insom

Not sure what hullabaloo -- they do provide a bunch of services to Canadian institutions (including Libraries and Archives Canada) and they perform physical services like book scanning and in the last few years I believe they are the parent organization for the physical Canadian datacentre _somewhere in BC_.

For my work, I worked in their Archiving & Data Services department, on https://archive-it.org/ -- I didn't know this before I joined, but Internet Archive offers various for-pay services to other cultural institutions, mostly around archiving their stuff or white-labelling playback of archives.

For example https://webarchiveweb.bac-lac.canada.ca/ (the Government of Canada's own Internet Archive) is actually outsourced to ADS within Internet Archive.

On one hand this is neat, as IA have expertise around this, but on the other hand (as a Canadian) I don't like that it's not actually sovereign and that it looks like it's run by our government but that it's not. Tradeoffs, I guess.

Thanks for trying. I assumed that ia.ch was clearly shorthand for internetarchive.ch but maybe one can't assume anything.

Slack, Zoom and Google Apps (but not for email) - otherwise basically everything was internally ran.

The Slack has (had?) hundreds of guest accounts due to volunteers and allied organizations. It’s an interesting (and cool) institution!

That website is really struggling. Very tempting to go to a mirror on archive.org to view it :)

This seems very distinct from Internet Archive in the US, I wonder how separate it is.

Internet Archive Canada (I worked there in 2024) operated like it was a subsidiary, even though I think it was technically an independent organization with some shared directors. Same Slack, same archive.org email domain, etc.

IA.ch has Brewster and Caslon on the board.

I suspect that for the political threats of the current decade the different Internet Archive organisations need to start operating more independently, especially when it comes to funding?

I'm in the same situation as GP and while I think you're right (we're some of the last well paid software developers who aren't also founders) it doesn't help with feeling less guilty!

It's a weird kind of guilt because it's not like we individually created these economic conditions; we were just there at the right time to take advantage of them before they were gone. I tend to think of this as "useless guilt" (vs. guilt about taking a transatlantic flight or other high-impact activity -- which I still do, but I think that guilt is societally useful)

Kijiji

Well for marketing and sales your bigger competitor is already doing the work of showing companies that they want the functionality at all, and the cheaper competitor's sales and marketing pitch can be: we are much cheaper.

This is pretty much what blacksmith.sh does -- GitHub Actions but it's on faster and cheaper hardware. I'm sure they spend non-trivial amounts on marketing but "X but much cheaper" doesn't sound like a difficult sale.

(edit) And the design, sadly, can be as simple as "rip-off bigger competitor" -- of course if one day you are the big competitor because you "won" in the market, you'll need to invest in design, but by then I guess you'll have the money?

The different Heathrow terminals have different security requirements. I suspect it’s based on countries they fly to from each terminal, but it could be age if equipment.

It is frustrating for security to act like you’re a total idiot for following a process another terminal says is fine (like leaving very small electronics like Kindles in your bag).

Oh, well.

This sounds amazing! Is it also protected from being lost forever by trivial mistakes that are very common?

The commenter did say up to 3x, so up to ~730K higher than that job in a major city (with possibly better facilities but who knows)

G includes MAFD extensions for non-embedded (I) applications. That's multiplication and division, atomics, single and double-precision floating point. It also includes the control/status register and a instruction-fence instruction. I think it's there to mean "the base plus the standard bits that people generally want in a processor if they're writing C for it".

Shopify had this between ~2017 and ~2020 -- every project was expected to complete a "health check" every two weeks where anonymous participants gave a 1-3 score on various metrics including velocity, quality, making good decisions quickly etc. You couldn't see the scores until everyone had answered and there was cultural pressure towards honesty. All that was stored was the average score and optional comments.

If you left comments, it was generally possible to figure out who said what based on idioms etc. but they were kept separate from the scores anyway.

I thought it was a good system but I'm pretty sure it was gone by the time I left in 2023. If nothing else, I don't think a system based on that kind of radical candor can survive the first or second round of layoffs at any company.

I saw this on HN and though “great I was just about to write this but now I don’t need to” - I have a legacy blog, a link blog and another thing I update which all produce RSS and I want to create one big feed of stuff I write, regardless of which platform I chose to put it on. Seems like I can use this for that.

Wasn't Hoare's "billion dollar mistake" back in Algol? We'd been suffering with it for 30 years before Java decided to include it.

Shopify only went remote in March 2020, after being strongly anti-remote for a long time. You're right that they have leaned into 100% remote since the pandemic, however.

There were remote employees before (especially in Production Engineering and much of Support), but R&D was almost all in person.

(Source: I miss the productivity of the Elgin Street office ...)

Glad to see someone already posted this. I don't know how anyone writes something like "this is what Slovaks are like" and doesn't stop to think about their biases.

I originally thought maybe he was from Slovakia (I have occasionally made jokes or generalisations about Irish people, as I am one) -- but then the footnotes make it clear it's not self deprecation. It's just prejudice.

When I started on twitter, it had no hashtags, replies were public (because they weren't initially part of the protocol), no t.co, no embedded photo sharing, no geotagging. All of these features were added, and made popular, in third party clients before being added to Twitter. It was like a giant lab where the features could be tried by smaller groups who shared certain clients or norms and the popular ones wrapped into the "official" API eventually.

If the passwords were POSTed over and left on the heap, then they were vulnerable to being scooped up via Heartbleed, even if they are stored hashed in the database.

The CN= part of the SSL has a space at the start, oddly:

  ---
  Certificate chain
   0 s:/CN= communities.intel.com
   i:/C=US/O=Intel Corporation/CN=Intel External Basic Issuing CA 3A
  ---

I can only up-vote this once, but it deserves like a million more.

The protocol is, while the domain system isn't. But then, you could say that about IPv4 and IPv6 - you have to get your allocation from somewhere, and your LIR gets it from its RIR and your RIR gets it from IANA. As long as you're using publicaly addressable computers, the system is in some way centralised. (And that's probably okay).

Fedora are making a push along these lines, not so much pushing the need to go and do anything extra, but making it so that using modern Internet protocols like SIP and XMPP is as easy as running your own mail server (that is; not brain dead simple, but not particularly challenging).

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/FederatedVoIP

Work in Fedora 19 has gone into making federation work out of the box - it's always existed for SIP and XMPP but generally required extra configuration because it was possible to run your own server yet still basically be beholden to a provider, which is very much not the default with SMTP.

(Of course, that's why SMTP is so horribly broken with regard to spam, so the pendulum swings both ways)

Everyone has an anecdote and all, but I was heavily into IRC as a teenager in the 90's (met my now-wife on there!) and there was a diverse range of backgrounds and ages, although it was a comparatively small group centred around an Irish ISP.

Farmers, teachers, tech workers, school kids, housewives, single mums, people living on poxy islands with nothing to do but with dial up and office workers whiling away the working day.

I'd be interested to know what your 'getting back into the flow' techniques are?

If you're being paid professional programmer rates you should get the best machine, not the one where price-performance hits some sweet spot. If the cost of a developer who wants a Dell is $80,750 and a developer who wants an rMBP is $82,200 (year 1), that developer needs to be 2% more productive over a year to justify it.

Hard to measure these things for a lot of folks but I've definitely saved over 2% of my work time from switching from spinning disks to high-end SSD on unit tests alone. Never mind the reduced boot times, how fast 'brew install' is and the general responsiveness.

If you're buying it yourself, be cheap, if you're paying someone's massive wage bill, get them the best thing you can.

Yup, the first lump of non-line-numbered BASIC I'd ever seen. I learned on the Spectrum 48K and when I switched to PCs I kept all of the limitations with me until I read those two.

It just goes to show that whatever language you use, you need to understand what the abstractions are doing: what bytes are really going where?