Frontend code can be easily bypassed or changed so you can't trust it to keep the state of your application in good condition. Nothing prevents me from picking the same username as someone else if there is no server-side code stopping it. Nothing prevents me from replying to a deleted comment if I don't check with the server.
That means that any validation that you do client-side you need to repeat server-side. Any business logic that you have client-side you also need to repeat server-side.
I see a lot of people confused about the host (Facebook). Carmack initially posted a lot of high quality articles on AltDevBlogADay. However, that site went down. Carmack said he moved to Facebook because he feels it's more reliable than other (cleaner) third-party hosts, which might not be around 10 years from now.
I've seen a lot of similar posts hosted on Google Plus and shared on HN in the past. They are all gone, now.
Sure, Google has a horrible track record when it comes to service durability, but I wouldn't trust Facebook as a reliable host either. Anyone having relied on their @facebook.com email address (2010-2016) may agree.
"Years ago, I felt burned when I wrote several articles for #AltDevBlogADay, and they vanished. I have much more confidence that what I write on FB won't vanish. [...]"
I've used vim for seven years now. My vimrc is a gargantuan 122 lines of vimL. It went from 0 lines to 300 to 750 and it's been 122 for a year now. Whenever someone asks me for tips and tricks to learn vim I reference this tweet:
Completely agree with everything you are saying. I also immediately have to think about something else to avoid what I feel would be a mental collapse.
One thing that has given me a bit of comfort was an answer I heard when somebody asked one of the great minds of the 21st century, Jennifer Lawrence, "what happens after we die?"
As an Indian, I will never ever be able to wrap my head around the concept of an old-age home that seems normal in western societies.
Whenever I find myself feeling a bit envious about the obvious advantages that are there in western countries, the reminder of the existence of this absurdity immediately removes all feelings of jealousy.
If you're not living in absolute poverty, it's completely possible to take care of your parents as they grow old. My father took care of my grandfather until his last day and they lived under the same roof albeit on different floors.
No matter how my life turns out, I will still do the same for my parents as they have done for theirs.
For large swathes of the population, putting your parents in and old-age home is seen as a complete and utter betrayal for the sacrifices they made for you.
You have x hours to spend. You can either spend them with yout children or spend them with dementia laden old parents who don’t know who you are
What’s better for you? For your children? For your parents?
A granny flat may be acceptable, but having the in-laws under your roof? It was awful when I was a kid, and we had mother-in-law round for a week or so after she came out of hospital for a knee replacement. We all found it intolerable.
I don’t want to be a burden on my kids, and my parents dont want to be a burden on me.
I think the key difference is that the visit from your mother-in-law was a novel or unique experience which you might not have the emotional tools to handle. It isn't exactly fair to compare that inexperience with what is a way of life in India.
The visit may have been uncomfortable for you because of the absence of societal and cultural rules to help streamline these situations.
Is it normal in India to stay in the same town as your parents?
I see that as part of the problem in the west, especially if you are educated and have some sort of specialization, you are kind of expected to travel to get a "better job" - though that's a fairly personal decision to be fair. Certainly my parents put more of an emphasis on getting ahead in the working world rather than staying close.
Also I have met a few Indians here in Europe, as far as I am aware they don't have plans to go home, whats the expectation there?
With the recent (and by recent I mean since 1991) opening of the Indian economy, there has been a cultural shift in the Indian mindset.
It might surprise you but leaving India for education or employment is actually pretty commonplace and is not actually in conflict with the picture I have painted of India.
However, India hasn't been as successful as China in rapid development without it affecting cultural values. China has pretty swiftly achieved modernization without westernization which I think was one of the sub-goals of it's architect: Deng Xiaoping who laid the foundations of the same in the 1980's.
Our equivalent of Deng was unfortunately only a brilliant economist, so his 1991 reforms were limited to economic reforms with no social safeguards to help avoid Westernization.
As such, India right now is in a massive state of flux. There are Indians abroad similar to the one's you had met who have siezed the opportunity given to them to massively elevate their quality of life. There are also Indian's abroad who left the country with a very specific goal of either: 1) bringing their family in the next decade or so or 2) secure enough money for an early retirement and return to India.
It really comes down to the type of mindset their parents valued, not the country they were born/raised in.
"Unlike in the West where the elderly dread the thought of being dependent on their children, the elderly in India expect to be dependent on their children. Eyebrows are raised if this equation is not seen in a family"
In most places with undeveloped third party social service family is your only option. If you have no family to watch after you, you perish miserably or put into some hellish institution running on absolute cheap.
For the lack of other options, family caretaking is typically presented as a virtue (just as GP does here). But it has its share of rarely mentioned horror stories with children and relatives… not doing adequate caretaking job with their parents to say least.
That's also a way of looking at it. I wouldn't agree with the part where you say "family caretaking is typically presented as a virtue" however. Being virtuous is synonymous with being honorable. If you see a parent taking care of their sick child would you say "how honorable"? Or is it simply what is expected of them to be considered a decent human being?
As long as you can provide good quality care, there isn't much of a moral difference how it's done. Just don't see how a trained professional changing vessels is worse than resentful daughter-in-law doing the same.
How was it smug in any way? I was trying to draw parallels in an attempt to understand your thought process.
You asserted that as long as the quality of the care is acceptable, the source shouldn't make too much of a difference. I tried to give an example that would meet these requirements and still be questionable and you completely shut down.
Well I gave you an example: childcare in nursery is widely accepted. You however got upset to hear a straightforward answer to a question expected to demonstrate your moral superiority.
Ok good we're on the same page then. So if the nursery was permanent and replaced the role of the parent completely, would that be moral?
Or to equate it more fairly, if a parent paid somebody to permanently take care of their children while they they visited them periodically, would that be as moral as putting their parents in a nursing home?
Oh, sure. Foster homes are a thing. Where children who would otherwise greatly suffer or disappear in "family-oriented" societies can live in reasonable safety and care.
There are parents who reject their children or even kill them: apparently infanticide in India is not uncommon. There are relatives who try getting rid of their inconveniencing elderly. You can't be unaware of it, these are plot devices in a number of Bollywood films and there are specific laws to deal just with that. In a country size of India, the number of people not receiving adequate care or outright abused has to be in millions. An independent safety net greatly improves their odds of survival and life expectancy.
Approximately noone is looking forward to watching after incontinent, or demented, or paralyzed patients while trying also to get on with daily life. It becomes a full time job very quick, and many simply have no proper means to do so. Lacking any other options, most people would do that however out of basic humanism, but it's not to say they find that process rewarding or they do any good job at that. Quietly hoping for timely death of the patient in their care while hating yourself for it isn't uncommon.
So again, for the lack of any alternatives you present the social order you live in as a virtue. But you can only make moral choice when you have any realistic choice at all.
I only ask that you don't let the plot devices of Bollywood films have a non-trivial influence on your world view.
The statement of yours that I was originally replying to was:
As long as you can provide good quality care, there isn't much of a moral difference how it's done. Just don't see how a trained professional changing vessels is worse than resentful daughter-in-law doing the same.[1]
The extended case I wanted to talk about was of a healthy, financially sound adult. Not kindergartens or extreme circumstances that lead to foster care. Say this adult wanted to put their 3-year old into an institution of permanent professional care. Would you find that to be the same as putting one's parents in an old folks home? Or is there some difference?
I am going to assume that you have children, because your entire tone changed when I brought up kids. If I'm wrong, please correct me. Would you be fine with putting your children in such an institution if you felt overwhelmed by the responsibility of child-rearing?
You keep deflecting from the original topic because you have nothing to say on my point, and are simple minded enough to think I don't see through this.
To your question: if I was an unfit parent, say an additct or abusive or schizophrenic, and maintained enough reflection to realize that, yes, absolutely. Otherwise there is no reason.
Now answer my question: are you really looking forward to wiping shit on an immobile incontinent patient for 15 years? Not asking if you would do that mind you, but if you dread thinking it.
The "immobile incontinent patient scenario" isn't too commonplace. In my family and most of the extended families of my friends, you stay with your parents for companionship and helping them out in day-to-day tasks if required. You don't wipe their shit for 15 years, they're still pretty able-bodied and independent.
What is confusing to me is your insistence to see the worst-case scenario and treat what is the last 3 months of their lives to the year-to-year scenario.
Please don't call me simple minded when I'm trying to be civil.
Now, back to your reply. You're saying that for you to put your child in professional care you would have to be an addict or abusive or schizophrenic. However, these don't seem to be preconditions for putting your parents in professional care. So going back to the statement I was focusing on:
As long as you can provide good quality care, there isn't much of a moral difference how it's done.[1]
Is it fair to say that you feel this is true for one's parents but not for one's children?
You keep dropping the second sentence of my reply to keep arguing your strawman:
Just don't see how a trained professional changing vessels is worse than resentful daughter-in-law doing the same. [1]
Noone puts their folks to elders home just for fun of it, I thought that much is clear. The freaking article we discuss here describes demented, incontinent elderly, yet you prefer to ingore the context.
Regarding "unrealistic" scenarios, I know people who lived through what I described (and worse).
Now, you did not answer my question, which is outright rude. I am not in an interrogation here, questions go both ways. Now of course I know your answer already, and it's uncomfortable enough for you to keep deflecting. But if you are unwilling to face it, this conversation is over.
This is the first time I dropped the second sentence. I've only quoted it twice and I quoted it fully the first time.
I tried to answer your question by trying to inform you that the scenario your painting is incredibly, incredibly unrealistic.
I also feel that the context of the argument changes when you take into consideration what my top-most statement was.
I was expressing disbelief at the prevalence of old-age homes in western civilization. I took the article as a way to express that sentiment.
I acknowledge that dementia can be rough, and even I have had one or two extended family members who have gone through the same. My own grandfather passed away from Alzheimer's and yes, the last year was difficult. I'm not uncomfortable to face the question. What is a hypothetical to you was a brief reality to me. I'm just trying to make you see things from a different perspective.
All I was trying to do was to understand what I felt was a dissonance in your world view w.r.t how we treat our children vs. how we treat our parents with regards to professional care. That's all.
EDIT: The only reason I omitted the daughter-in-law statement is because it paints you in a poor light if you think that it's her duty to take care of aging in-laws. It came off as a bit sexist and I didn't want to derail the conversation.
Daughter-in-law often ends up tending to bodily needs of husbands ailing mother. Super common thing in "family oriented" societies as touching body parts of opposite sex tends to be a taboo.
You know that though, and your edit serves no other function than an insult. So go screw yourself.
I think, you are romanticizing a very painful aspect of life, to which there are no clear answers. As some where later in the thread, your argument is more about assigning virtue to need(because of not enough options).
Another place you mention daughter-in-law caring for the elders. Totally ignoring the sexist nature of that proposition. Also in reality that whole in-laws under the same roof, has its own set of complications. Often resulting in a very unhealthy dynamic. When children also get affected in the politics of the grown ups.
I think, this is a very complicated and painful problem. For that no universally good solution exists. Its a problem worth solving though, anywhere in the world.
I didn't mention daughter in laws in any of my comments. You might be confusing the replies together. Your entire statement really seems to be a very pessimistic take that is certainly a possibility but not commonplace.
There are challenges in taking care of your in laws but raising a child is easily a more painful and arduous task, so it's not very extreme in the larger scale of things.
Also, I didn't bring up virtue. One of the other commenters is fixated on me demonstrating moral superiority so I'm trying to speak to only that person w.r.t. virtue.
I originally replied to that commenter with a statement that implies that there is literally zero virtue in taking care of your parents in India. Nobody praises you or holds you in higher esteem for doing so over here.
Thank you for putting into words the thoughts that I have had for quite some time. The "panicking" I experience is also similar, more accurately described as horror-fueled panic.
A good snippet to come back to whenever one needs to be humbled:
Euler's work touched upon so many fields that he is often the earliest written reference on a given matter. In an effort to avoid naming everything after Euler, some discoveries and theorems are attributed to the first person to have proved them after Euler.
There’s some of the same phenomenon going on with Gauss, as well. Not coincidentally, Gauss was probably the last person who truly understood all of mathematics, as it was known in his time.
If you think that might make you humbled, then consider that he was completely blind at the end of his life and he was still coming up with new discoveries and conversing with other mathematicians via scribes.
~> p | egrep 'Euler[-–][^ ]+' | sort
Euler–Bernoulli beam equation, a fourth-order ODE concerning the elasticity of structural beams.
Euler–Cauchy equation, a linear equidimensional second-order ODEs with variable coefficients. Its second-order version can emerge from Laplace equation in polar coordinates.
Euler–Fermat theorem, that aφ(m) ≡ 1 (mod m) whenever a is coprime to m, and φ is Euler's totient function
Euler–Fokker genus
Euler–Lagrange equation, a second-order ODE emerging from minimization problems in calculus of variations.
Euler–Lotka equation, a characteristic equation employed in mathematical demography
Euler–Maclaurin formula (Euler's summation formula) relating integrals to sums
Euler–Mascheroni constant, γ ≈ 0.5772, the limiting difference between the harmonic series and the natural logarithm.
Euler–Poisson–Darboux equation, a second-order PDE playing important role in solving the wave equation.
Euler–Rodrigues formula describing the rotation of a vector in three dimensions
Euler–Tricomi equation – a second-order PDE emerging from Euler conservation equations.
HN generates emotional friction[1], is filled with shallow but clever sounding dismissals[2] and is filled with low quality discussions on high quality articles[3].
I agree. I would argue that I get a lot more value out of the comments than than the linked content.
The only major issue I have with the comments on HN is that early ones get a lot more upvotes, causing later--but just as valid--points of view to be lost.
When a discussion is interesting enough for me to want to follow it, I will search the page for "minutes ago" to find the newest posts. It might be nice if new posts were highlighted for some amount of time.
I have a user script for that [1]. If you visited a story's comments before, it will highlight new comments and can auto-collapse threads without new comments. Otherwise, it gives you a slider you can use to highlight the X most recent comments.
I have to agree. The rules can seem a little ridiculous and somewhat arbitrary seeming here sometimes, but i have to admit, HN probably has the highest level of discourse on most articles I read here, sometimes better than the articles themselves, than most other sites i tend to browse. I read with showdead on and i find sometimes it's somewhat insightful to read a dead comment and figure out why. Sometimes they're completely infactual, spammy or rude but other times it's hard to figure out why.
Above all though, I learn things here all the time. There's some really knowlegeable people here and the range of topics that gets covered is more diverse than you might think.
I can't remember exactly when, a few weeks ago at least, i remember seeing an article about brewing tea or something on here and there was an extremely in depth discussion on the subtlties of tea and effects of brewing. There was some chemistry thrown in there and some oddly specific knowledge. It was great. I don't think i've ever learned so much from a discussion on tea before.
Also, just some of the personal anectodes and life stories i've read here really blow me away sometimes.
I've browsed a lot of different sites, the community of people here seem to be unlike most other sites, even similar ones.
There's a fairly high level of snobbishness and disconnect from some oddly ordinary aspects of life...and honestly sometimes I worry this site is full of sociopaths....
But, it's a pretty cool community of people that reminds me of the days of the old internet in ways that a lot of other sites don't. I never really feel like I'm wasting time even reading comments here, because the amount of accumulated knowledge and experience just seems to be a lot higher than pretty much anywhere else I browse regularly.
It seems familiar. That was the most recent I could find. I'm honestly not too sure. That discussion's pretty good too if it's mot the same one. There were a few articles about tea that came up in my search.
