devrandomguy

Also, there are APIs for acquiring real-world mailing addresses inside of "subdivided" warehouses. The only way to verify that a person isn't a bot is to make babies with them.

When you take away everything that is perceived as toxic, are you left with anything other than confirmation bias?

I'm sure Azure has great stats on paper, it's not the simple, easy-to-measure data that concerns us. I'm also sure that Azure is currently treating their clients really well, in the spirit of "the first hit is free". What is concerning, is not the effects of their current actions, but rather what their current actions say about their future plans, given MS' history of "embrace, extend, extinguish".

With MS, the EEE process should be your null hypothesis when you are trying to predict their behavior.

Having said that, I am not against the idea of taking advantage of an opponent who prostrates themselves, just make sure that you can safely extricate yourself from the trap. If you want to deploy on Azure, make sure it's a multi cloud deployment with some insulation above the infrastructure, like Mesos or Kube. Which precludes using the more specialized services, but seriously, who pipes unencrypted data through 3rd party message queues? That's just crazy.

In Qatar, which has a national firewall, I was able to use Tor to browse torrent sites, and then use a regular bittorrent client to fetch the contents of the magnet links (encrypted connections only). That worked great for the few years that I was there. The Qatari internet was a fair bit faster than what I am used to from Canada, about 30 - 50 MB/s at max torrent.

A CEO once told me, "If you owe someone $1 million, then they own you. If you owe someone $1 billion, then you own them." I think that the orgs who are owed by US are primarily concerned with maintaining the status quo, rather than gutting the golden goose.

It reflects poorly on us that this is being downvoted. The parent shared a simple cautionary tale without baiting or flaming or anything like that. It is a good thing, to be aware of the worst case scenario; IME, projects that fail badly do so mainly for people-reasons / org-reasons, just like this.

Yep, and personalization and A/B testing can be accommodated with query params. By whitelisting those AB params in the caching layers, you can mostly prevent a performance difference between A and B, something that may have messed up our results with a 3rd party AB testing service.

Yes, just like Intel. We engineered our way into this, we'll engineer our way out, and then smooth it all over with more engineering. Entropy wins again.

I've been ranting here occasionally about the infuriating unprofessionalism of a web app that can't operate without JS. There is very little that you can do with JS that can't also be done with the help of a server, unless you start making up overly-specific requirements about what technologies are used, or writing user stories for robots. As a diehard NoJS guy and a developer who uses React professionally, my community's willingness to accept of the problem, and obliviousness to the solutions established by the React devs themselves, are pretty embarrassing. And it's not like I hate the language, Node has been my go-to application server for years now (Clojure is displacing that for me, but I digress).

Last year, I was building a simple SVG based chart dashboard for internal usage. Being a NoJS guy, I would sometimes disable JS while developing, on purpose or otherwise, and aside from forcing me to manually hit refresh in the browser, things generally worked. I added a couple links (styled as buttons) for zooming, to supplement the JS based drag-window zoom, and let the browser scroll the potentially very wide SVG chart within a div. If necessary, I could have even embedded the whole thing in an iframe, to avoid triggering whole page reloads, but our caching story was tight enough to compensate. Also, the React-rendered SVG represented the bulk of the markup on the page anyway.

Interactive visualisation, no JS needed. It added maybe an extra 10% to my workload (we already had the SSR stack), and helped me to avoid a variety of little glitches that plague many client-only apps, glitches that users learn to tolerate with mild disgust. The satisfaction of seeing our in-house dashboard pop up "instantly" with data, while Parsely and New Relic were still churning spinners or stuttering while waiting on JS, or even waiting for initial data after waiting on JS, was very cathartic. TTI can equal TTR, we have the technology, we've had it for a decade or so.

The parameter you are looking for is delta-V, the total change in velocity that the craft can accelerate to. It relates to inverse specific thrust, which is the parameter discussed earlier, comparing slow heavy exhaust to fast light exhaust.

https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Cheat_Sheet#Delta-v...

Yeah, we should probably not do this in LEO, where orbits decay and half of the potential acceleration vectors lead back down to Earth. Fortunately, it takes a lot of energy and precision to de-orbit anything heavy that is in geosynchronous orbit or beyond.

If the fissile material could be acquired by asteroid mining, then it would never need to pass through the Earth's atmosphere. I know that still sounds way out there, but I think that uranium or thorium would actually be a great material for kicking off asteroid mining. A small amount will pay off in a big way, it is a very dangerous thing for humans to mine on Earth, and, like the parent mentioned, we really don't want to fly it around where it can fall on us.

In a small toroidally shaped universe, your radio is also your memory. All emissions eventually return to their origin, but you can reorder memory transmissions by moving while the data is in flight.

Wow, just thinking about C++ while slacking, was enough to inspire a solution to a race condition in my Clojurescript project.

Earlier, I made some notes and walked away from the problem, because it was getting frustrating. Then, while I was checking this out, I started thinking "Imagine how complex this would have been if I had done it in C++" Then the immediately following thought was "Well, in C++, I would instead build it like so, because it needs to be thread safe." Problem solved, obvious-in-hindsight solution.

Even though my problem wasn't caused by a low level threading mistake, thinking about the problem in the context of a more primitive tool helped me to better understand how my own tools are working.

The missing back story to Apollo 18!

I thought that it was going to log transactions to a blockchain, as a sabotage-resistant backup strategy.

Yeah, but a good weld is stronger than the metal around it. Win!

Docker. I need/want 64gb in my next laptop, so that I can run deployment simulations.

DNA is already digital.

Dude. That redirects to a picture of a scrotum in a cup, if you arrive with an HN referer header. I'm guessing you got pranked, lol.

They could do it in ASCII, on IRC.

Hah, same. I still haven't signed up for an account, but I've been getting a fair bit of my news there since around 1998, before people bragged about UIDs. As a child, I learned a lot about how the grownup world worked, by lurking in their threads.

What really amazes me more than anything though, is how willing some of us are to trust Microsoft all of a sudden. They did damage to the software and web communities that will take us decades to recover from, but with another round of "embrace", we are right back in the old loop. Reminding people of their history is now considered rude; our own communities have been co-opted by the MS PR machine.

It sure is frustrating that a site whose only purpose is to serve documents, and is created by people who advocate Tor, requires JavaScript for all navigation. Even the "about" anchor in the footer has an onClick instead of an href. What were they thinking?

Heck, a vanilla Wordpress install would have been sufficient for this, if they don't have resources for anything other than a free off-the-shelf solution.

If the user didn't opt in to a notification, then by definition, it is unsolicited.

Or, we could just go all meta, in a Postgres shell:

  CREATE TABLE queries IF NOT EXISTS (
    name varchar(64),
    version varchar(64),
    query text,
    description text
  );

  NOTIFY chat 'Alice: Bob, please insert that query into the new queries table, and then NOTIFY "chat" with the name and version of it';
  LISTEN chat;

  Asynchronous notification "chat" with payload "Bob: See update-rank, v. borked-1" received from server process with PID 8448.
  Asynchronous notification "chat" with payload "Bob: I have it set to update in a temp table, so we don't have to reset the real table" received from server process with PID 8448.

  SELECT queries.query FROM queries WHERE name="update-rank" AND version="borked-1"
  INTO query;

  \echo query

  -- "Looks sane, let's run it"

  DO $$ EXECUTE query INTO result $$; -- Something like that, I'm guessing.

  \echo result

Bonus points if you edit the query by shelling out to sed or butterflies.

OTOH, I kind of like the idea that something like this could lead me to discover a programming language that is better suited to the subjects that I am interested in.

Enough with the watt-hours already! Let's all just measure batteries using Joules, we have a unit specifically for quantities of electrical energy.

It's a standards-track proposal at the W3C...

Gotta start somewhere. Proposals that come with a working prototype probably fare much better than those that are purely theoretical.

What if we don't try to repair the body, but instead reconstruct it in a simulation? Even if the person's cells have all been mangled by ice crystals, a future medical team could conceivably map their neural network and estimate the strengths of the connections between neurons, with some futuristic high resolution scanning device. Maybe it doesn't matter that a frozen person is dead for now, if we could give their mind a virtual body transplant, and rehabilitate them in an idealized virtual environment.

Furthermore, there is no need for anyone to care what spacing scheme their team uses, after configuring their editor on day 1 with that team. I have Vim convert Python code to tab indentation when opening files, and have it convert to 4-spaces indentation when saving a Python code file. No one should be wasting even a flicker of brain activity over indentation in the 21st century, regardless of how backwards everyone else's preferences are.

While you're at it, please also s/\s+$//g on save. Those unintentional trailing spaces really clutter up Git history, and that comprehensive, clean history is what enables the team leads to do their job without bugging you on Slack. It also signals carelessness, or at least a lack of care for personal tools, and has your name attached to it.

Screw duty free, the airline should offer cannabis cookies as a snack option. What airline wouldn't like a plane full of chilled out passengers, who are contented to watch reruns of old Disney movies? And I'll take an extra pizza pocket, plz & thx.