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Running a business means contact with people's opinions. Having your server fall over when you post it to Hacker News means contact with reality.

by kragen 11mo ago

monarchwadia 11mo ago
I suppose one could argue that both are equally real.
- kragen 11mo ago
  I remember one time at summer camp in the teen dorm I claimed that pain was an illusion, because it was subjective. A girl named Lisa picked up a wooden block and threw it at me. It hit my lip, which started bleeding, and she was immediately horrified at what she had done; but I had to acknowledge that subjective "reality" has an importance to me that objective reality does not.
  - tourmalinetaco 11mo ago
    Interestingly I had just re-watched the House episode with the CIPA patient in S3, and it touched on this if you squint. The girl, having CIPA, effectively can’t feel pain. She can’t even feel getting 2nd degree burns and it’s questionable if she even felt them poking around in her head or if she used that to escape (and fall down a 2nd story balcony). The only time she felt actual pain was seeing her mother relapse and be wheeled off for more surgery. She cannot feel what should objectively cause her pain, but because pain is a subjective experience she can’t. However, truly subjective pain, that is pain derived from emotional connection, is literally the worst pain she can feel.
    - kragen 11mo ago
      This is a very deep story. Thank you.
    - NebulaStorm456 11mo ago
      I think you will like this Capgras Syndrome story. https://youtu.be/dqBGzkz1oDU https://youtu.be/dqBGzkz1oDU The guy couldn't emotionally recognise his mother after seeing her and started calling her imposter. But when he heard her voice over telephone, he felt emotional connection and said the person on other end was indeed his mother. Emotional pathways provide salience information in conjunction with sensory pathways. Any disruption to emotional pathways can override even correct sensory data.
  - svieira 11mo ago
    She objectively caused you to transition to an objective state which you both experienced subjectively!
  - didibus 11mo ago
    Pain actually has a lot of objective parts to it. There are real chemical and mechanical processes involved. You could even argue the subjective part might be smaller than people think. Mindset can change the experience, but different people might just have different "pain functions" to begin with. Same idea with hunger and weight gain or loss. Hunger is a biological process. You can push through it, but people also experience it differently because their actual hunger mechanisms differ, not just because they "interpret" it differently.
    - kragen 11mo ago
      I don't care about the objective parts; the chemical and mechanical processes would have been exactly the same if it had been Lisa's lip that was bruised and bleeding instead of my own, or the lip of another boy halfway around the world, but it wouldn't have mattered to me in the same way.
j45 11mo ago
Contact with paying customers, or eyeballs who refuse to pay is reality. Contact with curious internet traffic crippling a non cloudflared webserver might not be.
- kragen 11mo ago
  Computers are fast now. You can serve five million hits a day with a webserver that's a shell script running from inetd. You don't need Cloudflare unless you're getting DDoSed.
  - crop_rotation 11mo ago
    I don't understand such comments. Obviously the people having trouble serving HN traffic have no clue what inetd is. Most of them might not even know about using varnish/nginx and that too is fine. It is good that internet is so accessible that you don't need to write shell script from inetd to express your opinions on your own domain and website. A random php running blog will be able to serve far less than 5M hits/day and that too is fine. Most people can't run curlftpfs too and it turned out to be fine
    - kragen 11mo ago
      Oh, I was using a shell script spawned from inetd as the lowest-tech, most primitive, worst-performance simple way of running a web server. A random PHP-running blog will easily handle tens of millions of hits a day unless you way overcomplicate it.
      - j45 11mo ago
        Millions of hits a day doesn't seem to be the correct metric for an HN front page traffic spike. Concurrent connections per second is likely much more relevant, and in that case, one can put the most basic proxy or cache in front of the webpage to help a great deal, if not Cloudflare.
        11mo ago

Running a business means contact with people's opinions. Having your server fall over when you post it to Hacker News means contact with reality.

by kragen 11mo ago

Running a business means contact with people's opinions. Having your server fall over when you post it to Hacker News means contact with reality.

monarchwadia 11mo ago

I suppose one could argue that both are equally real.

kragen 11mo ago
I remember one time at summer camp in the teen dorm I claimed that pain was an illusion, because it was subjective. A girl named Lisa picked up a wooden block and threw it at me. It hit my lip, which started bleeding, and she was immediately horrified at what she had done; but I had to acknowledge that subjective "reality" has an importance to me that objective reality does not.
- tourmalinetaco 11mo ago
  Interestingly I had just re-watched the House episode with the CIPA patient in S3, and it touched on this if you squint. The girl, having CIPA, effectively can’t feel pain. She can’t even feel getting 2nd degree burns and it’s questionable if she even felt them poking around in her head or if she used that to escape (and fall down a 2nd story balcony). The only time she felt actual pain was seeing her mother relapse and be wheeled off for more surgery. She cannot feel what should objectively cause her pain, but because pain is a subjective experience she can’t. However, truly subjective pain, that is pain derived from emotional connection, is literally the worst pain she can feel.
  - kragen 11mo ago
    This is a very deep story. Thank you.
  - NebulaStorm456 11mo ago
    I think you will like this Capgras Syndrome story. https://youtu.be/dqBGzkz1oDU https://youtu.be/dqBGzkz1oDU The guy couldn't emotionally recognise his mother after seeing her and started calling her imposter. But when he heard her voice over telephone, he felt emotional connection and said the person on other end was indeed his mother. Emotional pathways provide salience information in conjunction with sensory pathways. Any disruption to emotional pathways can override even correct sensory data.
- svieira 11mo ago
  She objectively caused you to transition to an objective state which you both experienced subjectively!
- didibus 11mo ago
  Pain actually has a lot of objective parts to it. There are real chemical and mechanical processes involved. You could even argue the subjective part might be smaller than people think. Mindset can change the experience, but different people might just have different "pain functions" to begin with. Same idea with hunger and weight gain or loss. Hunger is a biological process. You can push through it, but people also experience it differently because their actual hunger mechanisms differ, not just because they "interpret" it differently.
  - kragen 11mo ago
    I don't care about the objective parts; the chemical and mechanical processes would have been exactly the same if it had been Lisa's lip that was bruised and bleeding instead of my own, or the lip of another boy halfway around the world, but it wouldn't have mattered to me in the same way.

j45 11mo ago

Contact with paying customers, or eyeballs who refuse to pay is reality. Contact with curious internet traffic crippling a non cloudflared webserver might not be.

kragen 11mo ago
Computers are fast now. You can serve five million hits a day with a webserver that's a shell script running from inetd. You don't need Cloudflare unless you're getting DDoSed.
- crop_rotation 11mo ago
  I don't understand such comments. Obviously the people having trouble serving HN traffic have no clue what inetd is. Most of them might not even know about using varnish/nginx and that too is fine. It is good that internet is so accessible that you don't need to write shell script from inetd to express your opinions on your own domain and website. A random php running blog will be able to serve far less than 5M hits/day and that too is fine. Most people can't run curlftpfs too and it turned out to be fine
  - kragen 11mo ago
    Oh, I was using a shell script spawned from inetd as the lowest-tech, most primitive, worst-performance simple way of running a web server. A random PHP-running blog will easily handle tens of millions of hits a day unless you way overcomplicate it.
    - j45 11mo ago
      Millions of hits a day doesn't seem to be the correct metric for an HN front page traffic spike. Concurrent connections per second is likely much more relevant, and in that case, one can put the most basic proxy or cache in front of the webpage to help a great deal, if not Cloudflare.
      - 11mo ago