samcday

Take a moment to consider what you seem to be saying here. You’re essentially pondering if it should be okay for a billionaire industrialist to willingly sacrifice the lives of between 1-50 people.

How low of an IFR would it take before you accepted that exposure?

If we lived in a sane world that valued EVERY individual human life above the self-serving dreams of an egotistical, arrogant sociopath, the answer would be zero.

Would incidentally exposing them to the common cold be ok?

Such a question screams for a sarcastic answer: in case you haven’t noticed, Covid-19 is not the common cold.

As an Aussie I grew up on a healthy diet of US exceptionalism propaganda. At some point I came to the realization that the US is an empire in decline.

Now, I’m starting to think the US is already a failed state. I’m pretty frightened to be living in this timeline. It’s like the collapse of Rome, but with wifi, vape pens, memes and nuclear arsenals.

Honestly I don’t really understand the end game of disinformation campaigns like this.

It’s one thing to spread propaganda in order to influence elections and get a crooked bureaucrat into power that can enrich some corporate buddies. But it’s another to deceive people about a global health crisis. If you’re successful, people go outside and trigger a second wave of infections - lots of people die and we’re back to square 1. Economy will still be fucked.

What am I missing here?

and also our feelings about Cloudflare attempting to build support in this manner, especially now, during the Corona Virus situation.

Weird angle. Unless the RPKI standard is somehow actively encouraging people to violate social distancing policies, I don't see any connection with Covid-19..

To me this whole article just reads like a network operator complaining that someone else is trying to hold them accountable.

So logically speaking, if a large portion of their current activity is already essential goods

I think the point is many suspect that is not the case.

https://thegrio.com/2020/04/01/amazon-worker-strike-covid-19...

I can only see it like this.

Amazon share price and business activity is surging as a direct result of Covid-19. They need to hire 100,000+ workers to meet the demand. However, the same thing they are profiting from (Covid-19) should also increase many of their operating expenses. Things like healthcare, paid sick leave adequate for the situation (so at least 4 weeks for proper quarantine), good PPE, in-depth infection combat strategies, and so on.

The problem is those operating expenses are only obvious if you have ethics/morality/whatever that concludes individual human life is more valuable than money. So if you're a big corporation that has been designed to enrich shareholders and the space company fantasies of your ego-maniacal CEO, you fight as hard as possible against taking on those operating expenses.

Aw, shucks. I still haven't gotten around to watching that HBO documentary about Elizabeth Holmes.

At this rate maybe they'll have already produced something about the backstory of Adam Neumann + WeWork (who will at that point probably be in prison?) before I get around to watching the Theranos one.

So any management position is exploitation? Being the boss of any manufacturing business is exploitation?

In many peoples opinion (including mine), yes. This can all be considered wage slavery.

Of course the magnitude and severity varies. A worker in the Gigafactory (probably) has a higher standard of living than the one in the Foxconn factory, who in turn probably has a better standard of living than the worker in the Nike sweatshop. But it’s all the same thing.

As an Australian pulling my hair out about our domestic policies w.r.t to fossil fuel exports / consumption, let me just say I would take token gestures and virtue signalling over total ignorance, passivity and inaction, any day of the week.

I mean, if I woke up and read that 500 million mosquitoes were victim to the Australian wildfires, I might not be so sad either.

But then you watch a video showing the charred carcasses of many beautiful Australian marsupial and bird species littered on the side of the road [1], and you realize jokes aren't really very useful here.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kn1vMTA3OD0

Not sure if you've seen the following statement from University of Sydney, but they're standing by the estimate: https://sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2020/01/03/a-stateme...

In fact, they've pointed out the 500 million figure is a conservative estimate, and is likely to be much higher: "... The true loss of animal life is likely to be much higher than 480 million. ..."

Can you just shoot these burglars on sight or do they have to be on your private property for that?

No idea about the law, but I would hope you value human life more than a stolen black suitcase.

Fun anecdote. I was living/working in San Francisco a couple of years ago. It was 10am on a work day. I was walking towards my office, along Folsom coming from the 101 towards 8th. Out of nowhere a guy just walks up to one of the cars parked on the street, smashes the rear window, and starts taking whatever was inside. There was several homeless people nearby just casually observing it, along with myself. The perpetrator clearly gave zero fucks and undertook the whole thing as casually as one might stop to tie their shoe on the street. It was a little surreal, and I was already desensitized to the ... interesting characteristics of SoMa streets by that point.

There's a lot of PHP positivity in the comments. I just want to inject some sobering pessimism in here, as someone who has spent the last 6 months using PHP for the $dayjob, and used to do commercial PHP work back in the PHP5 days.

PHP ....

... Doesn't ship with a production ready webserver. Yes, Python and Ruby also don't, but they have easy tools you can reach for (gunicorn, Puma) if you need to run them in a modern deployment stack where a whole nginx isn't really necessary.

... Doesn't have basic collection types in the core language. It's 2019 and PHP still thinks it's logical for the standard language to throw all Map, Set, List semantics into a single PHP array type. You can install the "phpds" native extension (and polyfill it from Composer) to get some passably usable implementations. But coming from Golang / Rust (or hell, even ES2015) I find them frustratingly limited.

... Doesn't have any sort of threading / async support. Even in a modest-scale webapp, this is going to hurt you when you want to do things like deploy PHP as a job queue handler. Or fan out even a trivial number of HTTP-client API calls from a PHP controller in a microservice-y world. The latter can be sort-of achieved with naive hacks like the cURL client concurrency support (Symfony HTTP-client supports it: https://symfony.com/doc/current/components/http_client.html#...) but that's a hack at best.

... Doesn't ship with a debugger out of the box. Even with great tooling like phpstorm IDE, you have to actually rub braincells together to be able to get xdebug installed / configured and ready to use.

... Has a somewhat decent package manager (Composer). But it doesn't ship with the language. Also, it's kinda crappy. It's painfully slow to do a composer install/update on anything larger than a toy project. It has all sorts of weird non-determinism issues (the composer.lock file flails around wildly between runs, changing case of metadata fields, etc).

... Has semi-decent static analysis tools (Psalm, phpstan), but they're pretty garbage compared to a proper compiler, or the quality of static analysis tools in other dynamic languages like Ruby / Javascript.

I could keep going. Profiling, code formatter, library ecosystem quality, and so on.

Where am I going with this? Honestly, I wish PHP would just die. It has some pros, but overall it's a terrible language that has no hope of modernizing enough to be relevant in 2019 and beyond. There's plenty of other excellent languages that do a better job in any category that PHP attempts to be good at. The effort being spent to maintain PHP as a language/runtime could be better spent on other languages that have made better choices in language design.

The developers who have become proficient in PHP, should continue to use their employable skills to maintain existing PHP codebases, but take a bit of time on the side to get proficient with another popular language if not already. And for the love of god, stop starting greenfields projects in PHP! Let it fade away peacefully.

Of course you're entitled to your point of view, but dismissing any other perspective on the matter as "crazy" is, well, itself a little bit crazy ;)

Putting aside the contract law side of this, philosophically what you're saying doesn't make sense to me. If Google were to direct some of its employees tomorrow to restrict the flow of information relating to a hot-button political issue, right in the middle of an election cycle, would it be crazy for some of the employees to attempt to "subvert" the company to prevent that from happening?

Conundrums like this make my head spin when I try to consider my position on Internet freedoms.

On the one hand I believe the Internet should be a truly personalized, private interface for humans all over the world to be able to communicate freely and privately - safe from censorship, mass-surveillance, profiling, and so on.

On the other hand I also believe if the Internet was that way, then it would mean that these elements of society, the ones that seek to horrifically and tragically exploit the most vulnerable of us, would be able to do so relatively unimpeded.

I'm just wrapping up the work to migrate my company away from Gitlab to Github and this happens. I did it because I figured Github has to have better reliability / uptime than Gitlab. Someone joked that as soon as the migration is done Github will have some major downtime.

sigh

Kurzgesagt[1] convinced me that space debris will become a real problem if we're not careful. A "Swarm" of fist-sized cubesats whizzing around our planet at a few thousand km/h sounds like a nightmare.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS1ibDImAYU

You're curious why they're not retiring a film franchise that consistently pulls in hundreds of millions of dollars of profit with every installment? :)

The whole story seems so bizarre. As far as I understand it, some kind of fraudster got caught up in a bunch of his own lies, of which being the inventor of Bitcoin happened to be one. We're only reading about it because "Bitcoin" happens to be a frothy buzzword that gets the clicks. Otherwise this would just be some local news case about a wacky person saying the darndest things.

It's funny how we decide what's news.

I only have a shallow understanding of the economic forces at play in the energy market. But it seems to be that we're just not going to be able to disrupt the fossil fuel industries before it's too late.

Is there someone who's knowledgeable on this subject that can cheer me up with some good data suggesting maybe we can turn this ship around in time? Or should I just start hoping that we miraculously nail fusion in the next 5 years and suddenly find we have absolutely no need for oil / coal / gas?

2.b Is the person who wrote the initial version still the main developer?

Our opinion: Developers don't like to inherit code at this stage when apps tend to be big monoliths. It's common that if they do it, they re-factor (or re-build) big chunks of the software.

Shockingly accurate. It's like these folks can read engineers' minds!

I'd like to think the simplest explanation to this recent spate of outages is that all the engineers at each org spent too long reading the HN comment thread on the previous company's outage, and didn't notice their own servers catching fire ;)

You're right, I definitely embellished things more than necessary there. I was just done reading that other article on HN frontpage today regarding what looks like gross negligence @ Boeing and I was all frothy at the mouth ;)

I don't think the end result would be clever and resourceful people being "afraid" of regulatory backlash if they screw up. Not if we demand a reform that is careful to avoid such an outcome, that is.

The way I see it, corporate systems around the world are being governed in such a way that often leads to directly rewarding bad behavior.

Humans can innovate at incredibly complicated levels. We have plenty of examples of that. I think we just need to find ways to ensure that the resulting organisations don't grow to such a size that they have an entire level of executive leadership that seeks to relentlessly drive profits at the cost of all else.

Maybe that means we as a species actually move a little bit slower sometimes? Would that be so bad? I'm probably suffering some extreme cognitive bias, but I really think that we'd be better off if that were the case.

So here we have a large multinational corporation that has let batteries explode on planes, sold bendy phones that don't really bend so well, and just flat out lied about the capabilities of a phone in a multi-million dollar ad campaign.

I'm really trying not to be one of those crazy "wake up sheeple!" type crazy folk. But surely the public will wake up soon to the dangers of letting these giant megacorps run free without better regulatory oversight?

All we do is slap them on the wrist with a few million dollars of fines and say "now now! Don't do that again!". Then we wonder why fining them for less than they probably spent on the damn marketing campaign isn't deterring them from doing it all over again.

One thing I'd like to pass by the Rust community is our internal "teleporter" that allows you to borrow an object mutably on one thread and then "teleport" an immutable ref to that object to any other thread using only a u64 handle (with obviously huge unsafe flags). This has been very handy for some of our async ffi work.

Would love to see a blog post (or better yet, library!) for this - sounds interesting!

Oh the multi-project stuff is definitely nice. I'm referring to the ability to keep multiple distinct Google accounts logged in.

Things like:

* filtering traces by services has been broken in App Engine flex environments for more than a year. * copy/pasting identifiers between places is a nightmare * their IAM design is somehow worse than AWS. It’s so impressively bad I can’t even be mad. My favourite part of their IAM approach is how they have consolidated a majority of the IAM controls in the IAM page, but then random services like GCS have it defined elsewhere. * not able to do basic time zooming of metric grafs on App Engine dashboard. * multi-account paper cuts. Almost everyone on my team has their personal and work google accounts logged in. Whenever I send them a link to a dashboard or whatever, they end up getting a permission denied, without fail.

These are all just off the top of my head. Many of them seem silly and minor (and they are!) but there’s enough of them that I kinda dread doing anything in the Cloud console now. I need to take more time to get productive in the gcloud CLI I guess...

Which, IMO, is actually a big problem.

AFAIK Amazon are running a lot of actual production loads on AWS. Dogfooding can be extremely valuable, especially if a massive portion of your staff have the same profession as your target market.

I've been using Google Cloud in a new role I started recently. There's definitely some parts of GCP I like, but whenever I use the Web Console I get the distinct impression nobody at Google actually uses it. If they did, I'm fairly sure all the annoying little warts I encounter would not exist.

I recently started a new position at a company that is using Gitlab. In the last month I've seen a lot of degraded performance and service outages (especially in Gitlab CI).

And then I see stuff like this that makes me scratch my head: https://about.gitlab.com/product/service-desk/

If anyone at Gitlab is reading this ... please, please slow down on chasing new markets + features and just make the stuff you already have work properly, and fill in the missing pieces. Example: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/63880