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actionowl

518 karma · joined September 13, 2017

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actionowl··on Apple is sued for telling you that you're “buying” movies
This is true for iTunes and Google Play too, I've had albums disappear from my Library with no explanation (I suspect some licensing change or label shuffle behind the scenes). I've totally abandoned streaming services since I've been bitten twice by this.

Bandcamp handles this exceptionally well, you can download anything you buy (even as Flac!) and for anything else, it's back to buying/checking-out CDs and ripping them old-school style.

actionowl··on Ask HN: Is it wise to create pre-launch/coming soon page for future product?
I recall someone (I think on HN) state that they created landing pages like you describe _before_ creating a product to see if the idea has enough interest to start on the project and they reported good results. So by that account, it doesn't sound like a bad idea.
actionowl··on The Endless Life Cycle of Japanese City Pop
> I tend to listen to music with no lyrics or with lyrics in languages I don't understand because it lets me program without becoming distracted.

This! When I started programming full time my music interests started shifting into what they are today which is just that. Either music with no lyrics or are mostly in a foreign language to prevent being distracted by it.

actionowl··on A reminder that you should double-check the licenses for software you use
I can't help but be reminded about this open source software license comic: https://burntsushi.net/stuff/wtfpl-strip.jpg
actionowl··on Ask HN: What are examples of British Web Innovations?
Last.fm is from the UK, and while it doesn't seem that groundbreaking of thing, they've been around quite a while and most streaming services almost certainty took ideas from what they did w/ music suggestions and such.
actionowl··on Bash_unit – bash unit testing framework
If you fancy posix shell (and C/C++ support) https://github.com/jmmv/atf/
actionowl··on Ask HN: How to get opportunities to travel around the world?
Where you were born, or at least the strength of your country's passport has a huge impact[0]

Depending on your passport's strength you may get visa on entry, have to apply for a visa, or can't go to a specific country at all.

[0] https://www.passportindex.org

actionowl··on Ask HN: Does Slack work better in the browser?
I've been a long-time in-browser slack user and yesterday Firefox refused to open any slack link, bookmark, or history entry I had. Closing all my tabs and relaunching FF did not help either.

In a pinch I installed the desktop app, and once I had a little bit of spare time I googled around and figured out the issue. Which was that Slack had used 2GB of Cookies/Site Data and Firefox neglected to notify me of that and that appears to be a hard limit and prevent Slack from loading. Clearing the data resolved the issue.

actionowl··on Ask HN: What is the safest way to put an Email address on my website in 2021?
Using a contact form that sends you an email server-side is a good one, that way they never have your email (unless you respond).

I also had a static website at one point where I didn't want to add server-side processing for a contact form so I stored the email address obfuscated in javascript like:

  ["m","o","c",".","l","i","a","m","e","@","e","m"].reverse().join('')
and injected it into the page. It seems that most scraper bots don't execute javascript and with it split into an array they likely won't find it by scraping the js files either.
actionowl··on [dead]
yes, with caveats

It's a private company. If they were unable to host their own servers, and no ISP would give them an IP address then that is a problem as long as they're following the law.

Maybe if this happened a little more often less companies would go all in on Cloud services.

actionowl··on Ask HN: How to Become an Expert at AWS?
Can suggest this as well, also I might suggest using Terraform.

The Console hides/obfuscates some things, w/ Terraform how resources are linked and work together become much more clear.

actionowl··on Ask HN: Anyone had success getting non-technical users install server software?
If you have customers with servers, then surely (hopefully) someone remotely technical manages them but I've found that technical expertise varies greatly and in my experience not many customers have interest in taking on the install/maintenance of said software.

You basically need something as easy to install (and update) as Google Chrome or you have to do the install and maintenance yourself (trust me on this, it's a huge time suck and customers can have all kinds of weird setups).

My "favorite" memory was a customer who ignored our request for a dedicated VM to install our web software onto. They neglected to tell us that this system already had a service running that used port 80/443 and somehow we were able to get through our install and take over that port without breaking the application but one day the server rebooted and our app got the ports before the other app. What was that app? It was their access control software that let people enter the building... whoops!

actionowl··on Ask HN: What's are your personal automations?
You might have just convinced me to buy a bread machine...

To add a similar answer, only in the past couple of years have I had a nice rice cooker (we have a Zojirushi) that keeps the rice fresh for ~12 hours. It is irreplaceable at this point (My wife is Asian and rice is a part of pretty much every meal.) Best appliance I have ever bought, gets used every. single. day. and have rice ready-to-eat throughout the day.

actionowl··on CentOS 8 vs. Amazon Linux 2
Came here to say the same thing.
actionowl··on If All You Have Is a Database, Everything Looks Like a Nail
No, but in our case, moving the sensitive data to a table queried less frequently than one used as a queue shrinks our logs considerably.
actionowl··on If All You Have Is a Database, Everything Looks Like a Nail
Just one data point, that might be of use to know:

We're currently running into an issue where we've used a table as a message queue in a database.

We gained a compliance requirement that we must log all access (including direct DB queries) to certain info in the database. One of the tables being used as a queue contains this data and is polled hundreds of times per minute making our logs ridiculously huge and we now have to move the queue somewhere else and/or split up the data.

actionowl··on 5 Reasons Why the Live Video Meeting is Dead
I'll be honest, I thought this was really silly at first from scrolling through the linked blog post but when working in a significantly different timezones as I have in the past (12 hours), this could be pretty convincing. It might be hard to sell my team on something called "weet" but I'm going look through the privacy policy and I might actually give this a try...
actionowl··on I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA
Got married, submitted adjustment of status forms, received notice of action 1, waiting for biometric appointment.
actionowl··on I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA
Do you think the new administration will have an impact on immigration and if so, what do you think will change?

My wife and I have been waiting since July on an update to her K1 adjustment of status. Some of that is COVID related issues, but I suspect some of the delay is due to additional processing of the new requirements (e.g. I-944).

actionowl··on AWS Cognito is having issues and health dashboards are still green
Multi-AZ doesn't help when a whole region is down, unless you're referring to multi-region AZs (e.g us-east-1a and us-west-1a)
actionowl··on Ask HN: Where are the Beautiful clean HTML/CSS templates?
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned awsm.css yet: https://igoradamenko.github.io/awsm.css/
actionowl··on Ask HN: How to create single email for each service I use?
Create a domain on gandi.net (or possibly some other provider, been a gandi customer over a decade so that's what I know) create an email on your new domain. Then whenever you need an email for a service create an email alias and point it to your "real" email. This is precisely what I do.

They have an API, you could also automate this, I intend to create a script to create the alias but just have never gotten around to it.

actionowl··on We are building a CLI first PaaS without a web frontend
That is terrible. As a "boss" of an SRE team, we only use the GUI for groking, testing (in a sandbox account), and for a handful of _documented_ things that have to be done in the GUI (usually account wide settings). Everything else, in every "real" environment is in source control, we use Terraform.
actionowl··on Wall-Mounted PC Build Examples (2018)
I was always a fan of wall mounted PCs (As someone who doesn't have kids, pets, or other forces of nature in my house).

Do any manufacturers make wall mount PC "cases"?

actionowl··on Git filtering mechanism isn't intended to be used the way Git LFS has used it
> IMO it might be a good idea to store binary assets in Git from a "history management" point of view.

You can't diff them, just see that they changed. If you have versions in the filename of the object that helps but isn't great from an auditing perspective. People change filenames, and if someone alters or tampers with the file it's hard to tell. You might argue that this is also possible if you fetch the file somewhere or install a package and link against it, but you have a better audit trail, packages can (should) also be signed.

actionowl··on Git filtering mechanism isn't intended to be used the way Git LFS has used it
Git-lfs isn't built into git, it's a separate thing you need to go find and download, or pull in from your package manager. It's a hack on top of git.
actionowl··on Git filtering mechanism isn't intended to be used the way Git LFS has used it
> Can you suggest where those artifacts should be stored?

It depends on where you get them. If you're using a compiled object that you get from a 3rd party and you don't have the source or don't build them then I'm not sure what to tell you. You're at the mercy of your vendor anyway so my other arguments against it won't make a difference.

actionowl··on Git filtering mechanism isn't intended to be used the way Git LFS has used it
I've personally only seen git lfs used as a bad-habit enabler (e.g. storing .dll, .so, and .exe files within a repo).

IMHO those artifacts should be stored elsewhere. Anyone have some better examples of how it's used?

actionowl··on Ask HN: What’s the worst bug you’ve written or encountered?
I've probably seen worst than this but this one comes to mind.

A sysadmin had (I can only assume accidentally) removed the SUID bit from the crontab binary causing an application we used that invoked the binary to not work. To even allow this to work we had a custom SELinux module that we suspected had the issue.

I ended up comparing systrace output between a working instance and the broken instance (in prod) to track it down.

actionowl··on Ask HN: What do you use your vanity domain for?
I use it not only for my personal email, but also for email aliases.

Whenever I sign up for anything I create a new email alias (foo@mydomin.com) pointed at my primary email. This helps me thwart faulty unsubscription services by just deleting the alias as needed or by detecting when a service has shared my email with 3rd parties or has been breached.

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