xb95

Yeah, that's fair. We did follow up and I'm told we're unblocked now.

There are a couple of discoverability mechanisms, but it really depends on what you're looking for.

Usually people follow the network -- find one person that's interesting, see who they talk to, and go from there.

Another approach is to see what "interests" are popular and click through to see who shares those/is active: https://www.dreamwidth.org/interests?view=popular

But, TBH, there's a lot of happenstance and serendipity (or are those the same).

I work on infrastructure at Discord. Our voice and video infrastructure gets attacked quite frequently and we have pretty good tracking about which ASNs the traffic is coming from as part of our mitigation processes.

Anyway, Choopa is a common source of DDoS in our reports, so I can corroborate the OP's comment to some degree. They aren't the largest we see, but they're in the top 10 sources for us.

It looks like this web site is unmaintained and incorrect in at least the Discord case. I see a PR open since 2017, and a comment on it saying 'this site is unmaintained.'

Yes, yes we are.

I respectfully disagree with the other comment who said he'd rather take a helicopter. (I'm a private pilot of fixed-wing aircraft.)

For General Aviation safety, read the Joseph T. Nall report: https://www.aopa.org/-/media/files/aopa/home/training-and-sa...

To summarize, helicopters and airplanes enjoy a reasonably similar lethality. Approximately 15-20% of accidents (total) are fatal to one or more occupants. However, if you break it down to fatal-accidents-per-100,000-hours then helicopters are worse (1.5 vs 1.0) at least in 2013.

When it comes to general aviation safety, however, the far and away most important factor is the pilot. Unless you get damned unlucky, the vast majority of accidents are either avoidable or survivable if the pilot doesn't do something wrong. In helicopters, a controlled autorotation will be survivable most of the time. In airplanes, a controlled forced landing is the same.

Of course, you can have your cake and eat it too -- I recently purchased a Cirrus SR22-TN (airplane) which has a Ballistic Recovery System aka a parachute. If anything goes wrong you can pull the chute and the entire airplane will descend to the ground. :-)

Caveat lector: I'm one of the two founders of Dreamwidth.

Yes! Dreamwidth is a fork of the old LiveJournal code that is still being developed by a small team of folks who would rather see a small site run in an open, transparent fashion than be beholden to large corporate interests and the whims of monetization.

We're a very happy little family and it's always exciting to see Dreamwidth links end up on HN. :)

Another Delphi person!! Yay! I spent so much of my life writing Delphi code. As a teenager. Basically from 12-18 I wrote Delphi/Pascal. Hundreds of stupid little Windows apps (and some stupid big ones).

I ran into the same sort of thing you did re: Delphi jobs. I was pretty sad, honestly, having started in the original Delphi days (version 1!) and going to 6 I had gotten pretty good at it...

I worked at CCP and was on the same team as t20 for a while. He definitely wasn't the reason BoB succeeded for as long as they did.

In random point, I (while a dev) was a member of ASCN. I was there the day Steve was unveiled and the day it died in C9N-CC. We lost to BoB "fairly" (everybody suffered from the state of the servers in those days, so maybe it was "CCP won"). There was some bad blood, of course; I'm still a little bitter about Steve's death. But the cookies crumbled and that was that.

Ultimately: I don't think t20's actions contributed substantially either way to BoB's ascendancy. Organization, good play, and a willingness to use all avenues (within the game) turned out to be pretty successful.

(Also... no longer employed by CCP, but still play EVE. 12 years later... still the best game I've ever touched.)

Only slightly less euphemistic than flying's CFIT - Controlled Flight Into Terrain. AKA "whoops, the ground".

Woah, typing code at speed is incredibly difficult. I don't know if it picks languages randomly but it gave me Lisp just now, and... ack!

Unrelated, TypeRacer is amazing. We had a bunch of contests at my last job and they ended up making a trophy because I was the King of Speed. It was pretty fun. So, thank you!

What's the source on your third paragraph? I want to read the backstory there.

Edit: Bias alert; I work for Dropbox on our infrastructure team. I'm just curious about that particular incident, since it predates me and I'm always curious about these things.

Yup. It's called 'fields': http://perldoc.perl.org/fields.html

I echo what they said in that post, though: don't prematurely optimize. If you find you have tons of objects and need the RAM or you're actually paying a premium for hash accesses, then fields can save you some effort... but if you've a small use case, don't bother.

Yes, thank you! That's exactly it.

This would help with the times I've just wanted to ask someone "so, does this shirt actually go with these pants, or am I totally crazy?"

All joking aside, this could be interesting. It makes me think of that service that existed for a while where you could ask a question of a topic area, and it would send an IM to people and ask them to answer it. I forget what it was called, but I used it for a little while.

The payment/HIPAA compliance aspect are pretty interesting, too. I would easily throw $50 at a 10 minute consult with a doctor instead of having to make an appointment and haul myself in to the local clinic. Particularly if said doctor could then fax a prescription for something completely boring but still not OTC to my local pharmacy.

Re: the remedy for introverts, yes.

I'm a strong introvert and I find that a few drinks makes me feel like what I suspect an extrovert feels like. Personally, I'd much rather socialize with a few drinks in me; and if there's a large group involved, it's almost mandatory for me to enjoy myself at all!

I saw this post and came to write a comment about "save yourself some trouble, make it random or positional and just have a functional inventory system which you'll need anyway" but hey, look, it's gmjosack beating me to it! ;)

Yup. Matt's Script Archive was a long time ago. Modern Perl is about a million times better and easier to use than it used to be.

Dancer, Moose, DBIx::Class (a bit more advanced), Plack/PSGI, etc etc. Not to mention the language changes they've made with 5.10/5.12/5.14/etc (I'm in love with the defined-or operator).

Wal-Mart has listed key executive compensation of around $63m USD this past year [http://insiders.morningstar.com/trading/executive-compensati...] and reported yearly revenue of $473,000m USD [http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=WMT].

I'd argue that spending 0.01% of revenue on key executive compensation (which is the 'paying executives millions' you talk about) is irrelevant to Wal-Mart overall and how much they can or can't pay their workers. Even if you stripped the executive compensation and gave it to the workers (2.2m of them), you'd only be handing out $30 to each person. That's a few hours of work total, and amortized over a year? Not a factor at all in the grand scheme of things.

...

The article is well worth a read. It's interesting and insightful and discusses more interesting things like business models, target demographics, value-mindedness, etc. I recommend it if you can get it to load. (It was fine for me.)

This is what I do/have done and it has worked well for me. I always bring my laptop and if they ask me to write code (as they invariably do) I pull it out and use it.

That said, whiteboards are still usually better for conveying ideas. If you don't understand the problem you're trying to solve or the data structures you need, you might want to start on the board before sitting down to code.

In amateur radio, the characteristics of someone's CW (morse code) is called their "fist". I used to be able to do 5 WPM and one year I participated in field day (the annual ham competition to contact as many people as you can, etc) with it -- that year was magical because I used morse code for my first time to talk to someone. The feeling of dits and dahs coming across the airwaves actually being communication from somewhere far away? It was brilliant.

So: kudos for learning an aging and mostly deprecated form of communication. Some folks still do it for hobby (I've lost all skill by this point), and I highly recommend the experience.

If nothing else, find a local ham group and go poke around in late June and see if they're doing anything for field day. It's worth checking out.

Fair point, joke removed.

In your .vimrc, insert at the top:

set shell=/bin/sh

No more problems with plugins in fish.

Agreed.

I was pretty excited to see what this project was about -- then I saw they were asking for $30,000 in funding to build this and wandered off to make a snarky comment on HackerNews. I don't really want to see this kind of stuff here.

Or at the very least, it should have a subject that says something about funding, etc.

Control over network configuration and hardware is one of the big reasons. I hate getting bitten because my three new servers are halfway across the facility and stuck with somebody else who is maxing out the uplink between our shared top of rack switch and the core...

Edited: Also, your "$100/month" quote is pretty fanciful. Who is handing out 32GB with SSDs for that price? I'd really love to know, because the best I've been able to get for a database quality machine (RAID-10 with BBU, SSDs, and lots of RAM) is closer to 10x that.

They use a managed hosting provider, which means that there is no guarantee that the disks are new. When one customer finishes with disks, they get wiped (hopefully) and passed on to the next customer.

Even if they are new, though, you never know if it's completely good until you've tested every block on the device. These days most format operations don't actually wipe out the whole disk (takes ages!) so even formatting on a brand new disk won't tell you if it's valid.

That said, the odds of having multiple disk failures on a brand new RAID in 72 hours are pretty low. If that's the case, I'd start to suspect a bad batch of disks and/or bad backplane or other hardware (bad power?) that is causing the hardware to fail.

"we obviously store data in mirrored mode on several servers"

They then asked the provider to swap the disk. They had a RAID1; it's a common enough setup.

SSDs fail in many of the the same ways as spinning disks, they just add a few more failure cases.

Nice to see a fellow pilot -- well, I'm still in the student phase, but I've been doing lots of "glide, grass, gas!" lately, as my instructor likes to say.

Sadly, the number of open fields to aim for in the SF Bay Area is pretty small. It's either hillsides, bay, or city. Oh, and a couple of thin dikes you could land on. ("That's why nailing the centerline is so important. Someday you might need to land on something like that dike wall -- and if you nail it, you walk away fine.")

Well, scrubbing with md is pretty easy, too.

That said, ZFS sounds great, and I've been meaning to learn it sometime. The big thing holding me off has been just -- well, how much time I've put into learning md and such, and how I would find it hard to justify going back to not knowing much (since this is my livelihood).

If you have any tips on "read this, it's a good intro" stuff (slanted to Linux, as that's my cuppa), I'd welcome them.

Not really.

A backup would be a filesystem level event, so at best it would only access 1/N of the sectors (where N is the duplication level). It isn't guaranteed to access all of the sectors the data resides in -- and also, it may have hit the kernel's filesystem cache or the on-disk cache or something like that, too, bypassing the physical media entirely.

Also keep in mind that a RAID rebuild is a media level event, it doesn't just copy files. It will copy over the "empty" sectors, too, because it just has no idea what's what on the disk. It faithfully recreates the raw bytes on the media.

The disk might have failed in a part of the disk you aren't actually using and never noticed because all of your actual data is intact -- the the RAID can't really rebuild without them.