> instilled the fear that "our way of life" will be destroyed if they don't vote for Trump, despite 1) being a lie
You may find this hard to believe, but there are a lot of people old enough to see how rapidly "our way of life" has gone down the toilet. It's not a myth, it's happening.
The US used to be a much more homogeneous country, which certainly makes it a lot easier for everyone to be on the same page because of shared cultural values.
That has changed dramatically in the past few decades and with it, places where Americans can find common ground.
Other western countries are going down the exact same path, just a bit behind us.
Funny though how all those European countries everyone on HN and Reddit point to as "how things should be" are all pretty ethnically and culturally homogenous, though that's changing rapidly. Interestingly, cracks are starting to appear.
> And the US was always less homogenous than other "western" countries.
The US was 85-90% white in 1965. That's pretty homogenous.
What is considered "white" now certainly wasn't in the past. It took a long time before Italians were considered to be part of the in-group. Irish and Italian people were considered an inferior race and suffered extreme racial prejudice when lots of immigrants came from those nations.
And that evolution itself tells the story of the US itself. The people in non-homogenous neighborhoods are happy and harmonious, but outsiders scared of cultural differences cause racial strife and discontent.
Those who let themselves get worked up about racism are the problem, not the non-homogenous races.
That barely scratches the surface of the bigotry that existed. Protestant or Catholic, Jewish or Gentile/Christian, Eastern European or Western European, Anglo or non-Anglo, Anglo + German or non, Southern European or Northern European - these are all lines people use to discriminate upon that I can think of just off the top of my head. That's without even getting into skin color.
You're confirming what I said earlier. There are both happy and unhappy "homogenous" countries. There's literally no correlation.
Instead of stopping there you're regurgitating, and it's unfortunate I'm confirming Poe's law, Mein Kampf.
> The US was 85-90% white in 1965. That's pretty homogenous.
I think you know nothing about culture, ethnicity, or the history of bigotry, xenophobia, and racism in the US if you can confidently make that statement. You're reducing all the diverse peoples that made up the nation into a single group based on their skin color.
> There are both happy and unhappy "homogenous" countries. There's literally no correlation.
There’s multiple components to what “happiness” entails. One might argue that a society filled with numerous cultures and ethnicities all vying for their own interests can make for quite a bit of unhappiness. E.g., if everyone was white, there’d be no hand-wringing over white supremacy. If everyone was straight, there’d be no hand-wringing over LGBT representation, and so on. That’s not saying that other social ills can’t exist in homogenous societies, but they do have fewer due to having more shared identity and values. Don’t be dense just to make a point.
> You're reducing all the diverse peoples that made up the nation into a single group based on their skin color.
Like people do today when lumping everyone of various ethnicities into the “white” bucket and decrying “whiteness”? If it’s a valid classification today why can’t we use the same term retrospectively?
> E.g., if everyone was white, there’d be no hand-wringing over white supremacy... Don’t be dense just to make a point.
You think people didn't find other ways to dislike each other when they were all "white"? Like I already said you don't know history very well or you're the one being "dense to make a point".
> If it’s a valid classification today why can’t we use the same term retrospectively?
I can't speak for today or say if it's valid. But that's not how things were back then because the people themselves didn't believe that. You've never heard the slurs people used for different ethnic and religious groups that all hailed from Europe and had light skin? The amount of "hand-wringing" about JFK being the first non-Protestant president? There was no feeling of "homogeneity" back then either based solely on skin color.
You understand how statistics work, don't you? When you have 64% of the population voting, that's a pretty big sample size, enough so that you can reasonably extrapolate that the 49.8% share _probably_ holds across the rest of the population, give or take.
Put another way, if someone asked you to estimate what the split between the one third of the population that didn't vote was, what would you use as a reference point? Social media posts? Vibes? Or maybe polls leading up to the vote that showed the same roughly 50-50 split found in the actual results?
I don't think that you understand how that part of statistics works. You are said that we have sampled 64% of the population, so we can extrapolate to the rest. That works if the sampling is sufficiently random. But in this case the "sampling" is people who voted, so an entirely (self) selected population, and pretty much not random at all (i.e.: people who were mostly less decisive about their opinions/vote).
So I don't think we can extrapolate confidently at all. So we really don't know whether it holds for the rest of the population at all.
> So I don't think we can extrapolate confidently at all
But the parent was — the implication being that if the other third had voted, surely they would have voted in greater proportion for Democrats than Republicans. That’s based on nothing but vibes and assumptions. I argue that the 64% share of people that actually did vote give you a lot more confidence in how the remaining third probably would have voted than whatever the parent suggested. It’s at least a starting point for extrapolation.
> Very easy to dismiss it as the rantings of a madman but no-one is holding him back.
Does anyone really need to? We're not getting Greenland and everyone knows it, ESPECIALLY the people screeching the most about it. Trump's whole thing is giving the media lots of fresh meat to go wild over so they're distracted. I'm sure it's some sort of Sun Tzu thing he read about and has latched on to.
However, this one in particular is really baffling in that he can't let it go and it just makes everything worse.
> People didn't take the tariff bluster seriously and then it became very real.
I mean, not really? There's been some tariffs here and there but nowhere near what was originally claimed, things have been walked back and forth multiple times, etc. That's really what's caused the most damage, the uncertainty moreso than the actual tariffs. And this is also something he's particular fixated on and I wish he'd drop since it's obvious it's not going to have the intended outcome.
It feels like the rest of the post answers your own question. Yes, Vance and basically everyone below him know full well that the US acquiring Greenland would be utterly pointless and utterly disastrous.
But he won't let it go, and in the mean time he's doing lots of stuff with real world consequences like tariffs and incinerating alliances to try to get people to agree with his stupid idea. Can't even use it as a "negotiation chip" when its the fruits of actual completed negotiations being threatened and the US could put any military installations in Greenland they wanted if they said "please" instead of "we are going to take you over".
It was also very smart of them to send their citizens to US universities and companies and exfiltrate research and IP to grow their own tech industry...
> RDS is a particular racket that will cost you hundreds of dollars for a rock bottom tier. Again, Digital Ocean is below $20 per month that will serve many a small business. And yet, AWS is the default goto at this point because the lockin is real.
This is a little disingenuous though. Yeah you can run a database server on DO cheaper than using RDS, but you’ll have to roll all that stuff that RDS does yourself: automatic backups/restores, tuning, monitoring, failover, etc. etc. I’m confident that the engineers who’ve set up those RDS servers and the associated plumbing/automation have done a far better job of all that stuff than I ever could unless I spent a lot of time and effort on it. That’s worth a premium.
For me it wasn't even about cost, it was the fact that logging into my self-hosted Plex server required an auth flow that went to Plex's servers for some reason.
'For some reason'? You mean for the sharing library and streaming services and all the other features that require identification to even use ...?
People like you are why I hate these plex discussions, because motivations and reasoning for functionality are quite clear and obvious but I have to play a game where I have to to discern whether comments like this are just being intentionally obtuse, or are genuinely unaware of what architecture and scale of services they provide, or are aware and are simply opine-ing about functionality you dont like ("bloated").
Jellyfin is a cool alternative to plex, keyword alternative. Its kind of a joke that all the capability it provides is even 30% matched by these other clients but what people are doing unconsciously is just admitting they dont know what they want out of a media server or HTPC. If your needs are met by providing an NFS share and using a vanilla media player to handle buffering, then I dont even see why you're in threads like this.
Also a strange technical ineptitude / fake "blindness" is accepted around here while talking about plex for some reason. Plex offered a free 5mbps reverse tunnel service that allowed you to use THEIR SERVERS to stream to others in a secure and anonymous way if you were unable to open ports. This is the functionality they put behind a paygate, the functionality that had a cost they were floating for free... youve never been restricted from sharing your media to yourself internally or externally, but I still have to pretend that comments from supposedly tech minded people who intentionally misrepresent reality are worth respecting. It really makes browsing ANY jellyfin thread unpleasant.
Can you please refrain from personal attack, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are? and also please avoid denunciatory rhetoric? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
You obviously know a lot about this, and your comment contains fine information, but unfortunately the negative elements do more harm than the fine ones do good.
> You mean for the sharing library and streaming services and all the other features that require identification to even use
Plex is for streaming my media from my server to my clients. I know a decent number of people who use (or used) Plex and I don’t think any of them would ever use it to access streaming services.
I have no problem with charging for functionality that needs their servers, or introducing streaming. But the way their authentication, “services”, and streaming features hae been shoved in our faces in the UI over time feels like a rug pull to those of us who paid for something else.
Your response is both unnecessarily aggressive and plainly wrong.
Yes, Plex _should_ work without an internet gateway. Why? Because it’s a client/server media application; it transcodes media to clients/players over the network.
Plex used to work like this. Actually, it was exclusively unauthenticated. Then early 10s they added optional auth, and eventually allowed you to reserve “server names”, and finally enforced with for running their server. But you can still use a client without auth today. Just read their docs: https://support.plex.tv/articles/200890058-authentication-fo...
> 'For some reason'? You mean for the sharing library and streaming services and all the other features that require identification to even use ...?
All I wanted to do was self host a Plex server and access it from devices on my intranet using Infuse. Why should I have to bounce to a third party server to do that?
And to be clear, the devices using Infuse didn't have to do that, but accessing the dashboard (for admin) did require an external hop. There's no reason IMO for that to be necessary.
> All I wanted to do was self host a Plex server and access it from devices on my intranet using Infuse. Why should I have to bounce to a third party server to do that?
Cool, a real discussion. Plex has the weakness of requiring a first time online auth because they didnt implement a local ldap/oauth/sso pathway. After that point, Settings > Network > "List of IP addresses and networks that are allowed without auth", use a generous netmask. Entirely local after that point if desired.
You're being a bit obtuse here yourself. The original premise of Plex was to stream your own media on your own network. I was a very early user of it, before these additional "features" that were pushed more by the Plex team than by user demand were added. They made it so you had to hack the xml config file to be able to use it in the traditional no login way, that was a pretty hostile move in my opinion and was the first eyebrow raiser for me. They also made it so you had to have a paid account to use any of the mobile clients in a clear monetization move there is no technical reason why you can't open your plex server to the internet and connect a mobile app that way, that's what jellyfin allows. I worked around this for a while by connecting to my home network on a VPN and just using chrome mobile to stream but it was less than ideal, obviously. Yes then they offered the proxying service with dynamic TLS cert generation as another paid for service, I remember it, but having never had a plex account let alone a paid one it was no interest to me. Do you work for Plex? Because your post reads like you do, especially the attitude of people not knowing what features they want and needing Plex to tell (sell) them.
IMO Mockito is fine, the problem I’ve encountered is people taking the easy way out and trying to test something that needs a real integration test with a convoluted series of mocks.
I agree. I mostly only use mocks for external service dependencies (apart from primary application database), or library features that are very problematic to use in test. A lot of code simply should not be unit tested - if an integration test can cover the same paths its far better in the long run. Performance can become an issue but it is easier to deal with that than to spend so much time maintaining and debugging mock constructs.
I’ve been on projects where mocking _literally made the project less reliable_ because people ended up “testing” against mocks that didn’t accurately reflect the behavior of the real APIs.
It left us with functionality that wasn’t actually tested and resulted in real bugs and regressions that shipped.
Mocking is one of these weird programmer pop-culture memetic viruses that spread in the early 2000s and achieved complete victory in the 2010s, like Agile and OOP, and now there are entire generations of devs who it’s not that they’re making a bad or a poorly argued choice, it’s that they literally don’t even know there are other ways of thinking about these problems because these ideas have sucked all the oxygen out of the room.
I think there's room to argue "Agile" is a popular bastardisation of what's meant by "agile software development", and with "OOP" we got the lame Java interpretation rather than the sophisticated Smalltalk interpretation. -- Or I might think that these ideas aren't that good if their poor imitations win out over the "proper" ideas.
With mocking.. I'm willing to be curious that there's some good/effective way of doing it. But the idea of "you're just testing that the compiler works" comes to mind.
For OOP, I'd say the issue isn't so much that it's not useful (it is very useful), but rather that it was treated as "common sense, the only way to do it".
Sometimes the right tool for the job is objects, sometimes it's functional, sometimes you do want encapsulation but it's better as structs and using composition over inheritance. When everything looks like a `class Hammer extends Tool`…
Agreed - I like your phrasing of it. There are some good ideas in OOP. I don't know that I'd go as far as to credit OOP for those ideas, but things like polymorphism and encapsulation can be very useful. What I objected to was, as you said, OOP became "the only way to do it". It became a dogma. I was very happy when functional programming started to break through and show that there were other ways that were not only viable, but often better.
Mocking and integration tests are not mutually exclusive. I often use mocks in my integration tests. Some things can be integration tested, some things can't. Sone things you just need to mock.
I don't see how "oh third parties can get a bit for it" is really an acceptable answer. Lightning cables are readily available but that wasn't consumer-friendly enough for the EU. I think the parent is right, let Ford try this and see how quickly the EU goes after them, because this is quite frankly very anti-consumer.
Ford in the EU is a european car manufacturer with around 100 years of history, so yeah, I think the answer will be the same as for BMW. And sure, car makers have special status - they have just recently secured a huge win in reducing the scope of emmission-related fines, which will now be charged from 10g/km instead of 0g/km from 2035. But this too applies to every manufacturer.
I understand the legislation is different, but the anti-consumer sentiment is the same, but worse in this case since I have a feeling the screw bit won't be nearly as available and cheap as Lightning cables are.
> Ford in the EU is a european car manufacturer
An American company with factories in the EU. I don't think it's the same as a company headquartered in the EU.
> No, anti-consumer sentiment is "you have to buy a different charger for each device and it becomes obsolete with the device".
But you don't? The other end of any Lightning connector is USB-A or USB-C. Works just fine anywhere.
> Factories in the EU means workers employed and taxes paid in the EU. It means a lot here.
So I guess going back to the original parent's point: if your company is producing stuff in Europe, proprietary screws are just fine from a consumer point of view. Which kind of confirms everyone's suspicions about EU regulations... they're just foreign company shakedowns under the guise of "protecting the consumer."
> Which kind of confirms everyone's suspicions about EU regulations...
they're just foreign company shakedowns under the guise of "protecting the consumer."
Zero evidence was provided to support this, but I guess facts don't matter anymore.
> Zero evidence was provided to support this, but I guess facts don't matter anymore.
What do you think the whole thread was about?
Apple makes a proprietary connector: anti-consumer behavior according to the EU. Use a standard connector or get fined to oblivion.
BMW makes a proprietary, patented _screw_: perfectly acceptable according to the EU.
Are you being intentionally obtuse here or what? The proof is that you have an instance of the same behavior in two different domains, with the main difference being one company is American and one is European.
> Apple makes a proprietary connector: anti-consumer behavior according to the EU. Use a standard connector or get fined to oblivion.
This was not reactive behavior to Apple on the part of the EU, the legislation was agreed long time ago and there was a period until which all manufacturers had to adapt. Zero evidence.
> BMW makes a proprietary, patented _screw_: perfectly acceptable according to the EU.
Car (parts) market is a different one, different rules apply. Additionally it was not proven there will be no aftermarket availability of the parts. There is no proof, I am sorry.
You may find this hard to believe, but there are a lot of people old enough to see how rapidly "our way of life" has gone down the toilet. It's not a myth, it's happening.
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