devchix

What other reasonable choice exist for moving off VMWare for a small to medium size organization? Nutanix and Citrix is just as expensive, and another platform capture. ProxMox is not ready for Enterprise, even as it gains traction from hobbyists. I work with Splunk, and its price is approaching the point of being unaffordable for most organizations. The logging and observability market is consolidating toward BigCo and I'm afraid eventually there's not going to be any choice left, for small consumers and small players. The answer can't be "build your own" for every little adjacent tech you need to run a shop.

This seems bad, Splunk advises you to turn off THP due its small read/write characteristics: https://help.splunk.com/en/splunk-enterprise/release-notes-a...

Bad because as of Splunk 10.x, Splunk bundles postgres to integrate with their SOAR platform. Parenthetically, this practice of bundling stuff with Splunk is making vuln remediation a real pain. Splunk bundles its own python, mongod, and now postgres, instead of doing dependency checking. They're going to have to keep doing it as long as they release a .tgz and not just an RPM. The most recent postgres vuln is not fixed in Splunk.

I've been here since 2016. I have never, not even once, downvoted any comment on HN. Today I downvoted every single of that person's comment in this thread. That discourse does not deserve to be heard, much less to occupy attention and debate.

The W in Santiago, Chile, has a full-length floor-to-ceiling glass window in the shower, with the morning sun shining right in. Your other option is a bathtub set in the middle of the bedroom itself. Mercifully the WC has a door.

The human body lacks the enzyme to digest inulin, it passes through the gut and feeds the gut bacteria, which I guess is why it's labeled a pro-biotic? Jerusalem artichoke (the root of a sunflower, Jerusalem is a corruption of girasole) contains a high concentration of inulin. This tuber is usually found served at upper-end swanky restaurants. One year I found it at a farmer's market, bought a bunch and gleefully carted it home. It was rather delicious. Also, gas that would turn a cow inside out. Beware.

Cumin is an olfactory note in perfumery. When well-paired it adds a lovely and unusual note of spice. Example: The Different Company Rose Poivrée was created by Jean-Claude Ellena, the in-house perfumer for Hermes before the current one. It has notes of coriander and cumin, subtle but distinctively there. If you like it, you like it. Unfortunately for me, after a while it starts smelling like a stinking armpit. Indole is another compound use in perfumery, at intense concentration it smells like poop.

Odysseus is shown stringing his bow in The Return (2024). The challenge was to string the bow and shoot an arrow through 12 axes. I had no idea what this meant so I went looking. In fact, it's to shoot the arrow through the eye of the axes. What's the eye of an axe? It's the hole where the handle attaches to the blade.

https://www.sylvaspoon.com/blog/2020/1/16/anatomy-of-an-axe

From a logging perspective, there is a time when an event happens. The timestamp for that should be absolute. Then there's the interaction with the viewer of the event, the person looking at the log, and where he is. If the timestamp is absolute, the event can be translated to the viewer at his local time. If the event happens in a a different TZ, for example a sysadmin sitting in PST looking at a box at EST, it's easier to translate the sysadmin TZ env, and any other sysadmin's TZ anywhere in the world, than to fiddle with the timestamp of the original event. It's a minor irritation if you run your server in UTC, and you had to add or subtract the offset, eg. if you want your cron to run at 6PM EDT, you have to write the cron for 0 22 * * *. You also had to do this mental arithmetic when you look at your local system logs, activities at 22:00:00 seem suspicious, but are they really? Avoid the headaches and set all your systems to UTC, and throw the logs into a tool that does the time translation for you.

The server does not "know" anything about the time, that is, it's really about the sysadmin knowing what happened and when.

How do you unsubscribe or leave?

SEEKING WORK / US / HYBRID, REMOTE, AVAILABLE FOR TRAVEL

I'm a Splunk Certified Architect with 20 years experience with OS, platform, HPC and adjacent technologies, looking for short-term engagements. I currently run a multi-clustered Splunk infrastructure built by me, in AWS and on-prem, with 15TB per day ingest by volume.

Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CjaIKN8WAPcpWOFqB3RR2MZmhH4... Email: in my CV and HN profile

Michael Lewis' (author of Moneyball, The Big Short) podcast Against the Rules had an episode about why we question experts, this was during the tail end of COVID. He asked, I'm paraphrasing from memory here, why is it we don't have people who argue that you could jump off bridges and tall buildings and lived, but so many people arguing that you don't need the vaccine. Perhaps because no one had jumped off tall structures and lived, but there are lots of stories about how someone who got the vaccine died anyway, or didn't get the vaccine, got COVID, and is still alive and thriving. There's also a lot of "Dad was a pack-a-day smoker and lived to be 95", "Every year that I got the flu shot, I got the flu, this year I said the hell with it and skipped the shot, no flu." Every time I hear that I desperately want to correct the person, but nobody wants to hear the "akshually ... there's no correlation" bit. I don't want to be "that guy". But the more these pithy sophism are said and heard, the more it becomes ingrained in the aggregate of common beliefs. There's not even a scientific nuance there, it's utterly wrong. To erase those beliefs one has to wipe away years of repeated exposure and reinforcement to this casual sort of ignorance. No one has the time to do that. In this story, the son also exposed the father to ChatGPT hoping it can overcome his father's beliefs with an overwhelming amount of facts, and it didn't work.

Sometimes a hot stove must be touched. If I were the son, I would ask the father to double down for another $10K, or even $20K. I believe that somewhere deep inside the father, there is a ghost of an understanding where the line of reality exists. He's just so deep into his world that he can't see where he mixes up the hope that these things will happen, vs the belief that these things will happen. But if you ask him to put real stakes on the line, say, even $100K if he has it, he will not be so unwavering in his belief.

There's another store with a long history that I fear will not survive the ruthless dismantling of the brick and mortar stores: WAWAK Sewing Supplies, they sell buttons, button-hole maker, zippers, D-rings, and probably the largest inventory of German-made threads.

Every time I go into a Joanne's it's more and more like a junk hobby shop, and not a nice one. Aisles are dimly lit, you can't see the merchandise, fabrics are stashed in disorderly piles, marked down things at the front; the people who work there aren't sewists and so can't really answer when to use this thing instead of that thing for a particular application. It's never a nice shopping experience. I would rather they had a third of the inventory, but better quality, and the option of buying stuff to get it delivered there.

I'm sad that we're no longer a maker society, there's so much skills and craft that are being lost, perhaps irrevocably. Seems like anytime I go in search for how to do a thing, the first thing I find is something to buy.

Have you seen The Tinder Swindler? A woman borrowed $250,000 USD from 9 separate banks to give money to a man within months of their meeting. I don't know how one gets to that place.

This guy is proud enough of his tips that he's sharing it. God help the person who sits next to him on any of his trips.

If you hire a driver, or use a taxi, offer to pay the driver to take you to visit their mother. They will ordinarily jump at the chance.

This is deluded.

They fulfill their filial duty and you will get easy entry into a local’s home, and a very high chance to taste some home cooking.

Oh I see, he's probably traveling in a very poor country.

Crash a wedding.

What? No. That's rude.

You are not a nuisance; you are the celebrity guest!

Oh I see, probably a white person from a rich country traveling in a poor country.

They will usually feel honored.

I stopped reading and CTRF-F for primae noctis. Disappointed. He had me going.

Sun changed its stock ticker from SUNW to JAVA. It never mattered for a dying company. Solaris packages were named SUNWxxxx, and was never renamed.

I listened to the accompanying podcast, it was so engrossing and the narrative was so compelling I binged the entire 8 episodes. It starts out with a bank in Kansas whose CEO had burned $47 million USD on a crypto scam. A woman, who by all estimations, was a smart, competent, self-directed adult was scammed out of $150K, not just her own money, but borrowed from her family, and took out a loan for $35K at a ruinous interest rate of 26%. There's a whole lawless world and physical cities operating these scams. When I hear the victims' account of how they were scammed, I was just beyond belief because their actions were so far out from the norm. They themselves acknowledge this when they recount their actions in hindsight.

Just like people who ask, how can you forget your baby/pet in the backseat of a car. It sounds outlandish but it happens, to all kinds of smart people. How can you give ten thousand dollars to someone on the internet, who you've chatted with but never met? And yet it happens and continues to happen. My takeaway of the comment elements for victims: loneliness (and neediness) and a tiny big of greed. This is not a condemnation, we are all greedy in some dimension. The scammers were successful because they presented a picture of readily available affluence, everyone is swimming in it, it seems so easy, why not me. Another vector of why social media is poison. I found this series fascinating!

Kansas banker sentenced to prison https://www.cjonline.com/story/news/crime/2024/08/20/kansas-...

Shwe Kokko https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c04nx1vnw17o

Thailand Cuts Electricity to Scam Sanctuaries Across Myanmar Border https://thediplomat.com/2025/02/thailand-cuts-electricity-to...

What is a pig-butchering scam https://www.wired.com/story/what-is-pig-butchering-scam/

HN threads:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41314542

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42971059

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39778486

SEEKING WORK / US / HYBRID, REMOTE, AVAILABLE FOR TRAVEL

I'm a Splunk Certified Architect with 20 years experience with OS, platform, HPC and adjacent technologies, looking for short-term engagements.

Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CjaIKN8WAPcpWOFqB3RR2MZmhH4... Email: in my CV and HN profile

Lamy Safari friends, I bought one, and it went unused for years because it was no fun to write with. The nib was scratchy, not feedback, scratchy, and no small tweak ever made it smooth. I was on the verge of buying a sheet of micro-mesh to fix it when I came to my senses, what the hell was I doing, like trying to fix a smokey candlewick for light. I thought to myself, it can't all be like this, and bought a TWSBI Eco. This was going to be my last fountain pen if it didn't work out. And, dear readers, it is amazing! It writes like butter, words cannot describe, I whip it out every chance I get to write with it.

(The Lamy does OK with a very wet ink and cheap printer paper. I use it to doodle, so all is not lost.)

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Have you inherited a giant Splunk cluster operating on hundreds of TBs of data, and you're not sure what's in it, or how to leverage what's in it for Business and Operational Intelligence?

Do you have more than one Splunk instance, in cloud, on-prem, a hodge-podge of Elastic, Prometheus, Grafana, and you need to combine their operations across network enclaves?

Do you have logs from devices running not-an-OS? Does rsyslog configuration fill you with dread? It does for me too, but I've written lots of them and integrated them with Splunk.

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I'm a Splunk Certified Architect who have worked with Splunk since 2008. I manage multiple clusters of +10TB/day by volume. How can I help?

Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CjaIKN8WAPcpWOFqB3RR2MZmhH4...

Email: in my CV and HN profile

Thank you for this devastating read! What a punch to the gut!

This thing looks amazing! The vibe of this place makes me think of all the disappearing delis all over the US, eg. Katz's https://ny.eater.com/2019/8/28/20829116/katzs-delicatessen-r...

When the Tsukiji fish market was still open to unescorted tourists there were many of these pocket eateries, I ate in one that was the size of a large closet, guests sat elbow to elbow, you can't lean back without bumping into another person who has lined up behind you to claim your seat when you're done. Clam broth, raw fish, chased with a beer, all before 6AM.

Suppose the same principle was applied to a home owner. At the end of each year your property is evaluated and you're taxed on the difference between last and this years price.

This is exactly how state property tax is assessed in the US. You're not taxed on just the difference but the entire assessed value of the house. There have been cases of seniors who have bought and lived in their homes for 30, 40 years having to sell because they could not afford the tax after the value of their home went into the stratosphere. Similarly for poorer neighborhoods experiencing gentrification when property value shot up beyond what the original buyer paid, and they are forced out. When objections are raised on how a wealth tax would be infeasible to administer, my rejoinder is local governments levy it all the time, on the middle class, they just call it a property tax.

Let us go back to the beginning. Are you saying home-bake bread which molds in 7 days is comparable to store-bought bread which does not mold in 7 days. OK then, in which we have nothing to argue about. I have no scientific source to cite one is better or worse than the other. By all means, buy and consume bread that does not mold for a long time. That sounds good.

The question is what kind of preservatives. Formaldehyde is a preservative. Acetic acid is a component of long-ferment lean dough such as sourdough, and an insignificant component of short-ferment (~2 hours) enriched dough, such as sandwich bread. It will not help with enhancement and preservation of texture, in this case the gelatinization of starch in the finished product.

I bake bread at home nearly weekly, it goes stale and crumbly in about 3 days at room temperature and moldy by 7. I bought some pita and didn't use it all up. It was still soft, pliant, mold-free after 2 weeks. I tossed the thing, never going to buy it again.

Sun had few paths forward, with Linux + commodity hardware, what were they going to do, keep selling the OS and support contract at a price fewer and fewer were willing to pay? Sun had a suite of IDE and compilers that at one time sold for thousands of dollars per seat, the compiler was optimized for the architecture, but gdb was free and can get you code that runs just as well, unless you're under a benchmark. They were also under pressure from the OpenSource dev tools that were getting richer for GNU + Linux. Now that Solaris is practically dead, and RHEL is a subsidiary of IBM, given the dev and support state of CentOS and RockyLinux, I wonder if the community ever regret the loss of what could have flourished as another branch of the *nix ecosystem.

And if you travel farther west on 70, you'll eventually reach Wheeling, WVA. At one time its position on the Ohio river and near railroads made it a transportation hub, it made money in iron, textile, and logging - they used to float logs down the river. The vestige of wealth is still visible in its architecture, beautiful brick homes, ornate porches, windows and roofs. It's this glimmer into this past, not so far in the distance, that is so sad to witness. A lot of the town has fallen into disrepair, not slum exactly, but heading there. There is a central market building with some kitschy arts and crafts, and food stalls that supply tour buses. The buses come for Wheeling Island Casino, which has one of the last two remaining greyhound racetracks in the US. There's some attempt at preserving the historic buildings and downtown. People keep leaving, and the tourist attractions are more of a detour stop than a destination point. There used to be a pie stall - best pies in the US, handmade, fresh ingredients, $15, baked to order by a retired teacher. He sold the shop, his kids didn't want it, it was too much work and they made more money doing other things.

CTRL-F Gibson, the tech and root parent comment eerily reminded me of Fragments of A Hologram Rose. We're closing the gap between fiction and reality. The short story was written in 1977! Gibson was prescient about so many things.

"He bought an ASP cassette that began with the subject asleep on a quiet beach. It had been recorded by a young blonde yogi with 20-20 vision and an abnormally acute color sense. The boy had been flown to Barbados for the sold purpose of taking a nap and his morning's exercise on a brilliant stretch of private beach. The microfiche laminate in the cassette's transparent case explained that the yogi could will himself through alpha to delta without an inducer. Parker, who hadn't been able to sleep without an inducer for two years, wondered if this was possible."

Her books were unexpectedly popular, drawing rabid fans and equally virulent critics. J-F-Christ ten thousand words to set the scene, soft focus, travelogue, have tea, visit the home, and more, to say only that. J.D. Salinger, Thomas Pynchon and many others managed to continue to write undisturbed. They also don't invite reporters into their homes for interviews.

Now there's a Google response, and a response to that response. I love it when journalists bring the receipt. Is it even deniable that Google search is terrible now? Remember a time when there was not anything close to Google search, and Bing! was a joke? I never thought I would switch, but my daily driver now is Bing+CoPilot. I've run the same search on both Google and Bing and the results are mostly better on Bing, with the majority of crud still in the result of both, but the better, more relevant results, are on Bing.