NullInvictus

I think the quality of a language for shell scripting is often secondary. What’s of greater significance is where it is at. I.e., does it have it already installed? The answer with Linux and Bash is almost always “yes”. Not so with ruby.

The moment you start asking the user to install things, you’ve opened up the possibility for writing a program rather than a shell script. The lifecycle of a piece of software is almost always one of growing responsibility. This cycle is devastating when it happens to shell scripts. What was once a simple script slowly becomes creaking mass of untestable, poorly understood code playing in the traffic of swimming environments (which grep you got, buddy?).

I guess I’m saying that once you open up the possibility of writing a program, you generally take that option and are usually happier for it. In the “write a program” world, ruby is still good, but it becomes a far harder question to answer whether ruby is still the right choice. There are a lot of languages with a lot of features engineers like.

Notably Diamine’s Registrar Ink and Rohrer & Klingner’s Eisen-Gallus-Tinte inks are relatively easy brands of iron gall ink to acquire and the modern formulas are less harsh and useable in fountain pens.

They’re nice in that they’re naturally waterproof inks. They’re a bit on the dry side though in terms of flow.

I’m not really excited about this; Meta has no strong incentive to be a long term good neighbor in the fediverse, but plenty of incentive to engage in poor behavior. No matter how sincere or well meaning leadership is now, a quarterly loss or stagnant profit will eventually push them to turn to some market capture or embrace, extend, extinguish behavior.

I’m not the only one who feels this way. A number of instances are prepping to partially or fully block Threads from the get-go.

Even without Meta, I’m not excited for another 1M+ instance. My experience is that the larger an instance is, the worse it is. Less community, worse moderation, more bad actors hiding in plain sight. You just can’t toss people into a generalist million people scrum and expect them to form a digital community.

If you’re on mastodon.social, you’re not experiencing the best of the fediverse IMO. Find a small instance of your interest (<500 people) and interact with the local timeline. People on my instance recognize me, make in jokes, I chat with the admin and mods, it’s like actual digital neighborhood. It’s really the closest we’ve gotten back to forums and I don’t think dumping a bucket of FAANG-style corporate water on it is the answer.

You have to have been raised pretty sweetly to not have known this kind of racketeering was a 'thing' for a very long time. Pressure to hire cops is rampant. 'rent-a-cop' is not aimed at the fact that security companies apply aggressive mimicry to their people, but that these people are themselves often off-duty cops. Security companies are strongly "encouraged" to hire off-duty cops, and find themselves left out to dry or otherwise 'convinced' if they try to resist.

Before you add 'Why don't [you|they] do...' responses, recognize for a moment that the police in the U.S. are largely out of control, have undue control of local government and politics, and have an ideology that enforces self-righteousness and an 'enemy at the gates' siege mentality, and oh yeah, are able to apply violence at a level unmatched in society. These are not polite people, and the way one 'deals' with them has far more in common with radical militias rather than state bureaucrats. If you haven't encountered that, you're just lucky enough to have never threatened their interests.

Short of something within a few hundred feet of Bezo's desk being actually on fire, AWS's health page never seems to actually report issues.

My read as well.

I write shell-scripts when the current tools solve the problem easily. I distribute shell scripts to colleagues (never customers) only when I absolutely do not want to install extra software on their system.

I avoid awk and perl because if I'm going to introduce a second language to a tool, I'm not going to pick the niche ones everyone only learns opportunistically if at all. At that point I'd rather pick something my colleagues are deeply familiar with.

And on a small level, writing these little binaries that truly do one thing and do it well and that I understand intimately is a private joy.

Is the story of how the paper was stood up documented anywhere?

Our concern would be that a professional educator would not only work for the district, but the district would also be their landlord

Employer:

* we don't want to wages in an amount to let the worker afford healthcare on his own, so we'll just tie the worker's health-insurance to his job.

* We don't want to pay wages in an amount that would let the worker afford housing on his own, so we'll tie the worker's housing to his job.

* Next step: We don't want to pay wages in an amount to let the worker afford necessities on his own, so we'll create a company store where he'll be able to buy things with our new innovative wage/credit scheme that will tie necessities to his job.

The implementation of this idea is terrible, one that will hold a further Damocles sword over the laborers, and if widely implemented, will absolutely be used against workers in future labor-disputes. We already have the history to show that. Your employer should not control your access to life-necessities.

Folks recommend the really cheap platinum preppy pens, but be warned they are super scratchy.

The reason people recommend the platinum is that its cheap and its cap system is especially good for avoiding dry-out. To me, the platinum preppy feels like a rounded pencil. I think its a good pen, but my reservation is that the plastic is a bit brittle on the preppy. I'd personally probably go with the Pilot Kakuno, or the more expensive Platinum prefonte, or if you're really worried about costs, the interesting and fraught world of Chinese fountain pens

I would go a size up from what you normally prefer wrt to nib (if you are new, try M as F and EF are extremely scratchy IMHO).

This is a feature of all the Japanese pens - they tend to have a finer grind. The European and other pens (e.g., Lamy) are about what you expect.

Finally, I don't love the metropolitan. Feels great in the hand but I always find myself reaching for the smooth writing I get from my Eco.

The Metropolitan is a love-or-hate pen for some people, due to hand feel. I personally like it. If you can hold one, that'd be best. I think a couple of things make the Metro a better beginning pen than the Eco, if you like how it feels in your hand. It's cheaper; its got a metal body and cap (can be banged around), its got better QC (The first Eco I was given had the infamous 'barrel crack'. The second just flat didn't write. I'm a bit miffed at the brand), It can take cartridges or its included converter-sac, and it is by far one of the easiest pens to tear down and clean. The Eco can be taken apart with its special wrench too, but people commonly crack it in the process.

I just wish pilot sold the nibs separately for repair, like Lamy does, of TWSBI does with their more expensive pens.

For the crowd around here: I'd also say that one of the joys of a fountain pen is that you can tune, smooth, and even grind your own nibs if you're that adventurous.

Commenting with the others: I'm a left-handed writer and an avid fountain pen user. It isn't so bad.

The best thing I can say is: try to learn to write under the line (under-hand) as opposed to hookwriting or sidewriting. Those make things pretty tough. If not, there are things you can try: Prefer extra-fine (EF) or fine (F) nibbed pens. Private Reserve and Noodler's make some fast-drying ink. This combo will often allow the ink to dry faster than your hand can get to it.

It’s just Whataboutism. What the DNC did or did not do is entirely irrelevant to the case, because the DNC is not who was standing before the grand jury.

“You could pin this on a large percentage of politicians”. Yes, please. It will in fact be good for the country. I don’t care what party they come from.

At a previous company I had a chance to sit down and talk with python developers across a number of groups, and a fun question was asked: Imagine Python 4 is another large breaking change on the scale of 2 to 3. What feature makes it worth it to you?

The most common and enthusiastic answer was: Packaging and distribution.

I think to say that "large numbers of python developers think packaging is bad and should be fixed" undersells the current sentiment. I think there are large numbers of python developers with boots on the ground who are _utterly sick to death_ of the problem and willing to accept drastic measures resulting inconsiderable suffering if just means it means the issue goes away. People are in other words, getting rather desperate and discontent.

Upstream needs to do a little soul searching and come to an understanding that whatever ideological rock they're chained to that is preventing some solution from emerging has a high chance of not being moored in the needs of reality.

EU is frozen and claim so many people will die in Europe due to high energy prices.

This complaint is one that (jokingly) makes me ask if you're new around here. the Economist is almost pathologically pessimist. I sometimes think they should call themselves _The Cassandra_, as they are constantly forecasting doom over every scenario.

I enjoy how they summarize background information and the candor of their analysis, but when it gets time to make long-term predictions I tune them out because they're about 0-50 on the number of times I should have been walking knee deep through rivers of bodies and economic collapse.

Pair it with the fact that by-and-by, apartments are extremely expensive, and in short supply, so that service jobs are often not near where people are forced to live, and that you have to pair the cost of a car with the cost of gas, and rent. Public transit is a joke, a hollow underfunded mess in most cities.

It is absolutely brutal out there, and the response is inhumane.

I don't want to discredit the experience of grad students. I've known more than a few Grad students (anecdote warning), and they are also stuck in a special kind of hell. As the article mentions, they often can't seek other employment, so they're stuck with what the university pays. But even if they could, they can't - universities may stipulate that they expect X number of hours a week, but that's a joke. Every task given over to graduate students comes with piles of mandatory overtime under crap conditions that are unpaid.

The university may talk about 'valuable experience that will pay dividends' (conveniently not paid out by the university), but grad students often deal with losing proof of that experience when their work or ideas appear under the byline of their advisor. What do you do? Your relationship with your advisor is crucial to graduating.

Suffer all that, and _maybe_ you'll get your PhD. I've met a couple of phD students who dropped out simply because their advisors were intolerable, or really disinterested in any part of the advising process except squeezing work from their student workers.

Looking from the outside in, there's a weird sorta hazing elitist mindset going on. Professors say, "My PhD program sucked, so now I'm going to make it suck for you. Can't hack it? Well, you probably don't 'belong'".

but they got to releasing v1 and then seemingly never really developed it any further.

Except for the core pieces, this is a distressing description of most google products.

Every COVID story here is an interesting little glimpse into how a seemingly normal forum has their latent political views exploited into adopting a conspiracy theory, re: anti-vaccine rhetoric. It becomes a little more extreme every day.

This study has nothing to do with the vaccine, and yet this is what HN clamors for. I wonder how many people here understand what kind of ride they're being taken for.

After all, any law which is enforced by fines is a law solely for the poor.

The anti-work philosophy is not anti-labor. I think anyone of sense can acknowledge that energy needs to be put into the system in order to produce the necessities of life. Rather, the ideology is about allowing people to focus on the kinds of labor which brings value and meaning the community and the ones doing it. It's about eliminating 'bullshit' work, work which does not generate anything other than inane products, stock values and tools to do more of the same. Much of the work around the software industry focuses on this kind of 'bullshit' work.

Possibilities: Inexperienced young people are made to commit hard and fast to a career path. Once locked in, this choice (in the US at least) often comes with a large financial burden and time. Support is not there to pivot. Immediately after you leave (trade, academic institutions), the culture sets to weighing you down with more debt. By the time you extract yourself from that, it's still hard to pivot because now you're dealing with Ageism and sunk cost (will you recover this productivity and still put enough away to retire?). Even if you decide to bridge that gap, society provides you with absolutely no safety net. The punishment from making the wrong choice as a young dumb kid are harsh.

The "Endless possibilities" is part of the depressing trap. They're _there_, but they're so far out of reach and dangerous that unless you happen to live a charmed life with a deep-pocketed safety net, the risk-reward just doesn't make sense. This is why many in the US want tax-sponsored education and single-payer healthcare, so they can make these pivots and find happiness without having to retire at 80.

On being forced: There is really no sane way to disengage with exchanging labor. Say that I want to drop out and entirely disconnect myself. Say I fully agree to reject the products of society, be alone even unto death, and be self-sufficient. I can't buy a piece of land and sit on it. Eventually the Tax Man will come for me, and if I don't pay, he will take my land, with violence if need be. I cannot go hide in the woods. That land is the property of another or of the government - I will be chased by law enforcement and federal agents. I can't even just ghost through cities who are growing increasingly hostile to homeless populations. The system is powered by violence and coercion, and your only choice is to exchange labor for money. This could be a fair exchange if it lived up to promises. There is a rate where exchanging freedoms for perks makes sense. but a lot of people play entirely by the rules, do everything right, and still end up miserable, trapped and broken.

So yeah, it's forced. If you can't sit back and live on generational wealth or rent on your assets, every job you've ever taken has implicit threat of force behind it. You can make bad-faith arguments about the existence of choice, but choice is an illusion unless the choices presented have a reality where taking that choice makes sense. Cake or Death - what kind of sane person chooses death over cake?

I don't think anti-work is a pit of hopelessness. It's actually far more idealistic in its view that _the pieces are there_ and there are alternatives. Whether you believe that or not is really up you. That this briefly made it on to Hackernews surprised me - Hackernews continues to largely reflect the California Ideology, something that doesn't tend to breed a lot of solidarity outside of its own professions.

Not at all surprised. This is pretty much the fate of all "minimalistic" devices like this (the freewrite comes to mind as well). Minimal just means that they reserve the right to put necessary features behind subscription walls.

What this also means long term is that any openness of the device is under a Damocles sword and will be actively expanded except where GPL demands it. The benefit of openness does not appear directly in a spreadsheet like a subscription service does, and if people start trying to supercede the subscription service, they will attack it.

Or just not continue it into the next iteration.

Worse, many firms are put off by juniors for entirely preventable reasons. In their minds, juniors are undesirable because the moment they are trained up, they tend to jump ship for senior positions elsewhere. Why train your competition, right?

The reason they jump ship is because the firm refuses to re-evaluate them for what they are worth, and keeps them on work meant to free up the company's existing senior staff (i.e., dead-end grunt-work that results in burnout). If you, as a junior developer, want to be re-valued, you need to jump ship.

This creates a feedback loop. Companies view juniors as a cheaper developer you _might_ get 2 years of low-cost work out of (after training) before they'll leave, creating a self fulfilling prophecy.

I've watched (and experienced) this loop multiple times. It's utterly baffling how firms would rather go through the cost and drain of finding and replacing talent rather than re-evaluate and pay their existing, proven talent what they are worth on the open market.

Workers would rather not move around. Workers would rather have a stable position in a job they like, in a community where they can purchase a home and build lives and/or families. Once you get past 35, playing the required musical-chairs needed to advance your career is a real drag. It does not need to be this way.

I think Gladwell cares about history, and he cares about story, but if (as is often the case in history) he has to choose one at the expense of the other, it is going to be _story_ that he chooses every single time.

As an overly broad generalization, Gladwell is at heart a journalist, not a historian (even though he has a bachelor's in history). I enjoy listening to Revisionist history and reading some of his books, because some things in history are revealed by trying to form some kind of narrative (e.g., Historical Materialism), but he's not telling you history. He's forming a story from history. But I think his work is often an excellent stepping off point to real history texts, and it sometimes gets you to think about the second-order effect of things (his episode on Brown v. Board was extremely interesting).

Ironically the Boston Tea Party episode was also the one that broke me and made me bring a lot more grains of salt to my experience of his work. I think it's one of his worst episodes, and one where he tips his hand a little too far and breaks the illusion for anyone who has even casually read any serious works on the period. It's a _piece_ as you said, but it's an incredible oversimplification.

It wouldn't surprise me. In many genres, I'm not sure there is a huge difference in the product put out by traditional publishers vs. that put out by direct publishing.

I own a lot of books, and a sizable chunk is fiction. Maybe I'm just picking up the best, but it feels like the freely published ones have the same amount of advertising, editing, and type-checking as the traditionally published ones.

Which is to say - absolutely none. It feels like in many cases, traditional publishing has decided to play the same numbers-game as the self-publishers and have given up on adding quality after they receive the manuscript. Ironically this may be why they're receding under the waves. Commodities is a hard place to get rich.

truck drivers are being tracked routinely and nobody makes a big fuss about that.

I know a number of truck drivers and they _hate_ it. Routing software is imperfect, accidents happen that have to be detoured, and every detour is another grilling by management who is staring you down like you're an inbred imbecile and asking "Why did you deviate?" They often well know why, but the procedure is clear. You just don't hear about it from truckers because the job is mercurial - turnover is high because the conditions suck, and its a lower item in a laundry list of grievances that truckers have.

And if I'm frank; A lot of people don't hear about it on this forum because they move in a different economic circle.

Being constantly overwatched and second-guessed is demeaning. It ruins work-place dignity, ensures there is no sense of trust between labor and leadership, and removes any feelings of agency from the laborer. As with any data-collecting system, it will also be relentlessly gamed.

Worse, you can have your cake and eat it too. You almost never need momentary data like this to check-and-balance your workplace. Why track drivers relentlessly when you can do statistical data analysis on order completion, fuel consumption, route times, and other models that allow you to average out all the chaos?

Results will speak for themselves, relationships will pay off. The solution to this 'problem' already exists, it's engaging with your workforce and focusing on results. It is bad. It's dehumanization in the workplace. The system worked just fine when people clocked in, clocked out, and the manager looked and said, "Yep, that hall is clean."

I wouldn't accept a keylogger, or strict grilling of my web history. I wouldn't accept being sleuthed on by my manager either. Humans deserve a base level of dignity in the work-place.

Trump can still write whatever he wants. He can still publish through the White House press. He can contact press, or communicate as American Presidents have always done. He is not being forcibly gagged as a whole. He has freedom to speak, just not where he pleases.

I feel like people are conflating "Freedom of Speech" with the "Freedom of Platform". This is an important difference. If I send a letter to Bloomberg or The New York Times, no one would find it surprising or wrong when they decided to not publish it (for ANY reason). If I violate their commenter section policies, they remove it and no one blinks. They decide what's on their platform without answer.

I am not against the idea of governments guaranteeing certain freedoms and access to platforms, but they currently do not exist as far as I understand. Saying some right has been newly violated is somewhat silly, especially given that the subject in question is a member of a political party who has fought tooth-and-nail to preserve this exact right for businesses -- to arbitrarily chose who they do business with. That is what we're contending with.

TL;DR: The discussion needs to be recentered.

Maybe it's a vast over-simplification as the article notes, but you cannot get away from the fact that what Mishima did was carry out a right-wing reactionary attempt to incite a military coup against a democratically elected government over what was essentially a culture war.

The kind of person who looks romantically at that disgusts me. we need a Mishima? By all means, be the first to spill your guts and call for a violent military overthrow because radical violence is the answer to the culture-war not going your way. I'm sure the Nazis will be far less willing than the Paris Commune to hijack Zoom, Netflix, Uber Eats and future products of Big Data and AI to keep you singing the party's tune. The only kind of people who look romantically at that kind of violence are the ones who feel it will never touch them, who are so safe they can't imagine the suffering. I'm sure the author feels happy giving Nouveau-Mishima the thumbs up because he tacitly thinks he'll be on the last flight out to watch the fireworks from the safety of a Paris cafe.

Lets say the 'shock' against this 'Last Man' isn't a call from the author for violence and political revolution because the Culture War isn't breaking his way. What's the Nouveau-Mishima supposed to do here? Besides some old man grumbling about "them d*mn kids and their nebulous and scary AI" it's not really identified what exactly we're being complacent in. I'm afraid this feels like more angry impotent pot-stirring mixed with a bit of rehabilitation.

The conservative's "Last Man" seems to come and go every century unabated, and with it the reactionary conservative backlash that oddly only ever seems to seek to turn back the clock a decade or two. We're always so arrogant in thinking that the present is so different than the past.

The sentiment that the world will ever be devoid of struggle to me is naive. The fear of the "fall of struggle" is like fear of the "rise of productivity". We all thought that the rise in productivity would mean less work and thus laziness; instead productivity is sky-high and we're all working ourselves to death. More productivity just means more opportunity for work. Likewise, People are naturally tuned to find struggle and risk, and they will redefine their selves and situations until they have it. Free of our old burdens, we'll just find new vaster ones. If you need the Noble Savage stuff to create art, wisdom, or whatever other product your spoiled mind think society has to produce to have 'worth', it's gonna be there, I promise.

What is it?

I feel like I ask this question for a lot of sites that launch on HN and have to work really hard to find a satisfactory answer. It's like marketing thinks that if I know what I'm dealing with, I'll walk away.

Any one have an insight on why this happens so frequently?

This also occurs a lot on posts for wider consumption that treats the audience like they're intimately familiar with the product.

I think a lot of people will read 'python malware' and assume packages; that's not what this is about.

A lot of exploits are two-stage. Stage one is usually the vulnerability, usually written in C given the low-level and tightly controlled instructions required. The exploit breaks security to run an executable or otherwise gain control. Stage two is usually downloading a python executable to grab the goods.

There's nothing especially sinister about the selection of Python for this case over other interpreted languages. Malware authors are just regular developers - they don't want to spend hours trying to hack together a C binary to dump a database when six lines of Python will do it. Python just runs on a lot of platforms, has a lot of mature drop-in libraries, and decent documentation. They use it for the same reason we use it.

The article just makes it sound like malware developers are using modern packaging tools to turn that two-stage exploit into a single-stage. That doesn't strike me as particularly surprising. Teams tend to gravitate towards specializing in one tool when they can. I'd obviously prefer to write a bunch of python than do the same in C, when performance isn't a huge concern (It's the other guy's CPU, after all).

Just seems like a minor observation, rather than some doom trend.

If you don't want to spend 30+ minutes a pop sterilizing everything, you can always go the homebrewer's route and pick up a bottle of Starsan, a food-grade sanitizer.

A bottle lasts for quite some time, and if you make the solution with distilled water, its shelf-life is quite a bit longer. When you want to sanitize something, just throw the dilution into a spray bottle and spray down your containers and wait for 30 seconds - no rinse needed.

Just a thought to save time for those who might be doing this often.

used to be about cutting-edge reporting and has devolved to fluff pieces

This is the hole all the big news and media houses fell into.

I don't think a lot of these companies really understood what the transaction they were making when they pivoted or expanded. When an outlet like Vice peddles fluff, click-bait and controversy pieces, the transaction is not videos/articles for clicks.

With those fluff pieces, Vice and others were trading away trust and reputation, which is the core product of any information business. In a time where truth and trust are desperately needed, the big media houses should have been making bank (My god, in the information age, why can't the original information businesses make money?).

Instead they bankrupted their core product for quick cash because they accidentally equated their product (Trust) with what they were selling (advertisements), and that lowered the whole industry to the point where they have to share space with the likes of Infowars.

It's a classic example of Goodhart's Law.

Setting a goal of "Zero or Near" down times doesn't necessarily mean less down times, but it usually does mean politics, shell games and 'clever' bookkeeping by middle and lower management, all of which is clearly visible to the rank and file.

Before you had down times and customers wondering if they could trust you. After a goal of "Zero or Near", you still have "down times", and you still have customers wondering if they can trust you while they stare at a status page is clearly lying to them.

But now you have employees watching their managers lying to their bosses, and wondering why they shouldn't do the same. You have a fall in morale, because those pretty numbers usually come at the expense of the things on the "Our Values" page. But to the Suits the graphs look better, and that's the important bit.

This isn't how is always is or always goes, but I've seen it enough.