throwawaaarrgh

GCP IAM is the worst. AWS IAM is not nearly as bad.

GCP sucks so bad as a product, that the only way to tell what IAM policies apply to your service account, is to run some kind of analysis query thing exported to a BigTable (which will cost you money).

You'd think you could just go into the console and click on the service account and it'd show you which policies are linked to roles are linked to your service account? That would make sense, and be convenient. But this is Google we're talking about. Engineering principles will always trump customer experience.

It's much worse than that of course. The default roles give too many permissions, for nearly anything you want to do. Often you are limited by what you can control, to only at an Org level, or Folder, or Project. Yet making a custom role is often difficult, leaving you to usually just slap on the default roles, making your resources insecure. Much of the time, a user must have an Admin-level permission over all VMs in order to SSH into them with GCP creds. Kind of defeating the purpose of having IAM to begin with.

I think the only reason we haven't heard of more GCP accounts getting compromised due to the shitty default policies is, thankfully, GCP has few customers.

It's not a best practice, it's a fad. 99% of people who recommend or use Postgres barely know how to use it. Another trendy database will come along and you'll stop seeing all these posts about it. Happens every decade. I'll link back to this post in a few years with "I told you so".

Built my own sofa. Fabric from JOANN, foam from a shitty IKEA thing thrown on the street, some plywood and pine from Home Depot, hardware, staples. Cost me $75. It's comfy and I can lay on it or sit on it. What the fuck about this is supposed to cost >$1,000, I have no idea. Are they stuffing sofas with live minks or something? It's just wood, bolts, foam and fabric.

For cushions I already had some, but you can easily make them with more JOANN fabric and a big box of poly stuffing. Extremely basic sewing skills and a pair of scissors are all you need.

Give a man a fish...

Immediate managers must have some experience with the report's work, absolutely. But farther up the chain, they still need to check work. There's certain details of progress you just can't fake.

If you have 10 pieces of work, and you show each piece getting done at regular intervals, along with demos, then you can show your actual results and exactly how close you're getting to finished. Even someone who has no insight into the product can follow along and see the progress's results and trajectory. The more detail you get about the work, the harder it is to fake (you can fake a demo, but it's much harder to fake an entire Jira board)

All of this is very true! Thanks to the author for being open about their mistakes.

If you want to avoid this scenario, your company needs good leadership. If you're at a company where the managers don't do any due diligence in terms of verifying the progress of work, you are at an either inept or toxic company. If all people do is ask you for a "status report" and they just hope it's correct, they're setting everyone up to fail.

Good management is like a teacher in school who checks if students are completing their work, and if they aren't, gives them assistance. The teacher must actually check the work, and be interested in the welfare of the student as much as improvement.

I don't know what I'd do if I had kids in the US. The education system here is so toxic. It's like a factory designed to churn out little automatons. Like everyone's purpose in life is to become a cog in a business wheel. "We're preparing you for a life of work."

Art, play, love, nature? Waste of time. Personal finances, cooking, repairs, wayfinding? Useless. We need you to learn advanced maths by hand, for that job you'll have at McDonald's where you need to handle advanced algebra. We need you to learn this highly curated view of history that excludes most of the important events in world history. Philosophy? You'll have to go to an expensive college for that. Psychology? Why should you have an insight into relationships, the human mind, emotional intelligence? It's not like that would come in handy at some point.

If I ran a school, the curriculum would consist mostly of teaching people to curate their inner and outer life towards their own goals and interests. The purpose and benefit of intelligence as a tool to use too improve their own life, and the lives of others. The benefits of benefiting society and our loved ones. The benefits of love. The things nobody should learn by accident.

The intelligence level of the average HN comment is lower than your average chat bot

OK doomer.

If your transport method for rsync was ssh, that is often a bottleneck, as openssh has historically had some weird performance limits that needed obscure patches to get around. Enabling compression helps too if your CPU doesn't become a bottleneck

This is actually much better because nbdcopy can handle sparse files, you can set the number of connections and threads to number of cores, you can force a flush before exit, and enable a progress bar. For unencrypted drives it also supports TLS.

You're missing out on the most critical detail of Japanese culture that is lost by most westerners:

Speed isn't more important than having respect for your craft. If you have to go slower to produce a better result, you go slower. If you have to work harder to perfect an incredibly tight joint, you do that. You don't have to use traditional joinery to build in Japan today. But if you build something in a shitty way, it reflects poorly on you.

Efficiency is not the goal.

I'm sorry, but you don't understand swap. It's useful to retain all kinds of memory in different scenarios, like cache, or windows that haven't been accessed in a while. It can free up fast memory, reducing contention and speeding up the system. And you can control snappiness to decide what and when things get swapped.

Swap is also used by the system's hibernate function to store a copy of RAM to disk.

If you have 64GB of RAM and no combination of your apps, cache, etc will ever approach that, then probably nothing will ever swap. But for more limited systems or when running apps with higher memory pressure, swap does increase system performance.

I've worked on medical devices. As a techie, what surprised me more is not the lack of trials for new devices. It's that for software (and other kinds of components), it's often acceptable to have black box testing to certify a component as functional.

This means basically saying "I pressed a button and the thing did X". That's the test. No need to understand how that works, or provide any more technical documentation or specs, or record system state or variables, or do anything else. Press button, it does X. That's good enough to be certified.

The reason for this is simple enough: sometimes the thing you're using is proprietary and its manufacturer/vendor simply won't give you anything else to certify it. But this black box testing is even used for open source software and components. It's like a short cut you can use to cut through a lot of the testing you could have done. I imagine this will remain standard practice as the "AI" companies push their hallucinating dreck and unexplainable magic into the medical device space.

Driving cross country in a car is actually the worst when you're in stop and go traffic, or cars keep slowing down and then speeding up. I can't wait to get my hands on adaptive cruise control because I get so aggravated and tired from having to shift and adjust speed. If I can just sit in one position and listen to comedy podcasts and audio books I do so much better

Or alert air traffic control, and maybe they can send an alert into the cockpit. But there must be a way to raise an alarm.

My guess is basically nobody cares that much about this rare condition. It's much more likely the pilots are incapacitated rather than asleep, in which case the alarm is pointless.

But I guess it's not that rare:

  - https://www.newsweek.com/pilots-boeing-737-both-doze-off-overshoot-airport-two-hour-flight-1735435
  - https://jalopnik.com/tale-of-both-pilots-sleeping-during-flight-reminds-us-t-1849014190
  - https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/pilots-sleep-cockpit-airline-safety/index.html
  - https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-24296544
  - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/both-pilots-fall-asleep-during-british-airbus-flight-incident-report-reveals/
  - https://www.aero-news.net/index.cfm?do=main.textpost&id=A9AAFE58-18F4-40B5-B59A-EBE316BBE878
  - https://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1932040,00.html

I just assume that there is always a 0day lurking in my kernel. If you can execute any code on my system I assume it's game over

Not really bro, but you stay angry

All of these people are so bizarre. It's like Howard Hughes versus some potential acquisition turned competitor and the yellow journalism that followed. Time is a flat circle.

Poor kid, learning how an enterprise works the hard way. If he stays in software eng long enough he'll be back here eventually, with a little less gumption, but a little more tactics and grit to fight the battles he wants to fight.

an opensource alternative to AWS

Just putting out there that OpenStack is open source, already exists, very feature complete, and there are even hosting providers that will give you your own OpenStack control plane and only bill you for the resources you use. Only one provider in the US, but several in Europe.

No need to deploy and manage your own clusters on bare metal. They do it all for you and just give you an API, same as AWS. Way better than managing your own stack. The fact that more providers aren't doing this kind of blows my mind. But they probably prefer the proprietary walled garden, easier to keep customers from moving.

Most companies in the world don't need to develop software. Software development itself is hype. But there's lots of money in it, despite no actual value being created most of the time.

Yes... And? We don't have to be happy with our lot if it sucks.

Just like you probably shouldn't be using K8s, you probably shouldn't be using a service mesh. Only add it when you actually need it. You'll know when that happens.

Right, and not only that, but Yellowstone has a long history of being fucked with by humans and the ecology basically falling apart, because humans just wanted it the way they wanted it. And because it's so accessible, people continue to dump their trash, play loud music, fuck with the animals, etc. It's not nature anymore, it's Disneyworld with animal exhibits.

There's room enough for both man-made parks and wilderness areas, but to keep wilderness wild we need to stop making them human-accessible. I mean the whole point of wilderness is that it's not accessible, helpful, friendly, easy. The wild is harsh, dangerous, remote, unkempt, challenging, but also beautiful, tranquil, awe-inspiring, soul-filling.

There's a balance to be struck. If wilderness areas end up like Yellowstone, then the experience is destroyed and the whole point of it remaining wild dies. Some things are more important than some human's desire to turn the planet into their amusement park.

It does look like there's no preservatives added to heinz. It appears the lack of mold growth in ketchup comes down to a combination of lower pH from the vinegar, and low water content by cooking it out of the tomatoes. According to some food safety experts, it's possible for mold to grow on ketchup, less so for pathogens. Keeping it cold will definitely extend the time it would take mold to root.

Wrong! Both bacteria and fungi can thrive in a variety of pH. Acidophiles are a group specialized to highly acidic environments, and there are alkaliphiles as well. Fungi and bacteria also have methods to both change the pH of their environment, and adapt to it. Google it, there's plenty of research papers.

Both bacteria and fungi prefer more acidic than alkaline environments, with a "happy range" for each. Tomatoes are only weakly acidic, at 4.3 to 4.9. But molds commonly grow at pH 3.5 to 8. Aspergillus niger and Penicillium funiculosum can grow at pH 2 and below.

Extremely low pH is certainly useful at inhibiting some forms of life, but the world contains many different forms of life, and some are a lot more adaptive than others. Research shows that the best way to preserve food is a combination of chemical preservatives and low pH. Which is why the commercial food industry uses preservatives...

It's probably from added stabilizers and not acidity. Molds do well with acidic food, as well as sugary and salty

Reduce, reuse, recycle. If they really want to make an impact, they should sell ketchup in bulk at grocery stores, with us bringing in our own reusable ketchup bottle to refill. Disposable packaging creates unnecessary waste.

This is a fantastic article, bravo. Required reading for all SW developers