Britain is currently getting asked to pay £18Trillion in reparations for slavery, when it is struggling to find £20billion in the upcoming budget to fund the black hole in the public finances, so you might be correct.

as a former developer at a marketing agency, that ain't happening

Any chance you have a write up on this?

Sorry for the late reply, but here is a write up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22290466

Thanks! Great little read, thinking about trying out something similar.

Agreed, or if you're not in the mood just fast forward a wee bit

My answer to this problem has been the plugin Wordfence. It's primary feature is a WAF whose rules update continuously and intercepts every request. Having worked at several agencies I've seen and inherited many hacked sites. I have never had a site be infected with a clean install using Wordfence. knocks on wood

Same here. WordFence has been a god-send. My agency offers fully custom sites, WordPress sites, and even builds on sites like Squarespace for people and I always differentiate them for clients. If it's a site that we'll end up managing, I always install WordFence and the developer license for it is incredibly reasonably priced. It's a 100% recommend from me for anyone considering it.

I use Wordfence and always thought it was good. But good to know that a lot of others find value in it too. Btw, looks like wordfence is getting killed with all the traffic from HN. Hopefully the increased sales will make it up to them :)

Wow. Founder here. Thank you!

I'm a lone developer in a marketing agency. I manage hundreds of WordPress sites. Some are my own work, many are not. As someone who has inherited more than his fair share of compromised sites, thank YOU! WordFence is the immediate fix for 99% of the hacks I see. It stops malicious activity in its tracks until I can patch the issues. There are simply no other plugins even close to the quality of WordFence.

Well thank you. I'm a big fan of your newsletter as well :)

It's a nice feature when used appropriately. Article says at the bottom in bold: "It’s a nice-to-know feature, good for impressing others, but my suggestion is to use this only if it’s the clearest way to express your concepts."

So far in the wild I've mostly seen it being used to confuse. Like in the very first part of the TestCafe documentaion (https://github.com/DevExpress/testcafe#creating-the-test):

    fixture `Getting Started`// declare the fixture
      .page `https://devexpress.github.io/testcafe/example`;  // specify the start page


    //then create a test and place your code there
    test('My first test', async t => {
      await t
        .typeText('#developer-name', 'John Smith')
        .click('#submit-button')
      // ...
    });

I spent ages going through their docs trying to find out why they specify their two main functions differently (`fixture` using tagged templates and `test` as a regular functions). In the docs it mentions "doesn't matter which way you do it". It's just there to confuse / impress.

It's a nice feature, when used for template strings. Looking at the library, it just looks awkward:

  sq.from`book`
    .return`distinct author`
    .where({ genre: 'Fantasy' })
    .where({ language: 'French' })

I can already hear the questions:

"Why do some functions require parenthesis and some don't?" "When do I need to use parenthesis?"

It's just unnecessarily confusing.

You're framing this as a question of syntax preference, but actually the whole point of template tags is to cater to a very specific need: the ability to sanitize an interpolated value.

In this specific example, let's say you have:

    sql.from`book`.return`distinct ${field}`

You don't want a sql injection to occur if somehow `field = 'author'; drop table book; --` or similar.

With a plain function call, the library would have no way of knowing what to sanitize.

    sql.from('book').return(`distinct ${field}`) // hello security hole

And without template tags, the API would arguably look more complex, and require the user to discover/learn an ad-hoc interpolation DSL:

    sql.from('book').return('distinct ${field}', {field})

You can still target the template tag's raw API requirements without the syntax (though you'd lose readability with multiple interpolations):

    sql.from('book').return(['distinct'], field)

Fair enough. I primarily use it for GraphQL queries. Each of my queries exist in a file queryName.jsx. Those files consist of the following code:

  import gql from 'graphql-tag';
  
  export default gql`
    query Blah($var: VarType!) {
      blah(var: $var) {
        id
        etc
      }
    }
  `;

I like it. Not confusing to me or anyone on my team. To each their own.

Using AWS CodePipeline (Github -> AWS CodeBuild -> AWS CodeDeploy). It works nicely with all of our AWS resources. Looking to migrate to Kubernetes.

I am a huge Grateful Dead fan (I don't call myself a dead head because I was 9 when Jerry died, I never saw them play.) But I always loved John Perry Barlow's songs. My old band used to cover The Music Never Stopped and Cassidy, and my all time favorite dead song is Throwing Stones.

I didn't even know he was a big influencer in tech until I saw him appear on the Colbert Report representing the EFF.

My JPB story is short and relatively meaningless, but back when I first signed up for twitter I just followed a bunch of famous people and would every now and then attempt to engage them. The only one that ever replied back to me was John Perry Barlow, and it made my week. I had interfaced with true greatness. Rest in peace, John!

Love it. Might want to update the meta tags to remove the mention of the "preact-boilerplate." That's some prime real estate for describing your site when sharing it socially.

Ha, thanks - done now

It is honestly worth your while to pay off your mortgage as soon as humanly possible.

This is an oversimplification. The average household has several kinds of debt, and generally debt should be paid down in descending order of interest rate.

More significantly, investment income opportunities need to have their interest rate (or equivalent) assessed. For example, in the past 12 months, the DIA has risen 18%. Thus, if 12 months ago I had money to spare, it would have been better to put the money into DIA rather than make an extra principal payment on the mortgage, unless my mortgage is 18% or more.

With the exception of bonds and CDs, it's not possible to know the investment growth in advance, so that creates some risk of course.

Further, because of the amortization schedule, applying that extra principal payment only shaves off the last month of the amortization schedule, which is the smallest fraction of interest of all payments.

One would still be better off investing that money in something until that last month, then apply the payment to save the very small amount of interest.

This assumes the mortgage is like most (all?) mortgages out there that follow an amortization schedule -- which are unlike credit cards or student loans, where early payments have a big benefit.

Not necessarily – interest rates are exceptionally low in places. My own mortgage is around the 1% mark – it's more efficient to invest the money that would otherwise be used to pay it off.

(That's not to say that there are no other reasons to pay off the mortgage – owning a home outright is a great security to have.)

1% is incredibly low. Where do you live, when did you take out the loan, and what are the terms? According to this[1] chart, the lowest 30 year mortgage rate in the past 40 years was about 3.5%. I'm curious how you got a loan with such a low rate.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=NUh

The UK. The mortgage market is different; terms are rarely 30 years, but rather homes are often refinanced every 2-5 years for a fixed mortgage rate, which reverts to a higher variable rate after that period.

Of course, this means that if interest rates suddenly spike then my mortgage payment will go up. But it does mean that in the short term it would not make sense to pay more off.

In Sweden the interest rates are around 1% (I don't know where the OP is from, just giving some context). I think the average is around 1.5% for all home owners and it's not unheard of for people with good jobs and not too big mortgages to have interest rates at the 0.5-0.75% mark.

This just isn't always the case, as others have said. Particularly with interest rates as low as they have been, it's often completely rational to pay off your mortgage as slow as you can.

Also, you might not want all your money tied up in your mortgage: Buying a second home, too much risk for your taste in real estate market, etc.

Besides investing in something with a better rate like others have said, you can also buy a boat and enjoy it while you're young then pay for it later when your salary is higher - even if it only grew to match inflation, that cancels out part of the mortgage interest.