andmarios

That's what cloud providers want you to believe. :)

I have had both VPS and collocated servers chugging along for over 5 years without any interruption. In the worst case scenario where I would lose one of them, given proper backups, it would take me less than a day to restore.

Few of the deployments I've seen in cloud providers, kubernetes, etc, could do 5 years without downtime.

Sure, there are other costs, like scaling, finding people who can work on them, or when the dreaded time for an update comes... But still, a single VPS can get you very far for a very small cost.

If you haven't stayed at any single position for at least a year, then odds are you haven't developed some skills crucial for your job.

Sure, you can move a mountain in 3-6 months, I've seen such people. Most of them will move the mountain to a wrong place, and won't stay to help bring it back at the desired one. They will just go, leaving chaos back, totally unaware of the mess they created. Or they will move the mountain to the correct place, but will do it in such a way, that no-one is able to maintain, improve, or fix the mountain.

Leaving before a year or two, means you never owned your mistakes. You never tweaked your engineering intuition for teamwork, reliability, or maintainability.

Hey, you might be brilliant, but that's not what engineering is about.

Some of the comments here about v4l2 and cameras make me feel so old. :)

When v4l2 came out, the main target were TV cards (analog TV cards, digital / satellite / cable TV was just starting for most western countries) and video capture cards. We did have webcams, but they were rare, basic, and only worked properly in movies. The top resolution was 640×480. I'd know, I had one of the best models back then, Creative Go Plus!

I've supported v4l2 across a few flamewars. In Windows back then you needed a closed source driver with a proprietary API for each TV card. It was impossible for a 3rd party application to support more than a few cards and usually you would only be able to use the software that came with the card. For Linux, if your hardware was supported, a common API was exposed. Thus any 3rd party application could take advantage of any TV card. This is why projects like MythTV were made possible and accessible to many.

Alas, I can see why a system designed over 20 years earlier, might not fit the needs for modern cameras and computational photography.

We have seen so many changes in these 20 years, that having a new library to interface with camera sensors, hardly seems something to fret over. ;)

Then what about EU enforcing more energy efficient buildings and home appliances, electric vehicles and more?

EU is not a political organization, it is a political and economical union. If companies are left alone, they will never make a decision that does not benefit themselves. This is why we need EU, to make the decisions that benefit the planet and the people, thus leveling the field, so companies can compete within sane limits.

I think the word documentation is not used correctly in the article. The article seems to suggest small snippets of text, ranging from one short paragraph to a few pages.

It also goes on to explain documentation as memo / press release / reference card. But all these are not documentation.

It sounds like the PRFAQ method, which is already in use by many teams. It's good, especially because it aligns people across all verticals of a company.

Quite interestingly the only laptops I've seen with such a feature (button to mute and LED to display the mic is muted) are huawei's matebooks. Some of them also have the camera under a keyboard button, extremely weird angle but when the camera is hidden you can be 100% sure you are not being recorded.

The mic mute button of course works at the OS level but still...

I disagree with your statement, because IP is a human construct that was created in order to help creators profit from their works so they can create more, and of higher quality works.

It is a very expensive construct, both in public resources (e.g to create, protect, and enforce the law), and towards humanity's progress (i.e free access to books, inventions, etc would benefit the planet).

So for creators to get the benefits of the letter of the IP law, they should respect the spirit of the law, which is to give gated access to everyone.

Most startups probably start as a cocktail party idea, so although the author is correct, he underestimates the value of the concept.

Also, whilst it is intuitive that someone without expertise in a field is easy to get everything wrong, it is more interesting that often experts also get everything wrong. Sometimes this happens because the problem may affect an expert's field but belongs to another field, or the problem just exists from someone else's point of view.

In Greece we refer to people who always know everything better than experts as couch coaches. :)

A single data point, but were I've found ANC technology to be amazing is air travel. I used to be tired after a flight, even short ones. Since I got an in-ear ANC headset (Jabra in case it matters to anyone) even transatlantic flights are a breeze and I get out of the plane well rested, just like you would expect after sitting for so many hours.

Ah, thank you! I didn't know about it, it looks good and is part of debian and ubuntu repos (so easy to install).

Lenses.io | Fulltime (perm) | Engineering, Product, Sales Engineering, etc | Remote in UK, GR, FR, IT, NL, ES, DE | https://lenses.io/careers/

We have many positions open, mostly for mid and senior positions. If you apply for one in Product or Engineering we will collaborate often. Specifically for SRE / DevOps and 1st level support we will be working together. For all other positions, we will still spend some time together. :)

We are growing the team fast and have exciting things coming up!

Brief company overview:

At Lenses.io we are on a mission to democratize streaming data, helping businesses to operate in real-time. Our technology allows organizations to practice DataOps, a new way of consuming, processing, and moving data. Our product makes working with cutting-edge open-source technologies more accessible to users and operationalizes them for enterprises. Our customers, who range from household names like Daimler-Benz and Adidas to cloud-native startups, use Lenses to help run their strategic streaming and software applications: think IoT, fraud-detection AI engines, and cutting-edge consumer-facing microservices.

A few words about the positions I know most of:

* At SRE/Platform/DevOps we work mostly on Kubernetes, Docker, Kafka, Helm, Jenkins, Bash, Terraform, ArgoCD and more. Our product is on-prem so our SRE/platform work is more oriented internally and when it comes to devops we also own the release and packaging. Besides expanding the current team, we are building a new team to support a SaaS product which might interest you. It requires strong knowledge of Kafka and Kubernetes.

* There are 1st level technical support positions not yet advertised but feel free to apply for the SRE/DevOps and mention support. We are supporting other engineers and it is a highly technical position, you will have to assist people to setup Lenses and overcome docker, kubernetes, helm, networking, and other issues. It could be your ticket to a devops or platform career.

* Our backend is in Scala and we have an all-star team that is a joy to work with.

* Our frontend is in React (with some angular leftovers) and the team has both highly skilled seniors and junior developers, being a very healthy environment to work and learn.

* Sales engineering is fun at Lenses.io. People love our product which makes your interactions with prospects a joy.

Unfortunately fdupes does not do this or at least nothing in their docs points to this functionality.

I say unfortunately because before writing duphard, I tested fdupes and a couple other utilities (duff and duperemove) but none offered the functionality I needed.

It looks good! When I wrote duphard, fclones didn't exist. :)

A shameless plug but it is a simple —and probably bad written— tool I made many years ago to scratch an itch, and I still use it.

It finds duplicate files and replaces them with hard links, saving you space. Just make sure you provide it with paths in the same filesystem.

I originally wrote it to save some space from personal files (videos, photos, etc), but it turned out very useful for tar files, docker images, websites, and more. For example I maintain a tar file and a docker image with Kafka connectors which share many jar files. Using duphard I can save hundreds of megabytes, or even more than a gigabyte! For a documentation website with many copies of the same image (let's just say some static generators favor this practice for maintaining multiple versions), I can reduce the website size by 60%+, which then makes ssh copies, docker pulls, etc way faster speeding up deployment times.

https://github.com/andmarios/duphard

An important component that seems many people miss, is that both open source and free software licenses include a business model[1] in the definition: other people are free to sell services for the licensed software.

Some people claim _I can download the software and use it for free, so it is ok that Amazon should not make money out of it and allow ElasticSearch to have a cloud monopoly_.

This sounds like Tesla selling you a car that you are allowed to service yourself, but you cannot have a professional service it for you except for Tesla.

I don't have a strong opinion towards the practice (I'm also working for a company that does closed source after all), but I do believe it is important to show respect to the freedoms that both free software and open source try to protect.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html

I think they couldn't really. If you look into modern artists they are extremelly talented and their unique style that seems like _anyone could do it_ comes in later stages in their life.

It's a bit like coding, where simple and elegant solutions only come to you after you reach a certain level. People looking into your work might think that the solution is simple enough that even a junior could do it, but it's not the case. It takes another good engineer to spot one. :)

Was looking for something like this. Thanks so much!

I would add games to this list. Most games for iOS or Android these days are pay to win.

Sure, they may not be as important as the things you mention, but when you start hating something that its main purpose is to be fun, is very telling of the situation.

I was under the impression a Web App runs on my browser, so it's more like edge computing. :p

To be fair, a 100x optimization is not something easy, and if it was, I would probably blame the development team. Your Web App is a whole lot of code and components in series. An 100x optimization would mean that every single part in there can get 100 times faster, or there is a component that takes maybe 95% of the time and this can be optimized 200x, and the rest of the stack takes 5% of the time and can be optimized 10x.

I do believe that often it's the other way around, instead of a very fast first iteration, people go and build the distributed version that can scale 100x but takes the performance hit that all distributed systems have for network, syncing, etc.

Most of us are using off-the-shelf components, so the space for optimization in our code isn't that big —unless you are a novice developer but compilers go a long way in our time. Thus it may come to choosing the correct off-the-shelf components, like maybe SQLite instead a NoSQL external datastore.

Nice little app (does one thing...) that can become part of one's everyday workflow. Usually I avoid such apps exactly because they can become part of my workflow, and when I change machines, or ssh into servers, or exec into containers the absence of them will disrupt my work. :)

Disclaimer: I work with the author

Google's contact has been utterly disappointing so far. They kept saying for months that they will port all missing features from Google Play Music to Youtube Music and they kept advertising that you can transfer everything over.

Guess what, they haven't transferred a single feature over and no, you cannot transfer everything over.

I'm still staying with YT Music because they have the second best recommendation engine —Google Play Music had the best by far. I did buy subscriptions to both Deezer and Spotify (and a 3rd party service to sync my collection over) to test, but their recommendations / radio features are way worse.

This is why I wrote it's a journey.

It is indeed true that calorific deficit and accurate measurements is the best way to predictable weight loss.

But can you eat chicken and brocoli for the rest of your life? Can you do zero cheating and accurate measurements for ever? Is losing 15 kgrs in 3 months healthy? It is very easy to take the weight back and then some. There is a reason we have the term yo-yo dieting. :(

Food is sustainance, but also is enjoyment. Following a more lax approach where you ease into a better diet and keep enjoying food is a more sustainable long-term approach. Lose 15kgrs in one year instead of 3 months and magical things will happen. After 3 months of hard dieting you will probably reach for a chocolate during a crave. After 12 months of moderate dieting, you will reach for an apple and you will enjoy it as much as a chocolate. Reprogramming ourselves takes time.

What worked for me, was when I changed my mentality to treat weight loss and keeping weight off as part of my identity and not as a goal I have to work hard towards to. My identity is that I want a healthy life. It is something that I will do for the rest of my life, so falling off the wagon every now and then is not much of a problem, it's normal, I'm human!

Did I overeat one or two days? No regrets. I don't have a goal that now moved further. It is what it is. Today is a new day and I'll do what I normally do. Did I hit a plateau? Well, what can I do? My identity still says I should eat sensibly. I stayed off processed foods this week? Check. Did I consume excess sugar or soda? No. Ate my greens? Yip! So, my lifestyle is healthy no matter what the scale says. Did I go out with friends and overindulged? Hey, that's a healthy lifestyle too! Just don't do it very often.

Sure, I can give more practical advice and do think that OP is way too early to announce victory after just one month, but it's a journey, you have to experience some things on your own.

I'll just comment on calorie counting. Once upon a time I used to count calories to single digit accuracy. It's not needed. Keep a rough track of your macros as some people say (protein and carbs are aroung 4KCal/gram, fat is around 9KCal/gram) and you will be fine.

Try to build the Linux kernel on your own (it's easy) and you'll find hundreds of different algorithms for all things networking and TCP. There isn't a global best algorithm or setting. Depending on whether you are a server or a client, whether you are on a connection that offers high banwidth, low latency, both or none, depending on the application (streaming, torrenting, VoIP), some configuration will be better than another.

If I recall correctly, delayed acks and tcp delay are there to provide higher throughput and prevent network congestion —think downloading from an ftp server as fast as possible, without causing trouble to the rest of the channel's tenants.

The solution provided works very well for a specific problem, HAProxy talking to a backend application, but would probably make things worse if you were to use it for your laptop from your shared home connection.

Currently the companies never explain their decisions, so we cannot know if there was a gag order.

A public authority is required to reply to requests unless there is explicitly a gag order. Of course the reply may be _the account is disabled as part of ongoing criminal investigation_ but again, once everything's done they will be required to disclose information.

I am not fond of suggestions to break up big companies, but I do believe that FAANG should be treated as utility companies and not be allowed to deny service to anyone; any termination decision should be left to an independent 3rd party, ideally a public authority, so the big company will not be liable for any account misconduct.

Dockerfile security best practices: treat is as you would treat any linux server. :)

In Linux this is a solved problem by a very simple measure. The gestures (click by tapping, scrolling) are turned off while you type for a short period of time (around 300ms) after each key-press. It works surprisingly well and I've never noticed the trackpad not working when I need it too.

In time for its 24th birthday which is tomorrow!

I have an xtreme 2 and it's a very convenient and enjoyable device.

My pet-peeve is that when I bought it, its sound-signature was very close to my JBL studio monitors. I was astounded by the quality. It could give you goose-bumps.

Unfortunately people started complaining that it does not have enough bass and with every firmware update since then, JBL increases the bass response and destroys everything else.

There is no way to downgrade the firmware. It's still a good speaker but nowhere near what it can do when tuned for fidelity instead of bass. :(