difficult.
In the United States SSNs are treated as secret. I shouldn't have t care if other people know my DOB or SSN, but I have to care because tons of companies and government offices use these as proof of ID.
Sorry, this reads like a The Onion piece for developers. It looks like pure nightmare. There's so much complexity that simply doesn't need to be there.
Kubernetes is a way to handle complexity with infrastructure and operations that is codified and implemented as a single standardized and portable solution. Much of what K8S does is replace what you would be doing manually or by tying together many other tools yourself.
That's completely different than taking a simple blogging site and turning it into some distributed monstrosity.
Kubernetes is a low level tool which should be used only at large companies with large teams to support it and build all the required tooling around it.
80% of companies building on top of kubernetes should just pay some provider to do it for them, or use higher level tools. The crazyness going in the DevOps/Infrastructure world is as bad, or worse, as the one going on in the frontend space.
Kubernetes provides a standardized way to deploy application artifacts to multiple servers, and handles monitoring, logging, process management, storage, networking, security, isolation, high-availability, rolling deployments, and other concerns in a industry-standard way that is portable across providers.
It's just software that runs your software. You can't remove complexity, only abstract it. Instead of using Chef/Puppet/systemd/hand-written scripts and a bunch of other tools to run and monitor your processes, you can replace all that with K8S.
> "used only at large companies with large teams"
Actually it's even more useful with smaller teams and let me, as a team of 1, deploy a global ad platform running billions of requests a day across hundreds of servers in multiple regions. Don't mistake lack of knowledge and experience as a problem with the tool.
> "pay some provider to do it for them"
Yes, you should use a managed K8S offering. Using K8S doesn't mean you have to install and operate it from scratch.
> Much of what K8S does is replace what you would be doing manually or by tying together many other tools yourself
So that's where it's wrong IMO, it replaces simple static site hosting/managers/etc, instead of having a single-click toolchain that takes your commits and CI/CD it properly, you now have to install and maintain that yourself manually.`
There are many CI/CD pipelines that deploy to K8S.
The "simple static site hosting" isn't magic, it's usually nothing more than a wrapper around putting your code into a nodejs docker container and deploying it to some lambda/serverless platform with a CDN in front. Your post is exactly what I mean about many frontend devs not understanding backend or infrastructure resulting in convoluted architectures.
He's selling courses on the technology he used, so the site is both a demonstration of and lesson in what he teaches. It's a functional portfolio that seems intended to demonstrate that the author and instructor understands what he is asking you to pay him to teach.
Well since this looks like a blog, either using a blogging platform, or a static website generator hosted on either a static website platform(1) or something like lambda + a cdn
Not everything in a static webapp needs to be static, just push most static things to the CDN and render some things like "user details" on the client... it just works out so much simpler.
> What is missing from the description apparently is the SLA for the site's downtime.
> If it's really low, I can imagine why it was made distributed.
If an extremely low SLA is the goal, I would not be home-rolling a distributed website technology stack. The more moving pieces you have, the more likely one of them is to fail.
The recipe for a high availability, high reliability website is relatively simple in the age of Cloudflare and other cheap hosted services. Introducing a lot of complexity and home-grown solutions is the last thing you want for high availability unless you have scores of engineers to maintain it and you can't solve it through traditional means.
That “distributed” quality itself is a choice that introduces complexity. There are many sites that deliver the same or greater level of value to users, and use a “boring” architecture and deployment.
Do you mind sharing some? Most websites I can think of are either highly distributed (e.g. Facebook, Netflix) or their customer base is geographically limited (Yelp).
Uploading media files to (or from) developing countries with weaker internet infra often results in timeouts and dropped connections. I tried uploading a 8GB file to Singapore S3 from Florida and my connection often timed out.
I'm trying to imagine how you can deliver a fast website to users around the globe without distributed systems.
Those are all sites with 1000s of engineers, real-world use, and actual evolutionary pressure driving their features. You want to compare to essentially static sites with some light user statefulness.
This guy's site is not netflix nor facebook, nor is he 10k developers to support those architectures.
If this guy were pragmatic, a Ruby on Rails/django app in heroku would do wonders. If he wants to promote React because that's what he sells, that's a different story.
The problem is the people taking what this guy says as "the modern way to do it" and then you find the messes you find at work.
For anyone who's wondering: a repost invite is a way of getting a post into the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), so it will get a random placement on HN's front page. If the original submission is older than a few days, we don't re-up it, but rather invite the submitter to repost it. Then it goes automatically into the pool. So yes, it's something good :)
At least half of the gains can probably achieved by just rolling a distributed redis setup and not distributing the PostgreSQL database. This should cover most non-personalized read operations which on this type of site should be most of them. It also seems like the database distribution is an attempt to solve a problem of his own making. He states that each blog posts page view needs 30 database queries in the background. This to me suggests an inefficient data structure or complexity for complexity’s sake. Heck, he could probably even achieve 80% of what he’s trying to do by delivering selected slow but static queries from edge computing KV stores without having any further distributed backend or database servers. But ofc this whole project is a sales pitch and he would get the attention he’s receiving with a simple Django+Postgres+Redis setup in a single region with just basic CI/CD.
It doesn't need to be distributed. It's a mostly static site with some dynamic parts.
A single small server running a typical web framework (anything from django to asp.net to laravel) can easily serve all these pages in milliseconds. Add a CDN in front to cache and serve quickly to users around the world.
This was my first reaction. But then I can also understand why you would use your own website as either an exercise or a showcase of all these techs.
I used to host my blog on Kubernetes for a while for that specific reason, just practice how to deploy and operate it. Then after I got bored with that simply transfered that to a static hosting solution.
Just imagine all the newbie and junior devs following the ideas this person puts in their heads. That's how you land a new job just to find out the landing has more engineering than the Mars Rover.
Nailed it. The whole time I was reading I had this uncanny valley feeling of like “this is so close to satire but not quite” waiting on the needle to drop that sealed it as satire, but it never came.
> I always thought that staring at monitors with blinding brightness is what causes retinal damage, not just blue light specifically.
Just curious, did it ever occur to you how much more blinding even a cloudy day outside is? Adjust cd/m2 to roughly match the ambient brightness of the room, that's general ergonomic advise.
I did some programming around light sensors calibrated to match human eye sensitivity, so I’m very much aware that outside sunlight (>50k lux) is much brighter than a monitor backlight (<1k lux measured at a distance of 30cm).
But I can stay outside in very bright sunlight for 12 hours (which I did 6 days a week before college while working in agriculture with my parents) and not have a headache or feel my eyes tired afterwards.
That’s contrary to what the monitor backlight does to me when staring at it even 6 hours at a time.
Not blinking often enough is probably the biggest cause, you are kinda forced to do that when reading/writing code and have to consciously make a decision to blink more often.
Focusing your mind very hard on the task is also probably a big cause of this and unrelated to light intensity or energy.
But having the monitor backlight adapted to the ambient light is what helps me the most to end up in a relaxed state after I finish working. I know it’s not something that will work for everyone, unlike most blue light filter ads going on nowadays about solving your sleep and vision problems.
I think using low brightness screens/bulbs/strips may have also increased my light sensitivity, because now I can’t stand a normal TV blasting its light into a dark room, or >1000lumen overhead light bulbs or staring at my phone in the dark without having the brightness all the way down (and sometimes using Reduce White Point).
I prefer the script[0] instead of the hacked ISO since you can install the script in later versions of W10 using your own preferred ISO.
Only caveat: There's no way of telling what versions of W10 it's compatible with (I imagine it breaks some versions). I have an old VM with AME installed and manually enabled updates by hacking the registry. (You could also alter the .BAT script to enable updates, but you have to know what to remove).
This project is cute, but I only ever used it for an offline sandbox for running low resource games and cracked versions of Photoshop. I am scared as shit to connect this thing to the Internet. I only connect to receive updates.
This looks interesting. Is there something like a Vagrant build image for this so that you can easily automate the build process to pick up the updates and adjust the configuration/customization in a json or yaml file?
Sure, just don't use it for plain text communication with non-geeks as their web mail client won't have a monospace font set for signatures. Hence they will wonder why you end your emails with blob of crap.
But large scale maps ("street level") are quite simple. You can generate those for yourself with ease. It's the small scale maps that seem to suck more often -- simplifications are hard.
[1] [PDF] https://www.regeringen.se/4a76f3/contentassets/2c767a1ae4e84...